I used to work in a consulting company that helped Pharmaceutical Companies deal with the FDA.
I think that regulations that deal with pharmceuticals are different than those which deal with energy efficiency, fuel economy, or printer ink usage.
Of course, as a consumer, you never see this. You may die because it makes a drug too expensive to develop, or the FDA delays its introduction for too long, but what the heck... anything else is just anti-government lunacy, right?
Motorcycle helmets aren't too expensive nor does it take them years to reach market. Same thing for dishwashers and clothes dryers. Yet all of those products have required government labelling and testing.
For example, what do you do about manufacturers that cheat?
Fine them.
How do you find out that they are cheating?
Random testing.
But printer cost of ownership labelling?
Sorry, but I don't think that meets the test.
Why? Why is it reasonable to show the consumers the cost of owning a given refrigerator but not a printer -- especially when the latter is quite likely to have a greater cost per year? You have an entire industry predicated on misleading consumers and hiding important information. You act like it's such a godawful imposition to run a program and count how many pages printed before the printer ran out of ink/toner. What's so complex or burdensome about that?
Let's see... so the FTC creates a Bureau of Printer Sticker regulation. Then it creates a National Laboratory for Printer Sticker Testing. This is placed in the district of the congressman who creates it.
What anti-government lunacy! The government requires testing and informational labelling on everything from food products to motorcycle helmets and, by and large, it works fine. The standards are published. All of the manufacturers submit to the same testing. Results are published. End of story.
Has the home appliance market become a nightmarish mess of outdated products because the products have to bear stickers showing energy usage? If not, why would stickers showing ink usage by printers be any more burdensome?
Or maybe you should start a web site where people can write their own experience.
That kind of thing has been tried and many of the "reviews" turn out to be written by shills. In the less clever examples, many "satisfied customers" all cast their votes or submit their reviews from the same IP block -- which happens to belong to the product's manufacturer. When you go to one of those web sites, you don't know if the negative review you are reading is from a consumer or from someone working for the competition. You don't know if the satisfied customer is technically astute or just some yahoo that wants to see his name in print. You don't know if someone was really dissatisfied with the product or if he's pissed off that the company laid him off.
Actually, I sort of wonder why Canon hasn't done this. It's a *selling point* for god's sake. They have the best prices out there, and aren't pulling any of the cheap tricks Lexmark is.
I agree with you on that, but part of the problem is that consumers have learned to be wary of anything voluntarily put on a box by a manufacturer. If it were not for crash tests, would you believe it if Ford advertised a car as being very safe in an accident? Would you believe a refrigerater manufacturer who said that their fridge has the lowest energy consumption of "any model in its class"? Would you believe that a package of cheese was "low calorie" if the government didn't specify what that meant?
But in this particular case, I think that self-regulation could work.
I guess we'll have to agree to disagree on that point. I'd just like to see the feds come up with an independent, standardized test and labelling requirement that does not unfairly favor any manufacturer. I'd like to be able to look at that label and know that it was not some massaged number created in conditions optimized by the manufacturer.
All it would take is for a couple of manufacturers to design a snazzy logo and put it on the front of all of their printers, very prominently. It would also include all pertinent refill information. Again - very prominently.
Then why hasn't it happened? The anti-government types always say that the free market will fix everything. Well it won't. The problem we're discussing has been with us for years and no two printer manufacturers have yet gotten together to "design a snazzy logo and put it on the front of all of their printers." Even if they did, Lexmark and its ilk would just design a competing logo to put on their printers that deceptively claimed a low cost of ownership.
Do you want to see what happens when the private sector is allowed to "self-regulate"? Just look at USB. USB 2.0 used to mean 480Mbps. Then they redefined USB 2.0 to include peripherals that were really USB 1.1 with 12Mbps transfer rate. They came up with "USB 2.0 High Speed" and "USB 2.0 Full Speed". They didn't do this to help consumers make informed choices. They did it to confuse and deceive consumers.
This needs to be done by a third party -- the government. If the private sector did it, there would be some committee that would get mired down in corporate in-fighting. Manufacturer X would push for the graphics to include more black because his black cartridge is larger than the competitors'. Manufacturer Y would want a test that ran all of the colors dry simultaneously because his printers use a single cartridge for all three colors. Manufacturer Z would want to use photo paper because it takes less ink from his printer. The committee would charge a membership fee and the test would be rigged to help those on the committee.
Private sector did not come up with MPG stickers. They fought against appliance energy efficiency stickers. I don't see the printer/cartridge mess being straightened out without government regulation.
Thanks. It's nice to get a little positive feedback now and then.
I'm usually not in favor of extra regulation, I don't really see stores volutarily putting up this info to their customers... how many $50 printers would they sell if there was another $100/year ink cost price tag on it?
Not many, and consumers don't even have a way to estimate the costs. They don't know whether the ink cartridge that the printer uses will print 200 pages or 2,000. So even if they know the cartridge cost, they still don't know the cost per page or how often they will have to go to the store to buy a new cartridge.
What pisses me off about the EPA estimates is that the largest consuming vehicles don't have estimates. The hummer H2 gets 8-10 MPG, but you won't see that number at the dealership.
Without diverging too far into politics or being partisan, those vehicles would have such numbers if:
1. The oil industry didn't have so much influence in Washington. 2. The gas guzzlers were imports rather than U.S. products.
The point I'm getting to is that printer manufacturers could claim that photo-quaility printers are a "professional" class, and the "mpg" doesn't really matter... just the results.
First, I would not make exceptions for "professional" class printers and, second, I'd let the consumer decide if the quality was the only concern. If a professional design firm wants to buy a dye sublimation printer that costs $1/page, that's their business and no sticker revealing that information would force them to choose a cheap inkjet instead.
This is the kind of regulation that the government is good at: requiring that companies honestly disclose specifications to consumers using standardized test methods. I think that it's great that a consumer can see the energy efficiency of an appliance before purchasing it. Its has lead to greater consumer awareness, more energy conservation, and manufacturers concentrating of making more energy-efficient appliances.
I'd like to see regulations to require that PC companies disclose the sound level emitted by their PCs so that consumers wanting a quiet PC could get one. They should make software companies reveal what personal data is collected by their products and to whom it is distributed. Regulations should be adpoted which require that products which employ forms of copy protection be clearly labelled indicating the restrictions imposed. That's the kind of information that consumers need in order to make informed choices.
When you pick up the phone to call ATA, what you are doing is harassment. You have nothing to sell them.
So you feel that the only Constitutionally protected form of speech should be commercial speech where the caller is trying to sell something? God forbid that a huge number of people call one of the telemarketing organizations and voice their opinion.
While my father was dying of cancer and I was awaiting "the call", I got a call from some jackass wanting to sell me vinyl replacement windows. When I was working night-shift testing satellites, I got multiple calls during the day from telemarketers who woke me up and kept me from getting adequate sleep. You think that these calls are valid forms of free speech which should exist unregulated but that me calling a business to tell them what I think of their lobbying efforts does not deserve those same protections?
I personally know an individual (a dentist) who has successfully used telemarketing. He employs one woman who works from home cold-calling people to get their teeth cleaned. Telemarketing has been the most successful method of getting new patients that he has ever tried. Additionally, the woman doing the job benefits from well paying at-home employment.
How is that any different than saying you know a successful penis enlargement pill salesman who employs people to send spam? I don't give a rat's ass about how successful he's been. It's like arguing that laws against embezzling are wrong because you know a successful embezzler.
I am not opposed to a Do Not Call list. I am, however, very much opposed to the legislation of said list.
So you think it's fine for people to register for the list but you don't think that telemarketers should be legally obliged to refrain from calling people on the list. Then, by extension, you believe that some handicapped or elderly person who has trouble and/or pain getting to the phone should be forced to receive telemarketing calls from any firm that wants to ignore the list. You think that people working night shift should have telemarketing calls wake them up in the middle of their sleep cycles. You believe that parents should have their toddlers woken up by telemarketing calls. You think that people should have to choose between taking the phone off of the hook and maybe missing an emergency telephone call or leaving it on the hook and being woken up, interrupted, or inconvenienced by some telemarketer.
I'm always amazed that magazines don't talk about cartridge costs in their printer reviews, but I think that if everyone just got in the habit of including operating costs in any discussion of printers, the problem would go away on its own.
You're probably familiar with the yellow EnergyGuide stickers that appear on all major appliances. You've doubtless seen the EPA mileage estimates on new car window stickers. Those are both examples of useful government regulations that require informational stickers to assist consumers in making informed purchases.
We need similar requirements levied on printer manufacturers. The manufacturers should have to include a prominent sticker which states the life expectancy of the toner/ink cartridges in pages and the estimated cost per page based on the MSRP of the manufacturer's cartridge. If the manufacturer does not publish an MSRP, then the sticker should be based on the dealer cost plus some fixed markup (representative of typical markup within the industry). The test would be equivalent to an EPA mileage test. It would use standard pages (e.g. X% coverage) and there might be a number for "B&W Text" and another for "Color Graphics" on each printer (with B&W printers having an "N/A" for the "Color Graphics").
Armed with that information, a consumer could make an intelligent, informed decision. It would do a lot to discourage deceptive pricing ($40 printers with -- surprise! -- $50 ink refills).
If the device is an external hard disc, capacious MP3 player, flash card adapter, CD or DVD drive, then hell yes they need it. If I bought a 512MB pen drive advertised as USB 2.0 and it only accepted data at 12Mbps, then I'd be damned pissed. That would mean that it would take a minimum of 341 seconds to fill even assuming the theoretical maximum transfer rate of 12Mbps with no overhead. That's about six minutes. Real USB 2.0 (480Mbps) would mean that the transfer would take about 8.5 seconds (again, assuming the maximum possible speed).
I've got an Archos Studio 10GB MP3 player. It runs USB 1.1 and it's slow to load up with music. It was also cheap and I was willing to accept slow data transfers for the low price. If I paid for one that was advertised as USB 2.0 and it only accepted data at the slow USB 1.1 transfer rate, I would be damned pissed and probably would return it.
Very well. Compare our highway system to that of other countries. Did you see the footage from Iraq? Afghanistan? Ever been to Mexico? We have a damned good highway system.
I can see it now. "As a part of the 'Internet Improvement Project', the root name servers will be unavailable from 9 A.M. to 7 P.M. the week of 11/10 - 11/14."
Root servers are like lanes. You can shut down one or two and traffic still moves.
But, somehow, I am against finding solution with involving word 'sue, lawers' etc.
That's what happens when you turn a not-for-profit government program over to a bunch of money-grubbing capitalist corporations. The corporations look for amoral, often unethical, means to generate more income. If it hurts competitors, it's all the better.
If you don't want lawyers and lawsuits, then stop allowing profits to enter into the equation. The "information superhighway" should be like the physical highway system in the U.S. It should be planned and maintained by the government. And before any of the anti-government wackos start shrieking, consider the fact that DARPA, a federal government agency, was the driving force behind the creation of the Internet.
If you're still tempted by the political approach, ask yourself one simple question: who is more technologically savvy, your average spammer or your average politician?
What an ignorant, assinine, ill-conceived, steaming pile of bullshit! You don't have to have expertise in something to make it illegal. The average pedophile knows more about how to lure children into cars than the average politician does. By the author's "logic", we should not have laws against child molestation.
The average junk faxer knew more about fax technology than the average politician did in 1991, yet politicians passed the Telephone Consumer Protection Act which banned junk faxes. The result: Junk faxes, which were following a growth curve similar to what we've seen for spam, have now been reduced to a tiny fraction of what they were when the law passed. It didn't require that politicians learn about fax protocols, computerized faxing software, switched telephone network protocols, printing technologies, or fax modems.
Sure, Linux can now boot in 200ms, but Windows can blue-screen 200ms before you can save your work. So it sounds like the Linux folks put all of their efforts into quickly beginning productive work while Microsoft focused on very quickly ending it.
IANAL, but our lawyers have made it clear that in order to boot someone for breach of contract you need to give 'fair warning' unless we're talking serious offences (involving serious law-breaking etc.) and unfortunately spamming isn't such an offence.
I suggest that you get new lawyers because other ISPs seem to be able to respond much more quickly. All that you need is a contract that specifically spells out your right to shut down service immediately and permanently for spamming. Have your lawyers prepared such a contract?
This is real life folks.
Yes, it is. Actions (and inactions) have consequences. If you take months to boot spammers off of your service, then you will probably find yourself blacklisted. And the operators of those blacklists might not remove you until your firm starts handling spam complaints more quickly. That's real life.
You can't stop or get rid of a customer without a lot of legal hassle and spammers do know how to fight these things. If you just force things you only give the spammers the pleasure of tearing you apart in court.
How in the hell would a spammer be "tearing you apart in court" if you had a signed contract that stated that you had the right to immediately terminate if the customer spams? That's absurd. The only ISPs that get torn apart in court are the ones who are too stupid to spell out rights and responsibilities in their contracts.
My response was cogent and directly addressed your points. You claimed that the trickle-down effect of technology would mean that filters got to the common man. To that end, you wrote:
I thought that was the normal life cycle for new technology: geeks invent it, start using it, refine it, and eventually someone says "maybe if I package it in this new way, a few end-users can start to use it". Then end-user feedback and design iterations eventually turn it into a solution for anyone to use.
So I replied showing examples which ran counter to your claims:
Then why are so many users are still using Netscape 4.7x and complaining about pop-up ads? Why are so many still running Windows 95? Why do viruses for which patches have been out for years still infect computers? The spam problem has been with us since the 1994. We're coming up on a decade and this trickle-down spam fighting technology you advocate isn't happening.
I went on to show the harm that would happen from your 'wait-and-see' approach and how ineffective it would be if personal filtering technology was not embraced almost universally. If you can't see that as having "much to do with the things [you] mentioned", then there is a reading comprehension problem on your end.
Thank you for your very reasoned and intelligent reply.
I believe that the shopping mall analogy falls down in one key respect: There is no direct cost to the shopping mall if I hand out leaflets. To make the a truly analogous situation, I would have to distribute the leaflets at some cost to the mall. For example, I would need to occupy enough space that they would need to expand the mall (analogy to additional servers needed for spam processing), I would have to draw enough traffic that they would need to increase the size of their entrances and exits (analogy to bandwidth), and I would need to cause them to need to increase the size of their parking lot (analogy to disk storage). Then the analogy works. The key to this is that I have a right to express myself, but I don't have a right to make you pay for it.
But never mind all that, just suppose that we do allow owners of networks and servers absolute control of what passes over their wires. Is that something you really want?
In one sense, yes. A network owner has a right to limit unwanted, unrequested, and harmful traffic. An ISP has a right to block port 135 to stop the spread of a worm. They have the right to refuse e-mail from a spammer who wishes to flood their network with messages. They have a right to block port 80 incoming to keep their residential users from running web servers. What I don't think that they have a right to do is purposely block requested content -- and I don't think that they want to do that, either.
These ISPs, if they coordinated their efforts, and were allowed to totally control whatever passes over their wires, could do something that governments have repeatedly tried and failed to do: censor the internet.
But the free market will stop them from doing that. If AOL, Earthlink, and MSN all entered into a censorship pact, then other ISPs would capitalize on offering the "Internet uncensored." There is also the ever-present threat of being considered publishers rather than common carriers. If an ISP were to exercise editorial control over the content that traversed their network, they would quickly find themselves in the legal role of publisher, complete with all of the pitfalls and dangers that entails.
This really scared me at the time, since the internet backbone had been consolidated into just a few big companies, most of them with the same censorship-prone connections as the Time Warner backbone. Since then, the backbone situation has gotten a little more competitive. But with the trend to consolidate more and more communications into fewer and fewer companies, I wouldn't get to sanguine.
I agree with your concerns and what they point out is how important it is for the federal government to actively assure that the marketplace remains competitive, that we don't get a "Clear Channel" or "AOL Time Warner" controlling vast swaths of the marketplace.
I thought that was the normal life cycle for new technology: geeks invent it, start using it, refine it, and eventually someone says "maybe if I package it in this new way, a few end-users can start to use it". Then end-user feedback and design iterations eventually turn it into a solution for anyone to use.
Then why are so many users are still using Netscape 4.7x and complaining about pop-up ads? Why are so many still running Windows 95? Why do viruses for which patches have been out for years still infect computers? The spam problem has been with us since the 1994. We're coming up on a decade and this trickle-down spam fighting technology you advocate isn't happening.
I don't agree with fmaxwell's assertion -- I think this is a good thing.
So you think that all of us should continue to have inflated Internet prices to cover the cost of ISPs buying bandwidth, servers, and storage to handle incoming spam? Face facts: If 50% of Internet users get effective personal filtering, the spammers will just send more spam and look for ways around the filters. The vast majority of the people who would seek out filtering weren't going to buy the alleged penis enlarging pills anyway. So the spammers don't care. They want to go for the uneducated newbies. Result: you continue paying your ISP to move spam.
We need a means to stop the spam from ever being received, stored, and forwarded by the ISP. We don't need a way to hide the spam from ourselves.
You could agree that people who make use of the blacklists (not necessarily the writers of the blacklists) are blocking free speech to their customers. However, intent is a very important thing. Many are using the lists not to silence a particular thought or belief, but to save themselves money from the processing needed on all those spam emails.
Intent is only important if it is a government action. A private entity can block speech based on content, sender identity, message length, time of day, phase of moon, what the voices in their head told them to do, or just about any other reason. There is nothing in the Constitution that requires that an ISP allow you to use their bandwidth, servers, and storage to broadcast your message. I have a right to free speech, but it does not mean that the local grocery store has to let me use their PA system to express myself to their customers.
Nice retort! I've got to learn to be succinct like that.
Should we file a lawsuit against the phone company for providing caller ID? It suppresses free speech because it lets people make an informed decision about whether to take each call.
Ah, but some people are forced to use a blacklist because their ISP uses them. Earthlink, for example, is blocking mail from a popular and legitimate mail forwarding service.
And, as you point out later, no one makes anyone use Earthlink. If you want e-mail that Earthlink blocks, then don't use Earthlink.
Some might not have noticed that they aren't getting any mail forwarded.
And you think that these people should be in charge of their own filtering? Scary.
The choice should stay with the end-user, and I hope ISPs will become more flexible.
In general, I agree with you. I believe that providers should, by default, put in a default best-effort filtering package for each user. Each user should be able to change the filtering (via a user-friendly web page) to suit their own needs.
But the key is that the filtering should exist by default. I don't want a situation where 6,536,310 users at a given ISP receive every piece of spam addressed to them while 796 tech geeks are the only ones with effective spam filtering. That's what makes spam profitable.
Um, you're overlooking something too, asshole. There is no such thing as the First Amendment when the government isn't the one doing the speech-surpressing.
Suck my ass. I said that DDoS attacks against blacklists were suppressing free speech, not that they were a violation of the First Amendment.
There is at least one gaping hole in your argument, namely that blacklists are also suppressing free speech. You Suck.
That's an idiotic statement. Blacklists don't suppress speech. No one forces you or your ISP to use the blacklists or to refuse e-mail from IP addresses listed on them. I use blacklists and my server may reject messages from you. So what? You have no Constitutionally guaranteed right to use my server to deliver your message. It's my private property, just as your ISP's server is their property.
Suppose your ISP started blocking all e-mail from ISP X after reading a New York Times article that ISP X hosts spammers. Would you accuse the New York Times of suppressing free speech? If not, then why would you accuse a blacklist provider of suppressing free speech? Because it's easier to search their database than to search the NY Times archives?
"if a message is spam, click the nice big "junk" button that mozilla mail provides. if a message is marked as spam while it isn't, click the "this isn't junk" button that is prominently displayed." not only _can_ I teach my grandmother that, I _have_ taught her that
So she couldn't install it on her own and needed personalized training on its use. Not everyone has a tech geek to install software and give them personal lessons in its use. Many people sign up for AOL or Earthlink, put in the CD that's mailed to them, and call tech support to ask "now what do I do"? Most people don't ever update their e-mail client and use whatever was installed on their Dell/Compaq/HP/Gateway/etc. when they bought it -- or what came on the CD from AOL. They don't have bayesian filtering and the spammers know that. So the spam keeps flowing because the spammers know that for every grandmother like yours there are 200 that will see the message.
I agree with you on that one. Not only does the traditional open-relay lists make it easy to find open relays to abuse, but the newer broadlisting of spam-sources, which hurts unbelievably many besides the spammer, doesn't have any impact on the amount of spam I see in my mailbox every day.
I run several domains and use multiple blacklists. The blacklists are incredibly effective, especially those which are country-wide like taiwan.blackholes.us and china.blackholes.us. I, and the other users of my domain, don't communicate with people in China or Taiwan. If I disable the blacklists, the ONLY thing that comes to us from those countries is spam.
How do you know that the use of blacklists "doesn't have any impact on the amount of spam" you get? It has a tremendous impact on the amount that I get. Because of those punitive "broadlists", many ISPs like AT&T and PSI who used to write "pink contracts" and host spammers no longer will. The broadlisting makes harboring spammers unsafe. AT&T is not going to piss off their entire subscriber base just to get one big pink contract from some spam house. It's not worth it to them. Many ISPs, especially dial-up ISPs have blocked outgoing port 25 so spammers can't use them for throwaway accounts from with to spam. No ISP wants to risk some spammer paying $9.99 for a month of service which will get the ISP blacklisted.
We are still listed despite having done what we're supposed to: Discovering the spammer, warning the spammer,
Any ISP which "warns" spammers deserves to be permanently blacklisted. What spammer doesn't know that spamming is against their ISP's terms of service and is an annoyance to the recipients? I hope that someone beats the sh*t out of you and gets a warning for it. Then maybe you'll understand why anti-spammers get so pissed off with ISPs who warn spammers.
I most certainly hope so! Blacklists are a cure far worse than the disease, and I'm completely rooting for the spammers here.
Publishing spam blacklists is a form of free speech and what you're advocating is the use of illegal means (DDoS) to suppress free speech. You suck.
What with bayesian junk filtering and using uniquely generated email addresses whenever I give them, I never see any spam, and the bandwidth it's costing me is minimal.
Grandma isn't going to be able to install and use bayesian filtering or generate unique e-mail addresses, so your solution sucks. Any "solution" which doesn't keep the spammers from getting their messages to the vast majority of people is just some geek doing mental masturbation. The spammers will continue to spam, using up bandwidth and storage, while costing ISPs, their subscribers, and businesses huge sums of money. And you'll sit there at home patting yourself on the back (or elsewhere) even though the spammers used your bandwidth, your ISP's bandwidth, your ISP's storage, and your storage. Not seeing the spam means that you can't complain about it, so that means that the spammer has less chance of being shut down.
You're just a spam ostrich. You have your head buried in the sand so that you don't see the spam -- even though it's still there.
I can't be held responsible for providing the information, all I did was copy and paste, not a big feat.
Actually, you can be held responsible for anything that you do. If your actions result in some innocent person being harassed, stalked, assaulted, etc., you can bet that he's got a case that you did not exercise due diligence.
Even ignoring the legal questions, what about ethics? How would you feel if you had the same name as some pedophile and found your home address and phone number posted online as a 'could-be' type of listing in a thread discussing pedophiles?
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I used to work in a consulting company that helped Pharmaceutical Companies deal with the FDA.
I think that regulations that deal with pharmceuticals are different than those which deal with energy efficiency, fuel economy, or printer ink usage.
Of course, as a consumer, you never see this. You may die because it makes a drug too expensive to develop, or the FDA delays its introduction for too long, but what the heck... anything else is just anti-government lunacy, right?
Motorcycle helmets aren't too expensive nor does it take them years to reach market. Same thing for dishwashers and clothes dryers. Yet all of those products have required government labelling and testing.
For example, what do you do about manufacturers that cheat?
Fine them.
How do you find out that they are cheating?
Random testing.
But printer cost of ownership labelling?
Sorry, but I don't think that meets the test.
Why? Why is it reasonable to show the consumers the cost of owning a given refrigerator but not a printer -- especially when the latter is quite likely to have a greater cost per year? You have an entire industry predicated on misleading consumers and hiding important information. You act like it's such a godawful imposition to run a program and count how many pages printed before the printer ran out of ink/toner. What's so complex or burdensome about that?
Let's see... so the FTC creates a Bureau of Printer Sticker regulation. Then it creates a National Laboratory for Printer Sticker Testing. This is placed in the district of the congressman who creates it.
What anti-government lunacy! The government requires testing and informational labelling on everything from food products to motorcycle helmets and, by and large, it works fine. The standards are published. All of the manufacturers submit to the same testing. Results are published. End of story.
Has the home appliance market become a nightmarish mess of outdated products because the products have to bear stickers showing energy usage? If not, why would stickers showing ink usage by printers be any more burdensome?
Or maybe you should start a web site where people can write their own experience.
That kind of thing has been tried and many of the "reviews" turn out to be written by shills. In the less clever examples, many "satisfied customers" all cast their votes or submit their reviews from the same IP block -- which happens to belong to the product's manufacturer. When you go to one of those web sites, you don't know if the negative review you are reading is from a consumer or from someone working for the competition. You don't know if the satisfied customer is technically astute or just some yahoo that wants to see his name in print. You don't know if someone was really dissatisfied with the product or if he's pissed off that the company laid him off.
Actually, I sort of wonder why Canon hasn't done this. It's a *selling point* for god's sake. They have the best prices out there, and aren't pulling any of the cheap tricks Lexmark is.
I agree with you on that, but part of the problem is that consumers have learned to be wary of anything voluntarily put on a box by a manufacturer. If it were not for crash tests, would you believe it if Ford advertised a car as being very safe in an accident? Would you believe a refrigerater manufacturer who said that their fridge has the lowest energy consumption of "any model in its class"? Would you believe that a package of cheese was "low calorie" if the government didn't specify what that meant?
But in this particular case, I think that self-regulation could work.
I guess we'll have to agree to disagree on that point. I'd just like to see the feds come up with an independent, standardized test and labelling requirement that does not unfairly favor any manufacturer. I'd like to be able to look at that label and know that it was not some massaged number created in conditions optimized by the manufacturer.
All it would take is for a couple of manufacturers to design a snazzy logo and put it on the front of all of their printers, very prominently. It would also include all pertinent refill information. Again - very prominently.
Then why hasn't it happened? The anti-government types always say that the free market will fix everything. Well it won't. The problem we're discussing has been with us for years and no two printer manufacturers have yet gotten together to "design a snazzy logo and put it on the front of all of their printers." Even if they did, Lexmark and its ilk would just design a competing logo to put on their printers that deceptively claimed a low cost of ownership.
Do you want to see what happens when the private sector is allowed to "self-regulate"? Just look at USB. USB 2.0 used to mean 480Mbps. Then they redefined USB 2.0 to include peripherals that were really USB 1.1 with 12Mbps transfer rate. They came up with "USB 2.0 High Speed" and "USB 2.0 Full Speed". They didn't do this to help consumers make informed choices. They did it to confuse and deceive consumers.
This needs to be done by a third party -- the government. If the private sector did it, there would be some committee that would get mired down in corporate in-fighting. Manufacturer X would push for the graphics to include more black because his black cartridge is larger than the competitors'. Manufacturer Y would want a test that ran all of the colors dry simultaneously because his printers use a single cartridge for all three colors. Manufacturer Z would want to use photo paper because it takes less ink from his printer. The committee would charge a membership fee and the test would be rigged to help those on the committee.
Private sector did not come up with MPG stickers. They fought against appliance energy efficiency stickers. I don't see the printer/cartridge mess being straightened out without government regulation.
That's a great idea.
Thanks. It's nice to get a little positive feedback now and then.
I'm usually not in favor of extra regulation, I don't really see stores volutarily putting up this info to their customers... how many $50 printers would they sell if there was another $100/year ink cost price tag on it?
Not many, and consumers don't even have a way to estimate the costs. They don't know whether the ink cartridge that the printer uses will print 200 pages or 2,000. So even if they know the cartridge cost, they still don't know the cost per page or how often they will have to go to the store to buy a new cartridge.
What pisses me off about the EPA estimates is that the largest consuming vehicles don't have estimates. The hummer H2 gets 8-10 MPG, but you won't see that number at the dealership.
Without diverging too far into politics or being partisan, those vehicles would have such numbers if:
1. The oil industry didn't have so much influence in Washington.
2. The gas guzzlers were imports rather than U.S. products.
The point I'm getting to is that printer manufacturers could claim that photo-quaility printers are a "professional" class, and the "mpg" doesn't really matter... just the results.
First, I would not make exceptions for "professional" class printers and, second, I'd let the consumer decide if the quality was the only concern. If a professional design firm wants to buy a dye sublimation printer that costs $1/page, that's their business and no sticker revealing that information would force them to choose a cheap inkjet instead.
This is the kind of regulation that the government is good at: requiring that companies honestly disclose specifications to consumers using standardized test methods. I think that it's great that a consumer can see the energy efficiency of an appliance before purchasing it. Its has lead to greater consumer awareness, more energy conservation, and manufacturers concentrating of making more energy-efficient appliances.
I'd like to see regulations to require that PC companies disclose the sound level emitted by their PCs so that consumers wanting a quiet PC could get one. They should make software companies reveal what personal data is collected by their products and to whom it is distributed. Regulations should be adpoted which require that products which employ forms of copy protection be clearly labelled indicating the restrictions imposed. That's the kind of information that consumers need in order to make informed choices.
When you pick up the phone to call ATA, what you are doing is harassment. You have nothing to sell them.
So you feel that the only Constitutionally protected form of speech should be commercial speech where the caller is trying to sell something? God forbid that a huge number of people call one of the telemarketing organizations and voice their opinion.
While my father was dying of cancer and I was awaiting "the call", I got a call from some jackass wanting to sell me vinyl replacement windows. When I was working night-shift testing satellites, I got multiple calls during the day from telemarketers who woke me up and kept me from getting adequate sleep. You think that these calls are valid forms of free speech which should exist unregulated but that me calling a business to tell them what I think of their lobbying efforts does not deserve those same protections?
I personally know an individual (a dentist) who has successfully used telemarketing. He employs one woman who works from home cold-calling people to get their teeth cleaned. Telemarketing has been the most successful method of getting new patients that he has ever tried. Additionally, the woman doing the job benefits from well paying at-home employment.
How is that any different than saying you know a successful penis enlargement pill salesman who employs people to send spam? I don't give a rat's ass about how successful he's been. It's like arguing that laws against embezzling are wrong because you know a successful embezzler.
I am not opposed to a Do Not Call list. I am, however, very much opposed to the legislation of said list.
So you think it's fine for people to register for the list but you don't think that telemarketers should be legally obliged to refrain from calling people on the list. Then, by extension, you believe that some handicapped or elderly person who has trouble and/or pain getting to the phone should be forced to receive telemarketing calls from any firm that wants to ignore the list. You think that people working night shift should have telemarketing calls wake them up in the middle of their sleep cycles. You believe that parents should have their toddlers woken up by telemarketing calls. You think that people should have to choose between taking the phone off of the hook and maybe missing an emergency telephone call or leaving it on the hook and being woken up, interrupted, or inconvenienced by some telemarketer.
You've got a screwed up set of priorities.
I'm always amazed that magazines don't talk about cartridge costs in their printer reviews, but I think that if everyone just got in the habit of including operating costs in any discussion of printers, the problem would go away on its own.
You're probably familiar with the yellow EnergyGuide stickers that appear on all major appliances. You've doubtless seen the EPA mileage estimates on new car window stickers. Those are both examples of useful government regulations that require informational stickers to assist consumers in making informed purchases.
We need similar requirements levied on printer manufacturers. The manufacturers should have to include a prominent sticker which states the life expectancy of the toner/ink cartridges in pages and the estimated cost per page based on the MSRP of the manufacturer's cartridge. If the manufacturer does not publish an MSRP, then the sticker should be based on the dealer cost plus some fixed markup (representative of typical markup within the industry). The test would be equivalent to an EPA mileage test. It would use standard pages (e.g. X% coverage) and there might be a number for "B&W Text" and another for "Color Graphics" on each printer (with B&W printers having an "N/A" for the "Color Graphics").
Armed with that information, a consumer could make an intelligent, informed decision. It would do a lot to discourage deceptive pricing ($40 printers with -- surprise! -- $50 ink refills).
Do the devices need that high-speed component?
If the device is an external hard disc, capacious MP3 player, flash card adapter, CD or DVD drive, then hell yes they need it. If I bought a 512MB pen drive advertised as USB 2.0 and it only accepted data at 12Mbps, then I'd be damned pissed. That would mean that it would take a minimum of 341 seconds to fill even assuming the theoretical maximum transfer rate of 12Mbps with no overhead. That's about six minutes. Real USB 2.0 (480Mbps) would mean that the transfer would take about 8.5 seconds (again, assuming the maximum possible speed).
I've got an Archos Studio 10GB MP3 player. It runs USB 1.1 and it's slow to load up with music. It was also cheap and I was willing to accept slow data transfers for the low price. If I paid for one that was advertised as USB 2.0 and it only accepted data at the slow USB 1.1 transfer rate, I would be damned pissed and probably would return it.
...and we all know how well that works.
Very well. Compare our highway system to that of other countries. Did you see the footage from Iraq? Afghanistan? Ever been to Mexico? We have a damned good highway system.
I can see it now. "As a part of the 'Internet Improvement Project', the root name servers will be unavailable from 9 A.M. to 7 P.M. the week of 11/10 - 11/14."
Root servers are like lanes. You can shut down one or two and traffic still moves.
But, somehow, I am against finding solution with involving word 'sue, lawers' etc.
That's what happens when you turn a not-for-profit government program over to a bunch of money-grubbing capitalist corporations. The corporations look for amoral, often unethical, means to generate more income. If it hurts competitors, it's all the better.
If you don't want lawyers and lawsuits, then stop allowing profits to enter into the equation. The "information superhighway" should be like the physical highway system in the U.S. It should be planned and maintained by the government. And before any of the anti-government wackos start shrieking, consider the fact that DARPA, a federal government agency, was the driving force behind the creation of the Internet.
If you're still tempted by the political approach, ask yourself one simple question: who is more technologically savvy, your average spammer or your average politician?
What an ignorant, assinine, ill-conceived, steaming pile of bullshit! You don't have to have expertise in something to make it illegal. The average pedophile knows more about how to lure children into cars than the average politician does. By the author's "logic", we should not have laws against child molestation.
The average junk faxer knew more about fax technology than the average politician did in 1991, yet politicians passed the Telephone Consumer Protection Act which banned junk faxes. The result: Junk faxes, which were following a growth curve similar to what we've seen for spam, have now been reduced to a tiny fraction of what they were when the law passed. It didn't require that politicians learn about fax protocols, computerized faxing software, switched telephone network protocols, printing technologies, or fax modems.
Sure, Linux can now boot in 200ms, but Windows can blue-screen 200ms before you can save your work. So it sounds like the Linux folks put all of their efforts into quickly beginning productive work while Microsoft focused on very quickly ending it.
IANAL, but our lawyers have made it clear that in order to boot someone for breach of contract you need to give 'fair warning' unless we're talking serious offences (involving serious law-breaking etc.) and unfortunately spamming isn't such an offence.
I suggest that you get new lawyers because other ISPs seem to be able to respond much more quickly. All that you need is a contract that specifically spells out your right to shut down service immediately and permanently for spamming. Have your lawyers prepared such a contract?
This is real life folks.
Yes, it is. Actions (and inactions) have consequences. If you take months to boot spammers off of your service, then you will probably find yourself blacklisted. And the operators of those blacklists might not remove you until your firm starts handling spam complaints more quickly. That's real life.
You can't stop or get rid of a customer without a lot of legal hassle and spammers do know how to fight these things. If you just force things you only give the spammers the pleasure of tearing you apart in court.
How in the hell would a spammer be "tearing you apart in court" if you had a signed contract that stated that you had the right to immediately terminate if the customer spams? That's absurd. The only ISPs that get torn apart in court are the ones who are too stupid to spell out rights and responsibilities in their contracts.
Thank you for your very reasoned and intelligent reply.
I believe that the shopping mall analogy falls down in one key respect: There is no direct cost to the shopping mall if I hand out leaflets. To make the a truly analogous situation, I would have to distribute the leaflets at some cost to the mall. For example, I would need to occupy enough space that they would need to expand the mall (analogy to additional servers needed for spam processing), I would have to draw enough traffic that they would need to increase the size of their entrances and exits (analogy to bandwidth), and I would need to cause them to need to increase the size of their parking lot (analogy to disk storage). Then the analogy works. The key to this is that I have a right to express myself, but I don't have a right to make you pay for it.
But never mind all that, just suppose that we do allow owners of networks and servers absolute control of what passes over their wires. Is that something you really want?
In one sense, yes. A network owner has a right to limit unwanted, unrequested, and harmful traffic. An ISP has a right to block port 135 to stop the spread of a worm. They have the right to refuse e-mail from a spammer who wishes to flood their network with messages. They have a right to block port 80 incoming to keep their residential users from running web servers. What I don't think that they have a right to do is purposely block requested content -- and I don't think that they want to do that, either.
These ISPs, if they coordinated their efforts, and were allowed to totally control whatever passes over their wires, could do something that governments have repeatedly tried and failed to do: censor the internet.
But the free market will stop them from doing that. If AOL, Earthlink, and MSN all entered into a censorship pact, then other ISPs would capitalize on offering the "Internet uncensored." There is also the ever-present threat of being considered publishers rather than common carriers. If an ISP were to exercise editorial control over the content that traversed their network, they would quickly find themselves in the legal role of publisher, complete with all of the pitfalls and dangers that entails.
This really scared me at the time, since the internet backbone had been consolidated into just a few big companies, most of them with the same censorship-prone connections as the Time Warner backbone. Since then, the backbone situation has gotten a little more competitive. But with the trend to consolidate more and more communications into fewer and fewer companies, I wouldn't get to sanguine.
I agree with your concerns and what they point out is how important it is for the federal government to actively assure that the marketplace remains competitive, that we don't get a "Clear Channel" or "AOL Time Warner" controlling vast swaths of the marketplace.
I thought that was the normal life cycle for new technology: geeks invent it, start using it, refine it, and eventually someone says "maybe if I package it in this new way, a few end-users can start to use it". Then end-user feedback and design iterations eventually turn it into a solution for anyone to use.
Then why are so many users are still using Netscape 4.7x and complaining about pop-up ads? Why are so many still running Windows 95? Why do viruses for which patches have been out for years still infect computers? The spam problem has been with us since the 1994. We're coming up on a decade and this trickle-down spam fighting technology you advocate isn't happening.
I don't agree with fmaxwell's assertion -- I think this is a good thing.
So you think that all of us should continue to have inflated Internet prices to cover the cost of ISPs buying bandwidth, servers, and storage to handle incoming spam? Face facts: If 50% of Internet users get effective personal filtering, the spammers will just send more spam and look for ways around the filters. The vast majority of the people who would seek out filtering weren't going to buy the alleged penis enlarging pills anyway. So the spammers don't care. They want to go for the uneducated newbies. Result: you continue paying your ISP to move spam.
We need a means to stop the spam from ever being received, stored, and forwarded by the ISP. We don't need a way to hide the spam from ourselves.
You could agree that people who make use of the blacklists (not necessarily the writers of the blacklists) are blocking free speech to their customers. However, intent is a very important thing. Many are using the lists not to silence a particular thought or belief, but to save themselves money from the processing needed on all those spam emails.
Intent is only important if it is a government action. A private entity can block speech based on content, sender identity, message length, time of day, phase of moon, what the voices in their head told them to do, or just about any other reason. There is nothing in the Constitution that requires that an ISP allow you to use their bandwidth, servers, and storage to broadcast your message. I have a right to free speech, but it does not mean that the local grocery store has to let me use their PA system to express myself to their customers.
Nice retort! I've got to learn to be succinct like that.
Should we file a lawsuit against the phone company for providing caller ID? It suppresses free speech because it lets people make an informed decision about whether to take each call.
Ah, but some people are forced to use a blacklist because their ISP uses them. Earthlink, for example, is blocking mail from a popular and legitimate mail forwarding service.
And, as you point out later, no one makes anyone use Earthlink. If you want e-mail that Earthlink blocks, then don't use Earthlink.
Some might not have noticed that they aren't getting any mail forwarded.
And you think that these people should be in charge of their own filtering? Scary.
The choice should stay with the end-user, and I hope ISPs will become more flexible.
In general, I agree with you. I believe that providers should, by default, put in a default best-effort filtering package for each user. Each user should be able to change the filtering (via a user-friendly web page) to suit their own needs.
But the key is that the filtering should exist by default. I don't want a situation where 6,536,310 users at a given ISP receive every piece of spam addressed to them while 796 tech geeks are the only ones with effective spam filtering. That's what makes spam profitable.
Um, you're overlooking something too, asshole. There is no such thing as the First Amendment when the government isn't the one doing the speech-surpressing.
Suck my ass. I said that DDoS attacks against blacklists were suppressing free speech, not that they were a violation of the First Amendment.
There is at least one gaping hole in your argument, namely that blacklists are also suppressing free speech. You Suck.
That's an idiotic statement. Blacklists don't suppress speech. No one forces you or your ISP to use the blacklists or to refuse e-mail from IP addresses listed on them. I use blacklists and my server may reject messages from you. So what? You have no Constitutionally guaranteed right to use my server to deliver your message. It's my private property, just as your ISP's server is their property.
Suppose your ISP started blocking all e-mail from ISP X after reading a New York Times article that ISP X hosts spammers. Would you accuse the New York Times of suppressing free speech? If not, then why would you accuse a blacklist provider of suppressing free speech? Because it's easier to search their database than to search the NY Times archives?
You need to take a class in Constitutional law.
"if a message is spam, click the nice big "junk" button that mozilla mail provides. if a message is marked as spam while it isn't, click the "this isn't junk" button that is prominently displayed." not only _can_ I teach my grandmother that, I _have_ taught her that
So she couldn't install it on her own and needed personalized training on its use. Not everyone has a tech geek to install software and give them personal lessons in its use. Many people sign up for AOL or Earthlink, put in the CD that's mailed to them, and call tech support to ask "now what do I do"? Most people don't ever update their e-mail client and use whatever was installed on their Dell/Compaq/HP/Gateway/etc. when they bought it -- or what came on the CD from AOL. They don't have bayesian filtering and the spammers know that. So the spam keeps flowing because the spammers know that for every grandmother like yours there are 200 that will see the message.
I agree with you on that one. Not only does the traditional open-relay lists make it easy to find open relays to abuse, but the newer broadlisting of spam-sources, which hurts unbelievably many besides the spammer, doesn't have any impact on the amount of spam I see in my mailbox every day.
I run several domains and use multiple blacklists. The blacklists are incredibly effective, especially those which are country-wide like taiwan.blackholes.us and china.blackholes.us. I, and the other users of my domain, don't communicate with people in China or Taiwan. If I disable the blacklists, the ONLY thing that comes to us from those countries is spam.
How do you know that the use of blacklists "doesn't have any impact on the amount of spam" you get? It has a tremendous impact on the amount that I get. Because of those punitive "broadlists", many ISPs like AT&T and PSI who used to write "pink contracts" and host spammers no longer will. The broadlisting makes harboring spammers unsafe. AT&T is not going to piss off their entire subscriber base just to get one big pink contract from some spam house. It's not worth it to them. Many ISPs, especially dial-up ISPs have blocked outgoing port 25 so spammers can't use them for throwaway accounts from with to spam. No ISP wants to risk some spammer paying $9.99 for a month of service which will get the ISP blacklisted.
We are still listed despite having done what we're supposed to: Discovering the spammer, warning the spammer,
Any ISP which "warns" spammers deserves to be permanently blacklisted. What spammer doesn't know that spamming is against their ISP's terms of service and is an annoyance to the recipients? I hope that someone beats the sh*t out of you and gets a warning for it. Then maybe you'll understand why anti-spammers get so pissed off with ISPs who warn spammers.
I most certainly hope so! Blacklists are a cure far worse than the disease, and I'm completely rooting for the spammers here.
Publishing spam blacklists is a form of free speech and what you're advocating is the use of illegal means (DDoS) to suppress free speech. You suck.
What with bayesian junk filtering and using uniquely generated email addresses whenever I give them, I never see any spam, and the bandwidth it's costing me is minimal.
Grandma isn't going to be able to install and use bayesian filtering or generate unique e-mail addresses, so your solution sucks. Any "solution" which doesn't keep the spammers from getting their messages to the vast majority of people is just some geek doing mental masturbation. The spammers will continue to spam, using up bandwidth and storage, while costing ISPs, their subscribers, and businesses huge sums of money. And you'll sit there at home patting yourself on the back (or elsewhere) even though the spammers used your bandwidth, your ISP's bandwidth, your ISP's storage, and your storage. Not seeing the spam means that you can't complain about it, so that means that the spammer has less chance of being shut down.
You're just a spam ostrich. You have your head buried in the sand so that you don't see the spam -- even though it's still there.
I can't be held responsible for providing the information, all I did was copy and paste, not a big feat.
Actually, you can be held responsible for anything that you do. If your actions result in some innocent person being harassed, stalked, assaulted, etc., you can bet that he's got a case that you did not exercise due diligence.
Even ignoring the legal questions, what about ethics? How would you feel if you had the same name as some pedophile and found your home address and phone number posted online as a 'could-be' type of listing in a thread discussing pedophiles?