No, the point is to prevent Microsoft from illegally abusing its monopoly status.
No, the point is to remedy the harm that has already been caused by Microsoft illegally abusing its monopoly power. It's not enough to stop them from doing it again, the illegal profit that they've already made must be taken away.
When you catch a thief, you don't just make him promise not to steal again. And you don't just force him to give the money back and promise not to steal either. You make him give the money back, and you punish him.
So what the combo of less property tax and more gambling has done is shift the tax burden for schools from business to individuals, and disproportionately to poorer individuals, who tend to gamble more (this is not a value judgement, just a fact).
I've been trying for some time to verify this particular "fact" and would be grateful for any information you can provide as to it's source. Note that casinos claim, (and have the player tracking data to support), that the majority of gambling dollars come from upper middle class patrons, and that the lower income people do not contribute even a proportional share to the casinos coffers.
More to the point, this is the way it SHOULD be. A country controls it's own country code TLD.
If.com,.gov,.net,.edu, (and.arpa for that matter) are essentially "american" then then they should be under the.us TLD - i.e..com.us. and there shouldn't be any non-country TLDs at all.
I paid $2000 / month for 1/4 T1 in 1995. Since then, PC's have gone from 90 MhZ to 2 GHz. RAM has dropped in price by a factor of 20 or more. Disk drives by a factor of 100. Bandwidth inside of CMOS chips is up by a factor of 100.
So... the technology used for switching digital signals is now cheaper than any analog phone technology. Why should a T1 line be any more expensive than a regular voice line?
The thing stinks of monopoly practices.
1995 to 2002 is 7 years, which should be 3 to 4 doublings or a factor of 8 - 16. If you were paying $2000 for 1/4 of a T1 in 1995, you should be able to get a full T1 for $500-$1000 in 2002. Guess what, you can.
If a long distance service offered three cents a minute anytime day or night, you'd probably think it was an amazing bargain. At $1000 a month, a T1 is under 2.5 cents a minute.
Even without compression, you could carry more than 1 phone conversation over a T1. With compression you could do 30 streams of higher quality than the phone company, at a cost of under.1 cents per minute per stream.
The question isn't "why does a T1 cost more than a voice line?", the question is "why does long distance cost so much?".
Well if you want to host a server do like the rest of us and buy a T-1. $1500.00 a month is what I pay for the right to have a server and a static ip.
A T1? What are you thinking? If you really want to run a server, do what the pros do and get space in a facility that is dedicated to doing that. You can get a dedicated server with 1Mbps of traffic for less than half that price. I like Hurricane Electric, but there are also dozens of other companies that do the same thing, do a search on Google for "dedicated servers". If the company is any good, they include the computer, the space to store it, the electricity to run it, the UPS to make sure it keeps running, and a staff that spends their day making sure your connections stay up, and of course, a static IP, all for a fraction of the price you quote.
That is the biggest load of bullshit I've ever heard.
Somehow, according to your spam-happy ass, its the CUSTOMERS who are making their costs higher, not the SPAMMERS?
I didn't say spammers weren't costing the customer, I said that customers who are irate about spam cost ISPs more than spammers cost ISPs.
I know it seems twisted, but yes, the customers who are complaining are raising the costs more than the spammer is. Ralph Nader probably cost the car companies a lot more than the product liability suits did too. And by complaining in a big way, he forced cars to be made with lots of safety features that cost money, and raised the prices across the board.
Just like Nader, the spam complainers are raising the price of doing business. That doesn't mean they are bad, or that I don't admire them for doing it, Just that I'm willing to call a spade a spade.
People who argue against spam using unreasonable figures, and stupid, untrue rhetoric that they copied from an anti-spam web site without even a tiny amount of critical thinking aren't doing the rest us any favors.
Spam is tiny. The average spam is between 5 and 6K, depending on header sizes. You can store thousands on a 20 meg account. No, it's not free, but the costs are small and going down. I probably get a larger volume of spam than most, but it still costs me more to throw away the junk mail I get, then to deal with the spam.
I haven't commented on junk faxes, because there is nothing I want to say about them. 47USC227 was an interesting attempt to outlaw them, but I haven't seen much reduction in junk faxes as a result.
Getting a reasonable law against spam of any form is a lot of work. I applaud you for working on the task, and look forward to more of the same. If you think I'm being an asshole, wait til you run into someone who is actually pro spam.
Doesn't matter how much of our bandwidth SPAM is stealing. Its stealing our bandwidth and what we pay for. Even if its only a nickel.
Try re-reading my post again. Spam isn't what costs, the less than a nickel cost is dealing with people who complain about spam.
Making spam illegal would dramatically raise the price ISPs pay for dealing with spam. That price would be passed on to the consumer, and we'd all pay for it in the end.
Would you vote for a law that stopped spam, but raised your taxes $12 a year? What about $35? How about $100? What if it didn't work very well, but still raised your taxes?
30%? Spam doesn't even consume 1% of "our" bandwidth. The average person receives less than 50K bytes of spam a day. Even with a 33K baud dialup line, it takes less 15 seconds to download. Assuming that ISP oversells it's bandwidth 50 to 1, that's still only 0.02% The major cost of dealing with spam for an ISP isn't bandwidth, it's dealing with people who complain about it. Even so, it probably adds less than a nickel a month to your bill.
The bandwidth killers for email are viruses, then mailing lists. Spam actually comes after normal email in terms of bandwidth usage.
While I'm not opposed to legislation in principle, I'm opposed to your proposal for the following reasons;
It does not specify what the penalties for violating the law would be.
It does not mention who would be responsible for making the determination that the policy had been violated.
It's not possible to determine the size of an email with 99% accuracy unless you don't count the headers.
It's a lot more complex than it needs to be.
It doesn't prevent spam from individuals. Companies could therefore hire individuals to spam you.
I could list more reasons, but I'm only willing to feed trolls so much in one sitting.
It's clearly possible for Microsoft to package all the sources together for all the programs that go into making Windows XP, and sell it. It's easy to understand not releasing the copyright, and it would cost more to produce the source CDs than XP, But you can be sure a lot of software companies would buy a copy, even at ten times the price.
Once you realize why Microsoft doesn't do that, you will realize why Microsoft won't ever willingly work with the open source community.
Everquest boasts a user population of over 300,000. The national rate for suicide is 1 in 10,000. If only one person committed suicide after playing Everquest, then Everquest players are 97% less likely to commit suicide. I'd guess there are 30 suicides among Everquest players each year, but the families don't think of blaming Sony for them.
And speaking of computing power, even a fast machine today can process about 2 billion instructions per second, but a human brain has 2 to the 14th power neurons and 2 to the 16th power connections between them, all of which can be active at the same time
Maybe he meant 2 * 10^14, which would at least only be 3 orders of magnitude off.
A much closer approximation is 100,000,000,000 neurons, and 5,000 times that many connections. (For more on the number of neurons in the brain, see R.W. Williams and K. Herrup, Ann. Review Neuroscience, 11:423-453, 1988)
If a single neuron could perform the equivilant of an instruction, then human brains would only be 100-1000 times more powerful than a modern desktop computer, probably less when you consider that they're more like a beowolf cluster than a single powerful computer.
Microsoft says it can't be done? Ok, then hire a competent firm of programmers. Give them the source to windows, a time limit (say, six months from receiving a version of the source that compiles to windows) and $5,000,000. If they can't do it, then Microsoft only has to pay the $5,000,000 in penalties. If they can, then Microsoft has to ship the version they come up with in those nine states.
Don't give up on the idea completely. Maybe you can't copyright your DNA, but your finger prints aren't determined completely by DNA. If they were, identical twins would have identical finger prints. You may have to list your mother as a collaborator on the effort, but I think they qualify as a creative expression of an idea.
as far as MS having to divulge its secrets in protecting their networks, I don't think that is viable. I am no MS fan by any means, but I don't see why they should be forced to allow open access from other OS's.
If they want to block out whatever, I think that they should have that right.
Lest we forget, Microsoft broke the law, and this is being suggested as a punishment for having done that. The question isn't "is this fair?" it's "is this an appropriate punishment for the crime that has been committed?". I think it's more appropriate than many of the punishments that have been suggested, but considering that this isn't Microsoft's first offence, I think a structural remedy is more appropriate.
Hashcash is a specific type of challenge/response system. These have been tried before, and they haven't worked well. The major problem is acceptance, not implementation.
My approach is to use challenge as a "saver" to reduce false positives. I.e. instead of just trashing email that is identified as spam, you send back a note that says "your email was identified as spam because . If you feel this was in error, please send me the answer to the following question... (which can be found using this java app)" Even this has met with resistance in the small sample of users I've questioned about it. Most people think of email as a easy way for others to reach them. They do not want/anything/ to make it harder for people to send them email. Losing a single legitimate email is considered a disaster, and annoying a potential customer is completely unacceptable.
I get a lot of Spam and I am thinking about keeping every piece of Spam that I receive for a whole year, just to see how much I end up with.
Has anyone else does something like this?
Lots of people. Based on my collections, you can expect around 700, just like the article predicts. (The prediction comes from the brightmail people, so it's not surprising that it's accurate.)
Despite the claims of 100-200 spams a day, most people get less than 10 a day, even old timers whose email address shows up everywhere. The average spam size is between 5K and 6K, so a years worth is going to be less than 4.5 megabytes. If you have an old address that's been heavily published, then you can expect around 10 times that amount. Just try saving spam for a week - you'll probably get enough data to convince yourself that the numbers listed in the article are resonable.
know its cheap, but I'm really curious to see how much spammers really profit from their ads. There has to be a certain profile for the person who really believes that they can enlarge their penis by "clicking here".
Maybe the spammers should focus on only AOL addresses since their members seem to like daily solicitation, and leave the rest of us alone!
Opinions vary, but I believe that the response rate is 1-3 per 10,000. Responses aren't sales, but if we use junk mail as a guide, there's approximately a 10% sell through rate. That means 1-3 sales per 100,000. As a guess, most crap sold via spam is about 90% profit and sells for about $40.00. A dedicated spammer could easily saturate the market, which is about 150,000,000 people. That works out to about $50,000. That's a lot of assumptions, but I believe $50,000 is within an order of magnitude of correct. Not enough to excite me, but unfortunately more than enough to keep those assholes going.
I have a friend who works for an ISP. He claims a spammer offered to pay the ISP $10,000 a month to cover the cost of dealing with the spam complaints, if they were allowed to continue spamming. The spammer clearly thought that spam was worth more the $10,000 a month.
Seems to me that the majority of the DoS attacks came from 127.0.0.1. I suggest the prosecution track down the owner of that IP, and haul him into court instead of orbz.
Re:A quick run-down of what ORBZ is (i.e. was)
on
ORBZ Shuts Down
·
· Score: 2
On March 12, 2002, I pulled all the IPs from the spam in my trollboxes. Combined, there were 105, which is pretty typical. I checked these 105 with the handy web page that is unfortunately no longer available (http://orbz.org/) That web page checked inputs.orbz.org, outputs.orbz.org, relays.ordb.org, orbs.dorkslayers.com, dev.null.dk, relays.osirusoft.com, bl.spamcop.net, and relays.visi.com.
outputs.orbz.org listed the largest number as open relays at 43. By combining orbz.inputs, orbz.outputs, dorkslayers, dev_null and visi, the total went up 5, to 48.
In other words, using standard block lists that only list open relays would have stopped 46% of the spam received. Spam cop caught 65, Osirus caught 51. Spam cop and Osirus (despite the name relays.osirusoft.com) do not just list open relays. Combining all these together caught 82, or 78% of the spam. Since these were troll boxes, these is no measure of how many false positives there would have been.
Pretty strong evidence that most of the spam we receive isn't even bounced off an open relay at all, much less a Chinese relay.
Slashdot Mirror
No, the point is to remedy the harm that has already been caused by Microsoft illegally abusing its monopoly power. It's not enough to stop them from doing it again, the illegal profit that they've already made must be taken away.
When you catch a thief, you don't just make him promise not to steal again. And you don't just force him to give the money back and promise not to steal either. You make him give the money back, and you punish him.
-- this is not a
I've been trying for some time to verify this particular "fact" and would be grateful for any information you can provide as to it's source.
Note that casinos claim, (and have the player tracking data to support), that the majority of gambling dollars come from upper middle class patrons, and that the lower income people do not contribute even a proportional share to the casinos coffers.
-- this is not a
I agree, let's just make everything 17 years max.
If
-- this is not a
1995 to 2002 is 7 years, which should be 3 to 4 doublings or a factor of 8 - 16.
If you were paying $2000 for 1/4 of a T1 in 1995,
you should be able to get a full T1 for $500-$1000 in 2002.
Guess what, you can.
If a long distance service offered three cents a minute anytime day or night,
you'd probably think it was an amazing bargain.
At $1000 a month, a T1 is under 2.5 cents a minute.
Even without compression, you could carry more than 1 phone conversation over a T1.
With compression you could do 30 streams of higher quality than the phone company,
at a cost of under
The question isn't "why does a T1 cost more than a voice line?",
the question is "why does long distance cost so much?".
-- this is not a
A T1? What are you thinking?
If you really want to run a server, do what the pros do and get space in a facility that is dedicated to doing that. You can get a dedicated server with 1Mbps of traffic for less than half that price. I like Hurricane Electric, but there are also dozens of other companies that do the same thing, do a search on Google for "dedicated servers".
If the company is any good, they include the computer, the space to store it, the electricity to run it, the UPS to make sure it keeps running, and a staff that spends their day making sure your connections stay up, and of course, a static IP, all for a fraction of the price you quote.
-- this is not a
It won't be long before CIPA is a dirty word in the US too.
-- this is not a
I didn't say spammers weren't costing the customer, I said that customers who are
irate about spam cost ISPs more than spammers cost ISPs.
I know it seems twisted, but yes, the customers who are complaining
are raising the costs more than the spammer is. Ralph Nader probably
cost the car companies a lot more than the product liability suits did too.
And by complaining in a big way, he forced cars to be made with lots
of safety features that cost money, and raised the prices across the board.
Just like Nader, the spam complainers are raising the price of doing business.
That doesn't mean they are bad, or that I don't admire them for doing it,
Just that I'm willing to call a spade a spade.
People who argue against spam using unreasonable figures, and stupid, untrue
rhetoric that they copied from an anti-spam web site without even a tiny amount
of critical thinking aren't doing the rest us any favors.
Spam is tiny. The average spam is between 5 and 6K, depending on header sizes.
You can store thousands on a 20 meg account. No, it's not free, but the costs
are small and going down. I probably get a larger volume of spam than most,
but it still costs me more to throw away the junk mail I get, then to deal with
the spam.
I haven't commented on junk faxes, because there is nothing I want to say about them.
47USC227 was an interesting attempt to outlaw them, but I haven't
seen much reduction in junk faxes as a result.
Getting a reasonable law against spam of any form is a lot of work.
I applaud you for working on the task, and look forward to more of the same.
If you think I'm being an asshole, wait til you run into someone who is actually pro spam.
-- this is not a
Try re-reading my post again. Spam isn't what costs,
the less than a nickel cost is dealing with people who complain about spam.
Making spam illegal would dramatically raise the price ISPs pay for dealing with spam.
That price would be passed on to the consumer, and we'd all pay for it in the end.
Would you vote for a law that stopped spam, but raised your taxes $12 a year?
What about $35?
How about $100?
What if it didn't work very well, but still raised your taxes?
Spam Wolf, the best spam blocking vaporware yet!
The major cost of dealing with spam for an ISP isn't bandwidth, it's dealing with people who complain about it. Even so, it probably adds less than a nickel a month to your bill.
The bandwidth killers for email are viruses, then mailing lists. Spam actually comes after normal email in terms of bandwidth usage.
While I'm not opposed to legislation in principle, I'm opposed to your proposal for the following reasons;
I could list more reasons, but I'm only willing to feed trolls so much in one sitting.
Spam Wolf, the best spam blocking vaporware yet!
It's clearly possible for Microsoft to package all the sources together
for all the programs that go into making Windows XP, and sell it.
It's easy to understand not releasing the copyright,
and it would cost more to produce the source CDs than XP,
But you can be sure a lot of software companies would buy a copy,
even at ten times the price.
Once you realize why Microsoft doesn't do that,
you will realize why Microsoft won't ever willingly
work with the open source community.
Everquest boasts a user population of over 300,000.
.sig
The national rate for suicide is 1 in 10,000.
If only one person committed suicide after playing Everquest,
then Everquest players are 97% less likely to commit suicide.
I'd guess there are 30 suicides among Everquest players each year,
but the families don't think of blaming Sony for them.
-- this is not a
Maybe he meant 2 * 10^14, which would at least only be 3 orders of magnitude off.
A much closer approximation is 100,000,000,000 neurons, and 5,000 times that many connections.
(For more on the number of neurons in the brain, see R.W. Williams and K. Herrup, Ann. Review Neuroscience, 11:423-453, 1988)
If a single neuron could perform the equivilant of an instruction, then human brains would only be 100-1000 times more powerful than a modern desktop computer, probably less when you consider that they're more like a beowolf cluster than a single powerful computer.
-- Spam Wolf, the best spam blocking vaporware yet!
Microsoft says it can't be done? Ok, then hire a competent firm of programmers. Give them the source to windows, a time limit (say, six months from receiving a version of the source that compiles to windows) and $5,000,000. If they can't do it, then Microsoft only has to pay the $5,000,000 in penalties. If they can, then Microsoft has to ship the version they come up with in those nine states.
-- Spam Wolf, the best spam blocking vaporware yet!
Don't give up on the idea completely. Maybe you can't copyright your DNA, but your finger prints aren't determined completely by DNA. If they were, identical twins would have identical finger prints. You may have to list your mother as a collaborator on the effort, but I think they qualify as a creative expression of an idea.
-- Spam Wolf, the best spam blocking vaporware yet!
By reading this post you agree to give me $50.
The language in those whois results is, uh, interesting, but hardly legally binding. Even click "licences" are better than that.
-- this is not a
Lest we forget, Microsoft broke the law, and this is being suggested as a punishment for having done that. The question isn't "is this fair?" it's "is this an appropriate punishment for the crime that has been committed?". I think it's more appropriate than many of the punishments that have been suggested, but considering that this isn't Microsoft's first offence, I think a structural remedy is more appropriate.
-- this is not a
Q: Whats the difference between ...
.sig
a car salesman and a computer salesman?
A2: The car salesman knows when he's lying to you.
-- this is not a
You mean, like MSDOS?
-- this is not a sig.
The article states the foam is 4-5 times better than copper, and 3 1/2 times better than aluminum at conducting heat.
Yet another worthless piece of reporting. I think I'll wait until science news covers this story.
-- Spam Wolf, the best spam blocking vaporware yet!
Hashcash is a specific type of challenge/response system.
... (which can be found using this java app)" Even this has met with resistance in the small sample of users I've questioned about it. Most people think of email as a easy way for others to reach them. They do not want /anything/ to make it harder for people to send them email. Losing a single legitimate email is considered a disaster, and annoying a potential customer is completely unacceptable.
These have been tried before, and they haven't worked well.
The major problem is acceptance, not implementation.
My approach is to use challenge as a "saver" to reduce false positives. I.e. instead of just trashing email that is identified as spam, you send back a note that says "your email was identified as spam because . If you feel this was in error, please send me the answer to the following question
-- Spam Wolf, the best spam blocking vaporware yet!
Lots of people.
Based on my collections, you can expect around 700, just like the article predicts. (The prediction comes from the brightmail people, so it's not surprising that it's accurate.)
Despite the claims of 100-200 spams a day, most people get less than 10 a day, even old timers whose email address shows up everywhere. The average spam size is between 5K and 6K, so a years worth is going to be less than 4.5 megabytes. If you have an old address that's been heavily published, then you can expect around 10 times that amount. Just try saving spam for a week - you'll probably get enough data to convince yourself that the numbers listed in the article are resonable.
-- Spam Wolf, the best spam blocking vaporware yet!
Opinions vary, but I believe that the response rate is 1-3 per 10,000.
Responses aren't sales, but if we use junk mail as a guide, there's approximately a 10%
sell through rate. That means 1-3 sales per 100,000. As a guess, most crap sold via spam
is about 90% profit and sells for about $40.00. A dedicated spammer could easily saturate the market,
which is about 150,000,000 people. That works out to about $50,000.
That's a lot of assumptions, but I believe $50,000 is within an order of magnitude of correct.
Not enough to excite me, but unfortunately more than enough to keep those assholes going.
I have a friend who works for an ISP. He claims a spammer offered to pay the ISP $10,000
a month to cover the cost of dealing with the spam complaints, if they were allowed to continue spamming.
The spammer clearly thought that spam was worth more the $10,000 a month.
-- Spam Wolf, the best spam blocking vaporware yet!
Seems to me that the majority of the DoS attacks came from 127.0.0.1.
I suggest the prosecution track down the owner of that IP, and haul him into court instead of orbz.
On March 12, 2002, I pulled all the IPs from the spam in my trollboxes.
Combined, there were 105, which is pretty typical.
I checked these 105 with the handy web page that is unfortunately no longer available (http://orbz.org/)
That web page checked inputs.orbz.org, outputs.orbz.org, relays.ordb.org,
orbs.dorkslayers.com, dev.null.dk, relays.osirusoft.com, bl.spamcop.net, and relays.visi.com.
outputs.orbz.org listed the largest number as open relays at 43.
By combining orbz.inputs, orbz.outputs, dorkslayers, dev_null and visi,
the total went up 5, to 48.
In other words, using standard block lists that only list open relays would have stopped 46% of the spam received.
Spam cop caught 65, Osirus caught 51.
Spam cop and Osirus (despite the name relays.osirusoft.com) do not just list open relays.
Combining all these together caught 82, or 78% of the spam.
Since these were troll boxes, these is no measure of how many false positives there would have been.
Pretty strong evidence that most of the spam we receive
isn't even bounced off an open relay at all, much less a Chinese relay.
-- Spam Wolf, the best spam blocking vaporware yet!