By the same token though, if you were to say in 1950 that the next 50 years would be marked by a long slide in industrial employment, the very same question would apply. Indeed, given all that was known at the time, it would be quite reasonable to say that "the new jobs [that would be] created in the US to replace the [displaced industrial jobs] do not pay nearly as much nor do the[y] have the same level of [benefits]."
The same could be said in 1890, if it was pointed out that farm employment in the US would decline massively over that subsequent 50 years.
Capitalism is an inherently dynamic force. Any attempt to control this dynamism results in catastrophes like the Great Depression (largely caused by the errant adoption of anti-free trade laws during a normal recession).
...is to simply make the broadband user liable for actions taken using their connection, whether they had knowledge or not.
If Joe Lusers who signed up for cable internet and don't bother to patch their systems or run firewalls become spam relays and DDoS zombies they should be held liable. It's Mr. Luser's responsibility to figure out who was using his connection for nefarious purposes.
Get some news coverage about families that got judgements against them for $10,000 for spamming and you'll see progress in this area because then people will give a shit about this. From their perspective, it doesn't hurt them to be a spam or DDoS zombie, so they've no incentive whatsoever to not be a spam/DDoS zombie.
Now, what will the consequence of this be? When faced with risk, there are a few options:
Risk acceptance. Basically, this amounts to praying that the risked event does not occur.
Risk avoidance. This is completely avoiding the risk. In this case, it would mean terminating your broadband.
Risk reduction. This is researching the risks and taking prudent action to reduce the chances of the risked event occuring. This would be the broadband user who realizes that he's potentially liable for enough to make him bankrupt who then researches network security and educates himself.
Risk transference. This is passing the risk onto a voluntary other party. This would likely be an insurance company. If there's a definable, quantifiable risk, an insurance company will offer insurance against losses incurred from this risk. With liability defined, insurers will set rates for "broadband insurance". You would apply for coverage, list how many computers are on your network, what software you run, how regularly you patch, and maybe even take an exam to find out how security-aware you are. Based on these factors, you would then pay a premium to the insurance company, in return for which, if you're ever sued and found liable, the insurance company will pay the claim.
As far as I'm concerned, all four of those options are equally good and effective.
MySQL changed the license of the client libraries to GPL from LGPL. This meant that anything which linked to the client libs had to be GPL. The non-GPL crowd (including PHP) got in a huff about this.
Users (sysadmins) of the blacklist submit two lists of IPs, good (non-spammers) or bad (spammers).
When a server receives a mail, it checks with the list to see on which lists the IP appears as good and on which it appears as bad.
The user marks the mail as ham or as spam. A Bayesian algorithm then determines which lists are trustworthy for marking spam hosts.
Filters could then/dev/null mail based on this bayesian score
The idea is essentially to allow a collaboratively developed decentralized blacklist and whitelist to develop. Spammers will either submit the IPs they use to this list or not submit them; if they do submit them, then a "good" report from them will eventually be taken as a strong sign of spamminess. If they don't, then nothing happens, but presumably "trustworthy" blacklists would list them.
Thus, a user in Brazil, where they would be receiving lots of legit mail from Brazilian IPs would not find a blacklist that listed all of LACNIC to be a strong indicator of spamminess. The effects of blacklisters who maliciously put enemies into their blacklist would also be reduced, if not eliminated.
A suggested implementation detail on the blocking would be to make it random; that is to say that 100% of the mail with a 100% probability of being spam gets dropped, 99% of mail with a 99% probability gets dropped, 97% of mail with a 98% probability gets dropped, 94% of mail with a 97% probability gets dropped, 90% of mail with a 96% probability gets dropped, etc. according to this function:
d(p) = d(p+1)*p/100, where d(100) = 100, and 73<=p<=100
This would allow for a degree of "retraining" in the event of false positives (since a/dev/null'd mail cannot be retrained from!).
...now have to purchase major satellite or cable providers.
If Comcast purchases Disney, along with Time Warner owning (surprise!) Time Warner Cable, and News Corp. controlling DirecTV, then the distinct possibility exists of them essentially reaching a truce whereby they agree to give each other discounts on each other's programming as a quid pro quo. Since GE (NBC, Bravo, USA, Telemundo, etc.) and Viacom won't have the quid for the quo, that puts them at a large disadvantage.
The obvious solution to such a situation is that GE and Viacom buy large (10 million or so subscribers) cable or satellite providers. Cox and Echostar seem to fit that bill the best (being the most appealing), though I suppose that with the Bells starting to think of laying fiber to the home, BellSouth could also be in play (Verizon and SBC being too big for even GE to realistically swallow).
Of course, with the FCC talking about, in the fallout from Nipplegate, making pay-TV providers, in return for continuing exemption from decency regulations, allow susbscribers to opt out of receiving channels they consider indecent with corresponding discounts, who knows where all this will lead...
Cheny's undisclosed location interestingly enough or at least I've seen him around the Jackson area a number of times
Cheney has at the least had a summer home in Jackson Hole for a long time; he's a former congressman from Wyoming and changed his residency back from Texas to Wyoming in order to be Bush's running-mate.
one would think he would be out of there had there been any dramatic increases in geologic activity indicative of an eruption or large scale animal deaths as alleged in these rumors.
Ah, but your father in law is part of the massive conspiracy!
Of course, myself being a part of that conspiracy (something you might want to take notice of, so govern yourselves accordingly) and all that...;o)
Subscribers get the opportunity to spot warts, but sending an email to editors@slashdot is too time-consuming... 'twould be much better if there was a link in stories From the Mysterious Future to a form where "editorial comments" (additional links of interest, spelling/grammar nits, etc.) could be posted and visible by all editors (and only editors).
I get the distinct impression that large amounts of mail to editors@slashdot gets/dev/null'd immediately.
Kernel 2.6.3 (unless you use kernel-linus) in Mandrake includes many of the patches that will be in 2.6.4 (if you use Thomas Backlund's kernels, you'll get even more of those, along with pre-emption).
KDE "3.2.0" in Mandrake has the 3.2.1 fixes included, despite being tagged as 3.2.0.
Gimp 2.0 (or something similar) is in contribs and has been for a long time.
Probably the best one I've encountered is Neteller. Especially if you're planning on using this to sell stuff, Neteller is much better than Paypal (weekly settlements of the amount in your account in excess of the pre-set "float" are done via check sent through FedEx, for instance).
I'll be deploying Neteller soon for taking online payments.
If they start, Bush and Ashcroft are going to go down as the people who sent the Republican Party into the graveyard.
Rupert Murdoch is basically gambling his empire on DirecTV. Increased content regulations will hurt his profit (porn is the most profitable aspect of DirecTV's business). If the GOP becomes a threat to the profitability, Rupert will try to eliminate the GOP.
This means prime-time specials on Fox, Fox Sports, and Fox News denouncing the Republican Party as the Communist Party of the USA. This means every GOP scandal will be fully aired in the New York Post.
He's taken down governments in Australia and the UK before.
If I create a hacked up leviramsey version of Mozilla and post it on SourceForge, am I entitled to demand that my browser be included?
Or if some company decides to customize Moz with the hidden motive being to get their logo on the desktop of every copy of Windows. Should they get free advertising like that?
These things look simple when you assume that there's only a few options. But if there's a situation where Netscape and IE are the only browsers to get this privilege, is that not an anti-competitive action against Opera or Mosaic?
Netscape was poop circa NS4. It was that blunder that got them in trouble, since people began looking for other browsers. Had NS4 been even equal to IE4, NS would probably still be dominant today (and Mozilla would probably never be open-sourced, but that's neither here nor there).
When competing with Microsoft, the cardinal rule is: don't release crap. If you try to race Microsoft to see who can do the crappiest software, you're toast, because no one is better at making money off of crap software than Microsoft. Look at Adobe. They're getting squeezed by Apple and Microsoft in their core business (photo software). Yet, neither is really making a dent, and likely never will. Adobe continues to release quality software, and even if Microsoft releases a Photoshop competitor that matches it in quality, Adobe will still win, thanks to the installed base of experienced users. Of course, if Adobe stumbles and Photoshop has a bad version that nobody wants to use, Microsoft may well take over the market. But you can hardly blame Microsoft for Adobe releasing crap, can you?
However, Windows Media Player cannot play Real codecs (afaik). Real had the market for streaming audio sewn up tightly. RealPlayer was even more widespread than WMP.
If RealPlayer hadn't gone into the shitter in terms of quality, they would be able to ride that installed base to this date and ASF would be a footnote to history (much like, say, VDOlive was).
Bundling a streaming media player like WMP is a very different kettle of fish from bundling a browser like IE. These all use proprietary codecs (yes, they have support for MPEG, but how much streaming MPEG is there online?). There was no lock-in, though, for Netscape's dominant market share, HTTP being an open standard (there wasn't too much of a loss going to IE from Netscape, even if you were viewing Netscape-specific pages... so you lost blinking text... big deal).
With proprietary codecs, Real had a lock-in. You couldn't switch to WMP to watch those.rm's if you wanted to. In that type of situation, when Real has a dominant market share (i.e., the number of computers that had Real but not WMP greater than the number of computers that had WMP but not Real), the expectation would be for them to maintain that dominance. No one in their right mind would go to WM to stream content, when they can reach more users by using Real. It doesn't matter how cheap you make WM on the server side; it doesn't deliver value because the users aren't there.
Real failed to realize that by simply keeping the client as a better product than WMP, they could continue their dominance. Instead, they went into a panic, forgetting the uniqueness of their situation relative to others who have battled Microsoft, and actually made their software worse. Not surprisingly, people began getting rid of the crap, or simply not upgrading from the last known-good version of the software.
Winamp 3 was so shitty, I imagine that a lot of people decided to go to WMP then and there.
The interesting thing about Microsoft is that with Office, with IE, and now with WM, a case can be made that it was more the ineptitude of their competition (along with critical missteps in quality from said competitors) that led to dominance.
In 1990-91, the dominant word processor was WordPerfect and the dominant spreadsheet was 1-2-3 (with dBase or Paradox being the main PC databases). These were slow to move to Windows from DOS and OS/2. The first efforts at "$OLD_DOS_APP for Windows" were uniformly junk (Remember 1-2-3 for Windows release 2? Or WordPerfect 5.1 for Windows?).
By the mid 1990s, 1-2-3 (5.0) for Windows was a hell of a lot better than Excel. WordPerfect has been better (IMHO) than Word since then. But the fact is that users will not change software unless they see a reason to, and Word/Excel are good enough. By the same token, Word and Excel were jokes in terms of market share for their first several years, even if they were generally competitive. There was no reason to migrate from 1-2-3 to Excel, until people moved to Windows and decided to get a Windows spreadsheet; at this time, Excel was the only real game in town.
This happened with browsers. How minuscule was IE's share with the 3.x generation browsers (though IE3 was, IMHO, better than NS3)? Even IE4 didn't see a huge increase (despite bundling with Win98) relative to Netscape. NS4, though, was a piece of crap. Then when the 5.x generation came out, it was no contest. If Netscape had put out an NS4 that wasn't a steaming pile of poop, the browser wars would still be going on, with Netscape at 50% share and MS at 40% share.
Re:What do...
on
Real's Reality
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Exactly. Another case of Slashdot getting its collective panties in a bunch and crying "erosion of our rights!" when in reality nothing has changed.
In most (all?) states that have sales taxes, they also have a "use tax" at the same rate which is applied to items purchased and brought into the state. Failure to pay this is tax evasion (though it's next to impossible to enforce).
About the only cases in Massachusetts where this is collected are cars, boats, and other items where registration is required. Indeed, you're often better off buying such things at a registered dealer in Massachusetts, as out-of-state purchases would be construed as a private-party sale (possibly excepting multi-state chains like Herb Chambers...). As a result, rather than assess the tax on the amount of the sale, the tax is based on the "hypothetical value" of the vehicle, which basically is just depreciating the vehicle from its original suggested price. So you might pay $500 for a rustbucket of a BMW in New Hampshire and register it in Massachusetts and end up paying the tax as if you paid $5,000 for it.
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Anybody who argues that it was retaliatory tariffs had anything to do with the Great Depression is ignorant.
Nice straw man you took the trouble to build up, Mr. Aldredge.
Who knows?
By the same token though, if you were to say in 1950 that the next 50 years would be marked by a long slide in industrial employment, the very same question would apply. Indeed, given all that was known at the time, it would be quite reasonable to say that "the new jobs [that would be] created in the US to replace the [displaced industrial jobs] do not pay nearly as much nor do the[y] have the same level of [benefits]."
The same could be said in 1890, if it was pointed out that farm employment in the US would decline massively over that subsequent 50 years.
Capitalism is an inherently dynamic force. Any attempt to control this dynamism results in catastrophes like the Great Depression (largely caused by the errant adoption of anti-free trade laws during a normal recession).
...is to simply make the broadband user liable for actions taken using their connection, whether they had knowledge or not.
If Joe Lusers who signed up for cable internet and don't bother to patch their systems or run firewalls become spam relays and DDoS zombies they should be held liable. It's Mr. Luser's responsibility to figure out who was using his connection for nefarious purposes.
Get some news coverage about families that got judgements against them for $10,000 for spamming and you'll see progress in this area because then people will give a shit about this. From their perspective, it doesn't hurt them to be a spam or DDoS zombie, so they've no incentive whatsoever to not be a spam/DDoS zombie.
Now, what will the consequence of this be? When faced with risk, there are a few options:
As far as I'm concerned, all four of those options are equally good and effective.
And it's not like there's much population east of Riverhead in Suffolk County anyway...
MySQL changed the license of the client libraries to GPL from LGPL. This meant that anything which linked to the client libs had to be GPL. The non-GPL crowd (including PHP) got in a huff about this.
There basically isn't. But hey, what contribution can the blind, or the deaf, (or both, for that matter) make to society?
I just devised a setup that might be interesting:
The idea is essentially to allow a collaboratively developed decentralized blacklist and whitelist to develop. Spammers will either submit the IPs they use to this list or not submit them; if they do submit them, then a "good" report from them will eventually be taken as a strong sign of spamminess. If they don't, then nothing happens, but presumably "trustworthy" blacklists would list them.
Thus, a user in Brazil, where they would be receiving lots of legit mail from Brazilian IPs would not find a blacklist that listed all of LACNIC to be a strong indicator of spamminess. The effects of blacklisters who maliciously put enemies into their blacklist would also be reduced, if not eliminated.
A suggested implementation detail on the blocking would be to make it random; that is to say that 100% of the mail with a 100% probability of being spam gets dropped, 99% of mail with a 99% probability gets dropped, 97% of mail with a 98% probability gets dropped, 94% of mail with a 97% probability gets dropped, 90% of mail with a 96% probability gets dropped, etc. according to this function:
This would allow for a degree of "retraining" in the event of false positives (since a /dev/null'd mail cannot be retrained from!).
...now have to purchase major satellite or cable providers.
If Comcast purchases Disney, along with Time Warner owning (surprise!) Time Warner Cable, and News Corp. controlling DirecTV, then the distinct possibility exists of them essentially reaching a truce whereby they agree to give each other discounts on each other's programming as a quid pro quo. Since GE (NBC, Bravo, USA, Telemundo, etc.) and Viacom won't have the quid for the quo, that puts them at a large disadvantage.
The obvious solution to such a situation is that GE and Viacom buy large (10 million or so subscribers) cable or satellite providers. Cox and Echostar seem to fit that bill the best (being the most appealing), though I suppose that with the Bells starting to think of laying fiber to the home, BellSouth could also be in play (Verizon and SBC being too big for even GE to realistically swallow).
Of course, with the FCC talking about, in the fallout from Nipplegate, making pay-TV providers, in return for continuing exemption from decency regulations, allow susbscribers to opt out of receiving channels they consider indecent with corresponding discounts, who knows where all this will lead...
Indeed, and they're probably worthy, well-qualified, and properly vouched for...
Cheney has at the least had a summer home in Jackson Hole for a long time; he's a former congressman from Wyoming and changed his residency back from Texas to Wyoming in order to be Bush's running-mate.
Ah, but your father in law is part of the massive conspiracy!
Of course, myself being a part of that conspiracy (something you might want to take notice of, so govern yourselves accordingly) and all that... ;o)
Subscribers get the opportunity to spot warts, but sending an email to editors@slashdot is too time-consuming... 'twould be much better if there was a link in stories From the Mysterious Future to a form where "editorial comments" (additional links of interest, spelling/grammar nits, etc.) could be posted and visible by all editors (and only editors).
I get the distinct impression that large amounts of mail to editors@slashdot gets /dev/null'd immediately.
Kernel 2.6.3 (unless you use kernel-linus) in Mandrake includes many of the patches that will be in 2.6.4 (if you use Thomas Backlund's kernels, you'll get even more of those, along with pre-emption).
KDE "3.2.0" in Mandrake has the 3.2.1 fixes included, despite being tagged as 3.2.0.
Gimp 2.0 (or something similar) is in contribs and has been for a long time.
It does... Even though it's tagged as "3.2.0" it's really 3.2.1 (all the fixes from CVS have been integrated).
Probably the best one I've encountered is Neteller. Especially if you're planning on using this to sell stuff, Neteller is much better than Paypal (weekly settlements of the amount in your account in excess of the pre-set "float" are done via check sent through FedEx, for instance).
I'll be deploying Neteller soon for taking online payments.
Viacom doesn't have a monopoly there... hell fuse is better than the MTV Networks anyway.
AFAIK, DirecTV hasn't raised rates in the past few years.
If they start, Bush and Ashcroft are going to go down as the people who sent the Republican Party into the graveyard.
Rupert Murdoch is basically gambling his empire on DirecTV. Increased content regulations will hurt his profit (porn is the most profitable aspect of DirecTV's business). If the GOP becomes a threat to the profitability, Rupert will try to eliminate the GOP.
This means prime-time specials on Fox, Fox Sports, and Fox News denouncing the Republican Party as the Communist Party of the USA. This means every GOP scandal will be fully aired in the New York Post.
He's taken down governments in Australia and the UK before.
State laws regarding pay TV do not affect satellite, as transaction is held to occur in another state.
How do you decide what browsers get in?
If I create a hacked up leviramsey version of Mozilla and post it on SourceForge, am I entitled to demand that my browser be included?
Or if some company decides to customize Moz with the hidden motive being to get their logo on the desktop of every copy of Windows. Should they get free advertising like that?
These things look simple when you assume that there's only a few options. But if there's a situation where Netscape and IE are the only browsers to get this privilege, is that not an anti-competitive action against Opera or Mosaic?
Netscape was poop circa NS4. It was that blunder that got them in trouble, since people began looking for other browsers. Had NS4 been even equal to IE4, NS would probably still be dominant today (and Mozilla would probably never be open-sourced, but that's neither here nor there).
When competing with Microsoft, the cardinal rule is: don't release crap. If you try to race Microsoft to see who can do the crappiest software, you're toast, because no one is better at making money off of crap software than Microsoft. Look at Adobe. They're getting squeezed by Apple and Microsoft in their core business (photo software). Yet, neither is really making a dent, and likely never will. Adobe continues to release quality software, and even if Microsoft releases a Photoshop competitor that matches it in quality, Adobe will still win, thanks to the installed base of experienced users. Of course, if Adobe stumbles and Photoshop has a bad version that nobody wants to use, Microsoft may well take over the market. But you can hardly blame Microsoft for Adobe releasing crap, can you?
However, Windows Media Player cannot play Real codecs (afaik). Real had the market for streaming audio sewn up tightly. RealPlayer was even more widespread than WMP.
If RealPlayer hadn't gone into the shitter in terms of quality, they would be able to ride that installed base to this date and ASF would be a footnote to history (much like, say, VDOlive was).
Bundling a streaming media player like WMP is a very different kettle of fish from bundling a browser like IE. These all use proprietary codecs (yes, they have support for MPEG, but how much streaming MPEG is there online?). There was no lock-in, though, for Netscape's dominant market share, HTTP being an open standard (there wasn't too much of a loss going to IE from Netscape, even if you were viewing Netscape-specific pages... so you lost blinking text... big deal).
With proprietary codecs, Real had a lock-in. You couldn't switch to WMP to watch those .rm's if you wanted to. In that type of situation, when Real has a dominant market share (i.e., the number of computers that had Real but not WMP greater than the number of computers that had WMP but not Real), the expectation would be for them to maintain that dominance. No one in their right mind would go to WM to stream content, when they can reach more users by using Real. It doesn't matter how cheap you make WM on the server side; it doesn't deliver value because the users aren't there.
Real failed to realize that by simply keeping the client as a better product than WMP, they could continue their dominance. Instead, they went into a panic, forgetting the uniqueness of their situation relative to others who have battled Microsoft, and actually made their software worse. Not surprisingly, people began getting rid of the crap, or simply not upgrading from the last known-good version of the software.
Winamp 3 was so shitty, I imagine that a lot of people decided to go to WMP then and there.
The interesting thing about Microsoft is that with Office, with IE, and now with WM, a case can be made that it was more the ineptitude of their competition (along with critical missteps in quality from said competitors) that led to dominance.
In 1990-91, the dominant word processor was WordPerfect and the dominant spreadsheet was 1-2-3 (with dBase or Paradox being the main PC databases). These were slow to move to Windows from DOS and OS/2. The first efforts at "$OLD_DOS_APP for Windows" were uniformly junk (Remember 1-2-3 for Windows release 2? Or WordPerfect 5.1 for Windows?).
By the mid 1990s, 1-2-3 (5.0) for Windows was a hell of a lot better than Excel. WordPerfect has been better (IMHO) than Word since then. But the fact is that users will not change software unless they see a reason to, and Word/Excel are good enough. By the same token, Word and Excel were jokes in terms of market share for their first several years, even if they were generally competitive. There was no reason to migrate from 1-2-3 to Excel, until people moved to Windows and decided to get a Windows spreadsheet; at this time, Excel was the only real game in town.
This happened with browsers. How minuscule was IE's share with the 3.x generation browsers (though IE3 was, IMHO, better than NS3)? Even IE4 didn't see a huge increase (despite bundling with Win98) relative to Netscape. NS4, though, was a piece of crap. Then when the 5.x generation came out, it was no contest. If Netscape had put out an NS4 that wasn't a steaming pile of poop, the browser wars would still be going on, with Netscape at 50% share and MS at 40% share.
Did fdisk /mbr work?
Right... but there's exactly zero means of enforcement. There's no way to know whether somebody bought something out of state.
Exactly. Another case of Slashdot getting its collective panties in a bunch and crying "erosion of our rights!" when in reality nothing has changed.
In most (all?) states that have sales taxes, they also have a "use tax" at the same rate which is applied to items purchased and brought into the state. Failure to pay this is tax evasion (though it's next to impossible to enforce).
About the only cases in Massachusetts where this is collected are cars, boats, and other items where registration is required. Indeed, you're often better off buying such things at a registered dealer in Massachusetts, as out-of-state purchases would be construed as a private-party sale (possibly excepting multi-state chains like Herb Chambers...). As a result, rather than assess the tax on the amount of the sale, the tax is based on the "hypothetical value" of the vehicle, which basically is just depreciating the vehicle from its original suggested price. So you might pay $500 for a rustbucket of a BMW in New Hampshire and register it in Massachusetts and end up paying the tax as if you paid $5,000 for it.