Now some semi-popular music has merit. There are (thankfully!) still alternative bands out there like Radiohead and Tool that are really pushing the boundaries of modern music, and I heartily recommend picking up a copy of Kid A or Lateralus, or at the very least trying to borrow a copy from somebody. If you were born and raised on the likes Beethoven or Bach it probably won't be much to your tastes, but at least your IQ won't drop a point every time you hear the same recycled single.
Well, yeah, that's the solution to any crime in an ideal world. But the U.S. justice system is (supposedly) based on the punishment fitting the crime. Given the public's (and justice system's) paranoia towards computer crimes, it's pretty damn likely that somebody could spend more time in jail for breaking into somebody's computer than for killing somebody and then stealing their computer outright.
But maybe you're right. After we all, we all know the goverment has the best intentions in mind when they pass laws about computer and high-tech crimes. (*cough* DMCA *cough*)
Stab somebody with a knife and kill them, and odds are you'll spend 20 years in jail, tops. Maybe more if you use a gun, or stab somebody famous, but as any U.S. citizen can tell you, even life sentences for violent crimes rarely live up to their name.
Break into their computer, and you're instantly labelled a terrorist. Think there's any chance you'll get much less than the maximum penalty of life? Hell, my high school once informally accused me of piracy (which, incidentally, I was not guilty of) just on the basis that I knew enough and therefore could have done it. If there's anything that makes people paranoid, it's hearing that the Big Bad Hacker is right outside their computer's door.
Unless I'm mistaken, promo = what they hand out early to radio stations. My guess is they're trying to avoid tech-savvy DJs distributing MP3s of the song over Gnutella & Co. before the general public can get to it.
Not that that justifies what they're doing, but it suggests they might be less likely to do it to end-user copies.
Actually "Bullet with Butterfly Wings" is the one with the refrain "Despite all my rage/I am still just a rat in a cage."
That said, after reading the list, I'm wondering if it's genuine or not. Why would they ban Alien Ant Farm's cover of "Smooth Criminal" but not Michael Jackson's original version? And some of the bannings like "What A Wonderful World" don't even make any sense.
You might want to check out one of the Effecient SpeedStream routers. SWBell ran out of DSL modems and gave us a free SpeedStream 5660 DSL modem/router instead (with the warning that sharing the connection is perfectly legal according to our TOS but won't be supported of course, *nudge nudge wink wink*).
It's got probably everything you're looking for: NAT, DNS, port forwarding, hardware firewalling, and support for everything from PPPoE to static IPs on the ISP side. Plus it's got a nice HTML interface plus a UNIX-style Telnet interface (with lock-down support, of course) and even support for a serial cable so you can Telnet to it as a dumb terminal if the Ethernet's down. And the documentation, while not super-thorough, isn't drool-proofed. The only real complaint that I have with it is the way the firewall works; it blocks unopened ports if there's no outgoing packet to correspond with incoming ones. This is only a problem if you're serving something, but more software works like a server (as far as the router's concerned) than you may expect; it was a little weird having to manually open up AIM's port so my little brother could use AIM without having to initiate the conversation.
The main disadvantage is price and availability -- I don't know how easy these are for end users to get their hands on these, and it'll probably run upwards of $300. If you're lucky, your ISP might have some, but I've heard of ISPs giving out these routers and with the remote administration password-locked so people don't (ahem) accidentally enable NAT without paying for a static IP first.
Suncom, a cheap peripherals company (best known for their oh-so-cheap joysticks), was selling joystick-style mice at my local department store back before when we got our first PC clone, which was in 1988. This was even years before mice were standard on computers. (That's right, Virginia, computers didn't always use mice!)
I know they say "don't feed the trolls", but somebody was modding the parent up . . .
Not buying CDs and piracy are two different things. You see, it would only be piracy if he didn't buy CDs, and then downloaded the music from the CDs anyway. What he's referring to is when many people in the/. crowd were boycotting the RIAA by refusing to buy their CDs -- just because you don't buy their CDs doesn't mean you're also illegally downloading MP3s in their place.
By your definition, anybody who doesn't own a CD player is a pirate, because since they aren't buying CDs, they must clearly be pirating them!
Just because CmdrTaco doesn't want to support an "organization" that he feels is bullying Napster doesn't mean he's using Napster illegally, or even at all. That's like saying that all people who support the Free Dmitry campaign are doing it because they're E-book pirates.
Unless you get some slick Linux people in there, the AOLers and the A:\SETUPers will not be able to support it properly.
Or, another way to look at it is, the AOLers and A:\SETUPers among the students won't be able to screw it up. On the Windows boxes in our Arts & Sciences department, the only way the tech people could keep them running from more than a few days at a time was to revert the drive from an image on a central server on every reboot, since a few students there were convinced they needed extra stuff like MSN Messenger on them. (These are low-end computers we're talking about, and they would slow to a crawl if you had much more than a Web browser loaded into memory.) Our engineering department's Solaris lab is infinitely more reliable than our NT lab, since you can't easily put crap on the Solaris boxes that stop them from booting. (And it's not just because there's fewer students using the Solaris lab, because they teach all the introductory courses on Solaris so people can Telnet/SSH to them and do homework.)
So what you see as a liability, a school would see as an asset, since you're talking about a lot of students the age when AOLers start turning script kiddies. Obviously, it won't lock out the most determined students (then again, neither would any other OS) but it'll pretty much halt kids who think they're l33t because they can install Snood on the computers.
It's worse than that. Gator's not actually going to replace the ads like a proxy would -- they're still being loaded, but Gator will superimpose new ones over the old ones. The real problem here is that sites like Yahoo! that make money by selling ad impressions are going to have more problems finding sponsors -- thanks to Gator, advertisers will be paying for ad impressions that nobody sees. At least when I use WebWasher or the like nobody's paying for the ads I'm not seeing. (Plus, I had to personally decided to install WebWasher, which limits its impact to the number of tech savvy people that know about ad filters -- how many people voluntarily installed Gator, as compared to how many got it by installing Crap Puzzle Bobble Clone or the like?)
Personally, this whole thing stinks of extortion to me -- you have to pay Gator an additional fee to get your ad in their circulation, or your ad gets covered up.
I guess it's a good thing you didn't pay a lot of money for MSIE, did you?
Yes, I did.
Even if you ignore arguments about how it's killing competition, etc., you still have to pay actual money for Internet Explorer. Obviously Internet Explorer's dev team needs to be paid, since they don't work for free. So where do you think Microsoft gets the money -- the sky?
That's right -- the prices for all those other Microsoft products subsidizes the development for Internet Explorer. So when I buy Windows, I'm paying for Internet Explorer, even though I'll never use it. Real fair, huh? It's like those "extras" that most people never use that the car manufacturers tack on cars to drive up the price (like cruise control), except (unlike with cars) you can't special order a copy of Windows without IE, much less without paying for it.
Even if you go the alternate OS route, unless you're getting a Mac or building your own computer, you're paying the Windows tax for the copy of Windows you're not going to use, and probably countless other Microsoft products like Office and Money. So when you buy a PC, even if you never touch Internet Explorer in your lifetime, you're paying for it.
If that's not anti-competitive, I'm not sure what is.
I'm not sure exactly what advantage this has over other MP3 players, or even over non-MP3 players. Sure, it's small, but so are traditional MP3 players with flash media; plus they don't have the problems that CD players have (tons of moving parts, skipping, delicate laser, media easy to break, etc.), and they're getting close to the 180-something MB a 8 cm disk can store. The media may be a hell of a lot cheaper than flash, but at a 256 kbps encoding rate (IMHO the lowest you can go to get decent sound quality without losing bass or getting artifacts) we're only talking about 100 minutes of music . . . in which case if you're willing to put up with a traditional media-based player you might as well go with a MiniDisc and not worry about compression artifacts at all.
To me the advantage of CD-based MP3 players has always been that they can store massive amounts of music they can store -- 700 megs (or more if you get more expensive CDs and/or overburn) on a CD that costs pennies. Being able to pop a CD containing 5 to 10 CDs' worth of music into my Rio Volt is the main reason I bought it -- no lugging around more than a couple of CDs, and I can use it in the car without endangering other people on the road by flipping through CDs when I should be driving. By cutting the storage capacity to just over a quarter of that, it's sort of eliminating the point of using CDs. Iomega had the same problems with the HipZip -- no matter how cheap the media is, nobody's willing to put up with the problems brought on by optical or magnetic media unless they get some big storage payoff. (Admittedly, at 40MB the PocketZip disks are significantly smaller, but so are the disks' physical size, and you didn't have to invest in a CD burner if you didn't already own one.)
That isn't to say I don't wish Philips well with this -- my last (pre-MP3) CD player was a Philips, and it's taken quite a beating and still works as well as the day I bought it. I'm just afraid the market for this sort of thing isn't going to be very warm.
Re:Help me out on this one...
on
Code Red III
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Code Red takes advantage of what's called a "buffer overflow" in Microsoft's IIS web server software.
What happens is that IIS sits there, waiting for Web browsers to request pages. A Code Red infected server starts randomly picking other computers on the Internet or the network, and requests them to send a Web page called default.ida. It then passes a huge parameter to default.ida.
Apparently, default.ida has hard-coded a maximum length for parameters -- say, 200 letters. (Probably not actually 200 -- but you get the idea.) That's what all the XXX and NNN's are there -- it's the 200 (etc.) letters that's the most default.ida is expecting to receive. A buffer overflow is when something goes past that maximum number of letters, and a program with a buffer overflow problem usually does something strange with the information past that point -- in this case, default.ida takes everthing after that number of letters and runs it like it were a program.
Normally, this would just crash IIS (since it's getting a bunch of garbage, and running garbage makes programs crash) but Code Red is purposely designed so after the right number (200 or whatever) of XXX/NNN's, it tacks on the code to infect the computer with Code Red. So, IIS runs the code, the computer becomes infected with Code Red, it starts trying to spread it to other computers, and the whole cycle starts all over again.
I brought this up before when the port was announced, but nobody knew the exact answer, so maybe I can get it straight from the horse's mouth . . .
From what I understand, the PS2 Linux distro uses a proprietary, binary-only driver/library/program to allow programmers to access the PS2's graphics chip. My question is, how will this hinder end users' ability to get their hands on SDL-based PS2 games?
Does this mean they'll have to buy a copy of the $200 Linux development kit? Or are developers allowed to freely redistribute the graphics runtimes? (Or have you found some other way around this, perhaps by accessing the PS2 hardware without the binary runtime?)
I'm just afraid that most PS2 gamers (read: non-geeks) won't find SDL games too attractive if they have to buy a $200 Linux kit to play them.
They need voices from a tape un-erased? Sounds like a job for . . . MOVIE OS!
Brought to you by the people that gave you the Infinite Sharpness filter for Photoshop (find those completely sharp faces buried in fuzzy films) and the Internet Welcome Screen.
Re:You must be mistaken.
on
Case Tweaking
·
· Score: 2
I can't actually read the article (damn/. effect) but several other people have pointed out that the guy just bought the case, and recommended going to an Apple service center to get one, so he's not exactly tearing a G4 apart.
I think what most people hate about Mac hardware is the fact that you still can't buy all the parts you need to build one yourself. Hell, I probably would have built a Mac, if I had the option (and if OS X were available at the time).
Realistically, I have no problem with this - maybe that $200 kicks the price point above where they will be making a loss (at least when they drop the price this coming holiday season). That way, Sony can keep the PS2 in market, even if people aren't buying licensed games.
Good point -- I had forgotten about the whole selling the hardware at a loss issue. Still, to the average gamer, who probably knows or cares little about free or Free games, $200 is an awfully high price to justify getting the ability to play SDL games.
Sure, the Cool Factor is definitely there, but the $200 entry fee would probably be too high for anybody but die-hard geeks who want to play their SDL games on a TV mainly for the hell of it, which is a far cry from small developers being able to reach millions of gamers like some people had hoped for.
This is great news, except I can see one problem with it. The CNet article implies the only way to get Linux to run on the PS2 is to buy the $200 development kit -- since the Linux runtimes are proprietary, and presumably not freely distributable, this could definitely hamper the ability to play SDL games for most people. Obviously nobody can stop developers from circulating the kernel, but since the specs on the hardware are closed I'm assuming SDL has been built on top of these runtimes, and thus depends on them.
Does anybody have information about whether or not developers will be able to redistribute enough of the Linux-based runtimes to make this feasible? Actual quotes from the license agreement(s) would be nice. (Or has the porter found some way around using the binary-only stuff?)
My question is, why wouldn't they? If anything, they should be more concerned about it than we are -- they're the ones paying the bandwidth bill and rebooting the clogged mail servers. Not only is running a virus scanner on POP3 and SMTP servers a good idea to do out of courtosey (sp?) for their customers, but it will save them money in the long run every time the next Sircam or Melissa comes around.
I've heard this urban legend before, and I'm assuming it's just that: a legend. I've never heard from anyone who's actually gotten a damaged floppy disk drive from trying to copy an Activision game.
What I do know for a fact is they had some type of sneaky copy protection where if you tried to copy the game (short of using Copy II PC or the like) it would not only produce a non-working copy, but your original wouldn't work anymore. I managed to end up with a non-working Rampage disk because I normally copy games so I can play the backup copies and store the originals away. Thankfully, I only wrecked the 3.5" disk (this was when they gave you both 3.5" and 5.25") so I was still able to use the 5.25" disk; by the time I got a computer without a 5.25" drive Neverlock had long since removed the copy protection check from most of my games, Rampage included.
Without a doubt, Silicon Snake Oil by Cliff Stoll is more important than any other computer book budding programmers can read. If you can take Stoll's heavy dose of cynicism, it's an excellent reflecion about what we're doing wrong with computers. Stoll really pushes programmers to ask themselves the question that should come first, but is rarely considered at all, in system design: "Does this really help people, or is it just another way to take away their productivity?"
When you get a telemarketing call, they pay their long distance company for the right to call you. It doesn't cost you a penny to pick up the phone. When you get junk (snail) mail, the marketer had to pay the postal service to send mail out to each and every address. Not only does it not cost you anything, but in the case of the U.S. Postal Service these bulk rates actually lower the cost of you sending mail, since they use it subsidize part of the cost of personal mail.
Bulk E-mail on the other hand is a different thing. First off, if you're not on a land-based U.S. phone line, odds are you're paying per-minute for your connection -- which sucks since you have to pay to get spam dumped in your E-mail program's inbox.
Even if you have a flat rate connection, you're still inevitably paying for spam mail, whether or not it's directly. Bandwidth isn't free -- take a 5k spam mail message and multiply it by 10 million messages, both of which are probably conversative estimates, and you're talking about 50 megabytes each time a spam is sent out. If you get 3 spam messages a day, that's 150 megabytes of bandwidth just for the messages that you received -- which is only a tiny fraction of all the spam sent out in a day. Multiply 50 megabytes by the countless number of messages, and that's a lot of bandwidth going up in smoke daily.
Guess who's paying for it? Hint: with spammers usually using stolen ISP accounts and fake credit card numbers, probably not them. Another hint: when ISPs' bandwidth costs go up, they pass it on to the users.
Not to mention the fact that spammers shoving millions of messages through creaky mail servers can take them down. So even excluding the monetary damage, what's it worth if a piece of E-mail sent to/from you was on that server when it went down in flames? Your message may be delayed, or it may never show up at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Now some semi-popular music has merit. There are (thankfully!) still alternative bands out there like Radiohead and Tool that are really pushing the boundaries of modern music, and I heartily recommend picking up a copy of Kid A or Lateralus, or at the very least trying to borrow a copy from somebody. If you were born and raised on the likes Beethoven or Bach it probably won't be much to your tastes, but at least your IQ won't drop a point every time you hear the same recycled single.
But maybe you're right. After we all, we all know the goverment has the best intentions in mind when they pass laws about computer and high-tech crimes. (*cough* DMCA *cough*)
Break into their computer, and you're instantly labelled a terrorist. Think there's any chance you'll get much less than the maximum penalty of life? Hell, my high school once informally accused me of piracy (which, incidentally, I was not guilty of) just on the basis that I knew enough and therefore could have done it. If there's anything that makes people paranoid, it's hearing that the Big Bad Hacker is right outside their computer's door.
Fair, no?
Not that that justifies what they're doing, but it suggests they might be less likely to do it to end-user copies.
That said, after reading the list, I'm wondering if it's genuine or not. Why would they ban Alien Ant Farm's cover of "Smooth Criminal" but not Michael Jackson's original version? And some of the bannings like "What A Wonderful World" don't even make any sense.
It's got probably everything you're looking for: NAT, DNS, port forwarding, hardware firewalling, and support for everything from PPPoE to static IPs on the ISP side. Plus it's got a nice HTML interface plus a UNIX-style Telnet interface (with lock-down support, of course) and even support for a serial cable so you can Telnet to it as a dumb terminal if the Ethernet's down. And the documentation, while not super-thorough, isn't drool-proofed. The only real complaint that I have with it is the way the firewall works; it blocks unopened ports if there's no outgoing packet to correspond with incoming ones. This is only a problem if you're serving something, but more software works like a server (as far as the router's concerned) than you may expect; it was a little weird having to manually open up AIM's port so my little brother could use AIM without having to initiate the conversation.
The main disadvantage is price and availability -- I don't know how easy these are for end users to get their hands on these, and it'll probably run upwards of $300. If you're lucky, your ISP might have some, but I've heard of ISPs giving out these routers and with the remote administration password-locked so people don't (ahem) accidentally enable NAT without paying for a static IP first.
Suncom, a cheap peripherals company (best known for their oh-so-cheap joysticks), was selling joystick-style mice at my local department store back before when we got our first PC clone, which was in 1988. This was even years before mice were standard on computers. (That's right, Virginia, computers didn't always use mice!)
Even back then it looked uncomfortable.
(Humor, not flamebait. Please mod accordingly.)
(It's a joke, people.)
Not buying CDs and piracy are two different things. You see, it would only be piracy if he didn't buy CDs, and then downloaded the music from the CDs anyway. What he's referring to is when many people in the /. crowd were boycotting the RIAA by refusing to buy their CDs -- just because you don't buy their CDs doesn't mean you're also illegally downloading MP3s in their place.
By your definition, anybody who doesn't own a CD player is a pirate, because since they aren't buying CDs, they must clearly be pirating them!
Just because CmdrTaco doesn't want to support an "organization" that he feels is bullying Napster doesn't mean he's using Napster illegally, or even at all. That's like saying that all people who support the Free Dmitry campaign are doing it because they're E-book pirates.
So what you see as a liability, a school would see as an asset, since you're talking about a lot of students the age when AOLers start turning script kiddies. Obviously, it won't lock out the most determined students (then again, neither would any other OS) but it'll pretty much halt kids who think they're l33t because they can install Snood on the computers.
It's worse than that. Gator's not actually going to replace the ads like a proxy would -- they're still being loaded, but Gator will superimpose new ones over the old ones. The real problem here is that sites like Yahoo! that make money by selling ad impressions are going to have more problems finding sponsors -- thanks to Gator, advertisers will be paying for ad impressions that nobody sees. At least when I use WebWasher or the like nobody's paying for the ads I'm not seeing. (Plus, I had to personally decided to install WebWasher, which limits its impact to the number of tech savvy people that know about ad filters -- how many people voluntarily installed Gator, as compared to how many got it by installing Crap Puzzle Bobble Clone or the like?)
Personally, this whole thing stinks of extortion to me -- you have to pay Gator an additional fee to get your ad in their circulation, or your ad gets covered up.
Even if you ignore arguments about how it's killing competition, etc., you still have to pay actual money for Internet Explorer. Obviously Internet Explorer's dev team needs to be paid, since they don't work for free. So where do you think Microsoft gets the money -- the sky?
That's right -- the prices for all those other Microsoft products subsidizes the development for Internet Explorer. So when I buy Windows, I'm paying for Internet Explorer, even though I'll never use it. Real fair, huh? It's like those "extras" that most people never use that the car manufacturers tack on cars to drive up the price (like cruise control), except (unlike with cars) you can't special order a copy of Windows without IE, much less without paying for it.
Even if you go the alternate OS route, unless you're getting a Mac or building your own computer, you're paying the Windows tax for the copy of Windows you're not going to use, and probably countless other Microsoft products like Office and Money. So when you buy a PC, even if you never touch Internet Explorer in your lifetime, you're paying for it.
If that's not anti-competitive, I'm not sure what is.
To me the advantage of CD-based MP3 players has always been that they can store massive amounts of music they can store -- 700 megs (or more if you get more expensive CDs and/or overburn) on a CD that costs pennies. Being able to pop a CD containing 5 to 10 CDs' worth of music into my Rio Volt is the main reason I bought it -- no lugging around more than a couple of CDs, and I can use it in the car without endangering other people on the road by flipping through CDs when I should be driving. By cutting the storage capacity to just over a quarter of that, it's sort of eliminating the point of using CDs. Iomega had the same problems with the HipZip -- no matter how cheap the media is, nobody's willing to put up with the problems brought on by optical or magnetic media unless they get some big storage payoff. (Admittedly, at 40MB the PocketZip disks are significantly smaller, but so are the disks' physical size, and you didn't have to invest in a CD burner if you didn't already own one.)
That isn't to say I don't wish Philips well with this -- my last (pre-MP3) CD player was a Philips, and it's taken quite a beating and still works as well as the day I bought it. I'm just afraid the market for this sort of thing isn't going to be very warm.
What happens is that IIS sits there, waiting for Web browsers to request pages. A Code Red infected server starts randomly picking other computers on the Internet or the network, and requests them to send a Web page called default.ida. It then passes a huge parameter to default.ida.
Apparently, default.ida has hard-coded a maximum length for parameters -- say, 200 letters. (Probably not actually 200 -- but you get the idea.) That's what all the XXX and NNN's are there -- it's the 200 (etc.) letters that's the most default.ida is expecting to receive. A buffer overflow is when something goes past that maximum number of letters, and a program with a buffer overflow problem usually does something strange with the information past that point -- in this case, default.ida takes everthing after that number of letters and runs it like it were a program.
Normally, this would just crash IIS (since it's getting a bunch of garbage, and running garbage makes programs crash) but Code Red is purposely designed so after the right number (200 or whatever) of XXX/NNN's, it tacks on the code to infect the computer with Code Red. So, IIS runs the code, the computer becomes infected with Code Red, it starts trying to spread it to other computers, and the whole cycle starts all over again.
From what I understand, the PS2 Linux distro uses a proprietary, binary-only driver/library/program to allow programmers to access the PS2's graphics chip. My question is, how will this hinder end users' ability to get their hands on SDL-based PS2 games?
Does this mean they'll have to buy a copy of the $200 Linux development kit? Or are developers allowed to freely redistribute the graphics runtimes? (Or have you found some other way around this, perhaps by accessing the PS2 hardware without the binary runtime?)
I'm just afraid that most PS2 gamers (read: non-geeks) won't find SDL games too attractive if they have to buy a $200 Linux kit to play them.
Brought to you by the people that gave you the Infinite Sharpness filter for Photoshop (find those completely sharp faces buried in fuzzy films) and the Internet Welcome Screen.
I think what most people hate about Mac hardware is the fact that you still can't buy all the parts you need to build one yourself. Hell, I probably would have built a Mac, if I had the option (and if OS X were available at the time).
Good point -- I had forgotten about the whole selling the hardware at a loss issue. Still, to the average gamer, who probably knows or cares little about free or Free games, $200 is an awfully high price to justify getting the ability to play SDL games.
Sure, the Cool Factor is definitely there, but the $200 entry fee would probably be too high for anybody but die-hard geeks who want to play their SDL games on a TV mainly for the hell of it, which is a far cry from small developers being able to reach millions of gamers like some people had hoped for.
Does anybody have information about whether or not developers will be able to redistribute enough of the Linux-based runtimes to make this feasible? Actual quotes from the license agreement(s) would be nice. (Or has the porter found some way around using the binary-only stuff?)
My question is, why wouldn't they? If anything, they should be more concerned about it than we are -- they're the ones paying the bandwidth bill and rebooting the clogged mail servers. Not only is running a virus scanner on POP3 and SMTP servers a good idea to do out of courtosey (sp?) for their customers, but it will save them money in the long run every time the next Sircam or Melissa comes around.
What I do know for a fact is they had some type of sneaky copy protection where if you tried to copy the game (short of using Copy II PC or the like) it would not only produce a non-working copy, but your original wouldn't work anymore. I managed to end up with a non-working Rampage disk because I normally copy games so I can play the backup copies and store the originals away. Thankfully, I only wrecked the 3.5" disk (this was when they gave you both 3.5" and 5.25") so I was still able to use the 5.25" disk; by the time I got a computer without a 5.25" drive Neverlock had long since removed the copy protection check from most of my games, Rampage included.
Without a doubt, Silicon Snake Oil by Cliff Stoll is more important than any other computer book budding programmers can read. If you can take Stoll's heavy dose of cynicism, it's an excellent reflecion about what we're doing wrong with computers. Stoll really pushes programmers to ask themselves the question that should come first, but is rarely considered at all, in system design: "Does this really help people, or is it just another way to take away their productivity?"
When you get a telemarketing call, they pay their long distance company for the right to call you. It doesn't cost you a penny to pick up the phone. When you get junk (snail) mail, the marketer had to pay the postal service to send mail out to each and every address. Not only does it not cost you anything, but in the case of the U.S. Postal Service these bulk rates actually lower the cost of you sending mail, since they use it subsidize part of the cost of personal mail.
Bulk E-mail on the other hand is a different thing. First off, if you're not on a land-based U.S. phone line, odds are you're paying per-minute for your connection -- which sucks since you have to pay to get spam dumped in your E-mail program's inbox.
Even if you have a flat rate connection, you're still inevitably paying for spam mail, whether or not it's directly. Bandwidth isn't free -- take a 5k spam mail message and multiply it by 10 million messages, both of which are probably conversative estimates, and you're talking about 50 megabytes each time a spam is sent out. If you get 3 spam messages a day, that's 150 megabytes of bandwidth just for the messages that you received -- which is only a tiny fraction of all the spam sent out in a day. Multiply 50 megabytes by the countless number of messages, and that's a lot of bandwidth going up in smoke daily.
Guess who's paying for it? Hint: with spammers usually using stolen ISP accounts and fake credit card numbers, probably not them. Another hint: when ISPs' bandwidth costs go up, they pass it on to the users.
Not to mention the fact that spammers shoving millions of messages through creaky mail servers can take them down. So even excluding the monetary damage, what's it worth if a piece of E-mail sent to/from you was on that server when it went down in flames? Your message may be delayed, or it may never show up at all.
Q: What goes, *stomp* *stomp* *stomp* *stomp* *sproi-oing* *stomp* *stomp* *stomp* *stomp*?
A: A prehistoric drive-by shooting.
(Yes, I know bows don't really go "sproi-oing", but it's a funnier sound effect than "fpppppt".)