"How much money does Microsoft spend on each minister. That would be truly embarassing, specially in the US."
Do you see US politicians being embarrased about being bought by Big Corp? I don't. Quite the opposite, actually. The entire cabinet is full of old-boy club members handing out favors to each other. And nobody cares.
"No matter what lies are spread, no matter whether or not you cost anyone any money, it's illegal. Period."
I don't disagree.
However, the RIAA is using their lies (it's the recession and the decline of the relative value of an audio CD compared to things like DVDs) to make the problem appear so serious that their lapdogs in the Senate and Congress come up with these near-fascist bills on a regular basis.
That's why it is important people do not buy into the lies and deception brought forward by the RIAA and their paid lobbyist in the Congress.
It is not black-and-white like the RIAA claims it is.
There're at least three classes of people who download copyrighted music:
1. People who pirate to avoid buying 2. People who pirate, but couldn't afford to buy the music in the first place 3. People who pirate, but also buy music they like
The RIAA in its campaign of half-truths is implying all the people, who download copyrighted music belong to group number 1 and hence all P2P activity is costing them money. That's a complete and utter lie.
They are actually getting MORE money from group number 3 and neither losing or getting more from people in group number 2. Granted there're probably more people in group number 1 than group number 3.
You looked at the wrong stat. You looked at the PAC contributions only. Politicians are bought also by individual contributions...
Top Industries supporting Berman lists TV/Music/Movies as #1 with roughly 25% of all contributions made to the "honorable" Howard L. Berman (for sale for highest bidder).
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill politicians who've been bought
There're a lot of problems with the Universal Remove List (term coined by spamming scum) aka "do-not-call" approach.
Most of them do not allow sitewide opt-out or wildcards.
Most of them only allow number of Email addresses per user (I have an infinite number of potential Email addresses, and at least 25 active ones I use regularly).
A listing in DMA's list expires after a year or two. What sort of bullshit is that?
There is no way in hell there's going to be a "do-not-spam" list that will work, ever.
Still, I think, I'd personally welcome one, if it was managed by a pro-consumer 3rd party (not a.gov office, marketers or spammers) and there was some REAL sanctions on spammers that do not use it.
There's been plenty of examples of Universal Remove Lists ran by spammers (spammingbureau.com, Sanford Wallace had one, Walt Rines had one too, iemmc.org, etc. etc.). All of them are/were fronts set up by spammers to keep an appearance of respectibility.
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill spammers. Remember to shoot knees first, so that they can't run away while you slowly torture them to death
The article quotes a xs4all.nl spokesperson who says xs4all.nl has 14 of its 250 employees dedicated to handling issues relating to spam.
Let's say they get paid at about $15K / year. That's $200K on a single ISP in a single country.
Add the cost of site licenses on spam filtering software used in Europe. Add a fraction of the cost of all IT support people in every business that's connected to the Internet in Europe. Extra hardware costs to store all that junk, etc. etc.
It adds up.
AOL users alone, put together, pay several million USD every month, because of spam (AOL raised their fees by $2 / month sometime last year because of spam related costs).
Proletariat of the world, unite to kil spammers. Remember to shoot knees first, so that they can't run away while you slowly torture them to death
It's stupid in a sense that they're indiscriminently suing their prospectful customers.
I agree that trying to shut down P2P networks is completely ridiculous, and legally questionable tactics. I also agree that suing individuals who are sharing copyrighted mp3s on P2P networks is legally ok. Those people ARE engaging in illegal activity.
However, if RIAA continues on this track, they will eventually totally alienate the very people who spend money on music. Not only that, but the outrageous monetary penalties RIAA is insisting people pay are just grossly unfair. People react badly to unfair treatment of their peers...it's just horrible PR.
Instead of prosecuting they should look into ways of profiting from mp3 sharing. But I guess that's what you get when you have lawyers running the show.
Some of he independent labels and artists seem to have found a goldmine in P2P services. I'm not saying the major labels can do things the same way, but they're not even trying. All they do is have the RIAA parrot the same claims of mp3 sharing hurting sales (and ignoring all studies stating to the contrary). Apple did something, and they had phenomenal success (granted, the longevity of iTunes is yet to be determined). Why aren't the major labels even trying?
They can't possibly think they can intimidate tens of millions of people and get away with it. Or can they? If they do, that's actually pretty scary.
Additionally, RIAA's strategy doesn't at all consider the fact that there are different types of music "pirates": people who pirate to avoid buying, people who pirate to preview music they want to buy, people who pirate but have no plans of buying the music in the first place.
RIAA is losing money only from the first group of "pirates". They actually get MORE money from the 2nd group of people. Yet they claim all music sharing is costing them money. It's typical lobbying tactics, lieing through your teeth and hoping nobody will notice.
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill the RIAA www.boycott-riaa.com
When's the lawsuit against Walmart going to be filed?
I'll put down 7/15/2003.
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill the US Patent Office
Younger folks work faster? Hell no
on
Ageism in IT?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
From the user comments to the BBC article:
"In the IT sector (and coding in particular) younger minds generally work faster."
This is utter bullcrap.
I'm in my early 30s and been doing tech lead (lead teams of 5 - 20 people) for about 2 years now. I've worked with a lot of programmers, young and old. I've supervised, peered and worked under older programmers.
In my experience working faster has nothing whatsoever to do with age. It's everything to do with ability and experience though.
My experience tells me that even if a (really) young person was seemingly working faster, they really aren't, because their lack of experience generally makes them work on the wrong things. They do double the work, work on the wrong things and make more mistakes. That certainly applied to me when I was younger.
This is happening all over the place on the current team I'm managing. The youngest (most inexperienced) people are constantly the people I'm spending most of my time with. The older folks, not only know when to ask for help, but also produce less defects, so their work is much more efficient. They probably type slower though, if that's what "working faster" means...
Sometimes, very rarely though, a youngster can overcome his lack of experience by being truly brilliantly talented. I've had the pleasure of working with a handful of such people. The results these sort of people produce, are nothing short of amazing. Gotta give credit where credit is due. The next time you usually see these people is when they get that corner office with outside view:)
Their trading floor might've been up in no time, but speaking as someone who worked with the Lehman Brothers in WTC on 9/11, I can say some of their other divisions weren't as lucky.
The team I was on lost 2 months worth of work, because it wasn't backed up on a remote site. The version control servers were at WTC.
If it wasn't for a single developer, who had made an unauthorized copy of the project on a floppy, we would've lost much more than just 2 months.
"The only shock here is that someone was dumb enough to think they could get a/16 for only $500."
He wasn't dumb at all. He knew exactly what he was doing, i.e. stealing IP space so that he could send his porn spam and host the porn sites at IP space that wouldn't easily track back to him.
It's just that, in typical spammer fashion, he lied to the reporter who called him about it. And in typical reporter fashion, the reporter believed him without verifying the facts.
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill spammers
Re:Scelson, as all spammers, is a liar
on
I, Spammer
·
· Score: 1
"Someone could say the same about anti-spammers."
If that someone is a spammer, I certainly hope they'd think that.
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill spammers.
Re:Scelson, as all spammers, is a liar
on
I, Spammer
·
· Score: 1
"our sweeping statements of ignorance and promises of murder at the end are totally unwarranted."
It's a.sig, dolt.
From what I gather Scelson claimed he bought the entire AOL subscriber db from AOL. This is not going to happen for any amount of money Scelson can afford. I'm putting my money on Scelson being a liar, especially since he's already been proven, many times, for being one.
oh, and, btw, slashdot is an anti-spammer haven for the same reason the entire Internet is an anti-spammer haven. Study after study states a huge majority of Internet users hate spam, the more experienced Internet user you are, the more likely you're to hate spam and spammers. Why does it then surprise you that a large percentage of slashdotters are anti-spammers?
I've been an Internet user since 1990 or so. I used Internet when there was no spam (to speak of). I've seen what spam attacks do the systems. I also do work that would not exist without the Internet. Damn right I'm an anti-spammer and if I could legally maim spammers, I would.
BTW, there is no such thing as "non-evil spammer". They're all scum. Some are just more polite than others.
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill spammers. Remember to shoot knees first, so that they can't run away while you slowly torture them to death.
Re:Scelson, as all spammers, is a liar
on
I, Spammer
·
· Score: 1
When did spammers start to care about the quality of their lists?
Scelson can claim he has umpteen million AOL addresses and sell spamming services based on that. Suckers will buy his spamming services without asking how fresh the addresses are. That's the whole business plan for spammers: "There's a sucker born every minute."
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill spammers.
Re:Scelson, as all spammers, is a liar
on
I, Spammer
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Read my response to the previous reply.
Also consider this. How much do you think a little weasel like Scelson could've afforded to pay for the customer list? $20K, maybe, if he borrowed money from his stepmom.
AOL would NEVER sell complete (as in without AOL's involvement) access to their most valued asset for anything not in 6-7 figures.
Scelson is putting on a smoke-and-mirrors game trying to confuse people involved so that they won't notice he's a thief, liar and a conman. This is Spammer 101 tactics.
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill spammers
Re:Scelson, as all spammers, is a liar
on
I, Spammer
·
· Score: 1
Because that's not the way the PR game is played.
Here's an explanation of how it is played. Read the whole thread for more insights into how Big Corp's answer to dipshits, like Scelson, who lie in public about them.
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill spammers.
Scelson, as all spammers, is a liar
on
I, Spammer
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
There is NO way he bought the AOL address information from AOL.
One thing to keep in mind when talking with spammers is that they always lie. They lie to themselves ("everything I do is legal", "I am forced to hijack open proxies") and they lie to everyone else ("Here's the information you requested").
The career spammers are, indeed, bold enough to even lie to the US Government, face-to-face. Too bad the US Government is usually totally cluefree when it comes to the spam problem, so these conmen get away with lieing to senators.
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill spammers. Remember to shoot knees first, so that they can't run away while you slowly torture them to death
Who pays for the storage, distribution and cleanup of spamming? Who pays for the bandwidth of open proxies used by the spammers? Who pays for the increased subscriber fees ISPs are charging because of costs attributed to spam?
Not the spammers...They're the freeloading thieves of the Internet.
It might make sense for you to think before hitting that reply button.
Slashdot Mirror
"How much money does Microsoft spend on each minister. That would be truly embarassing, specially in the US."
Do you see US politicians being embarrased about being bought by Big Corp? I don't. Quite the opposite, actually. The entire cabinet is full of old-boy club members handing out favors to each other. And nobody cares.
"No matter what lies are spread, no matter whether or not you cost anyone any money, it's illegal. Period."
I don't disagree.
However, the RIAA is using their lies (it's the recession and the decline of the relative value of an audio CD compared to things like DVDs) to make the problem appear so serious that their lapdogs in the Senate and Congress come up with these near-fascist bills on a regular basis.
That's why it is important people do not buy into the lies and deception brought forward by the RIAA and their paid lobbyist in the Congress.
The WTC type of a terrorist is not the only kind of a terrorist.
The closest example of a terrorist of the kind the article you were responding to describes would be the abortion-clinic murderer(s).
It is not black-and-white like the RIAA claims it is.
There're at least three classes of people who download copyrighted music:
1. People who pirate to avoid buying
2. People who pirate, but couldn't afford to buy the music in the first place
3. People who pirate, but also buy music they like
The RIAA in its campaign of half-truths is implying all the people, who download copyrighted music belong to group number 1 and hence all P2P activity is costing them money. That's a complete and utter lie.
They are actually getting MORE money from group number 3 and neither losing or getting more from people in group number 2. Granted there're probably more people in group number 1 than group number 3.
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill the RIAA
You looked at the wrong stat. You looked at the PAC contributions only. Politicians are bought also by individual contributions...
Top Industries supporting Berman lists TV/Music/Movies as #1 with roughly 25% of all contributions made to the "honorable" Howard L. Berman (for sale for highest bidder).
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill politicians who've been bought
Up to 5 years in prison?
What we need to do is get Berman in prison, that's the real problem here.
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill politicians who've been bought
Please feel free to NOT read my posts, if they so annoy you.
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill morons
There're a lot of problems with the Universal Remove List (term coined by spamming scum) aka "do-not-call" approach.
.gov office, marketers or spammers) and there was some REAL sanctions on spammers that do not use it.
Most of them do not allow sitewide opt-out or wildcards.
Most of them only allow number of Email addresses per user (I have an infinite number of potential Email addresses, and at least 25 active ones I use regularly).
A listing in DMA's list expires after a year or two. What sort of bullshit is that?
There is no way in hell there's going to be a "do-not-spam" list that will work, ever.
Still, I think, I'd personally welcome one, if it was managed by a pro-consumer 3rd party (not a
There's been plenty of examples of Universal Remove Lists ran by spammers (spammingbureau.com, Sanford Wallace had one, Walt Rines had one too, iemmc.org, etc. etc.). All of them are/were fronts set up by spammers to keep an appearance of respectibility.
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill spammers. Remember to shoot knees first, so that they can't run away while you slowly torture them to death
The article quotes a xs4all.nl spokesperson who says xs4all.nl has 14 of its 250 employees dedicated to handling issues relating to spam.
Let's say they get paid at about $15K / year. That's $200K on a single ISP in a single country.
Add the cost of site licenses on spam filtering software used in Europe. Add a fraction of the cost of all IT support people in every business that's connected to the Internet in Europe. Extra hardware costs to store all that junk, etc. etc.
It adds up.
AOL users alone, put together, pay several million USD every month, because of spam (AOL raised their fees by $2 / month sometime last year because of spam related costs).
Proletariat of the world, unite to kil spammers. Remember to shoot knees first, so that they can't run away while you slowly torture them to death
"How precisely is this stupid of them?"
It's stupid in a sense that they're indiscriminently suing their prospectful customers.
I agree that trying to shut down P2P networks is completely ridiculous, and legally questionable tactics. I also agree that suing individuals who are sharing copyrighted mp3s on P2P networks is legally ok. Those people ARE engaging in illegal activity.
However, if RIAA continues on this track, they will eventually totally alienate the very people who spend money on music. Not only that, but the outrageous monetary penalties RIAA is insisting people pay are just grossly unfair. People react badly to unfair treatment of their peers...it's just horrible PR.
Instead of prosecuting they should look into ways of profiting from mp3 sharing. But I guess that's what you get when you have lawyers running the show.
Some of he independent labels and artists seem to have found a goldmine in P2P services. I'm not saying the major labels can do things the same way, but they're not even trying. All they do is have the RIAA parrot the same claims of mp3 sharing hurting sales (and ignoring all studies stating to the contrary). Apple did something, and they had phenomenal success (granted, the longevity of iTunes is yet to be determined). Why aren't the major labels even trying?
They can't possibly think they can intimidate tens of millions of people and get away with it. Or can they? If they do, that's actually pretty scary.
Additionally, RIAA's strategy doesn't at all consider the fact that there are different types of music "pirates": people who pirate to avoid buying, people who pirate to preview music they want to buy, people who pirate but have no plans of buying the music in the first place.
RIAA is losing money only from the first group of "pirates". They actually get MORE money from the 2nd group of people. Yet they claim all music sharing is costing them money. It's typical lobbying tactics, lieing through your teeth and hoping nobody will notice.
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill the RIAA
www.boycott-riaa.com
I'm going to patent the act of inhaling and exhaling gazes using organic devices.
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill the US Patent Office
When's the lawsuit against Walmart going to be filed?
I'll put down 7/15/2003.
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill the US Patent Office
From the user comments to the BBC article:
:)
"In the IT sector (and coding in particular) younger minds generally work faster."
This is utter bullcrap.
I'm in my early 30s and been doing tech lead (lead teams of 5 - 20 people) for about 2 years now. I've worked with a lot of programmers, young and old. I've supervised, peered and worked under older programmers.
In my experience working faster has nothing whatsoever to do with age. It's everything to do with ability and experience though.
My experience tells me that even if a (really) young person was seemingly working faster, they really aren't, because their lack of experience generally makes them work on the wrong things. They do double the work, work on the wrong things and make more mistakes. That certainly applied to me when I was younger.
This is happening all over the place on the current team I'm managing. The youngest (most inexperienced) people are constantly the people I'm spending most of my time with. The older folks, not only know when to ask for help, but also produce less defects, so their work is much more efficient. They probably type slower though, if that's what "working faster" means...
Sometimes, very rarely though, a youngster can overcome his lack of experience by being truly brilliantly talented. I've had the pleasure of working with a handful of such people. The results these sort of people produce, are nothing short of amazing. Gotta give credit where credit is due. The next time you usually see these people is when they get that corner office with outside view
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill ignorance
Read /. :)
Compression does wonders to text files such as source code, btw.
As far as I know, no, he wasn't.
Their trading floor might've been up in no time, but speaking as someone who worked with the Lehman Brothers in WTC on 9/11, I can say some of their other divisions weren't as lucky.
The team I was on lost 2 months worth of work, because it wasn't backed up on a remote site. The version control servers were at WTC.
If it wasn't for a single developer, who had made an unauthorized copy of the project on a floppy, we would've lost much more than just 2 months.
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill terrorism
"The only shock here is that someone was dumb enough to think they could get a /16 for only $500."
He wasn't dumb at all. He knew exactly what he was doing, i.e. stealing IP space so that he could send his porn spam and host the porn sites at IP space that wouldn't easily track back to him.
It's just that, in typical spammer fashion, he lied to the reporter who called him about it. And in typical reporter fashion, the reporter believed him without verifying the facts.
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill spammers
"Someone could say the same about anti-spammers."
If that someone is a spammer, I certainly hope they'd think that.
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill spammers.
"our sweeping statements of ignorance and promises of murder at the end are totally unwarranted."
.sig, dolt.
It's a
From what I gather Scelson claimed he bought the entire AOL subscriber db from AOL. This is not going to happen for any amount of money Scelson can afford. I'm putting my money on Scelson being a liar, especially since he's already been proven, many times, for being one.
oh, and, btw, slashdot is an anti-spammer haven for the same reason the entire Internet is an anti-spammer haven. Study after study states a huge majority of Internet users hate spam, the more experienced Internet user you are, the more likely you're to hate spam and spammers. Why does it then surprise you that a large percentage of slashdotters are anti-spammers?
I've been an Internet user since 1990 or so. I used Internet when there was no spam (to speak of). I've seen what spam attacks do the systems. I also do work that would not exist without the Internet. Damn right I'm an anti-spammer and if I could legally maim spammers, I would.
BTW, there is no such thing as "non-evil spammer". They're all scum. Some are just more polite than others.
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill spammers. Remember to shoot knees first, so that they can't run away while you slowly torture them to death.
When did spammers start to care about the quality of their lists?
Scelson can claim he has umpteen million AOL addresses and sell spamming services based on that. Suckers will buy his spamming services without asking how fresh the addresses are. That's the whole business plan for spammers: "There's a sucker born every minute."
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill spammers.
Read my response to the previous reply.
Also consider this. How much do you think a little weasel like Scelson could've afforded to pay for the customer list? $20K, maybe, if he borrowed money from his stepmom.
AOL would NEVER sell complete (as in without AOL's involvement) access to their most valued asset for anything not in 6-7 figures.
Scelson is putting on a smoke-and-mirrors game trying to confuse people involved so that they won't notice he's a thief, liar and a conman. This is Spammer 101 tactics.
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill spammers
Because that's not the way the PR game is played.
Here's an explanation of how it is played. Read the whole thread for more insights into how Big Corp's answer to dipshits, like Scelson, who lie in public about them.
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill spammers.
There is NO way he bought the AOL address information from AOL.
One thing to keep in mind when talking with spammers is that they always lie. They lie to themselves ("everything I do is legal", "I am forced to hijack open proxies") and they lie to everyone else ("Here's the information you requested").
The career spammers are, indeed, bold enough to even lie to the US Government, face-to-face. Too bad the US Government is usually totally cluefree when it comes to the spam problem, so these conmen get away with lieing to senators.
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill spammers. Remember to shoot knees first, so that they can't run away while you slowly torture them to death
Who pays for the storage, distribution and cleanup of spamming? Who pays for the bandwidth of open proxies used by the spammers? Who pays for the increased subscriber fees ISPs are charging because of costs attributed to spam?
Not the spammers...They're the freeloading thieves of the Internet.
It might make sense for you to think before hitting that reply button.
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill spammers
The f*** they do.
Using them is entirely voluntary.
Or is this yet another attempt to define "free speech" as "speech I like"?
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill spammers