although the threat of legal action will be a big deterrent there's always going to be spam unless we can come up with a technological solution to stop it.
It'd be great to stop spam, but doing so requires major changes to the email infrastructure on too many computers worldwide. I'm not saying it can't or won't happen, but it's not going to happen soon enough. Spammers will destroy email first.
The best solution available to us today are filters. And with Bayesian it works really damn well. No, it doesn't avoid the bandwidth and disk space involved in transferring the spam, but it does address the single largest cost of spam: the time of the end user. When compared to disk space and bandwidth, the user's time is the single largest cost of spam. If filters can reduce the amount of time users spend dealing with spam then we've solved the major cost component of dealing with spam.
Of course, if fewer users see spam then spam becomes less and less effective and there is less motivation for spammers to send it.
The solution is technical, not legislative--although I do support suing spammers for theft of services, fraud, etc.
There is currently about $675 billion dollars in U.S. currency in circulation. If U.S. currency is $675 billion I highly doubt the rest of the world has an additional 181.3 trillion dollars in circulation.
The above link also states that more than half of U.S. currency is in circulation *outside* of the U.S., so there's less than $330 billion in circulation within our country. Amazing isn't it? No, that doesn't mean that Bill Gates has 20% of the nation's wealth. It just demonstrates how money is created by the banking system. There are those that misunderstand this process (or don't believe it, amazingly enough!) and state that for someone to become rich someone else has to become poor. Thanks to the banking system this is NOT necessarily the case and also explains why a $10 trillion economy can work with only $330 billion in currency.
The USA is the most corrupt stagnant plutocracy in the world.
It is entirely obvious that you haven't actually lived outside of that "corrupt stagnant plutocracy" or you'd know first-hand that what you're saying is complete bull. I've lived overseas in a third world country for the last 8 years. Believe me, corruption in the U.S. government doesn't even come close to what happens in other countries.
I understand you're upset, and rightfully so. I used to feel depressed and helpless watching U.S. politicians do what they do. I now have almost a decade of real-life experience in another country and while it doesn't excuse the weaknesses of U.S. politicians, it *does* put it in perspective.
Believe me, the U.S. doesn't come close to being the most corrupt anything in the world. It might not be perfect and there might be other countries that are less corrupt, but we definitely aren't near the bottom of the heap.
Go for it. List 100 Republican Hollywood celebrities. I'm betting you might get a dozen or two if you limit yourself to any moderately well-known "celebrities."
Then consider that pretty much everyone else in Hollywood NOT on your dozen list is Democrat...
Just because Ronald Reagan and Arnold do/did so much better than your average Hollywood trash doesn't mean they are typical of the bunch. Anyone that thinks that Hollywood is pro-Republican or leans to the right needs a serious reality check. Really.
I completely disagree with the stance you've taken here. What is more friendly than popping a disc into a player pushing play and getting a perfect digital picture and sound?
You miss the point. The point is precisely that many of these new DVDs and CDs DON'T work when popped into many players and fewer computers. And many of us listen to our music on our computers as we work. I haven't had a working CD player since I lost my last CD player to dust infection about 6 years ago. Since then I listen to *ALL* my music on the computer because my CD player died and because it's more convenient. If I want to listen to a song that isn't MP3'd yet I just pop the CD into my computer, rip it, and then listen to the MP3 so I don't have to search for the CD the next time I want to hear that.
All of this is legal but all of it is made more difficult by CDs that don't work in computers because they don't WANT me to rip my own CD to my own computer. If a new CD should come out with a song I like but I know that I can't use that CD on my computer what are my options? Either just download it from the Internet or go without the music... either way the RIAA has lost a sale.
Nothing. But it's a hassle. Which is why others will hop online and look for a clean and open version of the content rather than buying it and having to go through the hassle of doing that.
Like I said, these guys are DRIVING consumers to P2P by introducing technologies that make it harder to use their product. When the P2P version is cheaper and easier to use than what they're selling, the RIAA is in trouble.
They keep on trying but when will they realize that as long as a human being can see or hear it that it can be recoded in a more friendly format and put online where others will be able to obtain it so that they don't have to go through the same hassle at getting the content in a user-friendly format.
These guys are going to kill their own business. Their copy-protection techniques will only increase the motivation to seek the content through obscure channels. When the "legitimate" version is less functional and more expensive than the "black market version", guess who's going to lose?
I agree that *Utahns* in general are not overly welcoming to outsiders, but this is common throughout the west. It's part of the culture. However, to say that only the Mormons are this way is bigoted.
I have nothing against Mormons--in fact, those that I have known seem very pleasant.
But I don't agree that part of the culture of the "west" is not to welcome outsiders. I've found people in the west to be generally more friendly than people in the east and haven't noticed Utah to be significantly different than the rest of the west. Utah is also quite beautiful and those that say otherwise either haven't been there or are just too used to living in a megacity on the east coast and aren't comfortable unless there are 20,000 people in the surrounding square mile.:)
No, I've never lived in Utah but I've been there many times.
As long as they can send spam to the 5% (Non-Windows) who don't use those programs, they'll do it.
It's possible, but I personally doubt it. If Microsoft actually implemented Bayesian such that the entire Windows base was using it and if that is 90% of the users in the world, the return on spam just dropped 90%. Probably more than that because Microsoft users, overall, are probably more likely than non-Microsoft users to respond to spam. THEY'RE the ones perpetuating the problem and they're the ones that need to have spam filtered to keep them from seeing and responding to it.
If the only people that receive spam are those that don't respond to spam, spam will die.
That said, I personally believe that non-Microsoft users are already more likely than Microsoft users to be taking active measures to avoid spam so I don't agree with the assertion that you have to run Microsoft to avoid spam. Personally, I think the Microsoft users are the ones that are least likely to make an effort to avoid spam. Heck, they're not willing to make an effort to avoid dealing with Microsoft, how much more of a pain is spam?:)
If you're willing to pay a little to solve the spam problem, buy a filter or a filtering service. There are many out there and many work very well. But taxing or charging for email will kill it and just opens the door to "email postage hikes" in the future either by a government(s) or a greedy company. How many billions of email are sent per day? What company wouldn't want a piece of that pie even if it were only a penny per email?
Email is free because it should be. That's what's made it so popular because it is fast, easy to use, and free. We shouldn't start charging regular users--or even legitiment mailing lists--to send email. We should charge the spammers.
Any "solution" that involves charging non-spammers money (even if it has the option of being returned by the receiver) should be dead on arrival and not be considered an option. Everyone is so concerned about the commercialization of the Internet when it comes to silly little banners that support the operation of a site--why would ANYONE consider the commercialization of email a valid option?
Actually, it arguably doesn't matter and arguably helps American business since our products are cheaper abroad making them more attractive ovreseas. Likewise, foresign products are more expensive to American consumers making it more likely that they buy something domestic. Europeans can vacation in the U.S. more cheaply right now which encourages those that are planning a U.S. vacation to do so--and vacations for Americans to Europe are more expensive right now encouraging them to do their vacation and spend their money here in the U.S.
There's a reason why the administration hasn't taken any action to prop up the dollar. This is cyclical, you aren't going to see any massive exodus from the dollar to the Euro, and the current situation, if anything, benefits the American economy. The dollar is strong over the long-term. The current exchange rate of the Euro is based on short-term conditions and does not mean it's a stronger currency than the dollar over the long-term. The Euro is a currency based on many weak European economies which is one of the main reasons the UK hasn't accepted the Euro--because their currency is already strong and pooling with other Euro-countries would only weaken it.
Yeah, we're being kicked in the nuts economically by Europe. Right.:)
That's not quite true. Yes, you have to pay income tax on your worldwide earnings. But you automatically get to exclude the first $80k (don't remember the exact number off hand). Unless you earn more than $80k overseas you don't pay income tax to the U.S. What you DO have to pay is self-employment tax regardless of where you live. So if you're self-employed overseas (as I am) you don't have to pay income tax on your first $80k of income, but you do have to pay self-employment tax on all of it.
Even so, your entire reply is kind of off-topic. We're talking about sales tax here, not income tax. The U.S. doesn't try to make companies in Mexico charge me the sales tax I would've paid in my home state in the U.S. Mexico would laugh in our face if we asked them to collect sales tax for us. Just like any American business will laugh at such an absurd "requirement" from the EU unless they have a place of business in the EU, in which case it just makes sense.
Read the article - these are EU citizens making transactions in the EU.
Right. So if the EU wants to tax their EU citizens, that's between the EU and their citizens. Perhaps a line on their tax forms "Amount purchased overseas" and then calculate the tax on that for them to send in.
I have a niche ecommerce website and I can assure you I won't be collecting any EU tax. Unless the U.S. requires me to do that and the EU provides an address within the U.S. to send the collected tax to, no, I'll be ignoring this.
Taxing any sales based on where the customer is physically located is bogus. The goods are in the hands of the SELLER so that's really where any transaction occurs. If there's going to be taxes on goods sold, that tax MUST be based on the location of the seller. If Colorado tells me to collect state sales tax on ALL sales instead of just in-state sales, I'd grudginly comply. But if I have to collect different taxes for different states and now for the EU, too? Keep dreaming.
Anyone notice how many "nazi" films are showing up on TV lately? Gee, you don't think that could have anything at all to do with the atmosphere set by the current administration, do you?
No, I don't think so, but I'm glad your liberal mindset is in overdrive.
The Nazi era, while awful, is basically the classic story of good vs. evil. I think that was even a tagline of one of the Indiana Jones movies, "Seldom in human history has good vs. evil been so clearly defined." That's really quite true for WWII.
Why are there so many "nazi" films? Because it's the classic story of good vs. evil and people want to see the good guys win. After 9/11 and not being able to see Bin Laden captured and after the wishy-washy lead-up to Iraq and subsequent failure to find Hussein I think many people are in the mood for a good, simple, "Here's the bad guys, here's the good guys. Good guys win."
It's not like we had an overabundance of movies of guys using cigars in disgusting ways with interns just because Bill Clinton happened to be in the White House.
At its basic level, individuals who want to track a route from one point to another or designate a specific meeting place can use the Universal Address System for accuracy.
Gotta love that sentence from the article. So instead of saying "Let's meet at Moe's bar at 5pm" we can say "Let's meet at Q31BA 21B4A at 5pm". And you're toast if you don't have a pen in hand, mistranscribe a number, or don't have some kind of electronic device to translate that into a "real" position.
I think I'll just stick with "Let's meet at Moe's bar" and for navigation GPS-based latitude and longitude work just great.
So you're OK with me putting all your cellphone conversations online?
It's common knowledge that you don't say anything confidential or that you don't want to have made public over a cell phone. I'm usually calling my friends so we can meet somewhere for dinner or a beer, or calling my wife to tell her I'll be a few minutes late or whatever. If someone intercepts those conversations I think it would be poor form on their part, but I'm not going to sue them over it.
If I have to mention my credit card number or I have information I want to maintain in secrecy then, no, I'm not going to convey that information over a cell phone. Legal or not I know there are people that could be listening.
DirectTV chose satellite distribution over cable distribution presumably because they decided they'd be able to reach a larger market with lower infrastructure costs. That's true. But that is not without a price--and the price is that you know people are going to be "listening" to your transmission. You HAD to know that when you made the business decision to go with satellite distribution and you HAD to factor that into your business decision as to whether the savings from satellite distribution was worth the added exposure for "piracy."
Personally, I think it makes sense for DTV to sue companies that sell products that allow people to intercept their service, just like I think people that mass produce pirated CDs to sell them on the street should be prosecuted. But I don't think end-users should be prosecuted for utilizing a signal passing through them.
You can't put up a store with walls made of paper to save on infrastructure cost and then start banning scissors--or suing every person that happens to have a pair of scissors--because they can get around your inadequate security, leading to theft of your product. You made your own bed when you decided to build a store with paper walls in the interest of lower infrastructure costs.
The user is supposed to back up the data. If the user chooses to not do this and subsequently loses said data, that's not the vendor's problem.
I agree, but if it is known that 1 out of 10 hard drives is going to fail in under a year whether or not the data is being backed up, that needs to be addressed before it happens.
Saying that it's not the vendor's problem that 1 out of 10 hard drives will fail because I should be backing up my data is like saying that Ford is not responsible if 1 out of 10 cars will explode even if I change my oil every 3000 miles.
Both the defective car and the defective hard drive need to be recalled before disaster strikes. Sure, with hard drives we backup our data but that does not avoid the downtime of a brand new hard drive failing, having to install a new hard drive, restore data, etc. While hard drives can fail at any time it is definitely not unreasonable to expect a HD to work at least 2 or 3 years--especially with the MTBF ratings we see documented.
Maybe the 2% of the population that won't or can't open IE just closes those windows and goes elsewhere, but that's something I just won't do - I use browsers to see content, I don't select content based on the brand of browser I run.
That's what I do--I close the window and look for another site. This is partially based on principle and partially based on my own convenience.
First, there are so many sites out there--some that look downright awesome--that don't require QuickTime, Flash, Java applets, or IE-specific nuances. I use the latest version of Mozilla and view virtually every site I want with no problem. I don't have Flash installed and don't plan to. If I get to a site that looks downright ugly because of plugins it couldn't load or because it demands IE then I'm going to go to the other hundreds of sites that provide the same information and conform to standards. That's my decision on principle.
Second, my decision is based on convenience. I am finally Windows-free. At least almost. I, too, sometimes need Windows: mostly when I do a consulting job that requires I develop in VB or VC++. For those cases I have Win4Lin which is awesome for running Windows applications under Linux. In fact, VB, VC++, and Word *ALL* run faster under Win4Lin than they did on the same laptop when it ran XP. Of course, IE is installed within that environment. The thing is, to get to IE I need to run Win4Lin which takes maybe 10-30 seconds to load initially. Unless I already have it running (which I usually don't), it's just faster for me to click "Back" and go to the next site on my Google search results page.
I do something similar. My cron job makes an incremental backup of my work every 3 hours locally. That's mostly so if I screw something up I can roll back.
Then once a night the system makes an incremental backup of everything changed in the last 24 hours and FTPs it over to another machine. The daily incremental backups are kept for a week.
Then once a week the system makes an incremental backup of everything changed in the last week and FTPs it over to the other machine. These are kept indefinitely (until I get around to purging them).
Finally, once a month a complete backup is made and sent over to the other system. These, too, are kept indefinitely.
I burn CDs with the backups from time to time. But I feel pretty well protected--I'd have to lose two hard drives, one in a laptop and one on a server machine, pretty much simultaneously to be SOL. And even then I have my CDs to recover from which is various degrees of SOL depending on how long it has been since my last CD burn.
Hard drives just make me nervous. They've gotten so big anymore that you have to be extremely careful that you don't put all your eggs in one basket--and with hard drives that are so many times bigger than what a CD can hold it's not easy to backup all your data on a frequent basis. That's why I've gone to the "backup to another computer" option--it happens automatically thanks to cron and it FITS, which is more than I can say for trying to back it up regularly to a CD.
Seagate agents Synnex Technology International and Taiwan Aries stressed that customers would be provided with complete warranty services if they were sold defective products.
So are they going to provide warranty service once the hard drive fails? That's a little late, isn't it? After all the data is toast? Seems like the correct thing to do is replace all hard drives that are at risk since it's impossible to know WHICH 10% of the hard drives are going to fail.
Offering to give a user a new hard drive after his has just died and taken the data with it is hardly any consolation to the user.
How much do you pay for email? Come on, stop bullshitting.
I'll tell you the truth... the cost of spam to me is much larger in terms of the time I spend dealing with it (deleting it, etc.) than the cost in bandwidth or CPU time. I'm set to receive 3000+ spams in May. Call it 10 seconds per spam. Why 10? Because spam doesn't come in all at once to delete at once--it comes in throughout the day, interrupting my work. So, yes, 10 seconds per spam. 3000 * 10 = 30,000 seconds per month. That's over 8 hours per month wasted on spam. A full work day. I consult at $100/hour so spam is costing either me or those who hire me as a consultant $800/month or $8400 a year. That's no bullshit.
That said, it's no longer a problem for me. Bayesian is letting about 5 to 10 spams per month rather than 3000. But that doesn't mean that the cost of spam is insignificant, I've just taken measures to reduce its impact on me.
This would more or less force spammers to send from their own domains...
I think one of the main benefits, rather than stopping spam or even making it particularly more traceable, is reducing the amount of spam sent with forged return emails. Fact is, we know most spam is forged--the problem is our mail servers don't. Being the victim of some spammer who put your email address as the return address is a bummer and this would help reduce the effects of the undeliverable bounces. Potential receivers would do the reverse lookup, your system would state from the beginning "No, not authorized" and the mail would just be rejected without generating a bounce message back to the purported sender.
No, I'm not scared of saying so. There are free options to spam filtering but most (if not all) require that the mail client first download the spam or require it be installed on the server. Many users don't want to download their spam at all and don't have access to install anything on the mail server (their ISP). This service targets a different set of people than the free alternatives and I don't know of any free service that does the same thing as this one (correct me if I'm wrong).
I haven't mentioned its cost because THAT, to me, is advertising. I feel my posts are on-topic because they suggest a valid solution to the spam problem--I'm not just posting messages out of the blue advertising the service, I've responded to someone elses queries to which our service is a valid option. Yes, the solution is a service and it costs us bandwidth and, so, yes, it costs the user a little money--welcome to capitalism. Of course, it's also the cheapest non-free service that I know of.
Anyway, we're not afraid of free options. If you can solve your spam problem for free, great. We developed this system for ourselves and decided it was worthwhile enough to make available to the public. It's obviously not for everyone and if a few pennies per day burns a hole in your pocket then, yes, you need to go for a free option.
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It'd be great to stop spam, but doing so requires major changes to the email infrastructure on too many computers worldwide. I'm not saying it can't or won't happen, but it's not going to happen soon enough. Spammers will destroy email first.
The best solution available to us today are filters. And with Bayesian it works really damn well. No, it doesn't avoid the bandwidth and disk space involved in transferring the spam, but it does address the single largest cost of spam: the time of the end user. When compared to disk space and bandwidth, the user's time is the single largest cost of spam. If filters can reduce the amount of time users spend dealing with spam then we've solved the major cost component of dealing with spam.
Of course, if fewer users see spam then spam becomes less and less effective and there is less motivation for spammers to send it.
The solution is technical, not legislative--although I do support suing spammers for theft of services, fraud, etc.
The above link also states that more than half of U.S. currency is in circulation *outside* of the U.S., so there's less than $330 billion in circulation within our country. Amazing isn't it? No, that doesn't mean that Bill Gates has 20% of the nation's wealth. It just demonstrates how money is created by the banking system. There are those that misunderstand this process (or don't believe it, amazingly enough!) and state that for someone to become rich someone else has to become poor. Thanks to the banking system this is NOT necessarily the case and also explains why a $10 trillion economy can work with only $330 billion in currency.
It is entirely obvious that you haven't actually lived outside of that "corrupt stagnant plutocracy" or you'd know first-hand that what you're saying is complete bull. I've lived overseas in a third world country for the last 8 years. Believe me, corruption in the U.S. government doesn't even come close to what happens in other countries.
I understand you're upset, and rightfully so. I used to feel depressed and helpless watching U.S. politicians do what they do. I now have almost a decade of real-life experience in another country and while it doesn't excuse the weaknesses of U.S. politicians, it *does* put it in perspective.
Believe me, the U.S. doesn't come close to being the most corrupt anything in the world. It might not be perfect and there might be other countries that are less corrupt, but we definitely aren't near the bottom of the heap.
Then consider that pretty much everyone else in Hollywood NOT on your dozen list is Democrat...
Just because Ronald Reagan and Arnold do/did so much better than your average Hollywood trash doesn't mean they are typical of the bunch. Anyone that thinks that Hollywood is pro-Republican or leans to the right needs a serious reality check. Really.
You miss the point. The point is precisely that many of these new DVDs and CDs DON'T work when popped into many players and fewer computers. And many of us listen to our music on our computers as we work. I haven't had a working CD player since I lost my last CD player to dust infection about 6 years ago. Since then I listen to *ALL* my music on the computer because my CD player died and because it's more convenient. If I want to listen to a song that isn't MP3'd yet I just pop the CD into my computer, rip it, and then listen to the MP3 so I don't have to search for the CD the next time I want to hear that.
All of this is legal but all of it is made more difficult by CDs that don't work in computers because they don't WANT me to rip my own CD to my own computer. If a new CD should come out with a song I like but I know that I can't use that CD on my computer what are my options? Either just download it from the Internet or go without the music... either way the RIAA has lost a sale.
If push comes to shove, about as long as it takes to connect the "line out" from the CD player to the "line in" on the computer audio card.
Like I said, these guys are DRIVING consumers to P2P by introducing technologies that make it harder to use their product. When the P2P version is cheaper and easier to use than what they're selling, the RIAA is in trouble.
These guys are going to kill their own business. Their copy-protection techniques will only increase the motivation to seek the content through obscure channels. When the "legitimate" version is less functional and more expensive than the "black market version", guess who's going to lose?
I have nothing against Mormons--in fact, those that I have known seem very pleasant.
But I don't agree that part of the culture of the "west" is not to welcome outsiders. I've found people in the west to be generally more friendly than people in the east and haven't noticed Utah to be significantly different than the rest of the west. Utah is also quite beautiful and those that say otherwise either haven't been there or are just too used to living in a megacity on the east coast and aren't comfortable unless there are 20,000 people in the surrounding square mile. :)
No, I've never lived in Utah but I've been there many times.
It's possible, but I personally doubt it. If Microsoft actually implemented Bayesian such that the entire Windows base was using it and if that is 90% of the users in the world, the return on spam just dropped 90%. Probably more than that because Microsoft users, overall, are probably more likely than non-Microsoft users to respond to spam. THEY'RE the ones perpetuating the problem and they're the ones that need to have spam filtered to keep them from seeing and responding to it.
If the only people that receive spam are those that don't respond to spam, spam will die.
That said, I personally believe that non-Microsoft users are already more likely than Microsoft users to be taking active measures to avoid spam so I don't agree with the assertion that you have to run Microsoft to avoid spam. Personally, I think the Microsoft users are the ones that are least likely to make an effort to avoid spam. Heck, they're not willing to make an effort to avoid dealing with Microsoft, how much more of a pain is spam? :)
Email is free because it should be. That's what's made it so popular because it is fast, easy to use, and free. We shouldn't start charging regular users--or even legitiment mailing lists--to send email. We should charge the spammers.
Any "solution" that involves charging non-spammers money (even if it has the option of being returned by the receiver) should be dead on arrival and not be considered an option. Everyone is so concerned about the commercialization of the Internet when it comes to silly little banners that support the operation of a site--why would ANYONE consider the commercialization of email a valid option?
There's a reason why the administration hasn't taken any action to prop up the dollar. This is cyclical, you aren't going to see any massive exodus from the dollar to the Euro, and the current situation, if anything, benefits the American economy. The dollar is strong over the long-term. The current exchange rate of the Euro is based on short-term conditions and does not mean it's a stronger currency than the dollar over the long-term. The Euro is a currency based on many weak European economies which is one of the main reasons the UK hasn't accepted the Euro--because their currency is already strong and pooling with other Euro-countries would only weaken it.
Yeah, we're being kicked in the nuts economically by Europe. Right. :)
Even so, your entire reply is kind of off-topic. We're talking about sales tax here, not income tax. The U.S. doesn't try to make companies in Mexico charge me the sales tax I would've paid in my home state in the U.S. Mexico would laugh in our face if we asked them to collect sales tax for us. Just like any American business will laugh at such an absurd "requirement" from the EU unless they have a place of business in the EU, in which case it just makes sense.
Right. So if the EU wants to tax their EU citizens, that's between the EU and their citizens. Perhaps a line on their tax forms "Amount purchased overseas" and then calculate the tax on that for them to send in.
I have a niche ecommerce website and I can assure you I won't be collecting any EU tax. Unless the U.S. requires me to do that and the EU provides an address within the U.S. to send the collected tax to, no, I'll be ignoring this.
Taxing any sales based on where the customer is physically located is bogus. The goods are in the hands of the SELLER so that's really where any transaction occurs. If there's going to be taxes on goods sold, that tax MUST be based on the location of the seller. If Colorado tells me to collect state sales tax on ALL sales instead of just in-state sales, I'd grudginly comply. But if I have to collect different taxes for different states and now for the EU, too? Keep dreaming.
No, I don't think so, but I'm glad your liberal mindset is in overdrive.
The Nazi era, while awful, is basically the classic story of good vs. evil. I think that was even a tagline of one of the Indiana Jones movies, "Seldom in human history has good vs. evil been so clearly defined." That's really quite true for WWII.
Why are there so many "nazi" films? Because it's the classic story of good vs. evil and people want to see the good guys win. After 9/11 and not being able to see Bin Laden captured and after the wishy-washy lead-up to Iraq and subsequent failure to find Hussein I think many people are in the mood for a good, simple, "Here's the bad guys, here's the good guys. Good guys win."
It's not like we had an overabundance of movies of guys using cigars in disgusting ways with interns just because Bill Clinton happened to be in the White House.
Gotta love that sentence from the article. So instead of saying "Let's meet at Moe's bar at 5pm" we can say "Let's meet at Q31BA 21B4A at 5pm". And you're toast if you don't have a pen in hand, mistranscribe a number, or don't have some kind of electronic device to translate that into a "real" position.
I think I'll just stick with "Let's meet at Moe's bar" and for navigation GPS-based latitude and longitude work just great.
It's common knowledge that you don't say anything confidential or that you don't want to have made public over a cell phone. I'm usually calling my friends so we can meet somewhere for dinner or a beer, or calling my wife to tell her I'll be a few minutes late or whatever. If someone intercepts those conversations I think it would be poor form on their part, but I'm not going to sue them over it.
If I have to mention my credit card number or I have information I want to maintain in secrecy then, no, I'm not going to convey that information over a cell phone. Legal or not I know there are people that could be listening.
DirectTV chose satellite distribution over cable distribution presumably because they decided they'd be able to reach a larger market with lower infrastructure costs. That's true. But that is not without a price--and the price is that you know people are going to be "listening" to your transmission. You HAD to know that when you made the business decision to go with satellite distribution and you HAD to factor that into your business decision as to whether the savings from satellite distribution was worth the added exposure for "piracy."
Personally, I think it makes sense for DTV to sue companies that sell products that allow people to intercept their service, just like I think people that mass produce pirated CDs to sell them on the street should be prosecuted. But I don't think end-users should be prosecuted for utilizing a signal passing through them.
You can't put up a store with walls made of paper to save on infrastructure cost and then start banning scissors--or suing every person that happens to have a pair of scissors--because they can get around your inadequate security, leading to theft of your product. You made your own bed when you decided to build a store with paper walls in the interest of lower infrastructure costs.
I agree, but if it is known that 1 out of 10 hard drives is going to fail in under a year whether or not the data is being backed up, that needs to be addressed before it happens.
Saying that it's not the vendor's problem that 1 out of 10 hard drives will fail because I should be backing up my data is like saying that Ford is not responsible if 1 out of 10 cars will explode even if I change my oil every 3000 miles.
Both the defective car and the defective hard drive need to be recalled before disaster strikes. Sure, with hard drives we backup our data but that does not avoid the downtime of a brand new hard drive failing, having to install a new hard drive, restore data, etc. While hard drives can fail at any time it is definitely not unreasonable to expect a HD to work at least 2 or 3 years--especially with the MTBF ratings we see documented.
That's what I do--I close the window and look for another site. This is partially based on principle and partially based on my own convenience.
First, there are so many sites out there--some that look downright awesome--that don't require QuickTime, Flash, Java applets, or IE-specific nuances. I use the latest version of Mozilla and view virtually every site I want with no problem. I don't have Flash installed and don't plan to. If I get to a site that looks downright ugly because of plugins it couldn't load or because it demands IE then I'm going to go to the other hundreds of sites that provide the same information and conform to standards. That's my decision on principle.
Second, my decision is based on convenience. I am finally Windows-free. At least almost. I, too, sometimes need Windows: mostly when I do a consulting job that requires I develop in VB or VC++. For those cases I have Win4Lin which is awesome for running Windows applications under Linux. In fact, VB, VC++, and Word *ALL* run faster under Win4Lin than they did on the same laptop when it ran XP. Of course, IE is installed within that environment. The thing is, to get to IE I need to run Win4Lin which takes maybe 10-30 seconds to load initially. Unless I already have it running (which I usually don't), it's just faster for me to click "Back" and go to the next site on my Google search results page.
Then once a night the system makes an incremental backup of everything changed in the last 24 hours and FTPs it over to another machine. The daily incremental backups are kept for a week.
Then once a week the system makes an incremental backup of everything changed in the last week and FTPs it over to the other machine. These are kept indefinitely (until I get around to purging them).
Finally, once a month a complete backup is made and sent over to the other system. These, too, are kept indefinitely.
I burn CDs with the backups from time to time. But I feel pretty well protected--I'd have to lose two hard drives, one in a laptop and one on a server machine, pretty much simultaneously to be SOL. And even then I have my CDs to recover from which is various degrees of SOL depending on how long it has been since my last CD burn.
Hard drives just make me nervous. They've gotten so big anymore that you have to be extremely careful that you don't put all your eggs in one basket--and with hard drives that are so many times bigger than what a CD can hold it's not easy to backup all your data on a frequent basis. That's why I've gone to the "backup to another computer" option--it happens automatically thanks to cron and it FITS, which is more than I can say for trying to back it up regularly to a CD.
So are they going to provide warranty service once the hard drive fails? That's a little late, isn't it? After all the data is toast? Seems like the correct thing to do is replace all hard drives that are at risk since it's impossible to know WHICH 10% of the hard drives are going to fail.
Offering to give a user a new hard drive after his has just died and taken the data with it is hardly any consolation to the user.
I'll tell you the truth... the cost of spam to me is much larger in terms of the time I spend dealing with it (deleting it, etc.) than the cost in bandwidth or CPU time. I'm set to receive 3000+ spams in May. Call it 10 seconds per spam. Why 10? Because spam doesn't come in all at once to delete at once--it comes in throughout the day, interrupting my work. So, yes, 10 seconds per spam. 3000 * 10 = 30,000 seconds per month. That's over 8 hours per month wasted on spam. A full work day. I consult at $100/hour so spam is costing either me or those who hire me as a consultant $800/month or $8400 a year. That's no bullshit.
That said, it's no longer a problem for me. Bayesian is letting about 5 to 10 spams per month rather than 3000. But that doesn't mean that the cost of spam is insignificant, I've just taken measures to reduce its impact on me.
I think one of the main benefits, rather than stopping spam or even making it particularly more traceable, is reducing the amount of spam sent with forged return emails. Fact is, we know most spam is forged--the problem is our mail servers don't. Being the victim of some spammer who put your email address as the return address is a bummer and this would help reduce the effects of the undeliverable bounces. Potential receivers would do the reverse lookup, your system would state from the beginning "No, not authorized" and the mail would just be rejected without generating a bounce message back to the purported sender.
I haven't mentioned its cost because THAT, to me, is advertising. I feel my posts are on-topic because they suggest a valid solution to the spam problem--I'm not just posting messages out of the blue advertising the service, I've responded to someone elses queries to which our service is a valid option. Yes, the solution is a service and it costs us bandwidth and, so, yes, it costs the user a little money--welcome to capitalism. Of course, it's also the cheapest non-free service that I know of.
Anyway, we're not afraid of free options. If you can solve your spam problem for free, great. We developed this system for ourselves and decided it was worthwhile enough to make available to the public. It's obviously not for everyone and if a few pennies per day burns a hole in your pocket then, yes, you need to go for a free option.