I believe that when you talk about free products given away to generate sales, you are talking about songs played on radio? Or is there another angle I am not seeing here?
In marketing terms, I'd say that the goodwill and recognition generated by the free stuff given away by the studios is more than counterbalanced by the consumer annoyance generated otherwise (inane copy protection for instance).
Good point about MP3 clips being played more often than bootleg e-books. It takes hours of assiduous reading to "use" an ebook, while you can listen to an MP3 in 3 mins while reading/., indeed.
I do think that the studios need the same kind of customer-friendly marketing and appeal as Baen. Instead of treating every listener like a potential criminal, the studios ought to give away MP3s of a few titles that they own and don't generate much revenue anymore, then allow people to download and burn CDs (not MP3) on demand, especially for older releases you won't find easily in stores. Some manufacturers even had planned a kiosk sitting in malls, on a fast link, where you could actually insert your credit card, select songs and burn them in a few minutes as high-quality redbook CD Audio files. The studios killed the project for, in my opinion, totally irrational reasons.
Also, if the CD prices went back to Canadian levels (about $11) instead of the current $18, the incentive for CD burning would be lower, generating more impulse sales. The studios' price fixing is killing the whole industry.
But said industry represents less than $10 billion. Compare with the $600B IT industry. Microsoft or IBM could buy every studio and barely miss the cash. So I violently object to the notion that the music industry should dictate DRM terms to the IT industry, especially when these terms fly in the face of the necessary protection of customers' rights.
Come on, ED, you cannot be that oblivious to the real world. Please.
There are many more reasons why the RIAA is one of the most
vilified organizations in the US. Look, Baen doesn't send the police
after students. They don't buy a law that trample the
4th Amendment and then use it against people who
are merely suspect.
As for differences between digital copies of audio and books, you
are right. However, consider that someone who loves a band will
actually go out and buy their CDs, often on the mere recommendation of
other fans, even if they already own MP3s of the songs. They value the
physical object, the cover art, etc. A fan who has the disposable
income and loves the band will fork out the $18 and buy the CD. If the
disposable income is not there, then the guy is not a potential
customer anyway.
Of course, this presupposes that there are bands and artistst that
can gather a real fan audience and that aren't mere disposable
products of a targetted marketing. If the studios had their way, we'd
all be buying tepid crap.
So of course, casual listeners will just as well listen to the
MP3. But please note that casual readers would just borrow the book!
You're absolutely right. In my case, I started by reading the frist free chapters of the 1st John Ringo novel online. Then I ordered the HTML version. Then I ended up buying the book for finishing it without having to stand in front of a screen. All of that beause of the free chapters online.
Would the RIAA people please look at the sales figure of Baen and get a freakin' clue?
I'm an African, and I'm currently in Sweden where I work as a Sysadmin.
And that, my friend, is the root of the problem. It is braindrain that is happening NOW, not colonialism four decades ago, that is the most damaging trend to Africa today.
African countries and families spend a disproportionate amount of money in education. It's common in some African countries to have families get into bad debts just so that a few of their boys can get a good education. And in return, do these kids work in their country, contributing to increasing economic activity? Heck no. They flee and go work abroad as fast as they can.
And who could blame them? The article is talking about work conditions and salary. But there is more. Look at the infrastructure -- water, road, electricity, and public services -- that us Westerners take for granted in our developed coutnries. It represents about 4 to 6 years of GNP. In other words, each person in a Western country enjoys about half a million dollar worth of infrastructure. This is a unimaginable boon to most Africans.
Once, in Senegal, I was discussing the brain drain problem with a few locals. A young French engineer, a volunteer international cooperant, was complaining that he had just spent 18 months teaching maths to 15-20 year old students and that his brightest students all dreamed of either emigrating or becoming politicians -- hardly production-increasing work as far as Senegal was concerned. I asked our old taxi driver what he thought. "You whites want to help us?", he said. "Fine. Build a concrete wall all around Africa. Don't come in, and don't let them youngsters out."
The sad thing is that to this day, this unreasonable idea is still the most practical among the numerous "solutions for Africa" I have heard of. Most of our ideas for "helping Africa" are recipes for disasters.
Minkwe, this is not a flame. I don't have a "solution for Africa". But I doubt that taking the best brains out of the continent is helping. I'd like your opinion as an emigrant, provided you keep a cool head.
So this company's management has a mental neon sign saying "No one ever got fired for buying Microsoft". Which is false anyway: The architect of National Westminster bank got fired after recommending an all-MS front office solution.
The parade is to dust that older sign saying "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM". Which also has exceptions but hush.
Get the management to contact IBM Services, a branch of Big Blue that make half the revenue of IBM these days. They would be very happy to discuss Linux solutions for the company and will do support as well -- for a price of course.
Then some PHB will notice that since this open source thingy is free and you only pay for service, Joe Schmoe in IT can install and use open source tools if that saves money.... And you win.
He said he was a small child when he stumbled on a book called "Spaceship Galileo" and has been "a huge fan" of science fiction ever since.
"Spaceship Galileo" by Robert A. Heinlein. Yep, a classic. Heinlein wrote one of the very few juvenile SF books that could be enjoyed by adults as well.
Allen could have chosen worse.
Yes, that's about the right approach. I do encourage people to anonymously contact companies in order to warn them of flaws in their products, though. Sometimes they do fix things.
If they stonewall people who warn them, then publish the exploit. The exploit is out there anyway. It is not "irresponsible publicizing", it's pointing to the naked, hairy, stinking butt of the Emperor. Silencing people who blow the whistle never makes a problem go away.
And mind you, I am one of the poor guys who trott to customer sites when panic erupts.
Actually, someone tried that already. He ended up in jail.
In 1997, after four years of research, a French cryptographer, Serge Humpich, found a flaw in the widely used French smart card, which requires owners to type a PIN on a payment terminal for all credit card and ATM transactions. He found that 1.the PIN was verified by the chip on the card, 2. some terminals didn't really check what chip they were talking to, and 3. If the chip told the terminal "yes, the PIN is right", the terminal would blindly accept the confirmation and allow the transaction. Such a card is called a "yes-card"
Humpich contacted the Carte Bleue consortium, an association of 200 banks managing the French smart cards, and told them about the flaw. They refused to believe him. So he made a yes-card out of spare parts and went to a Parisian metro station. There, he bought a few metro tickets and send them, along with the payment receipt, to the Carte Bleue people. They immediately contacted the police.
Humpich was arrested in September 1999 and jailed for several months. In 2000, he was given a suspended 10-month jail sentence and a $2600 fine. All his equipment and documentation was confiscated. Now he has a criminal indictment that bars him from a number of jobs.
Of course, the French and US laws are different. But if anything, I suspect a US court will actually be harsher, especially now that the DMCA has been used in several precedents. Heck, the DMCA makes it almost mandatory to jail you if you figure out a way to program your VCR without reading the obviously encrypted documentation!
So I really don't think it's a good idea to show the problem exists. Blackboard knows, the people who selected them as a supplier know, and if you show them that they're effectively slobs,
they'll crush you to cover their asses.
Yes, I agree, that's what I said. MB/ and Mb/s are OK. It the dumbed-down "BPS" writing that is a mistake. It's on par with the murky "musical watts" of sound equipment makers.
Wow, I looked up the Wright Amendment and I learned something even more disgusting today.
You're right about bad businesses deserving to go belly up. Moreover, it would bother me if the gummint did rescue these lame ducks and shield them from the realities of the market.
Subsidizing money-losing corporations with taxpayers' money is the surest way to 1. Destroy jobs that could have been created with the money absorbed in the taxes, 2. Shield bad management from the market and let them perpetuate more bad mgmt; 3. Make sure corporations brownnose politicians but ignore customers.
Competition works. Which is why established corporations always try to legislate their way out of it.
Here is a bit of history to understand why SST never took off in the US.
At the time the Concorde SST was introduced, Boeing lobbied for (and got) legislation that practically forbad SST flights over the US. This was meant to give Boeing time to introduce their own SST. Unfortunately, their SST project was cancelled, and this stupid legislation is still in place.
Anyone who ever took a "red-eye" night flight from California to the East Coast would kill for halving the duration of that painful flight. But repelling that law would require greasing too many palms.
And of course, without that piece of the market, the future of SST is questionable.
If you think legal mingling in the IT industry is bad (DMCA comes to mind), rest assured it's nothing compared to the stomach-churning lobbying that routinely takes place in the aerospace and air transportation industries.
Some people seem to resent Microsoft for being successful. I resent them for mass-selling an unreliable product creating problems that *I* have to fix.
Oh, so your college had a 370 background? Then I am not surprised that the AIX operating system of the SP2 was a complete mystery for them. The sysops were probably using MVS or VM, which are totally different from AIX/Unix.
You're on something here. Yes, that's a good analogy. Only, the technology is bleeding edge. I mean, have you seen the insanely huge processor plate in a zSeries mainframe? One 5x5 inch ceramic plate, 20 processors, goobles of cache, a dozen dedicated I/O processors, gigabytes per second of bandwidth, and the instruction flow in each processor is executed in parallel by two CPUs, and the instruction is redone in case the output disagree (which happens only if a solar flare or stray alpha particle is hitting your CPU). Try that on your spanking new Linux cluster and see how well it works during a solar storm in a high altitude location such as Denver.
Real mainframers don't light their cheap cigarettes themselves. They just turn off the air cooling unit until a few processors glow a cherry red.
SP2s are actually Unix machines (RS/6000) packaged as a cluster. This ain't no mainframe, this is a modern Unix machine.
A student with a modicum amount of Unix experience and the root password could have RTFM and installed PVM in a few days. I am afraid that your college was just as clueless as most colleges.
It's about bloody time that the "hotter sun" concept breaks into the mainstream. That's what I have been repeating over and over about the reason why the best computer climatology models fail to reproduce known climating history, and hence prove their uselessness. It's because they are based on a "solar constant" (about 900 W/m2 at equatorial peak if I remember correctly) but the solar output is not a constant.
(Hey, sounds like this old Murphy's law of programming: "Constants aren't".)
Two years ago, the
Science magazine carried a paper explaining how researchers examined sediments in Yutacan and proved that solar output increase, with a cycle of about 208 years, forced a drought on the Maya that was probably the last straw and destroyed their empire. Findings are correlated with other data. See
"Solar Forcing of Drought Frequency in the Maya Lowlands" by David Hodell et.al. Very important paper for anyone who wants to understand climatology.
You'll have to rely on your die hard geeks, because even thirld-world countries ultimately will go digital and spectrum compression. For one good reason: after a while, it will be cheaper. Just as today, a CD player is much cheaper than an analog 33RPM pick-up table, whether it's in Bamako or in Tokyo.
Also, I believe there are no plans to digitize or compress short wave transmissions.
Right now, that's true. But you can bet that this will not stay true for very long. Evety band of the radio spectrum becomes increasingly crowded. Just wait until every gadget on Earth has its own transmitter. The spectrum will be full of spread-spectrum bursts that will make regular analog transmissions absolutely impossible, because all you'll pick will be interferences. The only way to get any signal over the waves will be to have a digital receiver-transmitter.
I've seen and enjoyed Jimmy Neutron. Good animated. But hardly sound science. All it has done is convince me that all aliens want from Earthling is to sacrifice them to their god Poultra. So if I ever see one of these whacos broadcasting a signal that could betray Earth's position, I'll personally hack his transmitter into bits.:-)
Yes, but we are talking about signals that take decades or centuries to arrive to earth. I think it is naive on your part to assume that an alien race would develop non-radio transmission technology from the offset.
Actually, it's not naivete, it's careful reasoning. Let me explain.
I don't think it's necessary to assume a civilization will have "buttoned up" their transmission. All I am saying is that we'll not be able to tell them apart from noise.
To understand this, take a look at radio technology here on Earth.
What we observe on earth is that after about a century of radiotransmissions, we have advanced the use of spectrum to the point where most new applications are using compression and frequency-hopping. Older applications (e.g. regular analog TV broadcast) are getting phased out. It's safe to estimate that in another 30 years, spectrum will be so scarse that no uncompressed broadcast will be allowed. Compression and frequency-hopping remove repetitive patterns in signal and spread it over the available spectrum. Such transmissions look like noise.
So from the point of view of an alien, our future broadcasts will look more and more like noise (due to compression) and less and less like patterned, artificial transmissions. You can say that from 1900 to 2050, Earth will obviously broadcast artificial signal. Before that, zilch. After that, noise undistinguishable from the radio noise of, say, Jupiter.
Now assume you are alien Zorg on planet X at N light-years from Earth. You run a SETI-like program to find intelligent broadcast sent from the vicinity of our star. To have any chance, you
have only a very limited time frame: Years 1900+N to 2050+N.
That is a very thin period of time in the history of things. Chinese and Egyptians have a 4000-year old history, and any advance civilization will also have a very long history. Yet, the very nature of radio broadcast gives you a mere 150-year sliver during which a SETI-like program has any chance of success.
If there is any advanced civilization within a few hundred light years, chances are they already went waaay past the spectrum compression stage and that by the time we started SETI, all we could pick is noise-like.
Now, if you can find a mistake in these assumptions, feel free to pinpoint them.
Angle_slam, I am a satisfied user of SpamGourmet.com ( described here) and sneakemail.com ( described here). My favorite is SG and I really want to help it getting well known (it is free and open-source too).
My experience: sneakemail is good for one-time communications or automated services. It creates addresses that are a random string, and this jumble of letters and numbers is very hard to memorize or to simply dictate over the phone.
So you should never use sneakemail for generating email addresses that are also account names (e.g., sites such as amazon that identify you through your email address), because you'll not be able to remember them. Also, don't use them to give to people over the phone.
Spamgourmet allows you to pick a user name and then to create addresses of the form word1.word2.username@spamgourmet.com, with a possible extra prefix to avoid dictionary attacks. So if your user name is Joe6Pack, and sleazy.com wants you to register, give them something like sleazy.reg.Joe6Pack@spamgourmt.com that you'll be able to remember and that will be easy to trace. If sleazy.com starts spamming you, you just disable the address.
I tried several disposable services, and my favorite are spamgourmet and sneakemail, in that order.
Make sure you pick a new, secret, never used address to forward the emails received by these services.
Did I mention I have absolutely ZERO spam since I started using these services? Of course I had to get rid of my old address that was spammed to death.
Well, I am a satisfied user of Spamgourmet.com. This site has a nice little stat: 91% of the email it gets is spam. And therefore destroyed.
Granted, spamgourmet addresses are disposable and are generally given to mail-order web sites or other web-based suppliers, who are likely to spam you or to refuse to ever take you off their mailing lists (which is also unwanted mass mailing, hence spam). So it's hard to generalize this example to the whole Internet.
Still, it's a rather sobering amount. So the 40% figure is prolly optimistic indeed.
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I believe that when you talk about free products given away to generate sales, you are talking about songs played on radio? Or is there another angle I am not seeing here?
In marketing terms, I'd say that the goodwill and recognition generated by the free stuff given away by the studios is more than counterbalanced by the consumer annoyance generated otherwise (inane copy protection for instance).
Good point about MP3 clips being played more often than bootleg e-books. It takes hours of assiduous reading to "use" an ebook, while you can listen to an MP3 in 3 mins while reading /., indeed.
I do think that the studios need the same kind of customer-friendly marketing and appeal as Baen. Instead of treating every listener like a potential criminal, the studios ought to give away MP3s of a few titles that they own and don't generate much revenue anymore, then allow people to download and burn CDs (not MP3) on demand, especially for older releases you won't find easily in stores. Some manufacturers even had planned a kiosk sitting in malls, on a fast link, where you could actually insert your credit card, select songs and burn them in a few minutes as high-quality redbook CD Audio files. The studios killed the project for, in my opinion, totally irrational reasons.
Also, if the CD prices went back to Canadian levels (about $11) instead of the current $18, the incentive for CD burning would be lower, generating more impulse sales. The studios' price fixing is killing the whole industry.
But said industry represents less than $10 billion. Compare with the $600B IT industry. Microsoft or IBM could buy every studio and barely miss the cash. So I violently object to the notion that the music industry should dictate DRM terms to the IT industry, especially when these terms fly in the face of the necessary protection of customers' rights.
There are many more reasons why the RIAA is one of the most vilified organizations in the US. Look, Baen doesn't send the police after students. They don't buy a law that trample the 4th Amendment and then use it against people who are merely suspect.
As for differences between digital copies of audio and books, you are right. However, consider that someone who loves a band will actually go out and buy their CDs, often on the mere recommendation of other fans, even if they already own MP3s of the songs. They value the physical object, the cover art, etc. A fan who has the disposable income and loves the band will fork out the $18 and buy the CD. If the disposable income is not there, then the guy is not a potential customer anyway.
Of course, this presupposes that there are bands and artistst that can gather a real fan audience and that aren't mere disposable products of a targetted marketing. If the studios had their way, we'd all be buying tepid crap.
So of course, casual listeners will just as well listen to the MP3. But please note that casual readers would just borrow the book!
Would the RIAA people please look at the sales figure of Baen and get a freakin' clue?
And that, my friend, is the root of the problem. It is braindrain that is happening NOW, not colonialism four decades ago, that is the most damaging trend to Africa today.
African countries and families spend a disproportionate amount of money in education. It's common in some African countries to have families get into bad debts just so that a few of their boys can get a good education. And in return, do these kids work in their country, contributing to increasing economic activity? Heck no. They flee and go work abroad as fast as they can.
And who could blame them? The article is talking about work conditions and salary. But there is more. Look at the infrastructure -- water, road, electricity, and public services -- that us Westerners take for granted in our developed coutnries. It represents about 4 to 6 years of GNP. In other words, each person in a Western country enjoys about half a million dollar worth of infrastructure. This is a unimaginable boon to most Africans.
Once, in Senegal, I was discussing the brain drain problem with a few locals. A young French engineer, a volunteer international cooperant, was complaining that he had just spent 18 months teaching maths to 15-20 year old students and that his brightest students all dreamed of either emigrating or becoming politicians -- hardly production-increasing work as far as Senegal was concerned. I asked our old taxi driver what he thought. "You whites want to help us?", he said. "Fine. Build a concrete wall all around Africa. Don't come in, and don't let them youngsters out."
The sad thing is that to this day, this unreasonable idea is still the most practical among the numerous "solutions for Africa" I have heard of. Most of our ideas for "helping Africa" are recipes for disasters.
Minkwe, this is not a flame. I don't have a "solution for Africa". But I doubt that taking the best brains out of the continent is helping. I'd like your opinion as an emigrant, provided you keep a cool head.
It means that CmdrTaco carefully avoids to read his own web site. I guess it speaks volume about what he thinks of the rest of us. :-)
The parade is to dust that older sign saying "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM". Which also has exceptions but hush.
Get the management to contact IBM Services, a branch of Big Blue that make half the revenue of IBM these days. They would be very happy to discuss Linux solutions for the company and will do support as well -- for a price of course.
Then some PHB will notice that since this open source thingy is free and you only pay for service, Joe Schmoe in IT can install and use open source tools if that saves money.... And you win.
"Spaceship Galileo" by Robert A. Heinlein. Yep, a classic. Heinlein wrote one of the very few juvenile SF books that could be enjoyed by adults as well. Allen could have chosen worse.
If they stonewall people who warn them, then publish the exploit. The exploit is out there anyway. It is not "irresponsible publicizing", it's pointing to the naked, hairy, stinking butt of the Emperor. Silencing people who blow the whistle never makes a problem go away.
And mind you, I am one of the poor guys who trott to customer sites when panic erupts.
In 1997, after four years of research, a French cryptographer, Serge Humpich, found a flaw in the widely used French smart card, which requires owners to type a PIN on a payment terminal for all credit card and ATM transactions. He found that 1.the PIN was verified by the chip on the card, 2. some terminals didn't really check what chip they were talking to, and 3. If the chip told the terminal "yes, the PIN is right", the terminal would blindly accept the confirmation and allow the transaction. Such a card is called a "yes-card"
Humpich contacted the Carte Bleue consortium, an association of 200 banks managing the French smart cards, and told them about the flaw. They refused to believe him. So he made a yes-card out of spare parts and went to a Parisian metro station. There, he bought a few metro tickets and send them, along with the payment receipt, to the Carte Bleue people. They immediately contacted the police.
Humpich was arrested in September 1999 and jailed for several months. In 2000, he was given a suspended 10-month jail sentence and a $2600 fine. All his equipment and documentation was confiscated. Now he has a criminal indictment that bars him from a number of jobs.
Of course, the French and US laws are different. But if anything, I suspect a US court will actually be harsher, especially now that the DMCA has been used in several precedents. Heck, the DMCA makes it almost mandatory to jail you if you figure out a way to program your VCR without reading the obviously encrypted documentation!
So I really don't think it's a good idea to show the problem exists. Blackboard knows, the people who selected them as a supplier know, and if you show them that they're effectively slobs, they'll crush you to cover their asses.
Ah, good old time, when mentioning RAID inside a computer room made people man the battle stations and wait for the Vikings.
So you're absolutely welcome to use MB/s or Mb/s.
Thanks for your reply.
I see MBps (mega Byte per second) and Mbps (Mega bit per second). A byte is 8 bits. That's an order of magnitude of difference!
The standardized way of writing this unit is Mbit/s or MByte/s. Don't invent your own, use the standard units.
Subsidizing money-losing corporations with taxpayers' money is the surest way to 1. Destroy jobs that could have been created with the money absorbed in the taxes, 2. Shield bad management from the market and let them perpetuate more bad mgmt; 3. Make sure corporations brownnose politicians but ignore customers.
Competition works. Which is why established corporations always try to legislate their way out of it.
Here is a bit of history to understand why SST never took off in the US.
At the time the Concorde SST was introduced, Boeing lobbied for (and got) legislation that practically forbad SST flights over the US. This was meant to give Boeing time to introduce their own SST. Unfortunately, their SST project was cancelled, and this stupid legislation is still in place.
Anyone who ever took a "red-eye" night flight from California to the East Coast would kill for halving the duration of that painful flight. But repelling that law would require greasing too many palms.
And of course, without that piece of the market, the future of SST is questionable.
If you think legal mingling in the IT industry is bad (DMCA comes to mind), rest assured it's nothing compared to the stomach-churning lobbying that routinely takes place in the aerospace and air transportation industries.
It's still quite troublesome that a whole cottage industry has popped up to actually offer automoatic reboots on Windows machines.
Some people seem to resent Microsoft for being successful. I resent them for mass-selling an unreliable product creating problems that *I* have to fix.
... And that title is reboot monkey.
Oh, so your college had a 370 background? Then I am not surprised that the AIX operating system of the SP2 was a complete mystery for them. The sysops were probably using MVS or VM, which are totally different from AIX/Unix.
You're on something here. Yes, that's a good analogy. Only, the technology is bleeding edge. I mean, have you seen the insanely huge processor plate in a zSeries mainframe? One 5x5 inch ceramic plate, 20 processors, goobles of cache, a dozen dedicated I/O processors, gigabytes per second of bandwidth, and the instruction flow in each processor is executed in parallel by two CPUs, and the instruction is redone in case the output disagree (which happens only if a solar flare or stray alpha particle is hitting your CPU). Try that on your spanking new Linux cluster and see how well it works during a solar storm in a high altitude location such as Denver.
Real mainframers don't light their cheap cigarettes themselves. They just turn off the air cooling unit until a few processors glow a cherry red.
SP2s are actually Unix machines (RS/6000) packaged as a cluster. This ain't no mainframe, this is a modern Unix machine.
A student with a modicum amount of Unix experience and the root password could have RTFM and installed PVM in a few days. I am afraid that your college was just as clueless as most colleges.
I am not positive about the 900 W. It is around this value, though.
It's about bloody time that the "hotter sun" concept breaks into the mainstream. That's what I have been repeating over and over about the reason why the best computer climatology models fail to reproduce known climating history, and hence prove their uselessness. It's because they are based on a "solar constant" (about 900 W/m2 at equatorial peak if I remember correctly) but the solar output is not a constant.
(Hey, sounds like this old Murphy's law of programming: "Constants aren't".)
Two years ago, the Science magazine carried a paper explaining how researchers examined sediments in Yutacan and proved that solar output increase, with a cycle of about 208 years, forced a drought on the Maya that was probably the last straw and destroyed their empire. Findings are correlated with other data. See "Solar Forcing of Drought Frequency in the Maya Lowlands" by David Hodell et.al. Very important paper for anyone who wants to understand climatology.
You'll have to rely on your die hard geeks, because even thirld-world countries ultimately will go digital and spectrum compression. For one good reason: after a while, it will be cheaper. Just as today, a CD player is much cheaper than an analog 33RPM pick-up table, whether it's in Bamako or in Tokyo.
Also, I believe there are no plans to digitize or compress short wave transmissions.
Right now, that's true. But you can bet that this will not stay true for very long. Evety band of the radio spectrum becomes increasingly crowded. Just wait until every gadget on Earth has its own transmitter. The spectrum will be full of spread-spectrum bursts that will make regular analog transmissions absolutely impossible, because all you'll pick will be interferences. The only way to get any signal over the waves will be to have a digital receiver-transmitter.
I've seen and enjoyed Jimmy Neutron. Good animated. But hardly sound science. All it has done is convince me that all aliens want from Earthling is to sacrifice them to their god Poultra. So if I ever see one of these whacos broadcasting a signal that could betray Earth's position, I'll personally hack his transmitter into bits. :-)
Actually, it's not naivete, it's careful reasoning. Let me explain.
I don't think it's necessary to assume a civilization will have "buttoned up" their transmission. All I am saying is that we'll not be able to tell them apart from noise.
To understand this, take a look at radio technology here on Earth.
What we observe on earth is that after about a century of radiotransmissions, we have advanced the use of spectrum to the point where most new applications are using compression and frequency-hopping. Older applications (e.g. regular analog TV broadcast) are getting phased out. It's safe to estimate that in another 30 years, spectrum will be so scarse that no uncompressed broadcast will be allowed. Compression and frequency-hopping remove repetitive patterns in signal and spread it over the available spectrum. Such transmissions look like noise.
So from the point of view of an alien, our future broadcasts will look more and more like noise (due to compression) and less and less like patterned, artificial transmissions. You can say that from 1900 to 2050, Earth will obviously broadcast artificial signal. Before that, zilch. After that, noise undistinguishable from the radio noise of, say, Jupiter.
Now assume you are alien Zorg on planet X at N light-years from Earth. You run a SETI-like program to find intelligent broadcast sent from the vicinity of our star. To have any chance, you have only a very limited time frame: Years 1900+N to 2050+N.
That is a very thin period of time in the history of things. Chinese and Egyptians have a 4000-year old history, and any advance civilization will also have a very long history. Yet, the very nature of radio broadcast gives you a mere 150-year sliver during which a SETI-like program has any chance of success.
If there is any advanced civilization within a few hundred light years, chances are they already went waaay past the spectrum compression stage and that by the time we started SETI, all we could pick is noise-like.
Now, if you can find a mistake in these assumptions, feel free to pinpoint them.
Angle_slam, I am a satisfied user of SpamGourmet.com ( described here) and sneakemail.com ( described here). My favorite is SG and I really want to help it getting well known (it is free and open-source too).
My experience: sneakemail is good for one-time communications or automated services. It creates addresses that are a random string, and this jumble of letters and numbers is very hard to memorize or to simply dictate over the phone.
So you should never use sneakemail for generating email addresses that are also account names (e.g., sites such as amazon that identify you through your email address), because you'll not be able to remember them. Also, don't use them to give to people over the phone.
Spamgourmet allows you to pick a user name and then to create addresses of the form word1.word2.username@spamgourmet.com, with a possible extra prefix to avoid dictionary attacks. So if your user name is Joe6Pack, and sleazy.com wants you to register, give them something like sleazy.reg.Joe6Pack@spamgourmt.com that you'll be able to remember and that will be easy to trace. If sleazy.com starts spamming you, you just disable the address.
I tried several disposable services, and my favorite are spamgourmet and sneakemail, in that order.
Make sure you pick a new, secret, never used address to forward the emails received by these services.
Did I mention I have absolutely ZERO spam since I started using these services? Of course I had to get rid of my old address that was spammed to death.
Well, I am a satisfied user of Spamgourmet.com. This site has a nice little stat: 91% of the email it gets is spam. And therefore destroyed.
Granted, spamgourmet addresses are disposable and are generally given to mail-order web sites or other web-based suppliers, who are likely to spam you or to refuse to ever take you off their mailing lists (which is also unwanted mass mailing, hence spam). So it's hard to generalize this example to the whole Internet.
Still, it's a rather sobering amount. So the 40% figure is prolly optimistic indeed.