Meaning: Don't run a business that requires you to publish an address to get mail from new customers. And don't send mail to anyone who is going to put you in their address book and get infected by a mail-sending virus.
You're right, it's easy! All you have to do is be psychic: you'll already know who today's new customer is going to be, and you'll accurately predict which potential correspondents are going to get viruses. Bingo, end of spam problem! Plus you can give your friends hot stock tips.
Right, because spammers are all decent, hardworking folk who would never send messages in violation of the law.
I'm all for well-crafted anti-spam laws, but (a) the Internet isn't covered by one set of laws, and (b) some people will break whatever laws exist. So filtering technologies are still very much worthwhile even in the presence of a good legal framework.
Furthermore, widely-deployed SPF does serve one useful function even if it doesn't stop a single spammer from sending mail: it stops them from sending mail claiming to come from me. I've had my address used by a spammer once, and my mailbox was not a pretty sight for a couple weeks. Without something like SPF, you have zero defense against that kind of indirect harrassment.
By the way, substitute "virus" for "spammer" in all of the above as well. Unless of course you enjoy getting a steady stream of spurious "Our virus scanner has detected a virus in your mail" autoresponses.
This isn't going to work -- you simply can't solve a social / legal problem with technology.
You'll be buying all your doors without locks from now on, I take it, since burglary is a social/legal problem and the government has passed laws against it. Let us know how that goes.
Or, if you're really like Cory Doctorow, you do what he did and put the whole thing online for free. He claims it led to increased sales of the print version.
Stephen King's experiment failed, in my opinion, because the book sucked. I read the free sample and wasn't interested in reading any more, even if it hadn't cost anything. (And I've enjoyed some of his other books, so it's not like I didn't give it a fair chance.)
Hands down the worst I've seen is Hardware. I saw it in college, a time in my life when I liked a lot of lousy, gory movies (Rabid Grannies, Street Trash) and by the time the credits rolled, I was wishing I was carrying a knife with which to gouge out my own eyeballs. The pain would have been less.
Primaries? Ha! In every presidential election I've been old enough for, all the primary candidates I would have wanted to vote for had already dropped out of the race by the time my state's primary happened. Unless you live in New Hampshire or Iowa or (sometimes) a Super Tuesday state, primaries are a useless exercise that serve no purpose other than giving a warm fuzzy to the de facto party nominee. Or maybe, if you're really lucky, you get to choose between two of the nominees you didn't care for.
Suggest that again when they change the primaries to all happen on the same day, which is the only way to ensure that everyone's vote actually counts equally.
Hmm, I don't think they'll buy that argument in northern Europe or Alaska. (But I agree with the point for most of the world's highly populated areas.)
What about SMTP AUTH? That's working fine for my traveling users. They're at another site behind a firewall, but they can still connect out to my mail server, authenticate themselves, and send their mail. I put that in place along with a pretty strict SPF record and everything seems fine.
The ability to draw on the screen is pretty nice, and PDA screens are too small to be useful for much of that. A tablet PC hooked up to a projector is like a whiteboard with cut-and-paste and a Save button, pretty useful for engineering brainstorming meetings.
Re:Sorry. No way.
on
TMBG on DRM
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
But, as a content producer, they are effectively the same. In either case, something of value is being effectively taken from me.
Sometimes. But not necessarily. Let me illustrate with a true story.
When I was 11 years old, I was a rampant software pirate. I had an obscenely huge collection of games for my Atari 800. Any game I could get my hands on, I copied, even if it stank.
By your logic, I effectively stole tens of thousands of dollars out of the pockets of hundreds of developers.
Except... I was 11 years old. I had an allowance of about five dollars a week. If I had pirated no games at all, and had spent every last dime of my income trying to buy them instead, I would have contributed a whopping $260 a year to the coffers of the game industry.
As it was, I spent about half my allowance on games anyway, since I couldn't find a pirated copy of everything I wanted. So my piracy cannot, regardless of how one twists the numbers, have cost the total global population of developers more than $130 a year, because that's all the additional money I could have given them no matter how desperately I wanted their content. And of course, you'd have to spread that $130 in "loss" across hundreds of developers.
I will put this another way. After that $130, a developer whose game I didn't pirate would have gotten $0 out of me. A developer whose game I did pirate also got $0 out of me.
What, exactly, is the "something of value" that I was taking from the second developer? It's not "a potential purchase" because I would have already made all my potential purchases, and would have no money left.
Does the above make software piracy morally right? No, and these days my game collection is 100% legally acquired. I don't download music illegally either, so please don't assume otherwise -- the fact that I understand that there's a distinction between stealing and copying doesn't automatically require that I support either one.
But it's a more nuanced and complicated situation than "every copy of my creation is money out of my pocket." That is a zero-sum-game analysis and the nature of intellectual property is inherently non-zero-sum.
Re:Sorry. No way.
on
TMBG on DRM
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
DRM is a lock to the content. It's illegal to pick locks on people's houses, but I don't see anybody here advocating picking houses in order to steal THEIR contents, why is music any different?
Music is only susceptible to piracy while its copyright is in effect. Assuming Disney eventually fails to sufficiently bribe lawmakers to keep passing copyright extensions, the copyright on every piece of music in your CD cabinet will expire one day. It will then be perfectly legal, and not even slightly unethical, to make as many copies of those CDs as you like.
But if they're protected by DRM, you will be prevented from exercising that legal right, and the fact that it's illegal to break DRM schemes will mean that the music will have passed into the public domain in theory only.
That's the problem with legally-backed DRM.
But I agree with your main point about the radical change in the economics of the industry. Once enough artists clue into the fact that they'll end up with as much money, and much more creative control, keeping 90% of the profits on sales of 1000 self-promoted downloadable albums as they would with 1% of the profits on 90000 studio-promoted CDs, the labels are going to have a tough time attracting new talent, and they'll wither and die.
If you break into my house and steal my CD collection, you have a CD collection and I don't. If you break into my house and copy my CD collection, you have a CD collection and so do I. You may not approve of the second case, and that's fine, but nobody can honestly claim that there is no difference between the two.
I'll probably get modded down to -1 for this, but if they're constantly overloading their web servers, why are they still using an interpreted language like PHP? A compiled language like C/C++ or Java (yes, Java is compiled) seems like it would give them better CPU efficiency. A site like Wikipedia really ought to be database-bound.
I have nothing against PHP; it's a great tool for some jobs, and I use it on some of my sites. But it's not the right tool for every job.
There is no conspiracy here. Directors have always been forced for one reason or another to cut out footage they originally intended to include in a film. That's why there's usually a person with the job of "editor" on the crew of a movie -- in addition to helping select which particular angle is the best one for a scene, that person's job is to trim out the fat and keep the pacing of the movie on track.
The difference these days is that where the studios used to take all that extra film and throw it in the trash (or stuff it in poorly-maintaned warehouses where a lot of old footage has rotted away or -- I'm not joking -- been eaten by rats) now it's preserved and put on DVD for interested viewers.
Yeah, there are a few movies like the LotR trilogy where the director shoots a scene knowing full well that it's intended for the DVD. And I suppose given its financial success, we may see additional "shoot some extra scenes for the video game" cases like Matrix Reloaded. But the vast majority of deleted scenes on DVDs are simply the result of the absolutely ordinary process of editing a movie into shape.
When it comes on again, try watching "Project Greenlight" if you want an illuminating view of what a director goes through and how much of the intended film actually ends up on screen. I believe I heard they're doing a low-budget horror movie for the next project, which ought to be fun.
I noticed a big drop in the daily message traffic to my mail server (which receives about 85% spam, last I checked) around the time Comcast put their policy in place. It seems like about a 25-30% drop in overall message traffic, which is in line with the numbers they quote.
Kudos to them for doing a good job of it -- my home Internet connection is through Comcast, and I haven't experienced any trouble sending mail to my own SMTP server on another network. They could so easily have just gone the "all SMTP traffic must go to our hosts" route, but they're doing it the right way instead. Nice to see.
Slashdot Mirror
Meaning: Don't run a business that requires you to publish an address to get mail from new customers. And don't send mail to anyone who is going to put you in their address book and get infected by a mail-sending virus.
You're right, it's easy! All you have to do is be psychic: you'll already know who today's new customer is going to be, and you'll accurately predict which potential correspondents are going to get viruses. Bingo, end of spam problem! Plus you can give your friends hot stock tips.
I'm all for well-crafted anti-spam laws, but (a) the Internet isn't covered by one set of laws, and (b) some people will break whatever laws exist. So filtering technologies are still very much worthwhile even in the presence of a good legal framework.
Furthermore, widely-deployed SPF does serve one useful function even if it doesn't stop a single spammer from sending mail: it stops them from sending mail claiming to come from me. I've had my address used by a spammer once, and my mailbox was not a pretty sight for a couple weeks. Without something like SPF, you have zero defense against that kind of indirect harrassment.
By the way, substitute "virus" for "spammer" in all of the above as well. Unless of course you enjoy getting a steady stream of spurious "Our virus scanner has detected a virus in your mail" autoresponses.
You'll be buying all your doors without locks from now on, I take it, since burglary is a social/legal problem and the government has passed laws against it. Let us know how that goes.
Stephen King's experiment failed, in my opinion, because the book sucked. I read the free sample and wasn't interested in reading any more, even if it hadn't cost anything. (And I've enjoyed some of his other books, so it's not like I didn't give it a fair chance.)
They didn't misspell "through." They misspelled "breakthrough."
The Zen case from Shuttle has an external power supply and is very quiet.
File server hard drives in another room at the opposite end of the house don't make noise, except in an if-a-tree-falls-in-the-forest kind of way.
Hands down the worst I've seen is Hardware. I saw it in college, a time in my life when I liked a lot of lousy, gory movies (Rabid Grannies, Street Trash) and by the time the credits rolled, I was wishing I was carrying a knife with which to gouge out my own eyeballs. The pain would have been less.
The other problem is that copyright expires (theoretically, anyway) but DRM schemes don't have to.
Suggest that again when they change the primaries to all happen on the same day, which is the only way to ensure that everyone's vote actually counts equally.
Hmm, I don't think they'll buy that argument in northern Europe or Alaska. (But I agree with the point for most of the world's highly populated areas.)
Maybe they don't offer that option any more, but given that this discussion is about older units, that's not relevant.
But at least we have John Ashcroft standing up for our rights to privacy and anonymity!
What about SMTP AUTH? That's working fine for my traveling users. They're at another site behind a firewall, but they can still connect out to my mail server, authenticate themselves, and send their mail. I put that in place along with a pretty strict SPF record and everything seems fine.
The ability to draw on the screen is pretty nice, and PDA screens are too small to be useful for much of that. A tablet PC hooked up to a projector is like a whiteboard with cut-and-paste and a Save button, pretty useful for engineering brainstorming meetings.
Nowadays? You know of some time when that wasn't the case?
dot-slashed?
Sometimes. But not necessarily. Let me illustrate with a true story.
When I was 11 years old, I was a rampant software pirate. I had an obscenely huge collection of games for my Atari 800. Any game I could get my hands on, I copied, even if it stank.
By your logic, I effectively stole tens of thousands of dollars out of the pockets of hundreds of developers.
Except... I was 11 years old. I had an allowance of about five dollars a week. If I had pirated no games at all, and had spent every last dime of my income trying to buy them instead, I would have contributed a whopping $260 a year to the coffers of the game industry.
As it was, I spent about half my allowance on games anyway, since I couldn't find a pirated copy of everything I wanted. So my piracy cannot, regardless of how one twists the numbers, have cost the total global population of developers more than $130 a year, because that's all the additional money I could have given them no matter how desperately I wanted their content. And of course, you'd have to spread that $130 in "loss" across hundreds of developers.
I will put this another way. After that $130, a developer whose game I didn't pirate would have gotten $0 out of me. A developer whose game I did pirate also got $0 out of me.
What, exactly, is the "something of value" that I was taking from the second developer? It's not "a potential purchase" because I would have already made all my potential purchases, and would have no money left.
Does the above make software piracy morally right? No, and these days my game collection is 100% legally acquired. I don't download music illegally either, so please don't assume otherwise -- the fact that I understand that there's a distinction between stealing and copying doesn't automatically require that I support either one.
But it's a more nuanced and complicated situation than "every copy of my creation is money out of my pocket." That is a zero-sum-game analysis and the nature of intellectual property is inherently non-zero-sum.
Music is only susceptible to piracy while its copyright is in effect. Assuming Disney eventually fails to sufficiently bribe lawmakers to keep passing copyright extensions, the copyright on every piece of music in your CD cabinet will expire one day. It will then be perfectly legal, and not even slightly unethical, to make as many copies of those CDs as you like.
But if they're protected by DRM, you will be prevented from exercising that legal right, and the fact that it's illegal to break DRM schemes will mean that the music will have passed into the public domain in theory only.
That's the problem with legally-backed DRM.
But I agree with your main point about the radical change in the economics of the industry. Once enough artists clue into the fact that they'll end up with as much money, and much more creative control, keeping 90% of the profits on sales of 1000 self-promoted downloadable albums as they would with 1% of the profits on 90000 studio-promoted CDs, the labels are going to have a tough time attracting new talent, and they'll wither and die.
He did tell you how it's different.
If you break into my house and steal my CD collection, you have a CD collection and I don't. If you break into my house and copy my CD collection, you have a CD collection and so do I. You may not approve of the second case, and that's fine, but nobody can honestly claim that there is no difference between the two.
I'd hardly call time spent attempting to produce children wasted.
I have nothing against PHP; it's a great tool for some jobs, and I use it on some of my sites. But it's not the right tool for every job.
The difference these days is that where the studios used to take all that extra film and throw it in the trash (or stuff it in poorly-maintaned warehouses where a lot of old footage has rotted away or -- I'm not joking -- been eaten by rats) now it's preserved and put on DVD for interested viewers.
Yeah, there are a few movies like the LotR trilogy where the director shoots a scene knowing full well that it's intended for the DVD. And I suppose given its financial success, we may see additional "shoot some extra scenes for the video game" cases like Matrix Reloaded. But the vast majority of deleted scenes on DVDs are simply the result of the absolutely ordinary process of editing a movie into shape.
When it comes on again, try watching "Project Greenlight" if you want an illuminating view of what a director goes through and how much of the intended film actually ends up on screen. I believe I heard they're doing a low-budget horror movie for the next project, which ought to be fun.
Kudos to them for doing a good job of it -- my home Internet connection is through Comcast, and I haven't experienced any trouble sending mail to my own SMTP server on another network. They could so easily have just gone the "all SMTP traffic must go to our hosts" route, but they're doing it the right way instead. Nice to see.