They're going to have a tough time selling this, especially at that price. Some friends of mine (see my sig below) have been running a low-cost secure webmail/POP/IMAPS service, and even at $14 a year, there aren't as many subscribers as they had hoped.
And Slashmail's offering is better than Microsoft's Outlook Live in many ways:
Works with Outlook or any standards-compliant program
No limit on email storage (Outlook Live has a 2 GB limit)
Exactly. You can set the default renderer to be Mozilla's Gecko, and then have settings for individual pages, telling it to use the IE renderer. You can also define other settings for specifically listed sites, just like in Firefox.
Your 5th freedom is best termed as "the freedom to take freedom away from others" or "the freedom to reduce freedom". Whether this is "more free" or "less free" is a philosphical question. As you've noted, the answer to that question is the main difference between the GPL and the BSD camps. I suppose whether it is a useful freedom depends on the situation -- I don't think anyone today would argue that you should be free to enslave another person. Thus, I don't think you can call it a "fundamental freedom".
The freedom to improve the program, and not release your improvements to the public (or sell said improvements to the public for profit)
Actually, the GPL allows you to do either of these, but not both. That is, you can make changes to a GPL program and use it yourself (or internally within your company) without having to release your improvements to the public. And you can sell GPLed programs, as long as you make the source available, and don't prevent the recipients from redistriuting the program.
I think what you're really concerned about is whether you can sell the modified program and make money. The GPL does not take this ability/freedom away; it just makes it difficult, because recipients are free to give copies to their friends. If you think about it, you shouldn't expect to make money off the original existing program -- you had nothing to do with it. So that leaves you with the possibility of profitting of the improvements you make. This actually isn't that difficult to do -- just find someone who wants the improvements, and have them fund your work.
A related question is whether you should be allowed to license software under non-free licenses.
NBC remade "Coupling" in the US last year. It lasted about 4 episodes. It was OK, but I'm sure they failed to include any of the feel/humor from the original UK series.
The thing that prevents me from taking advantage of people at every opportunity is the same thing that prevents you from doing so (and it isn't God): taking advantage of people doesn't obtain the desired result.
This reminds me of something I heard on a local talk radio show a year or so ago. The host (he's pretty much just a regular guy -- not like your typical talk radio host) had a Catholic priest and a rabbi on. They were talking about Hell. The rabbi said that the Jewish faith teaches that everyone eventually goes to Heaven. (I don't recall if there was no Hell, or if it was just a temporary punishment.) So the host asked why people should be good. The rabbi said that we should be good because God wants us to.
I thought that that was one of the best answers I've ever heard to a religious question. If every religion taught more of that, the world would be a much better place.
Looking back at that last paragraph of mine, I find it ironic that you were being accused of "might makes right" being the foundation of atheism.
OK, how can you mention "genetic defect" and "Europeans in the middle ages" without mentioning the bubonic plague and Black Death? It's even in the article. Really, the first question I had when I read the Slashdot blurb was whether they're somehow related. Scientists first thought they might be related, but now think that it was probably something more like smallpox. Anyway, RTFA if this interests you.
What are the fundies going to do now that straight black women are the number one group contracting HIV in the US? OK, I suppose I know what the Southern fundies will do. Anyway, world-wide, straight Africans are the most affected. The whole gay-AIDS thing isn't even a valid data-point any more.
I don't think the long hair reference is a good example. The version I found says that "if a man wears his hair long it is a disgrace to him". Verses 5-6 look like a better example, stating that it is shameful for women to pray without a veil, or to have short or shaved hair.
Also, I'm not following the reference to wearing cotton/polyester blend t-shirts? Can you provide some pointer to whatever it is that says it's wrong?
BTW, great thread. I'm glad you posted it to your journal.
I was under the impression that one of the main functions of a pharmacist is to know most of the various drugs by appearance. That's why drugs come in all different shapes and colors. So the pharmacist doesn't accidentally give you the little blue diamond pill (Viagra) when you're supposed to be getting the big yellow pill, even if the pills are in incorrectly marked containers. (I appreciate the fact that Walgreen's now puts a label on your presicription bottle describing the pill, so you can verify.) Somehow I doubt that automated systems are able to do this yet. Although with injected medicines, I'd supposed they almost all look alike (clear fluid). I'd be willing to bet that the machine has a much lower error rate, but it'd still be nice to have a visual check.
Actually, I think they were round so that the cables would all be the same length, not so they'd be shorter. Having the cables of different lengths would mean that the latency in different paths would be different, potentially causing synchronization problems. If they're all the same length, all the data arrives at the same time.
I don't see this as being a retribution. The spammers use our network resources to send us URLs that they want us to click on. In exchange, they want some of the recipients to click on the URLs and buy their wares. If every spam recipient were to go to those web sites, the whole balance of sending "free" bulk commercial emails becomes not so free.
I think that if it's the recipient who is (automatically) pulling down the web sites pointed to by the URLs, then this could not be considered retribution. If instead, one site has a whole bunch of people hitting the web pages, then it maybe could be considered to be retribution.
Saint Louis was home to many breweries in the 1800s, including Anheuser-Busch, now the largest brewer in the world. One of the main reasons is that there are a lot of caves in the bluffs overlooking the Mississippi River. The caves provided natural refrigeration that allowed the beer to last longer after brewing. Later, A-B was able to pull ahead of the pack by developing refrigerated rail cars and a national distribution network.
(I work at Anheuser-Busch as a contractor, and I've lived in St. Louis most of my life.)
I think a better idea would be to only allow copyright on source code. For the same reason that we require patents to disclose the new idea, in order for copyright to benefit the public good (as the US Constitution requires) there should be some way for the public to re-create the idea once the copyright term expires. Of course, Congress seems to have forgotten that copyright terms are supposed to expire.
The copyright on software would effectively be the same, because anyone who copied the binary code would have had to copy the source code that generated it. The only difference would be that software vendors would have to disclose the source code in order to be protected.
Microsoft has tried several times to make the tablet PC a viable product. (Among other things, like interactive TV.) If they really wanted it to take off, they'd release version 3.0 (or 3.1). Everyone knows that's when Microsoft products become useable.
Now that (after several days) the answer has been moderated up to 5, my comment isn't so insightful any more. Maybe it was an anti-self-fulfilling prophecy.
Interesting. The only answer that the original poster found satisfactory only has a score of 1. Come on, moderators! (Just double-checked to make sure I don't have moderator capabilities at the moment.)
Yes, I did read what you wrote. I didn't say that Slashmail had better spam filtering, I just said that it has spam filtering. It uses DSPAM, and they spend a lot of time fine-tuning it, so I expect it to work quite well. But I wouldn't expect it to be better than a company that only does spam filtering. Still, I don't know if it's worth it to spend twice as much to avoid the 1 or 2 extra spam messages that might slip through.
I'm more concerned with whether they offer encrypted POP. I.e. can somebody sniff my email as I download it? As far as I know, there's no real standard for encrypted POP. Yet another reason to want IMAP (actually IMAPS) instead.
The email service I have advertised in my sig supports IMAPS, and they're just a small start-up. They charge a few bucks a year, but they don't have any email storage limits, and their service seems to be more security-minded.
I think I can shed some light on the seemingly contradictory ideals that many folks hold regarding violation of GPL versus music "piracy".
First, very few of the pro-music-"piracy" folks believe that it's OK to sell the music they "steal" for money. Their main arguments are that the prices music companies want to charge are artifically inflated; and until recently, the music companies did not even offer legal copies of the music in the formats that the listeners were using. Also, many music downloaders (myself included, when I was on Napster) consider the P2P sharing a way to discover new music by "borrowing" a copy. Personally, my Napster usage caused me to buy several more CDs than I would have otherwise.
Second, the GPLed code is available for no cost already, so there's no money-saving incentive to break the GPL. Instead, those who purposely violate the GPL are causing something to be less free, while collecting money for it. Also, passing off someone else's work as your own is an additional moral infraction, beyond just re-distribution.
You could almost characterize it as "stealing from the rich" versus "stealing from the poor". Even if you agree that "pirating" music is wrong, you're still likely to agree that stealing from the poor is a more reprehensible action. And people have always gotten bent out of shape by sellers trying to pull a fast one on consumers.
Conversely, you could argue that music "piracy" is actually causing monetary harm to the IP owners, which is potentially damaging to their livelihoods. (I.e. it's worse to take money away from someone than to profit from something that was previously free.) But I think those who support music "piracy" believe that the monetary damages are minimal, if not outweighed by the benefits to the IP owners. Heck, even the music studios are aware of and take advantage of the benefits.
You are making an assumption that each piece of information is stored as a discrete bit. I think it has been established that the brain stores information in a more holistic method, distributed across many neurons. So perhaps every piece of information is stored in all the neurons in a certain area of the brain. If that's the case, then getting a bunch of information from all those neurons shouldn't take much longer than getting one piece of information.
I don't believe there's anything to suggest that an increase in the amount of knowledge a person holds has any correlation to how long it takes him to index and sort that information. I think you've ascribed a machine limitation to a human, which might not be the case.
Hmm, now that I think about that, perhaps this man's brain holds the key to the NP-complete question.
Slashdot Mirror
And Slashmail's offering is better than Microsoft's Outlook Live in many ways:
Exactly. You can set the default renderer to be Mozilla's Gecko, and then have settings for individual pages, telling it to use the IE renderer. You can also define other settings for specifically listed sites, just like in Firefox.
Actually, the GPL allows you to do either of these, but not both. That is, you can make changes to a GPL program and use it yourself (or internally within your company) without having to release your improvements to the public. And you can sell GPLed programs, as long as you make the source available, and don't prevent the recipients from redistriuting the program.
I think what you're really concerned about is whether you can sell the modified program and make money. The GPL does not take this ability/freedom away; it just makes it difficult, because recipients are free to give copies to their friends. If you think about it, you shouldn't expect to make money off the original existing program -- you had nothing to do with it. So that leaves you with the possibility of profitting of the improvements you make. This actually isn't that difficult to do -- just find someone who wants the improvements, and have them fund your work.
A related question is whether you should be allowed to license software under non-free licenses.
NBC remade "Coupling" in the US last year. It lasted about 4 episodes. It was OK, but I'm sure they failed to include any of the feel/humor from the original UK series.
This reminds me of something I heard on a local talk radio show a year or so ago. The host (he's pretty much just a regular guy -- not like your typical talk radio host) had a Catholic priest and a rabbi on. They were talking about Hell. The rabbi said that the Jewish faith teaches that everyone eventually goes to Heaven. (I don't recall if there was no Hell, or if it was just a temporary punishment.) So the host asked why people should be good. The rabbi said that we should be good because God wants us to.
I thought that that was one of the best answers I've ever heard to a religious question. If every religion taught more of that, the world would be a much better place.
Looking back at that last paragraph of mine, I find it ironic that you were being accused of "might makes right" being the foundation of atheism.
OK, how can you mention "genetic defect" and "Europeans in the middle ages" without mentioning the bubonic plague and Black Death? It's even in the article. Really, the first question I had when I read the Slashdot blurb was whether they're somehow related. Scientists first thought they might be related, but now think that it was probably something more like smallpox. Anyway, RTFA if this interests you.
What are the fundies going to do now that straight black women are the number one group contracting HIV in the US? OK, I suppose I know what the Southern fundies will do. Anyway, world-wide, straight Africans are the most affected. The whole gay-AIDS thing isn't even a valid data-point any more.
I don't think the long hair reference is a good example. The version I found says that "if a man wears his hair long it is a disgrace to him". Verses 5-6 look like a better example, stating that it is shameful for women to pray without a veil, or to have short or shaved hair.
Also, I'm not following the reference to wearing cotton/polyester blend t-shirts? Can you provide some pointer to whatever it is that says it's wrong?
BTW, great thread. I'm glad you posted it to your journal.
Thanks,
Craig
I was under the impression that one of the main functions of a pharmacist is to know most of the various drugs by appearance. That's why drugs come in all different shapes and colors. So the pharmacist doesn't accidentally give you the little blue diamond pill (Viagra) when you're supposed to be getting the big yellow pill, even if the pills are in incorrectly marked containers. (I appreciate the fact that Walgreen's now puts a label on your presicription bottle describing the pill, so you can verify.) Somehow I doubt that automated systems are able to do this yet. Although with injected medicines, I'd supposed they almost all look alike (clear fluid). I'd be willing to bet that the machine has a much lower error rate, but it'd still be nice to have a visual check.
Actually, I think they were round so that the cables would all be the same length, not so they'd be shorter. Having the cables of different lengths would mean that the latency in different paths would be different, potentially causing synchronization problems. If they're all the same length, all the data arrives at the same time.
I don't see this as being a retribution. The spammers use our network resources to send us URLs that they want us to click on. In exchange, they want some of the recipients to click on the URLs and buy their wares. If every spam recipient were to go to those web sites, the whole balance of sending "free" bulk commercial emails becomes not so free.
I think that if it's the recipient who is (automatically) pulling down the web sites pointed to by the URLs, then this could not be considered retribution. If instead, one site has a whole bunch of people hitting the web pages, then it maybe could be considered to be retribution.
Saint Louis was home to many breweries in the 1800s, including Anheuser-Busch, now the largest brewer in the world. One of the main reasons is that there are a lot of caves in the bluffs overlooking the Mississippi River. The caves provided natural refrigeration that allowed the beer to last longer after brewing. Later, A-B was able to pull ahead of the pack by developing refrigerated rail cars and a national distribution network.
(I work at Anheuser-Busch as a contractor, and I've lived in St. Louis most of my life.)
I think a better idea would be to only allow copyright on source code. For the same reason that we require patents to disclose the new idea, in order for copyright to benefit the public good (as the US Constitution requires) there should be some way for the public to re-create the idea once the copyright term expires. Of course, Congress seems to have forgotten that copyright terms are supposed to expire.
The copyright on software would effectively be the same, because anyone who copied the binary code would have had to copy the source code that generated it. The only difference would be that software vendors would have to disclose the source code in order to be protected.
Microsoft has tried several times to make the tablet PC a viable product. (Among other things, like interactive TV.) If they really wanted it to take off, they'd release version 3.0 (or 3.1). Everyone knows that's when Microsoft products become useable.
Now that (after several days) the answer has been moderated up to 5, my comment isn't so insightful any more. Maybe it was an anti-self-fulfilling prophecy.
Interesting. The only answer that the original poster found satisfactory only has a score of 1. Come on, moderators! (Just double-checked to make sure I don't have moderator capabilities at the moment.)
Yes, I did read what you wrote. I didn't say that Slashmail had better spam filtering, I just said that it has spam filtering. It uses DSPAM, and they spend a lot of time fine-tuning it, so I expect it to work quite well. But I wouldn't expect it to be better than a company that only does spam filtering. Still, I don't know if it's worth it to spend twice as much to avoid the 1 or 2 extra spam messages that might slip through.
Actually, Slashmail.org has spam and virus filtering as well. And it costs half as much.
I'm more concerned with whether they offer encrypted POP. I.e. can somebody sniff my email as I download it? As far as I know, there's no real standard for encrypted POP. Yet another reason to want IMAP (actually IMAPS) instead.
The email service I have advertised in my sig supports IMAPS, and they're just a small start-up. They charge a few bucks a year, but they don't have any email storage limits, and their service seems to be more security-minded.
Hey, what about my sig? It's both an advertisement, and on-topic!
Mr. President, good to see you here. I would suggest that you finish up the current war in Iraq before starting a new one.
Thanks,
Concerned Slashdotter
I think I can shed some light on the seemingly contradictory ideals that many folks hold regarding violation of GPL versus music "piracy".
First, very few of the pro-music-"piracy" folks believe that it's OK to sell the music they "steal" for money. Their main arguments are that the prices music companies want to charge are artifically inflated; and until recently, the music companies did not even offer legal copies of the music in the formats that the listeners were using. Also, many music downloaders (myself included, when I was on Napster) consider the P2P sharing a way to discover new music by "borrowing" a copy. Personally, my Napster usage caused me to buy several more CDs than I would have otherwise.
Second, the GPLed code is available for no cost already, so there's no money-saving incentive to break the GPL. Instead, those who purposely violate the GPL are causing something to be less free, while collecting money for it. Also, passing off someone else's work as your own is an additional moral infraction, beyond just re-distribution.
You could almost characterize it as "stealing from the rich" versus "stealing from the poor". Even if you agree that "pirating" music is wrong, you're still likely to agree that stealing from the poor is a more reprehensible action. And people have always gotten bent out of shape by sellers trying to pull a fast one on consumers.
Conversely, you could argue that music "piracy" is actually causing monetary harm to the IP owners, which is potentially damaging to their livelihoods. (I.e. it's worse to take money away from someone than to profit from something that was previously free.) But I think those who support music "piracy" believe that the monetary damages are minimal, if not outweighed by the benefits to the IP owners. Heck, even the music studios are aware of and take advantage of the benefits.
You are making an assumption that each piece of information is stored as a discrete bit. I think it has been established that the brain stores information in a more holistic method, distributed across many neurons. So perhaps every piece of information is stored in all the neurons in a certain area of the brain. If that's the case, then getting a bunch of information from all those neurons shouldn't take much longer than getting one piece of information.
I don't believe there's anything to suggest that an increase in the amount of knowledge a person holds has any correlation to how long it takes him to index and sort that information. I think you've ascribed a machine limitation to a human, which might not be the case.
Hmm, now that I think about that, perhaps this man's brain holds the key to the NP-complete question.
OK, can someone tell me why this is surprising?