Does Apple have the legal right to do what they're doing? Yes.
The problem is they've spent a couple decades selling themselves as different from all those big, bad corporations. And at one time, that was true. These days, its all so much bullshit.
"That means that some formerly-free list subscriptions are now going to cost you a penny a message. Deal with it; it's the price of killing spam."
I'm on quite a few mailing lists, due to my wide range of interests. I can receive 400-600 messages a day from these lists. So I should spend $4-$6 a day to fight spam, eh? The largest estimate of the cost to ISPs for dealing with spam has me paying about $8 a month.
Its a nice idea, but it just won't fly. Try again.
Yes, they might very well take umbrage, which is exactly why the companies themselves should be pressuring the government to abolish software patents (and other, even more rediculous forms of patents).
Right now, Joe and Jane Sixpack fit into one of the following categories:
Don't know the patent system is badly broken
Don't care
Don't know what a patent is
Eventually, that will change. Patent lunacy is already starting to his home with a small number of the Sixpacks.
For example, Utah-based Myriad Genetics claims to own mutation genes called BRCA1 and BRCA2, genes associated with breast cancer. They sent cease-and-desist orders to every province in Canada, ordering them to stop using their own tests for the genes and use the Myriad tests instead. British Columbia complied for awhile, then started testing again. Ontario told them to go to hell.
By the way, the Myriad test costs more than three times what Ontario's test costs, and takes about eight weeks longer to provide results. And this is what is mainly broken about the current patent system: it does not encourage innovation. It stiffles it.
Another quick example, then I'll shut up. Did you know that better HIV/AIDS therapeutic drugs are available in India and other developing nations than in America? The reason? Of course, patent problems.
So, to get back to my original point, why should companies want to kill software and other broken patents? Because eventually Joe and Jane Sixpack will wake up and see something wrong. What's the herds usual response to something unfavourable? Careful changes? A tweak here and there? Or burn the thing to the ground?
I'm using POPFile at home to filter mail to 4 POP accounts, one of which is flooded with as many as 100 pieces of spam per day (my Hotmail account, of course). It uses Bayesian filtering to learn what spam looks like, neatly handling the various tricks spammers use.
So far, on more than ten thousand messages its been better than 99.8% effective.
Of course, this isn't a solution, since I'm still paying something like $8 a month for the priviledge of receiving all this crap in the first place.
Yes, I'm serious. This court ruling makes me very happy.
Why? The DMCA is an unjust law, and as someone wiser than I once said, the best way to get an unjust law struck down is to vigorously enforce it.
Joe and Jane Sixpack don't care about some Russian company's software or some professors speach. They probably aren't even aware of them. But if they can't get cheap ink cartriges anymore... that might get their attention.
Heh, Crichton has never been one to let facts get in the way of his story. Look at "Eaters of the Dead." To give his yarn an air of authenticity, he added footnotes and a bibliography. Many of those footnotes and bibliographical references are themselves pure fiction.
Not really a loss for microsoft though, since they make much more money with selling Office/Productivity apps than with their Operating System sales.
This is incorrect. In Microsoft's Form 10-Q filing for the quarterly period ending Sept 30, they operating income from their Windows division of $2.48 billion on revenues of $2.89 billion, while their Office division saw a paltry $1.88 billion on revenues of $2.38 billion.
Ok, $1.88 billion profit in 3 months isn't exactly paltry, but the Windows division is even more profitable. Just how eager do you think Microsoft is to see a chunk taken out of that $2.48 billion?
To save its electronics business and make its dream of digital services a reality, Sony needs a system that doesn't punish consumers yet somehow satisfies the entertainment industry.
This system is not possible. The only system that will satisfy the entertainment industry is one which punishes consumers. The industry doesn't just want to protect it's copyrights (a goal with which I agree), but restrict consumer rights, making legal practices technologically impossible.
For example, the practice of burning a CD you legally own, so you can take that copy in your car with you leaving the original safely at home. To the consumer this is perfectly normal. To the courts, its perfectly legal. To the industry, its a perfect wasted, a lost opportunity for revenue. They want to make you buy two copies of the CD.
For the entertainment industry, DRM isn't about protecting copyrights, its about opening up new revenue streams. The problem facing the technology industry is the fundamental fact that consumers don't want to pay more for less.
Legal solutions will take years, if they are ever effective. Fixing the SMTP protocol will take even longer. The process of writing the RFC is bound to be long and drawn out, and implementing it... damn, just think of all the boxes, all the software, that would have to be rewritten to use the new protocol. And filters are increasingly ineffective, basically because the spammers are aware of them and design the spam accordingly.
We need a solution now, not years from now. Today, a portion of what I pay my ISP bill to cover the costs of receiving spam. Today, I have more than one email address that's become unusable due to the sheer volume of spam. Today, while I'll let my kid surf the net without worrying about it, I won't let her have an email address due to the fact that eventually she'll start getting explicit sexual photos in her mail.
Some have said that the spam situation should be fixed without breaking email. I agree. However, the spam situation is on the verge of breaking email all on its own.
... you begin to hate the game. Vehemently.... the one thing all players have in common is that they all hate Sony...
And here I was, foolishly thinking I was enjoying the game. Thank god there are people like "Bonewielder" Sanftenberg writing "excellent articles" that tell me what to think.
Ok, that's pretty sarcastic, but dammit I'm sick and tired of people trying to prop up their arguments with obviously, provably false statements like "all people feel this way." If your arguments can't stand on their own without adding on "everybody agrees with me", perhaps you need to re-evaluate your position.
Much of the rest of this rant is a stereotypical hatchet job: ignore the positives, overstate (or outright invent) the negatives, cluttering your document with falsehoods along the way.
Bah. I've wasted enough of my life on this time sink of a rant.
No, I don't think they should have to patent their process like that, but if it keeps them from getting sued, they're being smart, not greedy.
You almost have a point there. If they were to license their patents for, say, $1 USD, I'd tend to agree with you. However, they not only patent their ideas, they turn around and sue those who are infringing on their IP. They're not just "covering their butts." They're either trying to maintain a "competitive advantage" or exploit a new "revenue stream."
I must confess that I didn't read all the way to the end. I simply lacked the stamina to slog through four pages of Brin's pseudo-intellectual claptrap.
With a few exceptions here and there, commercial e-book operations have been a financial failure. There's a lot of conjecture floating around as to why no one seems to want these e-books. My own conjecture is that its due to the simple fact that people don't want to pay more for less (in a rational universe, this would go without saying for anyone with any business sense.)
Its too early so say for sure, but I see the possibility of the same thing happening here. Even leaving aside issues like playing media on Linux desktops, if Joe Sixpack can't do all the same stuff with this newfangled digital technology that he could do before with the old, if it is inconvenient to him, if he is getting less for the same money or more, he ain't gonna want it.
Its a good thing I avoid second-hand opinions
on
Critics Pan Nemesis
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
More than once I've seen a movie get clobbered by the critics, and when I went to see it in spite of the criticism, I've found a movie I really enjoy. Its especially funny to watch a critic blast a movie early in the year, see it do really well at the box office, and find the critic quietly adding the movie to his top ten list at the end of the year.
Years ago, I learned that its better to form your own opinion than to simply borrow someone else's second-hand.
When I read the Anti-Leech FAQ, the banner ad at the top was for an ad-blocker, ZeroAds. As if that wasn't bad enough, when I tried to go back to the Slashdot page, I got a popup up from Anti-Leech for the same product!
So, an anti-ad-blocker site, advertising an ad-blocker, through the use of banner and popup ads, which would be blocked if I was using the product.
But, if on a far chance this works out right, it could be very benefical. Someone like SourceForge could setup a signing authority which charges and does manual code audits. After passing, the code would signed.
Nifty! Say, how much do you suppose they would charge for this service? How many open source projects, most of which generate roughly $0USD in revenue for their authors, could afford this price?
Re:you dont know what you are talking about...
on
Crazy Stats on Spam
·
· Score: 1
I wouldn't take anything that Egg Troll says too seriously. It seems pretty clear that he/she/it is just a common troll, and not even a very good or interesting one at that. Frankly, I have to question whether or not this person is even black.
As has been correctly pointed out, Samba is a form of Brazilian music (http://brazilianmusic.com/samba.html). The racist term is Sambo. I really can't believe that a black person wouldn't be familiar with such terms.
Slashdot Mirror
Does Apple have the legal right to do what they're doing? Yes.
The problem is they've spent a couple decades selling themselves as different from all those big, bad corporations. And at one time, that was true. These days, its all so much bullshit.
yes, tomato is a fruit technically
Yes, botanically the tomato is a fruit. However, legally, according to the Supreme Court of the United States, tomatos are vegetables.
"That means that some formerly-free list subscriptions are now going to cost you a penny a message. Deal with it; it's the price of killing spam."
I'm on quite a few mailing lists, due to my wide range of interests. I can receive 400-600 messages a day from these lists. So I should spend $4-$6 a day to fight spam, eh? The largest estimate of the cost to ISPs for dealing with spam has me paying about $8 a month.
Its a nice idea, but it just won't fly. Try again.
This sounds like it might actually work.
Right now, Joe and Jane Sixpack fit into one of the following categories:
- Don't know the patent system is badly broken
- Don't care
- Don't know what a patent is
Eventually, that will change. Patent lunacy is already starting to his home with a small number of the Sixpacks.For example, Utah-based Myriad Genetics claims to own mutation genes called BRCA1 and BRCA2, genes associated with breast cancer. They sent cease-and-desist orders to every province in Canada, ordering them to stop using their own tests for the genes and use the Myriad tests instead. British Columbia complied for awhile, then started testing again. Ontario told them to go to hell.
By the way, the Myriad test costs more than three times what Ontario's test costs, and takes about eight weeks longer to provide results. And this is what is mainly broken about the current patent system: it does not encourage innovation. It stiffles it.
Another quick example, then I'll shut up. Did you know that better HIV/AIDS therapeutic drugs are available in India and other developing nations than in America? The reason? Of course, patent problems.
So, to get back to my original point, why should companies want to kill software and other broken patents? Because eventually Joe and Jane Sixpack will wake up and see something wrong. What's the herds usual response to something unfavourable? Careful changes? A tweak here and there? Or burn the thing to the ground?
Yup, and with some of the most elegantly simple code I've ever seen.
I'm using POPFile at home to filter mail to 4 POP accounts, one of which is flooded with as many as 100 pieces of spam per day (my Hotmail account, of course). It uses Bayesian filtering to learn what spam looks like, neatly handling the various tricks spammers use.
So far, on more than ten thousand messages its been better than 99.8% effective.
Of course, this isn't a solution, since I'm still paying something like $8 a month for the priviledge of receiving all this crap in the first place.
Going from "XML sucks" to "XML doesn't suck" isn't clarifying your stance!
Tim Bray didn't say "XML sucks." RTFA.
Yes, I'm serious. This court ruling makes me very happy.
... that might get their attention.
Why? The DMCA is an unjust law, and as someone wiser than I once said, the best way to get an unjust law struck down is to vigorously enforce it.
Joe and Jane Sixpack don't care about some Russian company's software or some professors speach. They probably aren't even aware of them. But if they can't get cheap ink cartriges anymore
Heh, Crichton has never been one to let facts get in the way of his story. Look at "Eaters of the Dead." To give his yarn an air of authenticity, he added footnotes and a bibliography. Many of those footnotes and bibliographical references are themselves pure fiction.
Not really a loss for microsoft though, since they make much more money with selling Office/Productivity apps than with their Operating System sales.
This is incorrect. In Microsoft's Form 10-Q filing for the quarterly period ending Sept 30, they operating income from their Windows division of $2.48 billion on revenues of $2.89 billion, while their Office division saw a paltry $1.88 billion on revenues of $2.38 billion.
Ok, $1.88 billion profit in 3 months isn't exactly paltry, but the Windows division is even more profitable. Just how eager do you think Microsoft is to see a chunk taken out of that $2.48 billion?
To save its electronics business and make its dream of digital services a reality, Sony needs a system that doesn't punish consumers yet somehow satisfies the entertainment industry.
This system is not possible. The only system that will satisfy the entertainment industry is one which punishes consumers. The industry doesn't just want to protect it's copyrights (a goal with which I agree), but restrict consumer rights, making legal practices technologically impossible.
For example, the practice of burning a CD you legally own, so you can take that copy in your car with you leaving the original safely at home. To the consumer this is perfectly normal. To the courts, its perfectly legal. To the industry, its a perfect wasted, a lost opportunity for revenue. They want to make you buy two copies of the CD.
For the entertainment industry, DRM isn't about protecting copyrights, its about opening up new revenue streams. The problem facing the technology industry is the fundamental fact that consumers don't want to pay more for less.
And a stop-gap solution is what is needed.
... damn, just think of all the boxes, all the software, that would have to be rewritten to use the new protocol. And filters are increasingly ineffective, basically because the spammers are aware of them and design the spam accordingly.
Legal solutions will take years, if they are ever effective. Fixing the SMTP protocol will take even longer. The process of writing the RFC is bound to be long and drawn out, and implementing it
We need a solution now, not years from now. Today, a portion of what I pay my ISP bill to cover the costs of receiving spam. Today, I have more than one email address that's become unusable due to the sheer volume of spam. Today, while I'll let my kid surf the net without worrying about it, I won't let her have an email address due to the fact that eventually she'll start getting explicit sexual photos in her mail.
Some have said that the spam situation should be fixed without breaking email. I agree. However, the spam situation is on the verge of breaking email all on its own.
... so I'll begin with this:
... you begin to hate the game. Vehemently. ... the one thing all players have in common is that they all hate Sony ...
And here I was, foolishly thinking I was enjoying the game. Thank god there are people like "Bonewielder" Sanftenberg writing "excellent articles" that tell me what to think.
Ok, that's pretty sarcastic, but dammit I'm sick and tired of people trying to prop up their arguments with obviously, provably false statements like "all people feel this way." If your arguments can't stand on their own without adding on "everybody agrees with me", perhaps you need to re-evaluate your position.
Much of the rest of this rant is a stereotypical hatchet job: ignore the positives, overstate (or outright invent) the negatives, cluttering your document with falsehoods along the way.
Bah. I've wasted enough of my life on this time sink of a rant.
No, I don't think they should have to patent their process like that, but if it keeps them from getting sued, they're being smart, not greedy.
You almost have a point there. If they were to license their patents for, say, $1 USD, I'd tend to agree with you. However, they not only patent their ideas, they turn around and sue those who are infringing on their IP. They're not just "covering their butts." They're either trying to maintain a "competitive advantage" or exploit a new "revenue stream."
If you'd bothered to check the links to the uspto, you'd have found that the news stories refer to different patents.
I must confess that I didn't read all the way to the end. I simply lacked the stamina to slog through four pages of Brin's pseudo-intellectual claptrap.
With a few exceptions here and there, commercial e-book operations have been a financial failure. There's a lot of conjecture floating around as to why no one seems to want these e-books. My own conjecture is that its due to the simple fact that people don't want to pay more for less (in a rational universe, this would go without saying for anyone with any business sense.)
Its too early so say for sure, but I see the possibility of the same thing happening here. Even leaving aside issues like playing media on Linux desktops, if Joe Sixpack can't do all the same stuff with this newfangled digital technology that he could do before with the old, if it is inconvenient to him, if he is getting less for the same money or more, he ain't gonna want it.
More than once I've seen a movie get clobbered by the critics, and when I went to see it in spite of the criticism, I've found a movie I really enjoy. Its especially funny to watch a critic blast a movie early in the year, see it do really well at the box office, and find the critic quietly adding the movie to his top ten list at the end of the year.
Years ago, I learned that its better to form your own opinion than to simply borrow someone else's second-hand.
When I read the Anti-Leech FAQ, the banner ad at the top was for an ad-blocker, ZeroAds. As if that wasn't bad enough, when I tried to go back to the Slashdot page, I got a popup up from Anti-Leech for the same product!
So, an anti-ad-blocker site, advertising an ad-blocker, through the use of banner and popup ads, which would be blocked if I was using the product.
ROFL!
But, if on a far chance this works out right, it could be very benefical. Someone like SourceForge could setup a signing authority which charges and does manual code audits. After passing, the code would signed.
Nifty! Say, how much do you suppose they would charge for this service? How many open source projects, most of which generate roughly $0USD in revenue for their authors, could afford this price?
I wouldn't take anything that Egg Troll says too seriously. It seems pretty clear that he/she/it is just a common troll, and not even a very good or interesting one at that. Frankly, I have to question whether or not this person is even black.
As has been correctly pointed out, Samba is a form of Brazilian music (http://brazilianmusic.com/samba.html). The racist term is Sambo. I really can't believe that a black person wouldn't be familiar with such terms.