IMHO, I like the idea of 2 or 3 seperate companies where all retain the rights to the same products, that way there would be immediate and direct competition on the same platform.
That wouldn't be good for anybody. It's hard enough for software developers to make stuff work on one version of Windows, let alone three. A split like the one you suggest would be so confusing to Microsoft's customers that the three companies couldn't compete against each other effectively.
Microsoft does have a point, in their request for a stay. If in fact Microsoft wins in the appeal and the ruling is overturned, their company will have come to irreperable harm if they are required to adhere to Jackson's Final Judgement in the mean time. Also, neither Jackson nor the DoJ has given any indication that the remedies outlined in the Final Judgement are urgent, and wouldn't be just as effective if they took place a few months down the road.
I don't believe that Microsoft will win in the appeal, and I don't think the Final Judgement is too severe at all (in fact it may not be severe enough). However, they are correct that they do have the right to appeal the decision.
To reiterate, I want them to fry, but I can wait a little while longer just so they can't whine and moan about it so much (and gain sympathy with the public and the legislature).
Being from the state of Oregon originally, I have a slightly different view on sales tax than most people in the U.S. My view is, sales tax completely sucks, period. Obviously, the government has to get money from somewhere. From what I've seen, though, the best way to do it is with a combination of income and property taxes.
Sales tax is unnecessarily messy: you tax consumers directly, pennies at a time, for everything they purchase. Very inefficient: for starters it's inconvenient to me to go into a convenience store, grab a bag of Doritos marked $0.99, and have to pay more than a dollar. It's hard to figure out exactly how much your groceries are going to cost, and it varies between states, and sometimes between cities. Also, if the customer can prove out-of-state residency (by showing a driver's license), they're usually exempt from sales taxes. More importantly, though, there's a fair ammount of overhead involved in actually collecting sales tax - both on the part of the retailer and the government.
Income tax is much easier, because your employer only has to deal with it for each employee, instead of each customer, and you only have to pay it once a year, rather than every time you go to the store. $0.99 Doritos cost $0.99 instead of $1.06. Everything costs what it says it costs. If you're from out of state, there's nothing to worry about; there's no sales tax anyway. This also means that there's no problem with interstate commerce on the Web.
In areas that attract a lot of tourists, the state generally collects a lot of sales taxes, and this helps the government. Great! Collect the same money from local businesses in the form of income taxes instead. If people are spending money, the businesses must be making money; tax that instead! Much easier.
Anyway, what I was really trying to get at was, doing away with sales tax completely solves the problem of Internet taxes. You don't need to worry about taxing online transactions if you instead tax the people and businesses in your own state or country regardless of what purchases are being made.
I apologize for the poor wording and lack of coherency of my rant, and I'd appreciate any feedback.:-)
I got the impression that in order for the problem to occur on the old kernel (thus causing the new Sendmail to bomb), a local user has to be deliberately trying to exploit the bug in attempt to get root. Under normal circumstances, it shouldn't happen, but if it does, something's wrong, and Sendmail will kill itself rather than hand root over to one of your users.
I agree with part of your sentiment - sending junk e-mail should not be illegal. However, forging message headers and bouncing mail through misconfigured open relay servers SHOULD be illegal (but only in the case of spam, since there are legitimate uses for maintaining anonymity).
Every time I sign up for something, I make up a new e-mail address. Then when I get spam, I know which dirty bastard corporation sold my e-mail address to a spammer's mailing list.
Finally, given that SMTP makes no guarantees about the validity of the "From:" address, I see no reason (other than ignorance) for anyone to have any expectation of its validity. I don't know about the "law of the land" when it comes to fraud, but I would imagine that the recipient's expectation of validity plays an important role in proving fraud.
Wait a minute. The average recipient hasn't read RFC 821, and in fact doesn't know what RFCs are. The average user, therefore, doesn't know that the "From:" line doesn't necessarily have to be the e-mail address of the actual sender. So, considering the recipient's expectation of validity, IBM could definitely sue for all kinds of things.
The From: and To: headers are really just part of the "data" part of the message, and are completely irrelevant to the transmission of the message (the message envelope, which is removed when the message hits your mailbox).
Honestly, yes, I'd like to see the government get involved. I have no objections to receiving Unsolicited Commercial E-mail that doesn't have forged headers and has a working "remove me from your list" link. My objection is when they forge the headers, put a bogus "remove" address, then bounce it off a misconfigured Exchange server in Korea. That's what I'd like to see the government take action against.
Q: What the heck is in SPAM anyway? Q: Pork shoulder and ham, mostly. And spices. Secret spices.
--
Re:Before the inevitable Stallman bashing starts .
on
RMS On 'Open' Motif
·
· Score: 1
Just look at Microsoft's definition of "open source": "If you're a registered Windows developer who pays us lots of money, and we don't have a reason to dislike you, and you sign a non-disclosure agreement that prevents you from telling anyone about it or using it for anything other than Windows applications, we'll show you selected parts of our source code, but not enough that you could actually compile anything."
The difference is, Offspring said it was OK. Napster didn't.
And it sounds like Napster's being hipocritical, since Metallica didn't say it was OK, but Napster's not the one sharing MP3s - they're only providing a means for other people to do so. Using Napster's service to distribute unauthorized Metallica MP3s is against Napster's policy, and will result in your account being terminated and your IP address banned if they find you (but of course they're not looking, which is why they shouldn't be in trouble: they're a common carrier and they don't monitor their content).
Assuming we're talking about Windows here, if all services are turned off and File & Printer Sharing is not bound to DUN (granted, most lusers don't take this precaution), simply being connected to the 'Net via a modem SHOULDN'T be a security risk, because it shouldn't be possible to access the LAN from the 'Net.
I suppose if you can get the luser to run a "trojan" like BO2k, Sub7, etc. then this would be a problem in the scenario you describe. Any modern up-to-date virus scanner should find the more popular ones, though.
Well, yeah, ok. But the striped mouseball is neat to watch through the translucent plastic! When you're not actually trying to use the computer, I mean.
5. Using a modem while connected through a local area network.
Hmm? What's wrong with being connected, as long as you don't allow incoming connections from the Internet? Setting all your daemons to only bind to eth0 isn't that hard, once you've disabled the ones you don't need anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
That wouldn't be good for anybody. It's hard enough for software developers to make stuff work on one version of Windows, let alone three. A split like the one you suggest would be so confusing to Microsoft's customers that the three companies couldn't compete against each other effectively.
--
I don't believe that Microsoft will win in the appeal, and I don't think the Final Judgement is too severe at all (in fact it may not be severe enough). However, they are correct that they do have the right to appeal the decision.
To reiterate, I want them to fry, but I can wait a little while longer just so they can't whine and moan about it so much (and gain sympathy with the public and the legislature).
--
Sales tax is unnecessarily messy: you tax consumers directly, pennies at a time, for everything they purchase. Very inefficient: for starters it's inconvenient to me to go into a convenience store, grab a bag of Doritos marked $0.99, and have to pay more than a dollar. It's hard to figure out exactly how much your groceries are going to cost, and it varies between states, and sometimes between cities. Also, if the customer can prove out-of-state residency (by showing a driver's license), they're usually exempt from sales taxes. More importantly, though, there's a fair ammount of overhead involved in actually collecting sales tax - both on the part of the retailer and the government.
Income tax is much easier, because your employer only has to deal with it for each employee, instead of each customer, and you only have to pay it once a year, rather than every time you go to the store. $0.99 Doritos cost $0.99 instead of $1.06. Everything costs what it says it costs. If you're from out of state, there's nothing to worry about; there's no sales tax anyway. This also means that there's no problem with interstate commerce on the Web.
In areas that attract a lot of tourists, the state generally collects a lot of sales taxes, and this helps the government. Great! Collect the same money from local businesses in the form of income taxes instead. If people are spending money, the businesses must be making money; tax that instead! Much easier.
Anyway, what I was really trying to get at was, doing away with sales tax completely solves the problem of Internet taxes. You don't need to worry about taxing online transactions if you instead tax the people and businesses in your own state or country regardless of what purchases are being made.
I apologize for the poor wording and lack of coherency of my rant, and I'd appreciate any feedback.
--
--
--
I thought it was obvious: AOL Time Warner.
--
--
Well, OK, it doesn't. But still....
--
Perhaps that a million bucks would be a lot of fun to play with? Or perhaps simply that it would go a long way towards paying the bills.
--
Umm, in the case of spam, the forger is trying to benefit - that's why they're sending the spam.
--
--
--
--
--
--
Wait a minute. The average recipient hasn't read RFC 821, and in fact doesn't know what RFCs are. The average user, therefore, doesn't know that the "From:" line doesn't necessarily have to be the e-mail address of the actual sender. So, considering the recipient's expectation of validity, IBM could definitely sue for all kinds of things.
--
--
--
Q: What the heck is in SPAM anyway?
Q: Pork shoulder and ham, mostly. And spices. Secret spices.
--
--
--
And it sounds like Napster's being hipocritical, since Metallica didn't say it was OK, but Napster's not the one sharing MP3s - they're only providing a means for other people to do so. Using Napster's service to distribute unauthorized Metallica MP3s is against Napster's policy, and will result in your account being terminated and your IP address banned if they find you (but of course they're not looking, which is why they shouldn't be in trouble: they're a common carrier and they don't monitor their content).
--
I suppose if you can get the luser to run a "trojan" like BO2k, Sub7, etc. then this would be a problem in the scenario you describe. Any modern up-to-date virus scanner should find the more popular ones, though.
--
--
Hmm? What's wrong with being connected, as long as you don't allow incoming connections from the Internet? Setting all your daemons to only bind to eth0 isn't that hard, once you've disabled the ones you don't need anyway.
--