Actually, if it became a class action lawsuit, the lawyers would walk away with $5million (US legal tender) and the class participants would each get $10 (Kozmo bucks)! And the Kozmo bucks would be worthless, because if it wasn't quite bankrupt before, it would be after paying the lawyers. But driving spammers into bankruptcy is worth it!
1. It's not administrative mail -- it's an advertisement for new services, among other things.
2. It was deliberately sent to people who had opted out from receiving such advertising.
3. OTOH, it was apparently sent just once. That's way below my annoyance threshold -- but apparently it is still spam under CA law. Anyhow, I'd probably feel different if 1,000 different companies each sent me just one unsolicited advertisement today, and that's probably going to happen eventually if we don't make it expensive.
4. The CA law allows suing in small claims court. He asked for $250 originally, the court gave him $50, which probably wasn't worth the time needed to go to court. But Kozmo had to pay someone to represent them in court -- so it would have cost less to pay the $250 in the first place. Small claims court does give a certain advantage to consumers with time on their hands -- but it saves money for both parties compared to a case in the normal court system. Also, in normal courts corporations have a great advantage, being able to bankrupt most individuals with legal costs before the case is even tried.
they never charged enough to cover costs. Especially when those costs include sending reps to defend yourself in small claims court against spamming charges. 8-)
how much more difficult would it be to develop a new open messaging standard? Instead of trying to pry open a standard which while easily picked apart, keeps getting the door slammed on the workarounds?
I thought the article answered that -- those of us who have to make a living sometimes have to talk to AOL customers, and most of them aren't capable of installing a third-party messaging program on top of that mess AOL makes of IE5.
If it is lead-acid, note that the Watt-Hour/Liter rating doesn't mean that much until you look at the Watt-Hour/kilogram -- lead-acid batteries are extremely dense.
Where did you find that? I looked around their web site, and couldn't find anything but PR puffery, utterly devoid of specs -- unless you had to register to get them. And I will generally not bother with registration unless I already know the products are worth looking at, so if I was looking for batteries to design into a product, chances are I would pass them by. There are too many competitors that put the crucial information up front for an engineer to bother with those that hide it.
I guess my P60 would kill at Pentium 4 750mhz. It's not that bad, by almost an order of magnitude -- that is, you'd need a 500 or 600 MHz chip to beat the throttled down P4. And it only throttles down if your cooling isn't good enough. But the main point is, unless your software has been recompiled specifically for the P4 (and I don't know if there are compilers that will do that yet), the P4 will give you less performance for more cost as compared to the 1.2GHz AMD. The release of the P4 in its present status seems very premature...
Yes, it is a good thing that the chip throttles itself down instead of melting down when it gets too hot. And apparently (contrary to the article), it won't throttle down if it has enough cooling. The issue is that Intel's specs are misleading as to what constitutes enough cooling -- they say 53W, but to actually get all the computing power you paid for, you need a 73W heatsink. It's like advertising a car as capable of 150 MPH and 50 miles to the gallon, but burying in the fine print that you get that gas mileage by turning off the V8 and running 10 mph with a lawnmower engine.
I did read the article. If it made sense to you, it must be because you know enough about the subject to fill in the omissions without thinking about them. It compared the cost of the diamond thermionic cells to semiconductor solar cells, which work on direct, unconcentrated sunlight. It did not mention the cost of mirrors to concentrate the sunlight. It would definitely have left anyone without appreciable technical knowledge of solar energy with the impression that a 1 meter square array would give 100KW power -- when actually a 1 m^2 mirror would be needed to feed a few cm^2 of thermionics, giving well under 1 KW power.
I haven't received my letter yet (and my Zip drive was working just fine last time I hooked it up, about 3 months ago...), but from other postings here it sounds like you have a choice of whether to use the rebate directly at Iomega's on-line store, or to buy somewhere else and mail it in. The rebates seem to be less than the overcharges at Iomega's on-line store versus other sellers, so if you can't use it at other sellers the offer is just plain fraudulent!
I wouldn't mind pro-rated if they sent cash. But the only people getting cash are the lawyers -- and Iomega, because to cash in one of those coupons, you have to spend five or ten times as much buying a new Iomega product. Note that Iomega hasn't promised to fix the defect (or admitted there was a defect) either -- and even if they had, I consider Zip drives obsolescent now.
However the costs of Zip/Jaz/Any Removable versus fixed disks just got worse and worse over time, while CD-R just got better and better.
That's the result of standardization and competition. With Zip, Jaz, etc., once they sell you the drive, you're a captive market for the disks. With CD-R, anyone can make disks or drives, and the market price tends towards the cost of making them at the most efficient factory.
The Branch Davidians did send out some of their children, after arranging for relatives to be waiting to take care of them. The FBI took the children and put them in foster homes instead. So, no more children leaving the compound.
Stupidity does carry the death penalty in the long run, and I consider any religious fanatic to be very stupid. But the gov't doesn't have to work to speed up the process.
From the article "there are a still a few billion people on the planet who don't own a personal computer. Some of them can actually afford one. Find those people."
Of course, for that to work, the computer makers have to make two changes. They have to abandon their business model of keeping computers at a nearly constant price by continually increasing the power of even the lowest-end models. And they have to make them work for people that just want to use them as tools, not mess around with registry settings, etc. (In other words, software unreliability, consequent on the software bloat that has sold the monster systems in the past, is going to become their enemy once they really start mass-marketing.)
The article claims this will get 10W/cm^2. Sunlight in earth orbit gives a power level of 1600 W/m^2 = 0.16W/cm^2.
Possibly the plan is to use mirrors or plastic Fresnel lenses to focus the light onto small spots of diamond thermionic emitters. This would help explain how they are going to get the high temperatures needed for thermionic emission -- but the article doesn't say. Lousy reporting.
Diamond makes a wonderful heat sink -- the only things that conduct heat better are gold and superconductors. Of course, a big piece of diamond makes gold look cheap, and I don't know of anyone using gold either -- but diamond film sounds like a possibility for spreading the heat from a tiny chunk of silicon out to a larger piece of copper, and maybe it would provide the needed electrical insulation also. However, there might be some material incompatibility issues don't know about...
It's a WIPO issue because WIPO customarily folds to the big company demands regardless of how it would play in trademark law. And pretty obviously the xSucks.com cases are not trademark violations -- unless x = Hoover.
And if that domain name is already taken by an individual it should simply be taken away?
Obviously a lot of companies think so; see this bit about Nissan Motor vs. Nissan Computer Company. "Nissan" happens to be a Hebrew word as well as whatever it means in Japanese. Uzi Nissan named various businesses after himself before Datsun changed it's name to Nissan Motors. And he registered nissan.com for Nissan Computer Corp in 1994. Now it appears that the Japanese carmaker has discovered the internet and wants nissan.com. They are 7 years too late -- if there is any consistency to the WIPO's decisions at all.
It (rounding up agitators and "subversives")happened in this country in the War of 1812, the Civil War, the period after the Civil War (anarchists & socialists), the First World War (the same + antiwar activists), the 1920's (the Palmer raids against alleged communists and civil rights agitators), the Second World War, the 1950's, and the 1960's (anti-war and civil rights activists were all "communists" in J.Edgar Hoover's eyes). Hoover finally went far enough that most Americans realized it was ridiculous, and we had 20 years without too much of this. But in 92, there was a new target (gun-toting "right-wingers") and a real innovation -- shooting children. And next year they killed over a hundred people in Waco...
Actually, the US is freer than almost anywhere else. When the gov't steps over the line, people notice. But we still haven't a real explanation of why the FBI thought it wise to pump a building with children full of flammable tear gas that was designed only for use outdoors on adults.
Ever read Jack Williamson's Humanoid stories? (Unfortunately, Williamson's prose tends to remind me of the 1920's Flash Gordon books... But his ideas are good.) He took this much, much further than that flaming liberal Asimov ever did. As soon as Asimov got to the point where his robots started to become smothering, he decided to make them smart enough to allow visible physical dangers in order to avoid the hidden psycological damage inflicted by overprotectiveness. However, gov't bureaucrats aren't ever going to be that smart -- and Asimov didn't want to face that...
Slashdot Mirror
write "For a good time call (spammer's 800#)" on the bathroom wall at the bus station. 8-)
Actually, if it became a class action lawsuit, the lawyers would walk away with $5million (US legal tender) and the class participants would each get $10 (Kozmo bucks)! And the Kozmo bucks would be worthless, because if it wasn't quite bankrupt before, it would be after paying the lawyers. But driving spammers into bankruptcy is worth it!
1. It's not administrative mail -- it's an advertisement for new services, among other things.
2. It was deliberately sent to people who had opted out from receiving such advertising.
3. OTOH, it was apparently sent just once. That's way below my annoyance threshold -- but apparently it is still spam under CA law. Anyhow, I'd probably feel different if 1,000 different companies each sent me just one unsolicited advertisement today, and that's probably going to happen eventually if we don't make it expensive.
4. The CA law allows suing in small claims court. He asked for $250 originally, the court gave him $50, which probably wasn't worth the time needed to go to court. But Kozmo had to pay someone to represent them in court -- so it would have cost less to pay the $250 in the first place. Small claims court does give a certain advantage to consumers with time on their hands -- but it saves money for both parties compared to a case in the normal court system. Also, in normal courts corporations have a great advantage, being able to bankrupt most individuals with legal costs before the case is even tried.
they never charged enough to cover costs. Especially when those costs include sending reps to defend yourself in small claims court against spamming charges. 8-)
how much more difficult would it be to develop a new open messaging standard? Instead of trying to pry open a standard which while easily picked apart, keeps getting the door slammed on the workarounds?
I thought the article answered that -- those of us who have to make a living sometimes have to talk to AOL customers, and most of them aren't capable of installing a third-party messaging program on top of that mess AOL makes of IE5.
Why is AOL even bothering?
1. Management Stupidity.
2. They don't want their customers to discover that there are better ISP's out there.
Some non-gov't approved info about Waco here. (Follow the link at the bottom to a very big pdf file.)
If it is lead-acid, note that the Watt-Hour/Liter rating doesn't mean that much until you look at the Watt-Hour/kilogram -- lead-acid batteries are extremely dense.
Where did you find that? I looked around their web site, and couldn't find anything but PR puffery, utterly devoid of specs -- unless you had to register to get them. And I will generally not bother with registration unless I already know the products are worth looking at, so if I was looking for batteries to design into a product, chances are I would pass them by. There are too many competitors that put the crucial information up front for an engineer to bother with those that hide it.
I guess my P60 would kill at Pentium 4 750mhz. It's not that bad, by almost an order of magnitude -- that is, you'd need a 500 or 600 MHz chip to beat the throttled down P4. And it only throttles down if your cooling isn't good enough. But the main point is, unless your software has been recompiled specifically for the P4 (and I don't know if there are compilers that will do that yet), the P4 will give you less performance for more cost as compared to the 1.2GHz AMD. The release of the P4 in its present status seems very premature...
Yes, it is a good thing that the chip throttles itself down instead of melting down when it gets too hot. And apparently (contrary to the article), it won't throttle down if it has enough cooling. The issue is that Intel's specs are misleading as to what constitutes enough cooling -- they say 53W, but to actually get all the computing power you paid for, you need a 73W heatsink. It's like advertising a car as capable of 150 MPH and 50 miles to the gallon, but burying in the fine print that you get that gas mileage by turning off the V8 and running 10 mph with a lawnmower engine.
I did read the article. If it made sense to you, it must be because you know enough about the subject to fill in the omissions without thinking about them. It compared the cost of the diamond thermionic cells to semiconductor solar cells, which work on direct, unconcentrated sunlight. It did not mention the cost of mirrors to concentrate the sunlight. It would definitely have left anyone without appreciable technical knowledge of solar energy with the impression that a 1 meter square array would give 100KW power -- when actually a 1 m^2 mirror would be needed to feed a few cm^2 of thermionics, giving well under 1 KW power.
I haven't received my letter yet (and my Zip drive was working just fine last time I hooked it up, about 3 months ago...), but from other postings here it sounds like you have a choice of whether to use the rebate directly at Iomega's on-line store, or to buy somewhere else and mail it in. The rebates seem to be less than the overcharges at Iomega's on-line store versus other sellers, so if you can't use it at other sellers the offer is just plain fraudulent!
I wouldn't mind pro-rated if they sent cash. But the only people getting cash are the lawyers -- and Iomega, because to cash in one of those coupons, you have to spend five or ten times as much buying a new Iomega product. Note that Iomega hasn't promised to fix the defect (or admitted there was a defect) either -- and even if they had, I consider Zip drives obsolescent now.
However the costs of Zip/Jaz/Any Removable versus fixed disks just got worse and worse over time, while CD-R just got better and better.
That's the result of standardization and competition. With Zip, Jaz, etc., once they sell you the drive, you're a captive market for the disks. With CD-R, anyone can make disks or drives, and the market price tends towards the cost of making them at the most efficient factory.
Maybe you could sell those rebates on e-bay -- so someone that really needs it could accumulate enough to replace their drive.
The Branch Davidians did send out some of their children, after arranging for relatives to be waiting to take care of them. The FBI took the children and put them in foster homes instead. So, no more children leaving the compound.
Stupidity does carry the death penalty in the long run, and I consider any religious fanatic to be very stupid. But the gov't doesn't have to work to speed up the process.
From the article "there are a still a few billion people on the planet who don't own a personal computer. Some of them can actually afford one. Find those people."
Of course, for that to work, the computer makers have to make two changes. They have to abandon their business model of keeping computers at a nearly constant price by continually increasing the power of even the lowest-end models. And they have to make them work for people that just want to use them as tools, not mess around with registry settings, etc. (In other words, software unreliability, consequent on the software bloat that has sold the monster systems in the past, is going to become their enemy once they really start mass-marketing.)
The article claims this will get 10W/cm^2. Sunlight in earth orbit gives a power level of 1600 W/m^2 = 0.16W/cm^2.
Possibly the plan is to use mirrors or plastic Fresnel lenses to focus the light onto small spots of diamond thermionic emitters. This would help explain how they are going to get the high temperatures needed for thermionic emission -- but the article doesn't say. Lousy reporting.
Diamond makes a wonderful heat sink -- the only things that conduct heat better are gold and superconductors. Of course, a big piece of diamond makes gold look cheap, and I don't know of anyone using gold either -- but diamond film sounds like a possibility for spreading the heat from a tiny chunk of silicon out to a larger piece of copper, and maybe it would provide the needed electrical insulation also. However, there might be some material incompatibility issues don't know about...
The front sheet cannot be thick -- light has to pass through it!
It's a WIPO issue because WIPO customarily folds to the big company demands regardless of how it would play in trademark law. And pretty obviously the xSucks.com cases are not trademark violations -- unless x = Hoover.
And if that domain name is already taken by an individual it should simply be taken away?
Obviously a lot of companies think so; see this bit about Nissan Motor vs. Nissan Computer Company. "Nissan" happens to be a Hebrew word as well as whatever it means in Japanese. Uzi Nissan named various businesses after himself before Datsun changed it's name to Nissan Motors. And he registered nissan.com for Nissan Computer Corp in 1994. Now it appears that the Japanese carmaker has discovered the internet and wants nissan.com. They are 7 years too late -- if there is any consistency to the WIPO's decisions at all.
It (rounding up agitators and "subversives")happened in this country in the War of 1812, the Civil War, the period after the Civil War (anarchists & socialists), the First World War (the same + antiwar activists), the 1920's (the Palmer raids against alleged communists and civil rights agitators), the Second World War, the 1950's, and the 1960's (anti-war and civil rights activists were all "communists" in J.Edgar Hoover's eyes). Hoover finally went far enough that most Americans realized it was ridiculous, and we had 20 years without too much of this. But in 92, there was a new target (gun-toting "right-wingers") and a real innovation -- shooting children. And next year they killed over a hundred people in Waco... Actually, the US is freer than almost anywhere else. When the gov't steps over the line, people notice. But we still haven't a real explanation of why the FBI thought it wise to pump a building with children full of flammable tear gas that was designed only for use outdoors on adults.
Ever read Jack Williamson's Humanoid stories? (Unfortunately, Williamson's prose tends to remind me of the 1920's Flash Gordon books... But his ideas are good.) He took this much, much further than that flaming liberal Asimov ever did. As soon as Asimov got to the point where his robots started to become smothering, he decided to make them smart enough to allow visible physical dangers in order to avoid the hidden psycological damage inflicted by overprotectiveness. However, gov't bureaucrats aren't ever going to be that smart -- and Asimov didn't want to face that...