This looks to me like deliberately misstating the views of someone you disagree with to embarass them and make yourself look like the "victim".
The issue over the pledge is a simple one, you can't have the government exerting pressure on people to believe in God. If people, on their own, without being lead by taxation-funded institutions, want to add "under God" to their pledge of allegience (I say add it, because it wasn't there originally), then that's fine and constitutional. What isn't is congress passing a law blessing an official version that deliberately adds those words, and taxation-funded teaches encouraging children to say it.
You don't have to "stop saying the pledge", nobody has called for that, either stopping you from saying the original version or Congress's mangled religious version. (It's worth noting also right now that the case hasn't even been decided, the Supreme Court opted last week not to rule on the issue because the person who'd brought the case didn't legally have the right to bring the case.)
I'm sure that in "some areas some people are almost embarassed to admit they goto(sic) church", but that's because you'll get the occasional pocket of atheism in any country coupled with discomfort from those who really are in a minority. I face the opposite issue in that when I reveal my atheism in this part of Florida (which isn't even West Coast or Northern Florida, I'm generally surrounded by ex-New Yorkers) people are usually shocked. If I didn't have the reputation as being a fairly nice guy and didn't take care in who I reveal it to, I know it would be used against me. I'm pretty certain from what I've seen of the US that this is the case in most of the country. Most of the US is the opposite of what you describe.
What we've got at the moment is a government which currently has leant too far to the "supporting religion" side, and there's a movement correcting that. Most people seeing that movement who are religious will, naturally, be - if they're not careful enough to be logical and rational about the situation - concerned because they'll see the government moving away from supporting something they stand for. Likewise, if the government's view ever started to support atheism I'd probably initially feel - should this start to be undermined - a little concerned too.
But this isn't a "They're changing the government to support atheism" thing as assumed by more hysterical xtians, this is a "We're changing the government to remove its support for religions based upon a God. We're changing the government to be neutral", as it should be, as the First Amendment calls for.
If the government ever does stop you saying "Under God" when you recite your version of the PoA, you can be pretty sure you'll win a First Amendment case and you'll also get pretty much universal support. However, to remain neutral, it's right that it shouldn't be encouraging (or discouraging) belief in a God, and right now, that's what it's doing.
As a postscript, the default mode for countries that support a class of religions is to get more specific as time goes on. The only argument right now I've heard from supporters of the corrupted PoA is that a majority of Americans believe in one of that class of religions that encompases one God. The same argument can be used for further state support for a specific religion that believes in God that also is in the majority. That's what everyone who believes in religious freedom is trying to fight against.
Ok, I misunderstood your point. That said, I would say I'm still not sure your comparisons are reasonable.
MS crippling Hotmail? Well, if they did do it, would it make a major difference given there are alternatives?
Telephone company blocking the bad side of town? There's a major difference in expectations, while (we agree) this would be "annoying, detrimental to their business, and (need I say?) constipatingly stupid" I'd also have to say that I couldn't reasonably be blamed for being surprised, nor reasonably blamed for making decisions based on BellWhatever continuing to provide a service they're under an obligation to provide, that even in the absense of regulation, I pay them to provide.
Such an assumption would be wrong in Yahoo's case. I know they're being paid by ads. I'm using a non-supported third party client, that doesn't show Yahoo's ads, they receive no other source of funding from me. At the very least, my surprise wouldn't be "Damn, they've shut the service down", it would be "Wow, this works" the first day I try it.
In that respect, the "what right they have to do" does come in it, in that there's a level of expectation here which has to do with what they can do, and what they're going to want to do. It's clearly not necessarily in Yahoo's interests to provide an IM service to people who are making no, direct or indirect, contribution to it. They're clearly Yahoo's servers, to do with as they wish. Why wouldn't I expect them to cut them off?
(This is not to imply that I think Yahoo! has done so in any mean fashion, I suspect this is a straightforward "Yes, we're upgrading the protocol to support new features, because time marches on, and we have no real obligation to devote our time to fixing other people's clients." type situation.)
How would you feel if Microsoft suddenly changed the "hotmail" protocol, so you could send e-mail to any one on hotmail, or receive any from them? Even if it's your girlfriend, or your mother?
I assume you meant "couldn't send", not "could send". I'll bear in mind you're liable for such typos if you ever write that awful constipatingly-stupid "could care less" corrupted phrase;)
That's up to MS. Seriously. There are a lot of email providers out there, and if MS decides to cripple their service in that way,
How about if your telephone company suddenly won't let you connect to the bad side of town? All those free phonecalls cost em, you know?
I pay my telephone company money, so they'd better not. And if the majority of people I want to contact are on the bad side of town, I may stop paying them altogether, as my service wouldn't be worth the money.
Seriously, this isn't a relevent comparison. Yahoo! takes in no money from me except what I indirectly pay via advertising. They certainly have no obligation to let me choose how I access their services, and they have the right to be annoyed if their service is funded via advertising and I'm bypassing that. Likewise, I have the right to say "No". And I can, legitimately, say "No", because while I rely on the phone, it being the only game in town and the core technology for telecommunications, I can't say the same about IM, IM simply isn't a practical technology to rely on, and there are good alternatives.
For what it's worth, these charges apply nationwide, not simply cities where their service sucks. For example, I can subscribe to this here on the Treasure Coast, Florida, where the service is excellent. So your explanation I'm afraid isn't up to scratch.
Likewise, AT&T charges the Earth for GPRS and has done even when their service sucks. Last year it was absolutely awful here, with blackspots, absurdly crappy call quality, and twenty to thirty section call connection times, and they were charging 3c a kilobyte even back then.
Voicestream bought Omnipoint, the two were different, separate, companies. T-Mobile, a German company with no US presense, then bought Voicestream.
I'm not sure about the roaming agreements ending as I thought T-Mobile only had coverage in some areas specifically because of the agreements, but I'll defer to you.
AT&T phones only indicate they're on Cingular's network when they're roaming, otherwise they show AT&T. I have an AT&T phone so I should know! This caused a certain amount of headaches until this month because SMS rates were different - AT&T customers who didn't check which network they were on would end up being charged 25c a message whenever their phone wandered onto Cingular's net.
That situation is resolved and the tariffs updated, but they haven't merged yet, so you're making use of "no roaming charges" when you see Cingular on your phone. There's also the risk of minutes you use this billing period being charged to your next one if you roam.
One of the flaws inherent in patenting, as opposed to copyright, is that you can violate a patent even if you didn't copy it. That is, if you independently come up with the same idea, you are still in violation of the pre-existing patent.
I thought that worth mentioning as that's another argument against patents that's frequently forgotten and is, to be, the crux of what makes patents, as opposed to copyrights, unjust, though it's not so relevent for this particular example.
There's a reason fish don't breed with strawberries in the natural world. It might not be a good idea to discover exactly what that reason is until we know a whole lot more about the way DNA works.
Not entirely sure why you were modded flamebait, especially as many of the responses to yours seemed to be responding to an entirely different argument.
Whatever though, the reason why fish do not breed with strawberries is because fishberries would taste absolutely disgusting. I thought I better let you know that.
FUD is a technique started by IBM in the sixties and seventies aimed at undermining their competitors. It stands for "Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt". The idea is to sow these into the minds of potential customers. Instead of saying: "Our all-new ACME Widgetmaster 2000 has these fantastic features", or even "Our all-new ACME Widgetmaster 2000 has these fantastic features unlike our competitor", you say:
"Well, yes, I can understand you liking the new BlogsCo Gadgetwhiz 3000, but between you and I, I'm hearing a lot of problems about their reliability. I suspect it probably will not be on the market before 2008, assuming they don't go bankrupt beforehand."
You'll note nobody's competing on merits, it's essentially a slime campaign. Make the potential customer feel uncomfortable with the competitor, make the potential customer assume trouble is ahead if they go with that competitor.
You could argue that most political campaigns in the US are FUD campaigns.
Ok, but now let's supposed that just as the user has.jpg associated with "xv", and ".html" associated with "mozilla" (because we're assuming this is a straightforward environment in which they'd expect to be able to double click on something and open it), they have something popular that's scriptable and can launch that kind of command.
I think it's a little premature to praise the security of GNU/Linux simply because shell scripts and binary executables need to be +x to run.
Also, FWIW, I don't really care about the part of the OS that's on CDs (it's a pain to reinstall, but at least it's there), it's the removing ~/ that'd kill me.
I think the only solution really is to make everything much more sandboxable.
There is no way to implement verification of senders without breaking forwarding when using legacy MTAs.
By legacy MTAs, you mean every existing MTA on the planet. Because you actually meant to type "current" but your fingers slipped, right?
And my answer to that comment, whether you use "legacy" or "current", is this: then don't. It's pointless, it's idiotic, verification of senders is not going to do anything about spam.
I think it's a tad silly to say "Well, we can't ever make a better system for e-mail because we must stay 100% compatible with an old, broken standard".
It's current, not "old", and it's not broken.
Translation: Sometimes we must break things to move forward, technologically speaking
Indeed we do. How is verifying the validity of an envelope From line a move forward? Is this such a move forward that it justifies breaking what it breaks?
No, you're making up things that I've said in order to try to cover a poor argument. Worse, you've picked some pretty sad examples.
Telnet isn't a particularly popular protocol (most computers, after all, run Windows), so replacing it with ssh is hardly an issue. Nevertheless, it's taken nearly a decade to get to this point, and the most popular operating system on Earth is still bundled with telnet, not ssh.
FTP isn't being replaced by HTTP, it's being augmented with it. Despite massive unpopularity, poor performance, firewall issues, etc, FTP is still around despite HTTP being available as a nominal replacement since 1990.
If we know who is sending the mails, then why can't we block them or sue them?
Ah. So you're not talking about replacing SMTP at all, what you're arguing for is an international identity verification system. Well, why the fuck didn't you say so?! I'll get right on that and implement it right away. It'll take me, what, five minutes? And I'm sure everyone will be delighted with the system, registering themselves with the various government bodies, presenting their papers to their ISPs, throwing out all their existing email software and replacing it with new unfamiliar software, they'll all upgrade in much less than fourteen years.
In the real world, where we don't create some sort of insane, draconian, international identify verification system simply to get rid of unwanted junk email, an SMTP replacement that requires "authentication" will be gotten around by spammers creating new identities, just as today (and since the beginning of time) they've invented new identities for the From: lines. You'll still not be able to link it to a physical person, so you'll still be back where you started.
SMTP is already established. "NSS&SMTP" is not going to go head-to-head with SMTP, it can't, SMTP's "won" before it's even been invented.
Besides which, at the risk of repeating what I've said elsewhere, secured SMTP will do little or nothing to prevent spam, it'll just cause more headaches. The problem we have is not that we don't know who is sending the emails, the problem we're having is that we don't want them.
Cingular's service is NOT based on GSM. This is the next generation of GSM (3G) which is based on CDMA technology.
Oh boy.
Cingular's service is based on GSM: it's a UMTS service, UMTS is essentially "GSM version 2". UMTS has plug-inable air-interface technologies, one of which is HSDPA. HSDPA is about three times more efficient than W-CDMA. Insofar as it's based on CDMA technology, this is technically true in that HSDPA is a much enhanced version of W-CDMA, which is a Code Division Multiple Access system. However, people in the US who use the term "CDMA" usually mean "IS-95" (the standard used by Sprint PCS and Verizon), which UMTS has no relation whatsoever to.
Why do you think Cingular and AT&T have been busy upgrading their TDMA (IS-136) networks to GSM?
Cingular and T-Mobile have an agreement to implement a transparent roaming system in areas where one has frequencies and the other doesn't. But the networks are essentially different. Cingular's runs on the frequencies it bought from the FCC, T-Mobile's on the frequencies it - or the companies that merged to create T-Mobile (Voicestream, Omnipoint, et al) - it bought from the FCC.
I don't know where this myth came from that they're the same network. They're not.
I'm not sure if you mean "CDMA is superior to GSM" in the "By CDMA I meant IS-95" sense, or "CDMA is superior to GSM" in the comparing chalk and cheese sense (ie CDMA is a technology, GSM is a standard.)
GSM is vastly better than IS-95. It's a complete standard that provides full, modern, PSTN integration, position independence, device independence, personal mobility, and a host of other things. Implementations of IS-95 in the US tend to lack these features and, from my perspective, are half-arsed attempts at using modern technologies to replicate a cellphone mentality still stuck in the seventies.
However GSM's default air interface layer is Time Division Multiple Access, which is generally considered not superior to Code Division and the structure makes it hard for non-TDMA based technologies to be incorporated. UMTS, essentially the next version of GSM, is much more flexible about different air interface technologies being plugged into the lowest level. Most European operators have adopted W-CDMA for UMTS's air interface technology. Most US GSM operators have yet to make a firm decision though Cingular, for now, is planning to roll out HSDPA, an enhanced version of W-CDMA.
A lot of this confusion is deliberate. Qualcomm, in the early days, for fear of losing to the rising GSM, embarked on three strategies to get its technology out: Lobbying government, running a bizarre and hysterical anti-GSM campaign which included everything from deliberately blurring the lines between TDMA and GSM to writing misleading FUD about GSM's origins, and making IS-95 highly dumbed down so it would slot into existing analog networks.
At some point I'll write a journal entry explaining the jargon. For now...
In the US, T-Mobile does unlimited WAP GPRS for about $5/mo (in addition to your normal talk plan.) There's also unlimited unfettered GPRS (eg no port blocking) for $20 per month, or $30 without a talk plan, if you plan to use it with your laptop.
Right now I'd have to agree that Cingular and AT&T are charging way too much for the service.
This is a classic example of trying to solve a problem with a solution to an entirely different problem.
How do you guarantee that an email is from a specific entity? You ask the sender to sign it.
How do you prevent spam from being delivered to you? You, you, er... ok, you control access to your email address, you run your own SMTP server if possible so that you can give different entities different email addresses that you can revoke if they're compromised; failing that you use Bayesian (or similar) filters with an overriding whitelist to make sure email from friends definitely arrives and isn't filtered out.
How does signing email help prevent spam? Answer: it doesn't. It never will. Spammers can sign their own email too, so filtering on the basis of the absense of a signature is a tad pointless. Filtering on the basis of known mail senders also doesn't help, whether you do it by From: line or by signature, because that pretty much prevents you from receiving email from new sources. If it worked, people would already be filtering on the basis of the From: line.
It's time to stop proposing it. It's silly. It's irrelevent.
I'm firmly of the opinion we could stop spammers in their tracks without breaking SMTP, without IP-based blocklists, destroying port 25, undermining anonymonity, or any of the other kooky measures proposed by the anti-spam community. It doesn't involve killing anyone either;) But while people propose solutions to other problems as solutions to spam, we will not see an end to spam.
ffmpeg was originally designed for exactly this kind of thing. The only problem with it is that it's pretty much under permanent development, but it's generally considered very high quality. Will support any video card supported by a Video4Linux interface, IIRC.
That would imply that the ".forward" file, that was certainly around 14 years ago when I had my first taste of Unix, was incorrectly named.
Indeed, bouncing generally means sending an email back to its sender, usually with an error. I've noticed this "new" definition, your's, recently on one mail client I used (I forget which) and think it's pretty stupid. Why redefine words like this? It's not even a sane redefinition.
It's not possible to move incoming SMTP to a different port. When someone wants to send you email they will expect port 25 to be open and accessable for your domain on the hosts your MX records point at (or failing that, the host your A record points at.)
Ironically, the only "useful" SMTP service you can move to another port is an SMTP relay, on the grounds that some email clients allow you to say which port the smarthost is on...
Note to people thinking of replying to the above to say I'm wrong. Please read it again. We're not talking about smarthosts in the first paragraph, and running your own smarthost is pretty pointless for the most part anyway. We're talking about a situation where you're running an SMTP server to *receive* email for "mydomain.blah". You *must* receive it via SMTP on port 25 if you want it accessable by standard email MTAs.
I agree with this. However, where the analogy doesn't apply is that SCO continued to distribute Linux after they filed the lawsuit against IBM.
What they did before the lawsuit was filed they could arguably claim was an accident. That doesn't take them off the hook, but it gives them some moral wiggle-room.
I gave up on Nokia's phones when they built in that connectivity thing that allows you to talk to someone else with them. I mean, what's the point? Why would you want to be able to talk to anyone? What a pointless gimmick!
No, a phone should be a lump of plastic that fits in your pocket. Nothing more, nothing less.
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The issue over the pledge is a simple one, you can't have the government exerting pressure on people to believe in God. If people, on their own, without being lead by taxation-funded institutions, want to add "under God" to their pledge of allegience (I say add it, because it wasn't there originally), then that's fine and constitutional. What isn't is congress passing a law blessing an official version that deliberately adds those words, and taxation-funded teaches encouraging children to say it.
You don't have to "stop saying the pledge", nobody has called for that, either stopping you from saying the original version or Congress's mangled religious version. (It's worth noting also right now that the case hasn't even been decided, the Supreme Court opted last week not to rule on the issue because the person who'd brought the case didn't legally have the right to bring the case.)
I'm sure that in "some areas some people are almost embarassed to admit they goto(sic) church", but that's because you'll get the occasional pocket of atheism in any country coupled with discomfort from those who really are in a minority. I face the opposite issue in that when I reveal my atheism in this part of Florida (which isn't even West Coast or Northern Florida, I'm generally surrounded by ex-New Yorkers) people are usually shocked. If I didn't have the reputation as being a fairly nice guy and didn't take care in who I reveal it to, I know it would be used against me. I'm pretty certain from what I've seen of the US that this is the case in most of the country. Most of the US is the opposite of what you describe.
What we've got at the moment is a government which currently has leant too far to the "supporting religion" side, and there's a movement correcting that. Most people seeing that movement who are religious will, naturally, be - if they're not careful enough to be logical and rational about the situation - concerned because they'll see the government moving away from supporting something they stand for. Likewise, if the government's view ever started to support atheism I'd probably initially feel - should this start to be undermined - a little concerned too.
But this isn't a "They're changing the government to support atheism" thing as assumed by more hysterical xtians, this is a "We're changing the government to remove its support for religions based upon a God. We're changing the government to be neutral", as it should be, as the First Amendment calls for.
If the government ever does stop you saying "Under God" when you recite your version of the PoA, you can be pretty sure you'll win a First Amendment case and you'll also get pretty much universal support. However, to remain neutral, it's right that it shouldn't be encouraging (or discouraging) belief in a God, and right now, that's what it's doing.
As a postscript, the default mode for countries that support a class of religions is to get more specific as time goes on. The only argument right now I've heard from supporters of the corrupted PoA is that a majority of Americans believe in one of that class of religions that encompases one God. The same argument can be used for further state support for a specific religion that believes in God that also is in the majority. That's what everyone who believes in religious freedom is trying to fight against.
MS crippling Hotmail? Well, if they did do it, would it make a major difference given there are alternatives?
Telephone company blocking the bad side of town? There's a major difference in expectations, while (we agree) this would be "annoying, detrimental to their business, and (need I say?) constipatingly stupid" I'd also have to say that I couldn't reasonably be blamed for being surprised, nor reasonably blamed for making decisions based on BellWhatever continuing to provide a service they're under an obligation to provide, that even in the absense of regulation, I pay them to provide.
Such an assumption would be wrong in Yahoo's case. I know they're being paid by ads. I'm using a non-supported third party client, that doesn't show Yahoo's ads, they receive no other source of funding from me. At the very least, my surprise wouldn't be "Damn, they've shut the service down", it would be "Wow, this works" the first day I try it.
In that respect, the "what right they have to do" does come in it, in that there's a level of expectation here which has to do with what they can do, and what they're going to want to do. It's clearly not necessarily in Yahoo's interests to provide an IM service to people who are making no, direct or indirect, contribution to it. They're clearly Yahoo's servers, to do with as they wish. Why wouldn't I expect them to cut them off?
(This is not to imply that I think Yahoo! has done so in any mean fashion, I suspect this is a straightforward "Yes, we're upgrading the protocol to support new features, because time marches on, and we have no real obligation to devote our time to fixing other people's clients." type situation.)
That's up to MS. Seriously. There are a lot of email providers out there, and if MS decides to cripple their service in that way,
I pay my telephone company money, so they'd better not. And if the majority of people I want to contact are on the bad side of town, I may stop paying them altogether, as my service wouldn't be worth the money.Seriously, this isn't a relevent comparison. Yahoo! takes in no money from me except what I indirectly pay via advertising. They certainly have no obligation to let me choose how I access their services, and they have the right to be annoyed if their service is funded via advertising and I'm bypassing that. Likewise, I have the right to say "No". And I can, legitimately, say "No", because while I rely on the phone, it being the only game in town and the core technology for telecommunications, I can't say the same about IM, IM simply isn't a practical technology to rely on, and there are good alternatives.
Likewise, AT&T charges the Earth for GPRS and has done even when their service sucks. Last year it was absolutely awful here, with blackspots, absurdly crappy call quality, and twenty to thirty section call connection times, and they were charging 3c a kilobyte even back then.
Voicestream bought Omnipoint, the two were different, separate, companies. T-Mobile, a German company with no US presense, then bought Voicestream.
I'm not sure about the roaming agreements ending as I thought T-Mobile only had coverage in some areas specifically because of the agreements, but I'll defer to you.
AT&T phones only indicate they're on Cingular's network when they're roaming, otherwise they show AT&T. I have an AT&T phone so I should know! This caused a certain amount of headaches until this month because SMS rates were different - AT&T customers who didn't check which network they were on would end up being charged 25c a message whenever their phone wandered onto Cingular's net.
That situation is resolved and the tariffs updated, but they haven't merged yet, so you're making use of "no roaming charges" when you see Cingular on your phone. There's also the risk of minutes you use this billing period being charged to your next one if you roam.
I thought that worth mentioning as that's another argument against patents that's frequently forgotten and is, to be, the crux of what makes patents, as opposed to copyrights, unjust, though it's not so relevent for this particular example.
Whatever though, the reason why fish do not breed with strawberries is because fishberries would taste absolutely disgusting. I thought I better let you know that.
Glad to help. I'm unbiased and I can say quite honestly and categorically that both Microsoft and ESR make some good points, and some bad ones.
"Well, yes, I can understand you liking the new BlogsCo Gadgetwhiz 3000, but between you and I, I'm hearing a lot of problems about their reliability. I suspect it probably will not be on the market before 2008, assuming they don't go bankrupt beforehand."
You'll note nobody's competing on merits, it's essentially a slime campaign. Make the potential customer feel uncomfortable with the competitor, make the potential customer assume trouble is ahead if they go with that competitor.
You could argue that most political campaigns in the US are FUD campaigns.
I think it's a little premature to praise the security of GNU/Linux simply because shell scripts and binary executables need to be +x to run.
Also, FWIW, I don't really care about the part of the OS that's on CDs (it's a pain to reinstall, but at least it's there), it's the removing ~/ that'd kill me.
I think the only solution really is to make everything much more sandboxable.
And my answer to that comment, whether you use "legacy" or "current", is this: then don't. It's pointless, it's idiotic, verification of senders is not going to do anything about spam.
It's current, not "old", and it's not broken. Indeed we do. How is verifying the validity of an envelope From line a move forward? Is this such a move forward that it justifies breaking what it breaks?Telnet isn't a particularly popular protocol (most computers, after all, run Windows), so replacing it with ssh is hardly an issue. Nevertheless, it's taken nearly a decade to get to this point, and the most popular operating system on Earth is still bundled with telnet, not ssh.
FTP isn't being replaced by HTTP, it's being augmented with it. Despite massive unpopularity, poor performance, firewall issues, etc, FTP is still around despite HTTP being available as a nominal replacement since 1990.
Ah. So you're not talking about replacing SMTP at all, what you're arguing for is an international identity verification system. Well, why the fuck didn't you say so?! I'll get right on that and implement it right away. It'll take me, what, five minutes? And I'm sure everyone will be delighted with the system, registering themselves with the various government bodies, presenting their papers to their ISPs, throwing out all their existing email software and replacing it with new unfamiliar software, they'll all upgrade in much less than fourteen years.In the real world, where we don't create some sort of insane, draconian, international identify verification system simply to get rid of unwanted junk email, an SMTP replacement that requires "authentication" will be gotten around by spammers creating new identities, just as today (and since the beginning of time) they've invented new identities for the From: lines. You'll still not be able to link it to a physical person, so you'll still be back where you started.
Besides which, at the risk of repeating what I've said elsewhere, secured SMTP will do little or nothing to prevent spam, it'll just cause more headaches. The problem we have is not that we don't know who is sending the emails, the problem we're having is that we don't want them.
Cingular's service is based on GSM: it's a UMTS service, UMTS is essentially "GSM version 2". UMTS has plug-inable air-interface technologies, one of which is HSDPA. HSDPA is about three times more efficient than W-CDMA. Insofar as it's based on CDMA technology, this is technically true in that HSDPA is a much enhanced version of W-CDMA, which is a Code Division Multiple Access system. However, people in the US who use the term "CDMA" usually mean "IS-95" (the standard used by Sprint PCS and Verizon), which UMTS has no relation whatsoever to.
Why do you think Cingular and AT&T have been busy upgrading their TDMA (IS-136) networks to GSM?
Cingular and T-Mobile have an agreement to implement a transparent roaming system in areas where one has frequencies and the other doesn't. But the networks are essentially different. Cingular's runs on the frequencies it bought from the FCC, T-Mobile's on the frequencies it - or the companies that merged to create T-Mobile (Voicestream, Omnipoint, et al) - it bought from the FCC.
I don't know where this myth came from that they're the same network. They're not.
GSM is vastly better than IS-95. It's a complete standard that provides full, modern, PSTN integration, position independence, device independence, personal mobility, and a host of other things. Implementations of IS-95 in the US tend to lack these features and, from my perspective, are half-arsed attempts at using modern technologies to replicate a cellphone mentality still stuck in the seventies.
However GSM's default air interface layer is Time Division Multiple Access, which is generally considered not superior to Code Division and the structure makes it hard for non-TDMA based technologies to be incorporated. UMTS, essentially the next version of GSM, is much more flexible about different air interface technologies being plugged into the lowest level. Most European operators have adopted W-CDMA for UMTS's air interface technology. Most US GSM operators have yet to make a firm decision though Cingular, for now, is planning to roll out HSDPA, an enhanced version of W-CDMA.
A lot of this confusion is deliberate. Qualcomm, in the early days, for fear of losing to the rising GSM, embarked on three strategies to get its technology out: Lobbying government, running a bizarre and hysterical anti-GSM campaign which included everything from deliberately blurring the lines between TDMA and GSM to writing misleading FUD about GSM's origins, and making IS-95 highly dumbed down so it would slot into existing analog networks.
At some point I'll write a journal entry explaining the jargon. For now...
Right now I'd have to agree that Cingular and AT&T are charging way too much for the service.
How do you guarantee that an email is from a specific entity? You ask the sender to sign it.
How do you prevent spam from being delivered to you? You, you, er... ok, you control access to your email address, you run your own SMTP server if possible so that you can give different entities different email addresses that you can revoke if they're compromised; failing that you use Bayesian (or similar) filters with an overriding whitelist to make sure email from friends definitely arrives and isn't filtered out.
How does signing email help prevent spam? Answer: it doesn't. It never will. Spammers can sign their own email too, so filtering on the basis of the absense of a signature is a tad pointless. Filtering on the basis of known mail senders also doesn't help, whether you do it by From: line or by signature, because that pretty much prevents you from receiving email from new sources. If it worked, people would already be filtering on the basis of the From: line.
It's time to stop proposing it. It's silly. It's irrelevent.
I'm firmly of the opinion we could stop spammers in their tracks without breaking SMTP, without IP-based blocklists, destroying port 25, undermining anonymonity, or any of the other kooky measures proposed by the anti-spam community. It doesn't involve killing anyone either ;) But while people propose solutions to other problems as solutions to spam, we will not see an end to spam.
The World Wide Web didn't replace Gopher, the two went head to head and the former won.
ffmpeg was originally designed for exactly this kind of thing. The only problem with it is that it's pretty much under permanent development, but it's generally considered very high quality. Will support any video card supported by a Video4Linux interface, IIRC.
Indeed, bouncing generally means sending an email back to its sender, usually with an error. I've noticed this "new" definition, your's, recently on one mail client I used (I forget which) and think it's pretty stupid. Why redefine words like this? It's not even a sane redefinition.
I think it's a tad silly to say "Well, it's ok if it breaks everything, because we can always change everything."
Ironically, the only "useful" SMTP service you can move to another port is an SMTP relay, on the grounds that some email clients allow you to say which port the smarthost is on...
Note to people thinking of replying to the above to say I'm wrong. Please read it again. We're not talking about smarthosts in the first paragraph, and running your own smarthost is pretty pointless for the most part anyway. We're talking about a situation where you're running an SMTP server to *receive* email for "mydomain.blah". You *must* receive it via SMTP on port 25 if you want it accessable by standard email MTAs.
What they did before the lawsuit was filed they could arguably claim was an accident. That doesn't take them off the hook, but it gives them some moral wiggle-room.
No, a phone should be a lump of plastic that fits in your pocket. Nothing more, nothing less.