Issuing options (or additional shares) imposes a cost to existing shareholders via dilution, but the total value of the company is unchanged.
In fact, the total value of the company actually increases slightly, due to the cash payment into the treasure required to exercise any stock option (at a non-zero option price that is).
Options dilute the value of the company stock, and since shareholders are the owners of a company it only makes sense to list them as expenses.
Non-monitary activities which could affect a companies stock price are not normally expensed or accounted for as revenue. e.g. a company cannot normally expense the act of announcing that a key product is way behind schedule (or the fact that a competitor announced that it is ahead of schedule), even though that may wipe out most of the value of its stock. These items are normally just footnotes in the reports to shareholders, as options currently are already.
If anything, the exercise of a stock option puts money into the companies treasury, and thus treating the inducement to do so as income makes about as much sense as expensing them.
Under the California law, if you send spam, you can be sued for $1000 per spam. That is a spam sender pay system, if I have ever seen one.
This is actually a user pays system, once you count your time and legal fees for gathering sufficient evidence, sheparding it though the legal system to conculsion, and figuring out how to collect even given a judgement in your favor that survives appeals, multiplied by the chances of success.
This is what I don't get - in order to be sure you have no false positives, you have to comb through all of the spam by hand,
True. But you can check if your false positive rate is low enough by statistical sampling.
So once every few days I scan through a thousand or so items marked as spam by procmail. As long as I continue to find 0 or 1 false positives (which I add to my whitelists), I consider my filters 99.9% good. That error rate is probably better than my own human error rate for misfiling and/or just forgetting to respond to email.
SMTP is so entrenched everywhere that writing a new spec is like making a new internet. In theory, it's easy, in reality everybody would bitch that their email doesn't work.
New net protocols have always displaced old protocols without requiring a new internet. Like Gopher (et.al.), SMTP will soon fade away because it already doesn't work. At the current rate-of-increase of spam, allowing current SMTP email onto your network will soon become (if not has become already) the same as paying a gangster to DDoS your network.
Attacking the source of the money--that, I believe, is the only way to kill spam.
Attacking only the source of the money won't help. There are too many stupid people, and more born every minute, as well as some malicious people who don't care about the money.
Attacking the cost/benefit ratio is the best solution. It cost you time and money to handle spam. If you, or your provider, start charging for any email which is allowed into your network to cover that cost, and most people do likewise, the cost/benefit ratio will eventually start working against spammers. Free email will be left to researchers and police tip lines (etc.)
Free and Open Source Software absolutely relies on a strong notion of copyright because of the need to protect (in this case preserve the freedom to modify) the software itself.
However it doesn't protect your software from a national government, since the government can always limit your standing to sue for infringement by changing copyright law or various other legal codes.
The entire point of copyright is that it grants to the holder of the copyright the right to license the work and it prevents you from taking it without a license.
Copyleft prevents someone from distributing your software without a license. But people can still take it for their own use without complying with the license.
you could just take it, I'd have no legal recourse, and there'd be no way for me to _force_ my code to be open.
You can always force your own code open by redistributing it, even if some company has taken it for its own internal use and modified their own version.
I think that the PDA world will take a dive once Handtop computers become available.
Handtop PC's, their current OS's, and the application suites that run on them are simply not designed to sip only milliamps of power while doing their expected functions. The weight of a useful battery will limit how small they can go.
Whereas the total CPU cycles and cache footprint (OS, app & data) of a PalmOS handheld running a PIM app or e-book reader is several orders of magnitudes smaller, with the resulting much smaller battery requirement for many typical portable uses (e.g. not photoshop).
And DRM under GPL liscensing is impractical enought to be funny.
Not with regard to the Feds. They can get Congress to rewrite copyright law sufficiently to make the GPL license unenforceable, or only selectively enforceable with regards to DRM.
But the Comcast execs would then realize that the unblocking process costs money in terms of staff time and phone expenses for the support call... and just axe that "feature".
Or better yet, make them pay for the opening the port. Then it would be both a revenue generator and an indirect way of making heavy users of upload bandwidth pay for their share.
The software doesn't come with source and is thus incompatible practically all oss licenses.
This is a perfect place to weaken the conflict of national "trade secrets" with "viral" OSS licenses. Just include a rider in the banknote law removing the right of anybody to sue for copyright infringement, if the only reason to do so is the refusal to distribute the closed source required by the banknote law. This will remove the teeth from all GPL-like licenses, and thus render them unenforceable for this particular situation.
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work....
The idea doesn't have to work. Given that asymtotically increasing spam is rendering email itself unworkable, a useful solution only has to be less broken than the status quo.
The Pentagon is free to use GPL'd code in any way it wants. The only requirement is that if it releases the product or software using GPL'd code outside of its organization, it must release the source code too.
The federal government is also free to change copyright law and/or give national security laws higher precedence in such a way as to render copyright actions against it impossible, thus making the GPL worthless with regards to Pentagon usage.
I don't see how any contract or license is enforceable unless both parties agree to its terms. If I hid a clause giving me the rights to your firstborn children in a copy of the GPL shipped with my software, I doubt any court would force compliance just because the software somehow ended up on your file share directory.
Whether I had any workable legal remedy left, in leu of your firstborn, for copyright infringement of said software, which I might be openly giving away to anonymous parties without payment, would be the big remaining issue.
The remedy might just end up being payment of the price which I'm openly charging all other anonymous users (e.g. zero). But courts do weird things. What do I know?
I can just see it now. Boss says to newbie secretary "send this letter to Singapore by the fastest means possible". A weeks later, the accounting dept. inquires why the company received a shipping bill from $35M from UnitedScaledCompositesExpress.
Your post advocates a (*)... approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work.
However email is ceasing to work, given the exponential increase in garbage being pumped into the net due to a "tragedy of the commons". So a good spam fighting solution no longer needs to work, but just be less broken than the non-working status quo.
So, yes, none of the solutions proposed will work, but one of them will still replace the current insecure free SMTP transport. My guess is that both cost and authentication of several kinds will be added to some form of "email2", and people will switch to it and stop reading SMTP email gradually as the new protocol proves itself as more costly to spammers.
The system has been abused for year. So, I'm sure there are those who feel entitled to the privacy and anonynimity they've been able to get for free so far.
I liken them to homeowners and small businesses who are dumping their pollution directly into the river, and then complaining when told that the same new environmental laws which apply to mega-toxic-corp upsteam also apply to them. However, just like the river, which may supply drinking water to people living downstream, DNS is a public service hosted on other peoples servers, not your own. If you want to use a public service (as opposed to running your own private DNS server for your buddies, etc.) you may have to abide by public rules.
The beginnings of a clean-up mechnism are simple. Notify people to clean up their DNS records and then randomly snail mail letters to a percentage of domain owners. Lock domains for owners who do not respond.
If you want your privacy and anonynimity, which was not implicit in the original rules for DNS service, pay for a proxy service (electronic equivalent of a PO box, answering service, subsidiary in the Bahama's, etc.). But don't depend on being entitled to a mechanism which makes you look exactly like joe toxic spammer at zero cost, and which leads to a Tragedy of the Commons.
Actually, if my team went over a deadline because we were 'powerless to fix something', we'd get fired and rightly so.
Not if you are powerless because of contracts signed or policies put in place by management above your hiring/firing manager. Making your project succeed (in your opinion) by making the CEO/CIO look bad could get both you and your manager fired (unless you have friends on the board, etc.)
If the system, keyboard and monitor aren't Tempest shielded, it might be possible for someone with an antenna pointed at your system, and the appropriate demodulators (canonical windowless black van parked outside), to see every keystroke, every mouse movement and record the raster show on your monitor, just from the RF leakage.
But they were on your girlfriend's (or her mom's) computer. e.g. they had physical possesion of the disk drive. So why weren't they charged with the crime?
differentiating how? by coughing up $2000? that's crazy.
Every add up how much your parents spent on snail mail postage over their lifetime, adjusted for inflation? Friends send me letters using first class postage; bulkrate stuff goes directly into the recycle bin.
> This is bad, as I host my own domain and send mail from it. I don't want to have to pay someone to host my mail server, and you know that plenty of ISPs will block mail that doesn't come from a.mail domain.
Nor can a lot of people, which is why this propsal will never work.
The current email system already doesn't work. There's no way people who get 1000's of spam emails per day will ever find email from your domain in their mail filter logs. So this plan doesn't have to work. It just has to be less broken then the status quo.
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In fact, the total value of the company actually increases slightly, due to the cash payment into the treasure required to exercise any stock option (at a non-zero option price that is).
Non-monitary activities which could affect a companies stock price are not normally expensed or accounted for as revenue. e.g. a company cannot normally expense the act of announcing that a key product is way behind schedule (or the fact that a competitor announced that it is ahead of schedule), even though that may wipe out most of the value of its stock. These items are normally just footnotes in the reports to shareholders, as options currently are already.
If anything, the exercise of a stock option puts money into the companies treasury, and thus treating the inducement to do so as income makes about as much sense as expensing them.
What a great way to help encourage Wintel users to clean up their systems!
I DEPEND on several email lists, and the only way sender pays is if it is universal, and that would bankrupt the lists I'm on
Many people think that bankrupting any mailing list which they haven't whitelisted is a good thing.
This is actually a user pays system, once you count your time and legal fees for gathering sufficient evidence, sheparding it though the legal system to conculsion, and figuring out how to collect even given a judgement in your favor that survives appeals, multiplied by the chances of success.
True. But you can check if your false positive rate is low enough by statistical sampling.
So once every few days I scan through a thousand or so items marked as spam by procmail. As long as I continue to find 0 or 1 false positives (which I add to my whitelists), I consider my filters 99.9% good. That error rate is probably better than my own human error rate for misfiling and/or just forgetting to respond to email.
New net protocols have always displaced old protocols without requiring a new internet. Like Gopher (et.al.), SMTP will soon fade away because it already doesn't work. At the current rate-of-increase of spam, allowing current SMTP email onto your network will soon become (if not has become already) the same as paying a gangster to DDoS your network.
Attacking only the source of the money won't help. There are too many stupid people, and more born every minute, as well as some malicious people who don't care about the money.
Attacking the cost/benefit ratio is the best solution. It cost you time and money to handle spam. If you, or your provider, start charging for any email which is allowed into your network to cover that cost, and most people do likewise, the cost/benefit ratio will eventually start working against spammers. Free email will be left to researchers and police tip lines (etc.)
However it doesn't protect your software from a national government, since the government can always limit your standing to sue for infringement by changing copyright law or various other legal codes.
Copyleft prevents someone from distributing your software without a license. But people can still take it for their own use without complying with the license.
you could just take it, I'd have no legal recourse, and there'd be no way for me to _force_ my code to be open.
You can always force your own code open by redistributing it, even if some company has taken it for its own internal use and modified their own version.
Handtop PC's, their current OS's, and the application suites that run on them are simply not designed to sip only milliamps of power while doing their expected functions. The weight of a useful battery will limit how small they can go.
Whereas the total CPU cycles and cache footprint (OS, app & data) of a PalmOS handheld running a PIM app or e-book reader is several orders of magnitudes smaller, with the resulting much smaller battery requirement for many typical portable uses (e.g. not photoshop).
Not with regard to the Feds. They can get Congress to rewrite copyright law sufficiently to make the GPL license unenforceable, or only selectively enforceable with regards to DRM.
Or better yet, make them pay for the opening the port. Then it would be both a revenue generator and an indirect way of making heavy users of upload bandwidth pay for their share.
This is a perfect place to weaken the conflict of national "trade secrets" with "viral" OSS licenses. Just include a rider in the banknote law removing the right of anybody to sue for copyright infringement, if the only reason to do so is the refusal to distribute the closed source required by the banknote law. This will remove the teeth from all GPL-like licenses, and thus render them unenforceable for this particular situation.
What Congress giveth, Congress can take away...
( ) technical ( ) legislative (X) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work.
The idea doesn't have to work. Given that asymtotically increasing spam is rendering email itself unworkable, a useful solution only has to be less broken than the status quo.
The federal government is also free to change copyright law and/or give national security laws higher precedence in such a way as to render copyright actions against it impossible, thus making the GPL worthless with regards to Pentagon usage.
I don't see how any contract or license is enforceable unless both parties agree to its terms. If I hid a clause giving me the rights to your firstborn children in a copy of the GPL shipped with my software, I doubt any court would force compliance just because the software somehow ended up on your file share directory.
Whether I had any workable legal remedy left, in leu of your firstborn, for copyright infringement of said software, which I might be openly giving away to anonymous parties without payment, would be the big remaining issue.
The remedy might just end up being payment of the price which I'm openly charging all other anonymous users (e.g. zero). But courts do weird things. What do I know?
I can just see it now. Boss says to newbie secretary "send this letter to Singapore by the fastest means possible". A weeks later, the accounting dept. inquires why the company received a shipping bill from $35M from UnitedScaledCompositesExpress.
(*)...
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work.
However email is ceasing to work, given the exponential increase in garbage being pumped into the net due to a "tragedy of the commons". So a good spam fighting solution no longer needs to work, but just be less broken than the non-working status quo.
So, yes, none of the solutions proposed will work, but one of them will still replace the current insecure free SMTP transport. My guess is that both cost and authentication of several kinds will be added to some form of "email2", and people will switch to it and stop reading SMTP email gradually as the new protocol proves itself as more costly to spammers.
The system has been abused for year. So, I'm sure there are those who feel entitled to the privacy and anonynimity they've been able to get for free so far.
I liken them to homeowners and small businesses who are dumping their pollution directly into the river, and then complaining when told that the same new environmental laws which apply to mega-toxic-corp upsteam also apply to them. However, just like the river, which may supply drinking water to people living downstream, DNS is a public service hosted on other peoples servers, not your own. If you want to use a public service (as opposed to running your own private DNS server for your buddies, etc.) you may have to abide by public rules.
The beginnings of a clean-up mechnism are simple. Notify people to clean up their DNS records and then randomly snail mail letters to a percentage of domain owners. Lock domains for owners who do not respond.
If you want your privacy and anonynimity, which was not implicit in the original rules for DNS service, pay for a proxy service (electronic equivalent of a PO box, answering service, subsidiary in the Bahama's, etc.). But don't depend on being entitled to a mechanism which makes you look exactly like joe toxic spammer at zero cost, and which leads to a Tragedy of the Commons.
Not if you are powerless because of contracts signed or policies put in place by management above your hiring/firing manager. Making your project succeed (in your opinion) by making the CEO/CIO look bad could get both you and your manager fired (unless you have friends on the board, etc.)
If the system, keyboard and monitor aren't Tempest shielded, it might be possible for someone with an antenna pointed at your system, and the appropriate demodulators (canonical windowless black van parked outside), to see every keystroke, every mouse movement and record the raster show on your monitor, just from the RF leakage.
See the book Cryptonomicon for an example.
But they were on your girlfriend's (or her mom's) computer. e.g. they had physical possesion of the disk drive. So why weren't they charged with the crime?
Every add up how much your parents spent on snail mail postage over their lifetime, adjusted for inflation? Friends send me letters using first class postage; bulkrate stuff goes directly into the recycle bin.
Nor can a lot of people, which is why this propsal will never work.
The current email system already doesn't work. There's no way people who get 1000's of spam emails per day will ever find email from your domain in their mail filter logs. So this plan doesn't have to work. It just has to be less broken then the status quo.