The only reason I haven't converted my entire vinyl collection to CD is that I'm hoping to get ALL of it onto a device about the size of a pack of cigarettes withing the decade.
At the same time, this whole thing clearly shows that when it's convenient for the record companies, you are licensing the right to listen to something, and when it's convenient to them, you are paying for a slab o' wax. There is no consistency or honesty to their positions, except "Gimme gimme gimme." No wonder consumers and bands alike hate them. There's precious little that separates record execs from freak show operators, except for the music itself.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
As long as slashdot lives under the reign of dem yoots who don' know better, I will always enjoy a carefully crafted bit o' sarcasm like this, especially when it gets good responses. It's enough to make me wish for a "Troll +1" moderation option!
The Bloodhound Gang is dangerous! "Almost arbitrary labels" are good! But you'd think the clickety-click morons would at least see the link back to slashdot as a big, flashing, neon "Joke, joke!" sign! It's rich enough to forgive the goatse link!
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
ICANN's supposed role is to assure the integrity of the domain name system, so the selections here seem to contain a balance of perceived desireability. With the disputes centered around dot-com, they really don't want the full-bore stampede that dot-web could cause.
Dot-biz may create a minor stampede, but this will be somewhat lessened by the bleed-off from dot-pro. dot-name is a whole nuther ball of wax.
That being said, there will be some grumbling about the lack of concrete dispute resolution procedures at this stage. There is sure to be some grumbling about the "connected" nature of some of the applications, and if people are not happy with the new registries, that grumbling will be loud. It remains to be seen whether or not these criticisms will be deserved.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
I'd hesitate to accuse them of selling the email database outright, since it's so damn easy to write a script that slowly scans whois for emails.
But in my experience, very few people actually do that. Mostly, the same list gets sold and resold. Even when I use/etc/mail/access.db to fake that the address is dead, they keep re-selling it to new losers; after all, shouldn't you get more money for a big list than a small one? Spam is so fly-by-night that the consequences for selling crap addresses are small.
I should note that I add new aliases all the time to help me track - and stop - the sources of spam.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
This is all pretty accurate. But in addition I would stress more reasons why campaign finance reform is going to be either ineffective in general or effective at shutting down free speech by less wealthy citizens in particular. Note, before flaming, that I deplore the fact of corporations having undue influence in the political process.
Take a look at the whole "soft money" issue, and how it came about; Congress passed laws to limit the size of donations to $1,000, whereupon those who wanted to donate more promptly developed systems by which they give - and spend - campaign money via proxies. There is no clear way to stop the giving to proxies, unless you want the government to approve each and every donation by any person to any organization that *might* have a political purpose. If there is any person out there who does not recognize the insanity and total loss of political freedom this would bring, please go away.
So you could stop the spending by proxies instead, right? Wrong again. For one thing, that just displaces the soft money problem one step further. And taken to the logical extreme - and you have to, if you don't want another layer of inscrutability regarding who is buying the loyalty of whome - this would mandate that every message with any political content of any kind be registered with the government. Sure, you say that you just went to Kinkos and printed up a bunch of "Nader rules" flyers, but how do I know that some political organization didn't pay you to do that in order to avoid the new campaign finance reform laws? I need you to write down all your political affiliations and check that with the state before I can let you use that copy machine, sir.
Campaign finance reform, however noble in intent, will not have the intended effect. That's why we have a first amendment, and why political speech deserves the highest protection; attempts to regulate speech, no matter how noble, always end up creating a political bias and pollute the openness of the process, eventually.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Just try explaining to someone in ad sales why you have no idea how long someone was reading a given web page. They will blithely ignore you and continue using Web Trends fatally-flawed heuristics for guessing "unique users" and the like, or make even sillier jumps of logic.
Ad sales: "But it says right here on the report." Me:"That report is a lie designed to provide you with statistics that do not exist. If I told you how long you read the newspaper this morning based on a conversation with your newstand owner, would you expect my estimate to be accurate?" Ad sales:"Oh, so the average user looks at our site for 30 minutes".
Never mind that the number two "entry" page to the site is in fact redirect CGI to handle a drop-down menu used for site navigation; they take this shit as gospel when it's plainly bogus.
After all, they've been using the Nielsen reports for ages and they aren't much better statistically than asking your friends what they like and guessing what the rest of the country likes.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Dunno about that "unreasonably large" part. Makes me think that most of the posters here are real tyros, or else ignorant about the world outside their own narrow interests.
First year salaries for kids fresh out of law school are, at major firms, closing in on $100K. Sure, they work shit hours too, but in 5 years, a lot of those same kids are making $250K with chances of bonuses that exceed the salaries of many coders. Look at salaries in the computer industry, and you'll find they don't match up, except for lucky lotter winners of "hot" stocks.
Having spent a lot of time around both lawyers and coders, I can say that what the lawyers do is no more difficult than what the coders do; some of the mental reasoning skills are remarkably similar. But there is a perceived gap in importance that far exceeds reality, a gap that can be chipped away only when coders start understanding their role in the overall organization more clearly. This means that you have to understand things that aren't your job and stick your neck out of the coder's cage/monkey house.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Presumably Apple is striving for widespread acceptance of quicktime. I don't think a project lead throwing a hissy fit because some Linux users weren't nice to him furthers this goal.
Don't release it then; I won't use it. I can frankly do without streaming video and my favorite radio station (WFMU) has MP3 streams.
What these companies keep forgetting is that the multitude of incompatible streams and players will soon eclipse bandwidth as the single greatest reason that streaming on the 'Net is a waste of time. Then, one day, Ogg's video codec or something similar will put that whiny project lead out of a job.
Good for him.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
I swear, you libertarian-types give me the creeps. You scream bloody murder when the government violates your rights, but if it's a
corporation misusing the law to do it, you bend over and pull down your pants. Sheesh.
Now that's just funny, but the rest of your post is all too true. Libertarian or not, I find it disgusting to hear talk of corporations having rights, as if they were people. But to find them stomping all over our REAL rights is downright evil.
I also find it hilarious that the trade secret finger is pointed at this poor guy without anyone stopping to question whether he might have gotten the documents, you know, LEGALLY? If they were given to him by an employee, it might be a violation of the employee's agreement with @Home, but that seems to be about it.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
The point behind the sarcasm was that many believe that there is no music outside the RIAA. You apparently agree. The point is that some of us like to listen to other stuff. We don't generally believe that the music industry is "keeping it down," but rather that retards like you aren't smart enough to know that it's good, because your weak personality can only manage culture that has been predigested for you.
But Occam's razor prefers the simplest explanation that accounts for observed facts. In the case of the music industry, examples abound to prove that "what people like" really means "what people like after removing all the stuff that the industry suits don't like" or occasionally "what people like and make popular only to have the music industry decide it's good, bring it into the fold, and gradually crush the life out of it" (cf Metallica;-)
The only music they CAN keep down is in fact usually made by mainstream artists or almost-was artists. The kind that ends up in a vault because some suit "doesn't hear a single" on it.
Go to bed, old man!
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Yeah, that's why it's called a "feature, not a bug." I mean, it's not like we come to slashdot for information, right? (I'm too tired to bother inserting the appropriate link to some "goat" name with a wide-view rectal shot...)
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
No, it's probably a Dell conspiracy. What planet do you come from, where no one makes money off government funding? Ever heard of Perot? Peru? Singapore? I'm too disgusted to give a real list.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Right, and throwing up your vote to some asshole who doesn't address your political concerns, isn't wasting your vote?
Secret tip: the voting booth is not an OTB, the goal is not to pick the winner, and you get nothing if you do pick the winner.
You clearly don't understand what democracy is. Try practicing it before you open your mouth.
If you think that you'd rather throw your support in with someone with a "better chance of winning," you should extract promises and ass-kissing from the candidate who would benefit from your change of vote, and nail his/her ass to the wall for failing to live up to those promises. Sounds too wimpy for you? Go live in Iraq, dickhead. Hard choices are what democracy is about; if you are too cowardly for them, get out of my country before you destroy democracy here.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
You may have a point regarding features/stability; I know that with mod_ssl, restarting apache doesn't always work smoothly for me (graceful restart does, however). But in the long run, Apache modules are cleaner, more stable, and easier to upgrade, so it is the right approach (vs patches) in many ways.
Another factor to consider is fixes, support, documentation. I spent a long time getting the mod_ssl mailing list, and Ralph Engelshall is uncommonly helpful. Minor version fixes are frequent when they involve bug fixes, and infrequent otherwise (seems obvious, but not everyone does that). The documentation is glossy and has large images, but it's accurate and I always found what I was looking for.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
A good cell phone module would kick and I've been waiting for it. If it's done right, I'll feel justified in buying a cheapo cell phone, screw the little startac lipstick phones, I'd rather have one where I can do wireless ssh =)
GPS modules have been around for a while; they were almost the first to crop up after the release run (flash backup, tiger woods golf, and something else useless). I can't comment on their quality.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
There's nothing wrong with it per se... The term itself is supposed to apply to a hypocritical cashing in by giving in to things one has spoken against.
That being said, unless you've gotten successful on your own terms, a la Metallica (hehe), you are not going to sell out, you are going to get fucked.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
And "hearsay" and "forgeries" are kinds of evidence.
But SDMI is NOT a form of buying music, as it eliminates (intends to) fair use and copyright expiry, and violates the First Sale doctrine. So 1984 is late and overbudget, they'd still like to get there.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
So I suppose if I catch you touching the handle of my car door as you pass by it on the street, we should lock you up on felony charges?
I don't get Americans like you. First you run around screaming "theyerawtabealaw" every time you perceive a problem, and next thing you know, you're screaming about the gubermint on your back.
Real democracy is hard, and it means spending a lot of time working for solutions outside the system, not radically curtailing freedom. Go live in a police state if you don't like it, but don't ruin my country.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
They shouldn't. The Right Thing to Do is to work with other companies and come up with a standard that allows for intercommunication between IM systems and finish what IRC started (the resulting need for universally unique logins - and the inability of others to claim them - would be one improvement - and the solution would, by definition, prevent "freeloading").
Sure, they have the "right" to just shut people out, but AOL is too big and too old and too powerful to be left with adolescent excuses (you're not the boss of me!). By refusing to work for a solution and opting instead for a war for dominace, they are showing contempt for their customers AND the general public. You can whine all you want, but it's a stupid decision for them to make, from both a business and a political perspective, and they will pay for it when the millions of people inconvenienced by their stance make their voice heard. They have a clear choice: whine, or find a solution that works for them AND the rest of us. That's neither a threat, nor a promise, it's just a realistic assessment of their political situation.
But seriously, no American out of their Michael-J-Fox-in-Family-Ties phase could take seriously the notion that the Feds will successfully force them to bear the financial cost of supporting users who are not their customers.
Well, except for a few right-wing nut jobs, but they probably hate Steve Case because they think he's a Jew.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Yeah, right, that's gonna be pretty hard, referencing hundreds of news articles, official complaints, press releases, etc. on this exact topic a few months back. I'd give links, but if your lazy enough to forget, then I'm lazy enough not to do your remembering.
Microsoft even alleged that a "security hole" in the AIM client was allowing AOL to update the official clients on-the-fly to change the authentication process and shut out the MS clone, thus preventing even a perfect imitiation from working for long. Based on my experience with GAIM, I'm not so sure that I haven't been a victim of it myself.
Oh, while you are "remembering", you should go back and read up on some history of the internet. A big turning point occurred when AOL and Compuserve began allowing their users to send email to one another; if this hadn't happened, the Internet proper might still be restricted to students, academics, and those in the technical community, while Online Services fought each other to the death; or else AOL might have died altogether as private use of the Internet blossomed, passing by the Online services altogether.
What IM needs (no, not IR-f***ing-C, but that's another story) is to be decentralized the way that SMTP is (again, IRC can do this, but that's not relevant or sufficient). In this way, AOL's legitimate complaint (which they have not made effectively, and is also very poorly expressed in the comment that started this whole thread) that non-customers are loading their servers is moot, since their customers would be at at least one end of every message, in the same way that no one authority bears the burden of email. There are in fact Open Source projects focussed on universalizing IM in such a way that this could indeed happen, but not as long as a few corporate giants continue to use their customers as cannon fodder in their war for total dominance.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
No kidding. They actually assert that the universities do not permit students to copy books in libraries. I can't tell you how many photocopies I have from Widener Library books at Harvard. The thing is, it isn't a cost-effective way to reproduce books, so people don't. But to claim that this is some kind of policy is barking mad and distracts from the real issue. You should always beware of people who attempt to cloud the real issue, as they are usually doing that to hide the fact that they are full shit.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Slashdot Mirror
The only reason I haven't converted my entire vinyl collection to CD is that I'm hoping to get ALL of it onto a device about the size of a pack of cigarettes withing the decade.
At the same time, this whole thing clearly shows that when it's convenient for the record companies, you are licensing the right to listen to something, and when it's convenient to them, you are paying for a slab o' wax. There is no consistency or honesty to their positions, except "Gimme gimme gimme." No wonder consumers and bands alike hate them. There's precious little that separates record execs from freak show operators, except for the music itself.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
The Bloodhound Gang is dangerous! "Almost arbitrary labels" are good! But you'd think the clickety-click morons would at least see the link back to slashdot as a big, flashing, neon "Joke, joke!" sign! It's rich enough to forgive the goatse link!
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Dot-biz may create a minor stampede, but this will be somewhat lessened by the bleed-off from dot-pro. dot-name is a whole nuther ball of wax.
That being said, there will be some grumbling about the lack of concrete dispute resolution procedures at this stage. There is sure to be some grumbling about the "connected" nature of some of the applications, and if people are not happy with the new registries, that grumbling will be loud. It remains to be seen whether or not these criticisms will be deserved.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
I'd hesitate to accuse them of selling the email database outright, since it's so damn easy to write a script that slowly scans whois for emails.
But in my experience, very few people actually do that. Mostly, the same list gets sold and resold. Even when I use /etc/mail/access.db to fake that the address is dead, they keep re-selling it to new losers; after all, shouldn't you get more money for a big list than a small one? Spam is so fly-by-night that the consequences for selling crap addresses are small.
I should note that I add new aliases all the time to help me track - and stop - the sources of spam.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
For once there will be no one for the marketroids to interfere with =)
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Take a look at the whole "soft money" issue, and how it came about; Congress passed laws to limit the size of donations to $1,000, whereupon those who wanted to donate more promptly developed systems by which they give - and spend - campaign money via proxies. There is no clear way to stop the giving to proxies, unless you want the government to approve each and every donation by any person to any organization that *might* have a political purpose. If there is any person out there who does not recognize the insanity and total loss of political freedom this would bring, please go away.
So you could stop the spending by proxies instead, right? Wrong again. For one thing, that just displaces the soft money problem one step further. And taken to the logical extreme - and you have to, if you don't want another layer of inscrutability regarding who is buying the loyalty of whome - this would mandate that every message with any political content of any kind be registered with the government. Sure, you say that you just went to Kinkos and printed up a bunch of "Nader rules" flyers, but how do I know that some political organization didn't pay you to do that in order to avoid the new campaign finance reform laws? I need you to write down all your political affiliations and check that with the state before I can let you use that copy machine, sir.
Campaign finance reform, however noble in intent, will not have the intended effect. That's why we have a first amendment, and why political speech deserves the highest protection; attempts to regulate speech, no matter how noble, always end up creating a political bias and pollute the openness of the process, eventually.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Just try explaining to someone in ad sales why you have no idea how long someone was reading a given web page. They will blithely ignore you and continue using Web Trends fatally-flawed heuristics for guessing "unique users" and the like, or make even sillier jumps of logic.
Never mind that the number two "entry" page to the site is in fact redirect CGI to handle a drop-down menu used for site navigation; they take this shit as gospel when it's plainly bogus.
After all, they've been using the Nielsen reports for ages and they aren't much better statistically than asking your friends what they like and guessing what the rest of the country likes.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
First year salaries for kids fresh out of law school are, at major firms, closing in on $100K. Sure, they work shit hours too, but in 5 years, a lot of those same kids are making $250K with chances of bonuses that exceed the salaries of many coders. Look at salaries in the computer industry, and you'll find they don't match up, except for lucky lotter winners of "hot" stocks.
Having spent a lot of time around both lawyers and coders, I can say that what the lawyers do is no more difficult than what the coders do; some of the mental reasoning skills are remarkably similar. But there is a perceived gap in importance that far exceeds reality, a gap that can be chipped away only when coders start understanding their role in the overall organization more clearly. This means that you have to understand things that aren't your job and stick your neck out of the coder's cage/monkey house.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Don't release it then; I won't use it. I can frankly do without streaming video and my favorite radio station (WFMU) has MP3 streams.
What these companies keep forgetting is that the multitude of incompatible streams and players will soon eclipse bandwidth as the single greatest reason that streaming on the 'Net is a waste of time. Then, one day, Ogg's video codec or something similar will put that whiny project lead out of a job.
Good for him.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Even without me doing that, you wouldn't guess my OS correctly... Linux Netscape runs fine on FreeBSD.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
I also find it hilarious that the trade secret finger is pointed at this poor guy without anyone stopping to question whether he might have gotten the documents, you know, LEGALLY? If they were given to him by an employee, it might be a violation of the employee's agreement with @Home, but that seems to be about it.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
The point behind the sarcasm was that many believe that there is no music outside the RIAA. You apparently agree. The point is that some of us like to listen to other stuff. We don't generally believe that the music industry is "keeping it down," but rather that retards like you aren't smart enough to know that it's good, because your weak personality can only manage culture that has been predigested for you.
But Occam's razor prefers the simplest explanation that accounts for observed facts. In the case of the music industry, examples abound to prove that "what people like" really means "what people like after removing all the stuff that the industry suits don't like" or occasionally "what people like and make popular only to have the music industry decide it's good, bring it into the fold, and gradually crush the life out of it" (cf Metallica ;-)
The only music they CAN keep down is in fact usually made by mainstream artists or almost-was artists. The kind that ends up in a vault because some suit "doesn't hear a single" on it.
Go to bed, old man!
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
HA HA ...HA
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Yeah, that's why it's called a "feature, not a bug." I mean, it's not like we come to slashdot for information, right? (I'm too tired to bother inserting the appropriate link to some "goat" name with a wide-view rectal shot...)
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
No, it's probably a Dell conspiracy. What planet do you come from, where no one makes money off government funding? Ever heard of Perot? Peru? Singapore? I'm too disgusted to give a real list.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Secret tip: the voting booth is not an OTB, the goal is not to pick the winner, and you get nothing if you do pick the winner.
You clearly don't understand what democracy is. Try practicing it before you open your mouth.
If you think that you'd rather throw your support in with someone with a "better chance of winning," you should extract promises and ass-kissing from the candidate who would benefit from your change of vote, and nail his/her ass to the wall for failing to live up to those promises. Sounds too wimpy for you? Go live in Iraq, dickhead. Hard choices are what democracy is about; if you are too cowardly for them, get out of my country before you destroy democracy here.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Sorry, I haven't seen enough beowulf cluster trolls as of late.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
You may have a point regarding features/stability; I know that with mod_ssl, restarting apache doesn't always work smoothly for me (graceful restart does, however). But in the long run, Apache modules are cleaner, more stable, and easier to upgrade, so it is the right approach (vs patches) in many ways.
Another factor to consider is fixes, support, documentation. I spent a long time getting the mod_ssl mailing list, and Ralph Engelshall is uncommonly helpful. Minor version fixes are frequent when they involve bug fixes, and infrequent otherwise (seems obvious, but not everyone does that). The documentation is glossy and has large images, but it's accurate and I always found what I was looking for.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
GPS modules have been around for a while; they were almost the first to crop up after the release run (flash backup, tiger woods golf, and something else useless). I can't comment on their quality.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
That being said, unless you've gotten successful on your own terms, a la Metallica (hehe), you are not going to sell out, you are going to get fucked.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
But SDMI is NOT a form of buying music, as it eliminates (intends to) fair use and copyright expiry, and violates the First Sale doctrine. So 1984 is late and overbudget, they'd still like to get there.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
So I suppose if I catch you touching the handle of my car door as you pass by it on the street, we should lock you up on felony charges?
I don't get Americans like you. First you run around screaming "theyerawtabealaw" every time you perceive a problem, and next thing you know, you're screaming about the gubermint on your back.
Real democracy is hard, and it means spending a lot of time working for solutions outside the system, not radically curtailing freedom. Go live in a police state if you don't like it, but don't ruin my country.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Sure, they have the "right" to just shut people out, but AOL is too big and too old and too powerful to be left with adolescent excuses (you're not the boss of me!). By refusing to work for a solution and opting instead for a war for dominace, they are showing contempt for their customers AND the general public. You can whine all you want, but it's a stupid decision for them to make, from both a business and a political perspective, and they will pay for it when the millions of people inconvenienced by their stance make their voice heard. They have a clear choice: whine, or find a solution that works for them AND the rest of us. That's neither a threat, nor a promise, it's just a realistic assessment of their political situation.
But seriously, no American out of their Michael-J-Fox-in-Family-Ties phase could take seriously the notion that the Feds will successfully force them to bear the financial cost of supporting users who are not their customers.
Well, except for a few right-wing nut jobs, but they probably hate Steve Case because they think he's a Jew.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Microsoft even alleged that a "security hole" in the AIM client was allowing AOL to update the official clients on-the-fly to change the authentication process and shut out the MS clone, thus preventing even a perfect imitiation from working for long. Based on my experience with GAIM, I'm not so sure that I haven't been a victim of it myself.
Oh, while you are "remembering", you should go back and read up on some history of the internet. A big turning point occurred when AOL and Compuserve began allowing their users to send email to one another; if this hadn't happened, the Internet proper might still be restricted to students, academics, and those in the technical community, while Online Services fought each other to the death; or else AOL might have died altogether as private use of the Internet blossomed, passing by the Online services altogether.
What IM needs (no, not IR-f***ing-C, but that's another story) is to be decentralized the way that SMTP is (again, IRC can do this, but that's not relevant or sufficient). In this way, AOL's legitimate complaint (which they have not made effectively, and is also very poorly expressed in the comment that started this whole thread) that non-customers are loading their servers is moot, since their customers would be at at least one end of every message, in the same way that no one authority bears the burden of email. There are in fact Open Source projects focussed on universalizing IM in such a way that this could indeed happen, but not as long as a few corporate giants continue to use their customers as cannon fodder in their war for total dominance.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
No kidding. They actually assert that the universities do not permit students to copy books in libraries. I can't tell you how many photocopies I have from Widener Library books at Harvard. The thing is, it isn't a cost-effective way to reproduce books, so people don't. But to claim that this is some kind of policy is barking mad and distracts from the real issue. You should always beware of people who attempt to cloud the real issue, as they are usually doing that to hide the fact that they are full shit.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.