So you can't see the difference between a person sending unsolicited advertisements to your personal address and a person actively participating in illegal file trading and discovering that some of those files aren't what they seemed to be?
Huh? Of course I can. Actually, I can't even see the similarity.
What I don't see is the difference between a person sending unsolicited advertisements and a person sending unsolicited mp3s. And don't try to tell me that the mp3s are solicited. What is solicited is the mp3 of the song, not someone asking me what the fuck I'm doing. Just like what is solicited when I put my email address on slashdot is personal email, not viagra advertisements.
The only difference is that the victim in the mp3 case is breaking the law. But you can't use that to separate the two, unless you're going to legalize vigilante justice.
Nonsense. Spam gets in by filter evasion tactics, which should be prosecuted and punished as heavily as any other form of computer cracking.
Are you kidding me? Most people don't even have a filter set up. Even for those that do, it's going to be really hard to prove that the filter was evaded intentionally.
If I set up a filter that only allows http access from IP addresses which start with "17", and you access my web page with such an IP address, have you engaged in filter evasion?
It's pretty hard to build a universal trust model when you're trafficking in an illegal product. In fact, it's pretty much impossible. You'd have to have anonymity and accountability at the same time, over a digital network. It's basically anonymous e-cash, one of the holy grails of the internet.
On the other hand, it might be legal to distribute a list of MD5 checksums of legitimate songs. Then you could have some accountability, at least.
But what have you done wrong? First of all, you didn't download the copyrighted song, you downloaded a bunch of blank air. Secondly, the RIAA offered it to you. Wouldn't that constitute an implied license?
Well first I PAY to have an Internet connection, I do not however, pay for the mail that gets sent to me - thats the mailers responsibility.
Some people pay for the mail that gets sent to them.
Also it seems a bit more personal being intruded upon in your own home, than having something sitting in your physical mailbox outside on the step, or the entryway to your building.
Oh please. You choose to download the spam. Are you intruding upon me in my own home, when I read your slashdot post?
Personally I think snail mail is far more wasteful in terms of actual resources, I just don't directly pay for it and I don't get as much of it and I can recycle it, but the time I spend sifting through hundreds of ridiculous spam emails a day impacts me more directly.
How do you "directly" pay for email spam? The only difference is you happen to get more email spam than snail mail. It takes a lot more time, per piece, to deal with snail mail spam.
Email spam cost us money and bandwidth on our end, bulk mail dont.
No, you have your reasoning backward. Email spam doesn't cost us money any more than bulk mail does. Sure, if it fills up our pipe, or mailbox, we have to get a bigger pipe, or mailbox.
But the real difference between bulk mail and email spam is that the sender isn't paying any money. If the USPS delivered postal mail for free, it would be exactly the same situation.
Forgive me, but I've just got to rant for a moment. Is it just me or does it seem that no one has been able to come up with an original idea for the last 20 years. It seems like I can't go a week without hearing about some game, movie or cartoon being "re-envisioned" by some post-gen-x hack that either: thinks that they genuinely have something to contribute to the meme (but never do), or more often, are purely motivated by a whorish greed to make another pile of cash off of a previously established money-maker.
The fine gentleman from Texas displays his outstanding grasp of statistics and engineering stating that 1 failure in ever 62.5 flights is NOT acceptable.
Only if you believe that the only reason for a corporation to exist is to make money.
Of course it is. To do otherwise would be illegal, and the shareholders would sue.
Granted, I'm talking about a publically held corporation. I'm certainly not talking about a non-profit.
There are some coporations that exist to serve some other end. For those corporations, profit is simply a necesity to keep the coporation in existence. Volvo come to mind as a corporation which claims to be intent on providing the best cars possible -- with profit claimed to be a fallout from the intention.
I'd like to see the corporate charter for Volvo. Somehow I doubt it's mission is to provide the best cars possible. But hey, you live and learn.
Actually I'd personally say it's the credit card company and Earthlink's problem. They should get a better authentication system. Why hassle the taxpayer with paying to solve what is essentially a monetary issue? But that's just my crazy opinion.
I spend an hour of personal time dealing with spam (either deleting it or entering it into my filters), and a full third of my business day dealing with it - yes - three hours EVERY DAY.
You should probably come up with a better solution, now, shouldn't you?
I work film projection, and almost all 16x9 movies have viewable image out to 4:3 - the 16:9 area is cropped out from the rest of the frame in the projection process.
I used to work in film projection, and most of the movies were anamorphic or hard-matted. Only the cheapest ones were soft-matted (cropped out at the time of the projection process).
That said, one time a film was out of frame so you could see the bottom part, and it became aware that some of the "naked" female actors were actually just wearing low-cut strapless bras.
The Washington Post reports that Earthlink is preparing to offer new spam filter technology that requires sender authentication.
I guess earthlink customers can't sign up for a slashdot account.
This solution won't work until webmasters realize that providing an email address is no more evidence that you are not a troll than providing a driver's licence is that you are not a terrorist.
I never said anything about mega profits. The fact that you can make any profit at all with a mom and pop store is an inefficiency in the marketplace. Online retailers have helped to remove that inefficiency.
One, especially in regards to computers, you can meet people in the area who are involved in the industry, and networking never hurts, even at the inflated cost of a few bucks per item.
A few bucks is not what I'm worried about. As I said, "I'd gladly shop at a mom and pop B&M if they had even slightly higher prices than stores on the web. But they never do."
Two, it supports your local economy, which may sound far fetched but is more important than you may think.
I'd rather support my local economy by supporting my own economy. The more money I have, the more time and money I can give to my community. If I wanted to help out mom and pop, they'd get a lot more out of it if I just handed them a couple bucks rather than wasting a couple bucks on a product they're selling. I'd rather have my money spent on bricks and mortar to build affordable housing than on bricks and mortar to build a store.
Also, IME, the more often you go to a m&p shop for your smaller needs, the more willing they are to give you a discount on larger ticket items, etc.
So I pay $2 extra 100 times just so I can get a $200 discount the 101st time which brings the price down to that which I can get on the web already anyway? That's bullshit, and it directly conflicts with your assertion that mom and pop couldn't lower prices without annihilating their profit.
For a crowd that complains about mega-corporations, this is a fantasic way to act locally in support of your ideals.
I don't have a problem with mega-corporations per se. I have a problem with the behavior of some of them. But I don't see how buying from mom and pop supports my ideals.
If a mega-corp charges $1 less than mom and pop, that mega-corp makes $0.10 profit, and mom and pop make $0.05 profit, wouldn't I be better off saving the $1 and using it to fight the mega-corp directly?
Slashdot Mirror
If everyone started using that, the RIAA would just start marking lots of legitimate files as fakes.
So you can't see the difference between a person sending unsolicited advertisements to your personal address and a person actively participating in illegal file trading and discovering that some of those files aren't what they seemed to be?
Huh? Of course I can. Actually, I can't even see the similarity.
What I don't see is the difference between a person sending unsolicited advertisements and a person sending unsolicited mp3s. And don't try to tell me that the mp3s are solicited. What is solicited is the mp3 of the song, not someone asking me what the fuck I'm doing. Just like what is solicited when I put my email address on slashdot is personal email, not viagra advertisements.
The only difference is that the victim in the mp3 case is breaking the law. But you can't use that to separate the two, unless you're going to legalize vigilante justice.
When you download a song you are choosing to receive that file and it's contents.
And the RIAA is sending a different file and contents.
Spam is sent to you without request.
No it isn't. It's only sent to me when I hit "receive."
Nonsense. Spam gets in by filter evasion tactics, which should be prosecuted and punished as heavily as any other form of computer cracking.
Are you kidding me? Most people don't even have a filter set up. Even for those that do, it's going to be really hard to prove that the filter was evaded intentionally.
If I set up a filter that only allows http access from IP addresses which start with "17", and you access my web page with such an IP address, have you engaged in filter evasion?
It's pretty hard to build a universal trust model when you're trafficking in an illegal product. In fact, it's pretty much impossible. You'd have to have anonymity and accountability at the same time, over a digital network. It's basically anonymous e-cash, one of the holy grails of the internet.
On the other hand, it might be legal to distribute a list of MD5 checksums of legitimate songs. Then you could have some accountability, at least.
What the fuck do you think you are doing?
I'm not sure how you downloading an MP3 and listening to it would count as them "forcing their speech" on you in any country in the world.
But you do understand how you downloading an email and reading it counts as a spammer "forcing their speech" on you? Interesting.
But what have you done wrong? First of all, you didn't download the copyrighted song, you downloaded a bunch of blank air. Secondly, the RIAA offered it to you. Wouldn't that constitute an implied license?
Well first I PAY to have an Internet connection, I do not however, pay for the mail that gets sent to me - thats the mailers responsibility.
Some people pay for the mail that gets sent to them.
Also it seems a bit more personal being intruded upon in your own home, than having something sitting in your physical mailbox outside on the step, or the entryway to your building.
Oh please. You choose to download the spam. Are you intruding upon me in my own home, when I read your slashdot post?
Personally I think snail mail is far more wasteful in terms of actual resources, I just don't directly pay for it and I don't get as much of it and I can recycle it, but the time I spend sifting through hundreds of ridiculous spam emails a day impacts me more directly.
How do you "directly" pay for email spam? The only difference is you happen to get more email spam than snail mail. It takes a lot more time, per piece, to deal with snail mail spam.
Email spam cost us money and bandwidth on our end, bulk mail dont.
No, you have your reasoning backward. Email spam doesn't cost us money any more than bulk mail does. Sure, if it fills up our pipe, or mailbox, we have to get a bigger pipe, or mailbox.
But the real difference between bulk mail and email spam is that the sender isn't paying any money. If the USPS delivered postal mail for free, it would be exactly the same situation.
Sheesh, it's a joke. I mean, flamebait? Who's going to start a flamewar over this?
Forgive me, but I've just got to rant for a moment. Is it just me or does it seem that no one has been able to come up with an original idea for the last 20 years. It seems like I can't go a week without hearing about some game, movie or cartoon being "re-envisioned" by some post-gen-x hack that either: thinks that they genuinely have something to contribute to the meme (but never do), or more often, are purely motivated by a whorish greed to make another pile of cash off of a previously established money-maker.
The fine gentleman from Texas displays his outstanding grasp of statistics and engineering stating that 1 failure in ever 62.5 flights is NOT acceptable.
In other words, there's no oil in outer space.
Only if you believe that the only reason for a corporation to exist is to make money.
Of course it is. To do otherwise would be illegal, and the shareholders would sue.
Granted, I'm talking about a publically held corporation. I'm certainly not talking about a non-profit.
There are some coporations that exist to serve some other end. For those corporations, profit is simply a necesity to keep the coporation in existence. Volvo come to mind as a corporation which claims to be intent on providing the best cars possible -- with profit claimed to be a fallout from the intention.
I'd like to see the corporate charter for Volvo. Somehow I doubt it's mission is to provide the best cars possible. But hey, you live and learn.
Actually I'd personally say it's the credit card company and Earthlink's problem. They should get a better authentication system. Why hassle the taxpayer with paying to solve what is essentially a monetary issue? But that's just my crazy opinion.
Monetary awards are not the only reason for suing somebody (although going into court without a monetary interest can confuse the best of judges..).
But making or saving money is the only reason for a corporation to sue somebody.
I spend an hour of personal time dealing with spam (either deleting it or entering it into my filters), and a full third of my business day dealing with it - yes - three hours EVERY DAY.
You should probably come up with a better solution, now, shouldn't you?
If they get more money back than was spent on the process, I will be surprised.
If they don't, then they shouldn't have sued in the first place.
The injunction is a good thing because if one of these lowlifes tries spamming again, they can throw him in jail.
You mean this guy was using stolen credit card numbers and identities and he's not in jail already?
Don't you know, when Earthlink collects money, all of its customers save money!
(Oh c'mon, it's no more ridiculous than saying that spam costs the recipient money)
Try looking straight ahead, can you see more up and down or left and right?
That's right, full screen, for the work horse in all of us.
I work film projection, and almost all 16x9 movies have viewable image out to 4:3 - the 16:9 area is cropped out from the rest of the frame in the projection process.
I used to work in film projection, and most of the movies were anamorphic or hard-matted. Only the cheapest ones were soft-matted (cropped out at the time of the projection process).
That said, one time a film was out of frame so you could see the bottom part, and it became aware that some of the "naked" female actors were actually just wearing low-cut strapless bras.
Wow, if they had wireless HDTV, they could put that in the UHF spectrum and free up the VHF spectrum for other uses!
The Washington Post reports that Earthlink is preparing to offer new spam filter technology that requires sender authentication.
I guess earthlink customers can't sign up for a slashdot account.
This solution won't work until webmasters realize that providing an email address is no more evidence that you are not a troll than providing a driver's licence is that you are not a terrorist.
I never said anything about mega profits. The fact that you can make any profit at all with a mom and pop store is an inefficiency in the marketplace. Online retailers have helped to remove that inefficiency.
One, especially in regards to computers, you can meet people in the area who are involved in the industry, and networking never hurts, even at the inflated cost of a few bucks per item.
A few bucks is not what I'm worried about. As I said, "I'd gladly shop at a mom and pop B&M if they had even slightly higher prices than stores on the web. But they never do."
Two, it supports your local economy, which may sound far fetched but is more important than you may think.
I'd rather support my local economy by supporting my own economy. The more money I have, the more time and money I can give to my community. If I wanted to help out mom and pop, they'd get a lot more out of it if I just handed them a couple bucks rather than wasting a couple bucks on a product they're selling. I'd rather have my money spent on bricks and mortar to build affordable housing than on bricks and mortar to build a store.
Also, IME, the more often you go to a m&p shop for your smaller needs, the more willing they are to give you a discount on larger ticket items, etc.
So I pay $2 extra 100 times just so I can get a $200 discount the 101st time which brings the price down to that which I can get on the web already anyway? That's bullshit, and it directly conflicts with your assertion that mom and pop couldn't lower prices without annihilating their profit.
For a crowd that complains about mega-corporations, this is a fantasic way to act locally in support of your ideals.
I don't have a problem with mega-corporations per se. I have a problem with the behavior of some of them. But I don't see how buying from mom and pop supports my ideals.
If a mega-corp charges $1 less than mom and pop, that mega-corp makes $0.10 profit, and mom and pop make $0.05 profit, wouldn't I be better off saving the $1 and using it to fight the mega-corp directly?