Do you assume that anyone who donates to Gnome would otherwise have donated an equal amount to one of your worthy charities?
I assume that some people would have. If someone donates $100 to Gnome, that's $100 less that they have to donate to other organizations.
Or do you think that the tax deductions themselves are somehow funded by these charities?
What? That's a new one on me.
The tax deduction that you get for donating to Gnome (hypothetically speaking) would be funded by every other taxpayer in the U.S. It is the American taxpayers that fund the deductions. If you get a deduction, the rest of us have to make up for it.
What do you call charities that accept sponorship of big companies?
So that they can get money to do charitable work.
Advertisement plain and simple.
No, that's why the big companies donate. It's not why the charity accepts the donation.
Are they not, using your defination, simply 'selling themselves out' by allowing for their image/goodwill/goodworks to be used to advertise a business and tie to it?
No. The charity work that they do still benefits the needy. Suppose FedEx sponsors Habitat for Humanity. Both win. Habitat for humanity gets much-needed money and FedEx gets good press.
That's far different than Gnome taking tax-deductible donations and then creating a GUI that is sold by Sun/RedHat/etc.
I say that by producing a legitemate, free, alternative to windows Gnome does many good works by allowing for a free desktop enviroment that can be used by any organization that can better spend the $200 it would normally spend on a os/GUI on more important things.
Okay, suppose that the government of Sudan suddenly got all of their software for free. How much money would that save on a per-capita basis? This may come as a shock, but there is not a computer on every desk in Sudan. Libraries are not found in every city with Internet access readily available. There are a handful of computers in most third-world countries and whether the government buys $200 operating systems or gets them for free has no bearing on the lives of the millions of people that live in those countries.
What helps third-world countries is software designed to run on old, slow computers that lack the memory, hard drive capacity, and speed to run things like Gnome.
On the subject of tax deductability, the GNOME Foundation meets the criteria for section 501(c)(3) (the foundation's work is of public benefit).
You and I both know that organizations like Gnome were not what legislators had in mind when they drafted 501(c)(3). It reminds me of the people that put a port-a-potty on their boat so that they can claim the boat as a residence. There is a difference between ethical and legal.
If you don't feel that it should have tax exempt status, then you should campaign against the law.
Yes, I probably should.
You make it sound like the foundation is trying to trick people in to donating.
I never meant to imply that. What I believe is that the tax-deductible status will cause some people to donate to Gnome rather than to humanitarian causes.
Your comment about "suffer and die" is inflammatory.
No, it is not. The other poster is the one that brought up cancer and famine victims dying anyway even if they received assistance.
The poster made the valid observation that many charities don't have a long-term benefit -- they just tide people over so they can suffer a little longer.
So would you rather die from pancreatic cancer in horrible agony, or would you rather that a charitable organization provided you with morphine to ease your pain?
Helping third-world nations avoid spending their meager finances on corporations software is a good thing for the world society.
There is already free software available. It was developed without the benefit of tax-deductible contributions. It is already good enough. A better version of Gnome is simply unimportant in this context.
Please, tell me what improvements are needed to Gnome before it is good enough to serve the needs of a third-world government.
Want to help third-world countries? Then develop text-based software that will run on 80386-based PCs with 1MB of RAM and a 120MB hard disk. Don't try to convince me that using tax dollars to help develop something that Sun will bundle with Solaris on high-end workstations is going to help third-world countries.
First off, what makes you think that the GNOME project, or any free software project does not help the less fortunate.
To some small extent, it does. But it helps the fortunate far more. The majority of third-world countries have very few computers relative to their population. The amount of money that could be saved on software would have no discernible effect on the lives of their citizens.
The GNOME project, along with the rest of GNU, is constantly being deployed in less developed countries.
And it is good enough already. These people need food, clothing, shelter, and medicine, not a more polished version of a Linux GUI.
How the hell is any free software project self-indulgent?
Because it is a hobby for those involved. They do it for personal fulfillment.
They clear their overhead and donate their product and services to anyone who needs them, just like any legitimate charity.
Do you think that Habitat for Humanity will be donating buildings to Sun and RedHat? Of course not. They will donate them to needy families. Legitimate charities do not invest tax-deductible contributions to develop products that are resold by big business.
He commented that helping cancer and famine victims was not as worthwhile as helping Gnome because those people would probably die anyway. I directly addressed that argument, so quite accusing me of being inflammatory or creating red-herring arguments.
If you feel that a donation to the GNOME foundation does not deserve a tax deduction (ie. you would prefer to pay tax on the contribution), feel free to not declare the donation.
You misunderstand my objection. I don't want anyone to be able to take a tax deduction for giving to Gnome. It diverts money away from worthy charities.
Helping to develop a product that big businesses (Sun, RedHat, etc.) will sell for a profit is not what tax deductions should be for.
Help a cancer victim and they'll die eventually anyway, help a famine victim and they might last until the next famine...
Reducing human suffering is more important than writing GUIs. I guess your point is that you'd rather see people suffer and die than have to use Gnome in its current state -- which it got to with no tax-deductible donations.
Help develop software that can spare the governments in the third world from spending money on proprietary software and they'll have more money over to spend on fighting famine.
The amount of money spent by third-world countries on software is insignificant compared to the cost of fighting famine, river blindness, AIDS, cancer, etc. If they got all of their computers for free, it would make little difference. The amount of money that, say, Sudan could save by using free software would make no significant difference to lives of the people of that country. None. Zero. Zilch. Nada.
Besides, there is already viable, free software. I don't think that an even more polished version of Gnome is what will cure the AIDS epidemic in sub-saharan Africa.
Me, I prefer being charitable for more longrange goals.
Are you sure that you don't just prefer charities that create software that you personally benefit from?
When I think of all the hundreds of thousands of people who benefit the hard work donated by open-source developers
Who cares? Lots of people benefit from the work of Intel and AMD, too, but it doesn't mean that they are morally entitled to tax-deductible contributions.
...a self-righteous liberal prig complaining about leveraging the tax code as it was intended is revolting.
It's easy to be self-righteous when you are right. But that's a feeling that you are unlikely to enjoy any time soon. Oh, and I'm damned proud to be a liberal -- thanks for noticing.
As to your name calling, I'll respond in kind:
I don't give a damn about what some right-wing, borrow-and-spend, self-centered, pompous ass like you has to say about charities and the tax code. Your kind lacks the moral compass to make that sort of judgement.
The idea that there are people out there who think only their pet projects deserve assistance is not my idea of a real uplifting message right before Christmas.
You lack the ability to differentiate between a deserving charity and a bunch of self-indulgent computer programmers. I do not. I don't need to assume that every organization from the Ku Klux Klan to Habitat for Humanity is equally deserving. I can look at what the organizations do to determine which ones are more deserving.
Now if you don't like givin' open source programers a bit of cash and gettin' a tax deduction then don't do it.
I won't.
But I feel that they are a valid charity because they previded a free public service with-out goverment funding or ADs.
When the government grants tax-deductible status, that is government funding. If you are in the 30% tax bracket, 30% of "your" donation came from the government.
But that is simply not the point. There are charities to help homeless people, cancer victims, orphans, and third-world famine victims -- just to name a few causes. That's a whole lot more worthwhile than sending money to people who are getting their jollies by coding a GUI.
and this year, they become a charity organization, meaning that contributions for US citizens will be tax deductions.
When I think of all of the worthy charities that help the less-fortunate, the idea of a bunch of self-indulgent computer programmers taking advantage of our tax code like this is revolting.
The announcement that Gnome is now a recognized, tax-deductible charity is not my idea of a real uplifting message right before the holidays.
I hate having to access my drives with letters, which are randomly garbled everytime I add or remove some drive, install a new SCSI driver, or whatever.
That may have been the case under Windows 9x/Me, but, under 2000 and XP, you simply assign the drive letters you want and those drive letters stick.
duh! - but it doesn't mean that it didn't hurt(annoy) them too.
I never said that the users were not annoyed. I simply said that their failure to file the lawsuit is why they have will not get money from the lawsuit.
I think AOL should also sue Amazon for all those extra emails its sending out to its users (again being cynical here)
Amazon does e-mail marketing right. It's an opt-in system. They send e-mails to people with whom they have an existing business relationship. The e-mails are sent from Amazon's servers, not some open relay in Korea. The e-mails include "unsubscribe" instructions that actually work. Amazon, to the best of my knowledge (and tracking) does not sell the e-mail addresses.
The whole idea of the original comment was a rant that although this may be a victory against spam it does not help all those people who were hurt by spam.
The spammer in question is unlikely to continue spamming AOL's users after that crippling loss. It is also likely that potential spammers, having seen news of the $7 million award, will reconsider their "business plan" and that will further reduce the amount of spam that pollutes the Internet in general. I see this as a big help to users.
The AOL users are the ones who were injured by all this spam, why is the money going to AOL and not distributed to all of it's user base in the past 4 years.
answer 1: Because the users did not press a lawsuit.
answer 2: The spam injured AOL by increasing their operating costs while driving away users.
answer 3: AOL has approximately 35 million users. The $7 million equals about 20 cents per user. After subtracting the legal expenses, postage, and costs to print and process 35 million checks, how much would be left? (hint: it's a negative number). Do the math before you post next time.
Rereading my post, I caught a rather ugly blunder. I said "The company that produced it is not out of business" when I meant to type "The company that produced it is now out of business."
Like the ones who do insane amounts of hacking to add upgrades and get more speed out of their Amigas. Or Acorns. Or Ataris. I think they do more than most groups to make the computing world interesting, and I applaud their efforts.
When I think of all of the effort that they are expending and how it could benefit a modern, viable platform, it seems a terrible waste.
I was a huge BeOS fan. I bought the commercial releases and really liked it, but its day has passed. The company that produced it is not out of business and the one that acquired them has no interest in developing or marketing it further. I wish that this were not the case, but it is.
BeOS is no longer cutting-edge technology and the multiple, disorganized, unfunded attempts to create a BeOS clone are unlikely to result in viable products. BeOS lacks the user base necessary to stimulate development, the software base to attract users, and the tech support that is needed by users and developers alike.
I decided long ago that I did not want to become like those sad people that cling to long-dead platforms, constantly predicting their return and vocally defending their virtues. Let BeOS rest in peace.
That's what we refer to as a "strawman argument." A strawman argument is where you distort your opponent's argument and then refute the distortion.
Here are a couple points that you came up with: 1) Spammers don't pay for bandwidth.
I never claimed that spammers did not pay for bandwidth. I said that the recipients bore the vast majority of the cost of spam. Here is an example of how:
Spammer sends a message. He does a blind copy to 50 recipients at ISP X. ISP X receives the message once and stores 50 copies of it in recipients' "mailboxes". Each of those recipients downloads the message. So the spammer moved it once, the ISP stored 50 copies of it, and it was downloaded from their servers 50 times.
2) Scratching messages into car paint is equivalent to sending email.
I did not say it was equivalent. It was a gross exaggeration to make a point: It is unfair for the recipient of an ad to incur a cost for receipt of the ad.
But if you are uncomfortable with that comparison, consider that it is illegal to send unsolicited ads via fax (47 USC 227). Why? Because the recipients bear the cost of the ads. That the sender paid for a phone line and the computer to send the faxes is irrelevent. The recipients pay for the paper, ink, and may even pay to receive the call (800 numbers, per-call numbers, etc.) Recipients also bear much of the costs of spam through higher monthly fees (ISPs pass on the costs associated with e-mail). AOL estimates that 25-30% of their e-mail traffic is spam. That means that they need more servers, storage, and e-mail bandwidth. They need the staff to support the additional infrastructure. And the costs for that are passed on to their subscribers. And what of customers that have to call their ISPs long distance? That's another cost directly borne by the recipients.
3) Spammers are annoying. 1 point for you!
I do not recall that being a point that I brought up. Besides, it's irrelevent. You can't ban speech simply because you find annoying.
4) Spammers are engaged in illegal activity. No. Some spammers are engaged in illegal activity. The vast majority of them are well within the bounds of legality.
I don't recall stating that it was always illegal. I said that it should be illegal.
Thank you for continuing this. Now please read the articles at the links I provided and, if you feel the articles are logically flawed, explain how.
As you can see, your arguments have become ridiculous, as I predicted before.
No they are not. They are intelligent, logical, and well-reasoned. Prove otherwise.
Are you incapable of debating in an intelligent manner? That you resorted to ad-hominem attacks when I presented rational arguments would tend to imply that.
You simply can't be against spam and back up your position with logical, non-contradictory arguments.
So what are the logical flaws or contradictions in my argument? Apparently, you are unwilling, or unable, to intelligently debate this so you turn tail and run as soon as you don't have an answer.
When someone sends me spam, they have paid for their email account, which is exactly the price of admission to the Internet.
So what? That has nothing to do with the costs associated with the spam they send. Besides, there is no "admission to the Internet."
You can't claim they aren't paying anything.
I did not claim that. I claimed, and still claim, that the lion's share of the cost of their advertising is borne by the recipients.
Linking to an anti-spam website that is clearly biased from the outset doesn't illuminate anything.
Stop the ad-hominem attacks and address the points that the articles make. The quality of the argument is what is at issue here, not whether you like the views of the organization making the argument.
If you think that I am being inflammatory because I believe that speech ought to remain free no matter how onerous it may be, then I refuse to apologize.
No, I think you are being inflammatory when you claim that I am against free speech simply because I don't want to bear the cost of the penis enlarger ad that some spammer wants to send to me.
Spam is one of the costs of being on the internet.
And theft is one of the costs of living in a city. Does that mean that theft should be legal?
If you don't want people sending you email, you should find a way to block them.
I am coming over to your house and scraping an ad for my business into the paint of your car. If you don't like it, find a way to stop me. But don't take away my free speech rights to carve that message into your car's paint.
AOL does not claim that they are substantially harmed in this suit.
I do not believe that and I challenge you to cite your sources. Every other complaint that they have posted from previous lawsuits has claimed harm. I attended a meeting regarding the spam problem and AOL had an attorney that was a featured speaker. They very much consider spam to be a terrible problem.
How does this injure us? The injury to us is equally undisputed, Your Honor, and the injury occurs in two ways. It occurs at the front end. Every single one of these e-mails comes to a computer server called a front-end server in this example sitting in Reston, Virginia, and when they arrive in this volume all at once, they utterly degrade the system. They slow down what our members expect to be a nearly instantaneous transmission of electronic e-mail messages.
It's just as if they pulled up to a McDonald's and dumped three busloads of people there. That would have the effect of creating a log jam, and if you were just trying to get a meal at McDonald's, you couldn't get it, because you'd be behind 300 busloads of people. That degradation of the quality of service has been recognized by the Fourth Circuit in particular in the Multi-Channel TV case as a form of irreparable injury.
The second and perhaps most insidious form of the irreparable injury is the good will damage it does to our members. They don't want this stuff. They want us to block it. They complain to us at 100,000 on average complaints a day about spam, and they hold America Online accountable for not preventing it, and when we get the messages back, the vast majority of those messages are saying to us, you do something about this, America Online.
Now America Online has tried its level best technically and through pleading and we've threatened to stop this practice, but they have no interest in stopping this practice. They have no interest in the good will of our customers. They have an interest in selling cyber-pornography. So unless the Court enjoins this practice, there is no technical cure, and they are not ever willingly going to stop.
So we're injured in two ways. Our computer system is downgraded, and our customers are infuriated by this. They say, however, that their injury from an injunction would outweigh that injury to us. I say poppycock.
What they would have you believe if you were to enjoin this practice, Your Honor, is that you would put them out of business, but that's just a conclusion that has no factual support at all.
Bear in mind what they're doing. They're advertising. They're shifting the cost of advertising, receiving, sorting, and distributing their direct marketing to us by dumping it on us over our objection, but it's just their advertising.
As the court said in CompuServe, there is simply no reason that you can't advertise in a more legitimate way. Send it to people who want it. Pay to send it to people who want it. Post it on the Web browser. Buy a billboard or do what most businesses of this kind do: Buy an ad in the back of a dirty magazine. There are legitimate ways to advertise this business.
The problem is they have to pay for it. And what they want in this case is advertising for free. Well, what business doesn't? It's not even free, Your Honor. They want advertising that we pay for. It's as if someone beamed commercials to NBC and said, "Air these over your airwaves, please."
The economics, I think, that we learned from Mr. Tajalle yesterday fully support the conclusion that they would not be meaningfully injured at all by this injunction. These are his numbers, so I presume they're undisputed.
He told us that in the first nine months of 1997, they have gross revenues of over $2 million from this pornography business. He told us that they enjoy a profit rate of 15 to 20 percent on that $2 million, astronomical in any industry. He told us that their cost of advertising that they incur is between 2 and 3.5 percent of gross revenues. Can you imagine a direct marketing business that has an advertising budget that low?
But it's no mystery in this case. The cost of advertising isn't that low. America Online is paying it. All we're asking by way of this injunction is not that you put them out of business, but that the Court ask them to bear their cost of advertising their business. That is not only not an irreparable injury to them; that's no injury at all.
So we can see right on the face that one of the largest internet companies, one that faces mountains of spam every day, doesn't see spam as a substantial problem much less their primary problem.
No go back and reread their testimony from the prior case and then try to keep a straight face while saying that AOL does not consider spam a substantial problem.
If you are going to make stuff up, at least try to make something up that is more difficult to prove wrong.
I pay for a post office box, so sending me junk mail is exactly the same as sending me spam.
If I send junk mail to your P.O. box, who pays for the postage? Me. Not you. It is not analogous in any way.
When someone sends you spam, your ISP pays for the bandwidth, storage, and servers that receive it. Then they pass those increased costs on to their users -- including you.
I don't have the time to explain the basics to you, so just read the information at the links shown below:
Slashdot Mirror
Do you assume that anyone who donates to Gnome would otherwise have donated an equal amount to one of your worthy charities?
I assume that some people would have. If someone donates $100 to Gnome, that's $100 less that they have to donate to other organizations.
Or do you think that the tax deductions themselves are somehow funded by these charities?
What? That's a new one on me.
The tax deduction that you get for donating to Gnome (hypothetically speaking) would be funded by every other taxpayer in the U.S. It is the American taxpayers that fund the deductions. If you get a deduction, the rest of us have to make up for it.
What do you call charities that accept sponorship of big companies?
So that they can get money to do charitable work.
Advertisement plain and simple.
No, that's why the big companies donate. It's not why the charity accepts the donation.
Are they not, using your defination, simply 'selling themselves out' by allowing for their image/goodwill/goodworks to be used to advertise a business and tie to it?
No. The charity work that they do still benefits the needy. Suppose FedEx sponsors Habitat for Humanity. Both win. Habitat for humanity gets much-needed money and FedEx gets good press.
That's far different than Gnome taking tax-deductible donations and then creating a GUI that is sold by Sun/RedHat/etc.
I say that by producing a legitemate, free, alternative to windows Gnome does many good works by allowing for a free desktop enviroment that can be used by any organization that can better spend the $200 it would normally spend on a os/GUI on more important things.
Okay, suppose that the government of Sudan suddenly got all of their software for free. How much money would that save on a per-capita basis? This may come as a shock, but there is not a computer on every desk in Sudan. Libraries are not found in every city with Internet access readily available. There are a handful of computers in most third-world countries and whether the government buys $200 operating systems or gets them for free has no bearing on the lives of the millions of people that live in those countries.
What helps third-world countries is software designed to run on old, slow computers that lack the memory, hard drive capacity, and speed to run things like Gnome.
people need to *think* more.
Your last post was damned good evidence of that.
On the subject of tax deductability, the GNOME Foundation meets the criteria for section 501(c)(3) (the foundation's work is of public benefit).
You and I both know that organizations like Gnome were not what legislators had in mind when they drafted 501(c)(3). It reminds me of the people that put a port-a-potty on their boat so that they can claim the boat as a residence. There is a difference between ethical and legal.
If you don't feel that it should have tax exempt status, then you should campaign against the law.
Yes, I probably should.
You make it sound like the foundation is trying to trick people in to donating.
I never meant to imply that. What I believe is that the tax-deductible status will cause some people to donate to Gnome rather than to humanitarian causes.
Your comment about "suffer and die" is inflammatory.
No, it is not. The other poster is the one that brought up cancer and famine victims dying anyway even if they received assistance.
The poster made the valid observation that many charities don't have a long-term benefit -- they just tide people over so they can suffer a little longer.
So would you rather die from pancreatic cancer in horrible agony, or would you rather that a charitable organization provided you with morphine to ease your pain?
Helping third-world nations avoid spending their meager finances on corporations software is a good thing for the world society.
There is already free software available. It was developed without the benefit of tax-deductible contributions. It is already good enough. A better version of Gnome is simply unimportant in this context.
Please, tell me what improvements are needed to Gnome before it is good enough to serve the needs of a third-world government.
Want to help third-world countries? Then develop text-based software that will run on 80386-based PCs with 1MB of RAM and a 120MB hard disk. Don't try to convince me that using tax dollars to help develop something that Sun will bundle with Solaris on high-end workstations is going to help third-world countries.
First off, what makes you think that the GNOME project, or any free software project does not help the less fortunate.
To some small extent, it does. But it helps the fortunate far more. The majority of third-world countries have very few computers relative to their population. The amount of money that could be saved on software would have no discernible effect on the lives of their citizens.
The GNOME project, along with the rest of GNU, is constantly being deployed in less developed countries.
And it is good enough already. These people need food, clothing, shelter, and medicine, not a more polished version of a Linux GUI.
How the hell is any free software project self-indulgent?
Because it is a hobby for those involved. They do it for personal fulfillment.
They clear their overhead and donate their product and services to anyone who needs them, just like any legitimate charity.
Do you think that Habitat for Humanity will be donating buildings to Sun and RedHat? Of course not. They will donate them to needy families. Legitimate charities do not invest tax-deductible contributions to develop products that are resold by big business.
He commented that helping cancer and famine victims was not as worthwhile as helping Gnome because those people would probably die anyway. I directly addressed that argument, so quite accusing me of being inflammatory or creating red-herring arguments.
If you feel that a donation to the GNOME foundation does not deserve a tax deduction (ie. you would prefer to pay tax on the contribution), feel free to not declare the donation.
You misunderstand my objection. I don't want anyone to be able to take a tax deduction for giving to Gnome. It diverts money away from worthy charities.
Helping to develop a product that big businesses (Sun, RedHat, etc.) will sell for a profit is not what tax deductions should be for.
By what criteria?
By my criteria.
Help a cancer victim and they'll die eventually anyway, help a famine victim and they might last until the next famine...
Reducing human suffering is more important than writing GUIs. I guess your point is that you'd rather see people suffer and die than have to use Gnome in its current state -- which it got to with no tax-deductible donations.
Help develop software that can spare the governments in the third world from spending money on proprietary software and they'll have more money over to spend on fighting famine.
The amount of money spent by third-world countries on software is insignificant compared to the cost of fighting famine, river blindness, AIDS, cancer, etc. If they got all of their computers for free, it would make little difference. The amount of money that, say, Sudan could save by using free software would make no significant difference to lives of the people of that country. None. Zero. Zilch. Nada.
Besides, there is already viable, free software. I don't think that an even more polished version of Gnome is what will cure the AIDS epidemic in sub-saharan Africa.
Me, I prefer being charitable for more longrange goals.
Are you sure that you don't just prefer charities that create software that you personally benefit from?
When I think of all the hundreds of thousands of people who benefit the hard work donated by open-source developers
...a self-righteous liberal prig complaining about leveraging the tax code as it was intended is revolting.
Who cares? Lots of people benefit from the work of Intel and AMD, too, but it doesn't mean that they are morally entitled to tax-deductible contributions.
It's easy to be self-righteous when you are right. But that's a feeling that you are unlikely to enjoy any time soon. Oh, and I'm damned proud to be a liberal -- thanks for noticing.
As to your name calling, I'll respond in kind:
I don't give a damn about what some right-wing, borrow-and-spend, self-centered, pompous ass like you has to say about charities and the tax code. Your kind lacks the moral compass to make that sort of judgement.
The idea that there are people out there who think only their pet projects deserve assistance is not my idea of a real uplifting message right before Christmas.
You lack the ability to differentiate between a deserving charity and a bunch of self-indulgent computer programmers. I do not. I don't need to assume that every organization from the Ku Klux Klan to Habitat for Humanity is equally deserving. I can look at what the organizations do to determine which ones are more deserving.
Now if you don't like givin' open source programers a bit of cash and gettin' a tax deduction then don't do it.
I won't.
But I feel that they are a valid charity because they previded a free public service with-out goverment funding or ADs.
When the government grants tax-deductible status, that is government funding. If you are in the 30% tax bracket, 30% of "your" donation came from the government.
But that is simply not the point. There are charities to help homeless people, cancer victims, orphans, and third-world famine victims -- just to name a few causes. That's a whole lot more worthwhile than sending money to people who are getting their jollies by coding a GUI.
and this year, they become a charity organization, meaning that contributions for US citizens will be tax deductions.
When I think of all of the worthy charities that help the less-fortunate, the idea of a bunch of self-indulgent computer programmers taking advantage of our tax code like this is revolting.
The announcement that Gnome is now a recognized, tax-deductible charity is not my idea of a real uplifting message right before the holidays.
I hate having to access my drives with letters, which are randomly garbled everytime I add or remove some drive, install a new SCSI driver, or whatever.
That may have been the case under Windows 9x/Me, but, under 2000 and XP, you simply assign the drive letters you want and those drive letters stick.
Where do you think people cut their teeth learning how to program?
In general, on PCs running Linux or Windows.
duh! - but it doesn't mean that it didn't hurt(annoy) them too.
I never said that the users were not annoyed. I simply said that their failure to file the lawsuit is why they have will not get money from the lawsuit.
I think AOL should also sue Amazon for all those extra emails its sending out to its users (again being cynical here)
Amazon does e-mail marketing right. It's an opt-in system. They send e-mails to people with whom they have an existing business relationship. The e-mails are sent from Amazon's servers, not some open relay in Korea. The e-mails include "unsubscribe" instructions that actually work. Amazon, to the best of my knowledge (and tracking) does not sell the e-mail addresses.
The whole idea of the original comment was a rant that although this may be a victory against spam it does not help all those people who were hurt by spam.
The spammer in question is unlikely to continue spamming AOL's users after that crippling loss. It is also likely that potential spammers, having seen news of the $7 million award, will reconsider their "business plan" and that will further reduce the amount of spam that pollutes the Internet in general. I see this as a big help to users.
The AOL users are the ones who were injured by all this spam, why is the money going to AOL and not distributed to all of it's user base in the past 4 years.
answer 1: Because the users did not press a lawsuit.
answer 2: The spam injured AOL by increasing their operating costs while driving away users.
answer 3: AOL has approximately 35 million users. The $7 million equals about 20 cents per user. After subtracting the legal expenses, postage, and costs to print and process 35 million checks, how much would be left? (hint: it's a negative number). Do the math before you post next time.
Rereading my post, I caught a rather ugly blunder. I said "The company that produced it is not out of business" when I meant to type "The company that produced it is now out of business."
Sorry for any confusion.
Like the ones who do insane amounts of hacking to add upgrades and get more speed out of their Amigas. Or Acorns. Or Ataris. I think they do more than most groups to make the computing world interesting, and I applaud their efforts.
When I think of all of the effort that they are expending and how it could benefit a modern, viable platform, it seems a terrible waste.
I was a huge BeOS fan. I bought the commercial releases and really liked it, but its day has passed. The company that produced it is not out of business and the one that acquired them has no interest in developing or marketing it further. I wish that this were not the case, but it is.
BeOS is no longer cutting-edge technology and the multiple, disorganized, unfunded attempts to create a BeOS clone are unlikely to result in viable products. BeOS lacks the user base necessary to stimulate development, the software base to attract users, and the tech support that is needed by users and developers alike.
I decided long ago that I did not want to become like those sad people that cling to long-dead platforms, constantly predicting their return and vocally defending their virtues. Let BeOS rest in peace.
That's what we refer to as a "strawman argument." A strawman argument is where you distort your opponent's argument and then refute the distortion.
Here are a couple points that you came up with:
1) Spammers don't pay for bandwidth.
I never claimed that spammers did not pay for bandwidth. I said that the recipients bore the vast majority of the cost of spam. Here is an example of how:
Spammer sends a message. He does a blind copy to 50 recipients at ISP X. ISP X receives the message once and stores 50 copies of it in recipients' "mailboxes". Each of those recipients downloads the message. So the spammer moved it once, the ISP stored 50 copies of it, and it was downloaded from their servers 50 times.
2) Scratching messages into car paint is equivalent to sending email.
I did not say it was equivalent. It was a gross exaggeration to make a point: It is unfair for the recipient of an ad to incur a cost for receipt of the ad.
But if you are uncomfortable with that comparison, consider that it is illegal to send unsolicited ads via fax (47 USC 227). Why? Because the recipients bear the cost of the ads. That the sender paid for a phone line and the computer to send the faxes is irrelevent. The recipients pay for the paper, ink, and may even pay to receive the call (800 numbers, per-call numbers, etc.) Recipients also bear much of the costs of spam through higher monthly fees (ISPs pass on the costs associated with e-mail). AOL estimates that 25-30% of their e-mail traffic is spam. That means that they need more servers, storage, and e-mail bandwidth. They need the staff to support the additional infrastructure. And the costs for that are passed on to their subscribers. And what of customers that have to call their ISPs long distance? That's another cost directly borne by the recipients.
3) Spammers are annoying.
1 point for you!
I do not recall that being a point that I brought up. Besides, it's irrelevent. You can't ban speech simply because you find annoying.
4) Spammers are engaged in illegal activity.
No. Some spammers are engaged in illegal activity. The vast majority of them are well within the bounds of legality.
I don't recall stating that it was always illegal. I said that it should be illegal.
Thank you for continuing this. Now please read the articles at the links I provided and, if you feel the articles are logically flawed, explain how.
As you can see, your arguments have become ridiculous, as I predicted before.
No they are not. They are intelligent, logical, and well-reasoned. Prove otherwise.
Are you incapable of debating in an intelligent manner? That you resorted to ad-hominem attacks when I presented rational arguments would tend to imply that.
You simply can't be against spam and back up your position with logical, non-contradictory arguments.
So what are the logical flaws or contradictions in my argument? Apparently, you are unwilling, or unable, to intelligently debate this so you turn tail and run as soon as you don't have an answer.
When someone sends me spam, they have paid for their email account, which is exactly the price of admission to the Internet.
So what? That has nothing to do with the costs associated with the spam they send. Besides, there is no "admission to the Internet."
You can't claim they aren't paying anything.
I did not claim that. I claimed, and still claim, that the lion's share of the cost of their advertising is borne by the recipients.
Linking to an anti-spam website that is clearly biased from the outset doesn't illuminate anything.
Stop the ad-hominem attacks and address the points that the articles make. The quality of the argument is what is at issue here, not whether you like the views of the organization making the argument.
If you think that I am being inflammatory because I believe that speech ought to remain free no matter how onerous it may be, then I refuse to apologize.
No, I think you are being inflammatory when you claim that I am against free speech simply because I don't want to bear the cost of the penis enlarger ad that some spammer wants to send to me.
Spam is one of the costs of being on the internet.
And theft is one of the costs of living in a city. Does that mean that theft should be legal?
If you don't want people sending you email, you should find a way to block them.
I am coming over to your house and scraping an ad for my business into the paint of your car. If you don't like it, find a way to stop me. But don't take away my free speech rights to carve that message into your car's paint.
I do not believe that and I challenge you to cite your sources. Every other complaint that they have posted from previous lawsuits has claimed harm. I attended a meeting regarding the spam problem and AOL had an attorney that was a featured speaker. They very much consider spam to be a terrible problem.
In AOL v. Over the Air Equipment, Inc., AOL's attorney, Everett C. Johnson, Jr. testified:
So we can see right on the face that one of the largest internet companies, one that faces mountains of spam every day, doesn't see spam as a substantial problem much less their primary problem.
No go back and reread their testimony from the prior case and then try to keep a straight face while saying that AOL does not consider spam a substantial problem.
If you are going to make stuff up, at least try to make something up that is more difficult to prove wrong.
I pay for a post office box, so sending me junk mail is exactly the same as sending me spam.
If I send junk mail to your P.O. box, who pays for the postage? Me. Not you. It is not analogous in any way.
When someone sends you spam, your ISP pays for the bandwidth, storage, and servers that receive it. Then they pass those increased costs on to their users -- including you.
I don't have the time to explain the basics to you, so just read the information at the links shown below:
Refutation of the "free speech" argument
Refutation of the it-does-not-cost-the-recipient-anything argument
Refutation of the postal mail analogy
Just because you don't like one sort of free speech does not mean that it should be made illegal.
Don't be an inflammatory ass.
So the problem you have is that it is too cheap to send spam?
No, but I'll make this simpler:
The problem I have with spam is that the recipient pays the cost of the spam. The sender does not. Therefore, it is theft.