No offense, but if I were going to pay someone to write software for me, the last guy I would hire is the one who says he wants to "hack" in a language.
"hacking" and systematic software engineering are two completely separate things. Sure, there are occasionally hackers that are good engineers, and vice versa, but I'm not going to hire a guy who wants to "hack" instead of engineer (I have enough hobbyists on my staff already).
Steve Linford is the director of Spamhaus. Steve Linford has absolutely nothing to do with SPEWS, nor would it be feasible for him to run two separate anti-spam organizations. Aside from the madness of doing so, Steve Linford does not agree with the methods and policies of SPEWS. He does however support SPEWS' right to exist.
Does that sound mysteriously like Monty Python to anyone else?
Judith: I've got an idea. Suppose you agree that he can't actually have babies, not having a womb, which is nobody's fault, not even the Roman's, but that he can have the _right_ to have babies.
Francis: Good idea Judith. We shall fight the oppressors for your _right_ to have babies, brother....err....Sister, sorry. ....
Reg: It's symbolic of his fight against reality.
The problem is that those that are too far from a switch for DSL, and aren't covered by cable modems, are still too far from a switch (or on crappy old copper) for 56k.
If it won't be available to those who can't get broadband, what's the point?
There's definitely alot more to all of this than people realize - and it's greatly complicated by the huge variety of users an educational network has (everything from Power User Computer Science teachers to literal 5 year olds).
If you do go for setting up thin-clients, just be dang sure that you have it on a well insulated network, where you're not unintentionally sucking bandwidth outside of the subnet you're working on.
0. I'm not Anti-OSS. I'm now a full time developer on the Linux platform - I'm very pro-Linux. It's good for my job and economic well-being;).
1. RedHat Network isn't absolutely necessary, unless you want to provide a comparable solution to that provided by Microsoft via SMS. In the district I worked for, the technology department was 4 people, servicing well over 5000 machines at 15 different physical locations spread out over about 30 miles geographically. Those four people did everything - including training, writing curriculum, network admin, hardware tech work, grant writing, budgeting, project planning and management, provisioning, purchasing, product evaluation, just-in-time-support, etc, etc...everything...4 people. The need to physically sit at or otherwise control each machine has to be eliminated - remote management, monitoring, and diagnostics are a must.
2. We evaluated thin client solutions, because they do seem to be the ideal answer, but we found them to be lacking for several reasons (any idea what a couple thousand clients can do to bandwidth utilization on a network? any idea how much hell you get if 1 of your terminal servers isn't available, rendering half of a campus unable to work? any idea how miserable it is to work on a remote terminal when bandwidth saturation is above about 70%? there's a reason thin-clients haven't caught on in the real world).
3. While we definitely did have our share of "old hardware," we intentionally spent very little time working with it as it provides very marginal return value for our time - even when it works, people don't want to use it. We started actively refusing most donations of old equipment, as it takes more time to get it and keep it in working order than it's worth - remember - 4 people. We once spent an entire week preparing palettes of old, donated equipment for auction to free up district storage space (there are very strict rules about how you can legally get rid of government owned equipment - just getting rid of the stuff costs more than its worth).
I used to be a technology purchaser for a school district (as a prerequisite to a purchase order being issued for any technology item, I evaluated software and hardware and returned purchase recommendations - including the level of support our technology group could provide for the product - to the academic/administrative department requesting the purchase).
1) Student's aren't doing the network administration unless it's a TINY school where someone has time to oversee it (and where the officials are willing to overlook privacy laws).
2) Larger school districts need the ability to mass-administer their workstations. RedHat Network is a great tool for that, but it runs somewhere in the neighborhood of $40-$50/seat/year in bulk purchase. SMS Server is $118 (one time cost, enterprise wide) and each Windows license will run you under $20 (at least in the State of Texas) through the educational bulk pricing arrangment.
3. Retraining, rewriting curriculum in the application-level courses, etc adds up quickly when you're talking about a couple thousand teachers and thousands of thousands of students.
I used to be a technology purchaser for a school district. In Texas, school districts can purchase the latest edition of Windows for somewhere around $26. Office goes for somewhere under $30. SMS (to do system management) runs $118.
RedHat Network is $60/"entitlement" (retail) or something like $50/"entitlement" (bulk purchase). Plus you have to retrain the entire population of the school who have used computers at home or other places of business, then you have to find state-approved curriculum that is generic enough to work well with Linux (it's much more difficult to teach a business applications course when all your textbooks cover Access and Excel and you only have mySQL and Gnumeric).
If school districts are honest up front about paying for their licenses, it is indeed cheaper to go the Microsoft route - hands down. When we Open-Sourcers start volunteering our services at our local schools, then their might be a competition.
Does the massive distribution of music via any means (most notably internet file sharing) increase or decrease sales of the same music? It DOES NOT MATTER from a legal and/or philosophical aspect.
If I manufacture widgets, and they are the best widgets in the world, and I own the IP on them, I have every right NOT to sell or distribute them, and to decide how they are sold and distributed, regardless of whether or not that increases or decreases my profit (a case can be made that certain things, for example, medicines are exempt from this claim...but music is clearly not necessary in the same way that advances in health care are).
My point is simply that the big argument about whether file sharing increases or decreases sales of the music in question is a moot point: the owner of the IP in that music still has the right to decide how that property should be distributed and sold.
The idea that music is property at all would have seemed bizarre 200 years ago, and maybe it will be seen that way in future.
The idea that music could be recorded onto a physical medium and sold for money in the free market would have been bizarre and absurd 200 years ago. That doesn't make the fact that music can be recorded and sold any less true now; nor does it make the fact that music is (or should be) considered property any less true or false now.
Times change, so must our assertions about the world we live in.
Yeah, P2P is causing their problems. Sure, sure it is.
Must I continually point out that it DOESN'T MATTER if P2P loses revenue for the record companies - P2P file sharing is still (in most instances) WRONG.
I'm so sick of hearing people whine and moan about how P2P should be considered legal because the record companies don't lose money because of it (typically followed by an argument that illustrates that the industry has sold more music since filesharing that before).
I'll say it again: IT DOES NOT MATTER.
Philosophically, this is called an "appeal to a complex argument," and it's considered a logical fallacy.
Let me give a more blatent example:
Suppose you own a really nice bicycle, but you only ride it from 5-6pm. Now suppose someone from down the street comes and "borrows" your bicycle from 7:30-8:00pm, and returns it in pristine condition...you can't tell it's been used. Their borrowing of the bicycle without your permission is still WRONG. The bicycle is your property, and they used it without your permission. You could even take it a step further and say that it would still have been wrong if they left a $5 bill on the seat, because they still used it without your permission.
We, a crowd of people of whom many make their living generating intellectual property, should understand that.
Music is simply property. If you use it without the owner's permission, it's wrong.
Are they cutting off their own noses by disallowing P2P sharing? I think they are in alot of cases. But it's their noses to be cut off.
I've heard countless people make the argument that filesharing of copyrighted material shouldn't be illegal because the CDs sell more when they are shared (and thus the owners of the copyright make more money).
That is a classic argument of the logical fallacy "assertion by complex argument".
For example:
I could make the argument that open source developers would make more money if everyone charged a $10 license fee, therefore all open source developers should be mandated to charge a $10 license fee.
Obviously there's something wrong with that argument. The two assertions (that developers would make more money and that developers should be mandated to charge license fees) are completely unrelated. So what if the developer would make more money? That has NOTHING to do with whether or not he should be required to do so.
In the same way, whether CD companies/artists would make more money (or sell more CDs) if they allowed their music to be shared is a totally disconnected assertion to the "file sharing should be legal" assertion. The copyright owner owns the material, and so it is his decision what to do with that material....regardless.
Now, if a copyright holder tries to sue Napster for direct damages the holder would have to prove that Napster cost them money. But the copyright laws provide for penalties that are not direct damages, and those are applicable whether the copyright holder makes less money or not.
Spam works simply because the marginal cost of 1 additional email is so low that the marginal gain of 1 additional email sent will ALWAYS be greater (which means that some kind of nation-wide policy like this stands a chance at fixing the situation by raising the marginal cost of email).
For example....
Suppose I do television advertising. As I buy more and more advertising, I come closer and closer to saturating my potential market with exposure to my advertisement. Say I'm buying advertisements during sitcoms. For each add I buy, I reach fewer people who have yet to be exposed to my advertisement than the last ad that I ran. Thus the marginal value of each ad I purchase goes down, while the cost remains equal (all other factors equal).
That means that eventually I will reach a point where the marginal cost of the ad is greater than the marginal value. At that point, I'll start losing money on the campaign, and quit running the ad.
Now, let's look at spam....
Each exposure still costs some finite amount of money. The difference is that the cost is TINY compared with television advertising. Suppose I spend $1,000 on a co-located server and the associated bandwidth (a totally arbitrary number). That server can probably send literally millions (if not billions) of emails in the month that my $1,000 paid for. It's obvious that the marginal cost of the spam campaign is TINY compared to the marginal cost of the television ad campaign.
That means that the spam campaign takes MUCH MUCH longer. Indeed, as the marginal cost of the spamming approaches zero (which it gets very close to), the number of mails it takes to reach the point where marginal cost = marginal value approaches infiniti (which means you won't ever stop sending mail).
It's simple economics. The only way to lessen spam (from a purely free-market standpoint) would be to increase the marginal cost of the email (or decrease the marginal value, but that's not going to happen, because there's always an idiot out there that can be scammed into sending you a $5 check). Increasing the marginal cost of the email could be done in lots of ways - but they mostly all involve giving up some of the freedoms which we're probably not willing to give up in exchange for freedom from some spam.
If he does get arrested for this, which I think he should not, the following trial may prove one thing: The DMCA is (partially) unconstitutional. I think enough people would voice their opinion that it would herald a major change.
While I agree in spirit with this comment, I think you miss an important point:
A Court is the entity which may strike down laws based on their unconstitutionality. Courts are (at least in theory) not swayed by public opinion.
If you want to deal with an organization that is intentionally swayed by public opinion, then you need to be speaking about Congress. That's where we citizens can go to have laws (regardless of their constitutionality) changed.
The Economics of Spam....
on
Spam Doesn't Work?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
If Spam didn't work, why do I get a hundred pieces of it every morning?
Spam works simply because the marginal cost of 1 additional email is so low that the marginal gain of 1 additional email sent will ALWAYS be greater.
For example....
Suppose I do television advertising. As I buy more and more advertising, I come closer and closer to saturating my potential market with exposure to my advertisement. Say I'm buying advertisements during sitcoms. For each add I buy, I reach fewer people who have yet to be exposed to my advertisement than the last ad that I ran. Thus the marginal value of each ad I purchase goes down, while the cost remains equal (all other factors equal).
That means that eventually I will reach a point where the marginal cost of the ad is greater than the marginal value. At that point, I'll start losing money on the campaign, and quit running the ad.
Now, let's look at spam....
Each exposure still costs some finite amount of money. The difference is that the cost is TINY compared with television advertising. Suppose I spend $1,000 on a co-located server and the associated bandwidth (a totally arbitrary number). That server can probably send literally millions (if not billions) of emails in the month that my $1,000 paid for. It's obvious that the marginal cost of the spam campaign is TINY compared to the marginal cost of the television ad campaign.
That means that the spam campaign takes MUCH MUCH longer. Indeed, as the marginal cost of the spamming approaches zero (which it gets very close to), the number of mails it takes to reach the point where marginal cost = marginal value approaches infiniti (which means you won't ever stop sending mail).
It's simple economics. The only way to lessen spam (from a purely free-market standpoint) would be to increase the marginal cost of the email (or decrease the marginal value, but that's not going to happen, because there's always an idiot out there that can be scammed into sending you a $5 check). Increasing the marginal cost of the email could be done in lots of ways - but they mostly all involve giving up some of the freedoms which we're probably not willing to give up in exchange for freedom from some spam.
You may or may not want to go with something as "different" as SmallTalk - but with ST, the IDE itself runs in the same heavyweight proc as the code you're writing (different lightweight procs). As you develop, you actually "mold" the process image itself into the application you are building. It's VERY powerful as far as extensibility (because you can mold the runtime process image to anything you want it to be, and that includes the IDE).
It's VERY portable. Object Engines (similar in concept to the Java Virtual Machine...and actually a precursor to the JVM) are available for virtually any platform (Win, Mac, all kinds of *nixes, BeOS, Palm, PocketPC, etc, etc, etc). With a tiny bit of careful development, your app will run on any platform for which there is an OE.
Cincom has a non-commerical version of their SmallTalk VisualWorks, which is quite cool.
Unfortunately, Lucas Film is once again playing "dictatorial information protector." We were asked to avoid questions directly pertaining to either Episode II or III.
I agree that it's not the same situation, but for a much more important reason.
In the Ford/Firestone situation, people's lives were potentially in immediate danger.
I've been a sysadmin. I know that dealing with the Nimda of the week can be a royal pain in the butt, but in now way is it fair to compare a security weakness in a piece of software
with the Ford/Firestone affair.
I'll also agree that it's possible that there is some pretty dang important information being stored/manipulated/otherwise dealt with by the software. If it's potentially life threatening, hire some good architects, developers, and support staff, and do it yourself.
I've seen several flicks on this screen (I live/work right down Central Expressway from it), and I used to be a projectionist in a small, analog only theatre (well...we got digital sound in 1 house right after I quit).
I must say, the digital (inexplicably) looks WAY WAY better. I know that in theory the analog film should be better, but the fact is, it isn't.
It just takes 1 dumb projectionist to hose a print for the rest of the print's run (hehe..oddly enough, we used to make fun of Cinemark projectionists...the one in competition with us didn't have projectionists, they had concessionaires that knew how to thread up a box...we had a real projectionist for every 6 screens that babysat the boxes for every minute they were on).
Man I wish I had some mod points...this post would get one!
I still don't understand how a bunch of supposed software peeps don't get this....ohwell..buhbye karma.
It's interesting that I haven't read any posts from anyone claiming that their method of VPNing has been actually disabled.
Having spent a significant amount of time working for a (smaller) ISP, I can tell you that there are many, many people out there who want their residential-class internet service to do business-type things. That's great and fine from the ISPs point of view, so long as it doesn't cost the ISP more money (or resources) to allow the residential user to do so.
What happens all too often is that residential-class customers who aren't capable of supporting themselves call the support line expecting tons of help on business-type services (web design, VPN setup, scripting support, etc).
These customers also tend to demand (understandably) a much higher uptime percentage, much "cleaner" throughput, etc.
Providing this type of support and service guarantees costs the ISP money.
The result is that many ISPs add clauses like this to their Terms of Service simply so that when a customer calls with a problem that is obviously business-related, they can inform them that those services aren't supported on their residential account. This allows the ISP to actually recoup the cost of the additional support.
At least in the case of my former ISP employer, we never would have actually disabled anyone's VPN service, but we sure weren't willing to provide support to residential customers who didn't have the knowledge to set it up themselves, so we included such clauses in our Terms of Service.
Slashdot Mirror
No offense, but if I were going to pay someone to write software for me, the last guy I would hire is the one who says he wants to "hack" in a language.
"hacking" and systematic software engineering are two completely separate things. Sure, there are occasionally hackers that are good engineers, and vice versa, but I'm not going to hire a guy who wants to "hack" instead of engineer (I have enough hobbyists on my staff already).
Steve Linford is the director of Spamhaus. Steve Linford has absolutely nothing to do with SPEWS, nor would it be feasible for him to run two separate anti-spam organizations. Aside from the madness of doing so, Steve Linford does not agree with the methods and policies of SPEWS. He does however support SPEWS' right to exist.
....
Does that sound mysteriously like Monty Python to anyone else?
Judith: I've got an idea. Suppose you agree that he can't actually have babies, not having a womb, which is nobody's fault, not even the Roman's, but that he can have the _right_ to have babies.
Francis: Good idea Judith. We shall fight the oppressors for your _right_ to have babies, brother....err....Sister, sorry.
Reg: It's symbolic of his fight against reality.
The problem is that those that are too far from a switch for DSL, and aren't covered by cable modems, are still too far from a switch (or on crappy old copper) for 56k.
If it won't be available to those who can't get broadband, what's the point?
Hehe...
There's definitely alot more to all of this than people realize - and it's greatly complicated by the huge variety of users an educational network has (everything from Power User Computer Science teachers to literal 5 year olds).
If you do go for setting up thin-clients, just be dang sure that you have it on a well insulated network, where you're not unintentionally sucking bandwidth outside of the subnet you're working on.
0. I'm not Anti-OSS. I'm now a full time developer on the Linux platform - I'm very pro-Linux. It's good for my job and economic well-being ;).
1. RedHat Network isn't absolutely necessary, unless you want to provide a comparable solution to that provided by Microsoft via SMS. In the district I worked for, the technology department was 4 people, servicing well over 5000 machines at 15 different physical locations spread out over about 30 miles geographically. Those four people did everything - including training, writing curriculum, network admin, hardware tech work, grant writing, budgeting, project planning and management, provisioning, purchasing, product evaluation, just-in-time-support, etc, etc...everything...4 people. The need to physically sit at or otherwise control each machine has to be eliminated - remote management, monitoring, and diagnostics are a must.
2. We evaluated thin client solutions, because they do seem to be the ideal answer, but we found them to be lacking for several reasons (any idea what a couple thousand clients can do to bandwidth utilization on a network? any idea how much hell you get if 1 of your terminal servers isn't available, rendering half of a campus unable to work? any idea how miserable it is to work on a remote terminal when bandwidth saturation is above about 70%? there's a reason thin-clients haven't caught on in the real world).
3. While we definitely did have our share of "old hardware," we intentionally spent very little time working with it as it provides very marginal return value for our time - even when it works, people don't want to use it. We started actively refusing most donations of old equipment, as it takes more time to get it and keep it in working order than it's worth - remember - 4 people. We once spent an entire week preparing palettes of old, donated equipment for auction to free up district storage space (there are very strict rules about how you can legally get rid of government owned equipment - just getting rid of the stuff costs more than its worth).
I used to be a technology purchaser for a school district (as a prerequisite to a purchase order being issued for any technology item, I evaluated software and hardware and returned purchase recommendations - including the level of support our technology group could provide for the product - to the academic/administrative department requesting the purchase).
1) Student's aren't doing the network administration unless it's a TINY school where someone has time to oversee it (and where the officials are willing to overlook privacy laws).
2) Larger school districts need the ability to mass-administer their workstations. RedHat Network is a great tool for that, but it runs somewhere in the neighborhood of $40-$50/seat/year in bulk purchase. SMS Server is $118 (one time cost, enterprise wide) and each Windows license will run you under $20 (at least in the State of Texas) through the educational bulk pricing arrangment.
3. Retraining, rewriting curriculum in the application-level courses, etc adds up quickly when you're talking about a couple thousand teachers and thousands of thousands of students.
I used to be a technology purchaser for a school district. In Texas, school districts can purchase the latest edition of Windows for somewhere around $26. Office goes for somewhere under $30. SMS (to do system management) runs $118.
RedHat Network is $60/"entitlement" (retail) or something like $50/"entitlement" (bulk purchase). Plus you have to retrain the entire population of the school who have used computers at home or other places of business, then you have to find state-approved curriculum that is generic enough to work well with Linux (it's much more difficult to teach a business applications course when all your textbooks cover Access and Excel and you only have mySQL and Gnumeric).
If school districts are honest up front about paying for their licenses, it is indeed cheaper to go the Microsoft route - hands down. When we Open-Sourcers start volunteering our services at our local schools, then their might be a competition.
I'm so very sick of reading this argument....
Does the massive distribution of music via any means (most notably internet file sharing) increase or decrease sales of the same music? It DOES NOT MATTER from a legal and/or philosophical aspect.
If I manufacture widgets, and they are the best widgets in the world, and I own the IP on them, I have every right NOT to sell or distribute them, and to decide how they are sold and distributed, regardless of whether or not that increases or decreases my profit (a case can be made that certain things, for example, medicines are exempt from this claim...but music is clearly not necessary in the same way that advances in health care are).
My point is simply that the big argument about whether file sharing increases or decreases sales of the music in question is a moot point: the owner of the IP in that music still has the right to decide how that property should be distributed and sold.
The idea that music is property at all would have seemed bizarre 200 years ago, and maybe it will be seen that way in future.
The idea that music could be recorded onto a physical medium and sold for money in the free market would have been bizarre and absurd 200 years ago. That doesn't make the fact that music can be recorded and sold any less true now; nor does it make the fact that music is (or should be) considered property any less true or false now.
Times change, so must our assertions about the world we live in.
Yeah, P2P is causing their problems. Sure, sure it is.
Must I continually point out that it DOESN'T MATTER if P2P loses revenue for the record companies - P2P file sharing is still (in most instances) WRONG.
I'm so sick of hearing people whine and moan about how P2P should be considered legal because the record companies don't lose money because of it (typically followed by an argument that illustrates that the industry has sold more music since filesharing that before).
I'll say it again: IT DOES NOT MATTER.
Philosophically, this is called an "appeal to a complex argument," and it's considered a logical fallacy.
Let me give a more blatent example:
Suppose you own a really nice bicycle, but you only ride it from 5-6pm. Now suppose someone from down the street comes and "borrows" your bicycle from 7:30-8:00pm, and returns it in pristine condition...you can't tell it's been used. Their borrowing of the bicycle without your permission is still WRONG. The bicycle is your property, and they used it without your permission. You could even take it a step further and say that it would still have been wrong if they left a $5 bill on the seat, because they still used it without your permission.
We, a crowd of people of whom many make their living generating intellectual property, should understand that.
Music is simply property. If you use it without the owner's permission, it's wrong.
Are they cutting off their own noses by disallowing P2P sharing? I think they are in alot of cases. But it's their noses to be cut off.
I've heard countless people make the argument that filesharing of copyrighted material shouldn't be illegal because the CDs sell more when they are shared (and thus the owners of the copyright make more money).
That is a classic argument of the logical fallacy "assertion by complex argument".
For example:
I could make the argument that open source developers would make more money if everyone charged a $10 license fee, therefore all open source developers should be mandated to charge a $10 license fee.
Obviously there's something wrong with that argument. The two assertions (that developers would make more money and that developers should be mandated to charge license fees) are completely unrelated. So what if the developer would make more money? That has NOTHING to do with whether or not he should be required to do so.
In the same way, whether CD companies/artists would make more money (or sell more CDs) if they allowed their music to be shared is a totally disconnected assertion to the "file sharing should be legal" assertion. The copyright owner owns the material, and so it is his decision what to do with that material....regardless.
Now, if a copyright holder tries to sue Napster for direct damages the holder would have to prove that Napster cost them money. But the copyright laws provide for penalties that are not direct damages, and those are applicable whether the copyright holder makes less money or not.
My point is simply that even if they do it totally legally, it's profitable, and makes sound economic sense.
...and I'll say it again....
Spam works simply because the marginal cost of 1 additional email is so low that the marginal gain of 1 additional email sent will ALWAYS be greater (which means that some kind of nation-wide policy like this stands a chance at fixing the situation by raising the marginal cost of email).
For example....
Suppose I do television advertising. As I buy more and more advertising, I come closer and closer to saturating my potential market with exposure to my advertisement. Say I'm buying advertisements during sitcoms. For each add I buy, I reach fewer people who have yet to be exposed to my advertisement than the last ad that I ran. Thus the marginal value of each ad I purchase goes down, while the cost remains equal (all other factors equal).
That means that eventually I will reach a point where the marginal cost of the ad is greater than the marginal value. At that point, I'll start losing money on the campaign, and quit running the ad.
Now, let's look at spam....
Each exposure still costs some finite amount of money. The difference is that the cost is TINY compared with television advertising. Suppose I spend $1,000 on a co-located server and the associated bandwidth (a totally arbitrary number). That server can probably send literally millions (if not billions) of emails in the month that my $1,000 paid for. It's obvious that the marginal cost of the spam campaign is TINY compared to the marginal cost of the television ad campaign.
That means that the spam campaign takes MUCH MUCH longer. Indeed, as the marginal cost of the spamming approaches zero (which it gets very close to), the number of mails it takes to reach the point where marginal cost = marginal value approaches infiniti (which means you won't ever stop sending mail).
It's simple economics. The only way to lessen spam (from a purely free-market standpoint) would be to increase the marginal cost of the email (or decrease the marginal value, but that's not going to happen, because there's always an idiot out there that can be scammed into sending you a $5 check). Increasing the marginal cost of the email could be done in lots of ways - but they mostly all involve giving up some of the freedoms which we're probably not willing to give up in exchange for freedom from some spam.
If he does get arrested for this, which I think he should not, the following trial may prove one thing: The DMCA is (partially) unconstitutional. I think enough people would voice their opinion that it would herald a major change.
While I agree in spirit with this comment, I think you miss an important point:
A Court is the entity which may strike down laws based on their unconstitutionality. Courts are (at least in theory) not swayed by public opinion.
If you want to deal with an organization that is intentionally swayed by public opinion, then you need to be speaking about Congress. That's where we citizens can go to have laws (regardless of their constitutionality) changed.
If Spam didn't work, why do I get a hundred pieces of it every morning?
Spam works simply because the marginal cost of 1 additional email is so low that the marginal gain of 1 additional email sent will ALWAYS be greater.
For example....
Suppose I do television advertising. As I buy more and more advertising, I come closer and closer to saturating my potential market with exposure to my advertisement. Say I'm buying advertisements during sitcoms. For each add I buy, I reach fewer people who have yet to be exposed to my advertisement than the last ad that I ran. Thus the marginal value of each ad I purchase goes down, while the cost remains equal (all other factors equal).
That means that eventually I will reach a point where the marginal cost of the ad is greater than the marginal value. At that point, I'll start losing money on the campaign, and quit running the ad.
Now, let's look at spam....
Each exposure still costs some finite amount of money. The difference is that the cost is TINY compared with television advertising. Suppose I spend $1,000 on a co-located server and the associated bandwidth (a totally arbitrary number). That server can probably send literally millions (if not billions) of emails in the month that my $1,000 paid for. It's obvious that the marginal cost of the spam campaign is TINY compared to the marginal cost of the television ad campaign.
That means that the spam campaign takes MUCH MUCH longer. Indeed, as the marginal cost of the spamming approaches zero (which it gets very close to), the number of mails it takes to reach the point where marginal cost = marginal value approaches infiniti (which means you won't ever stop sending mail).
It's simple economics. The only way to lessen spam (from a purely free-market standpoint) would be to increase the marginal cost of the email (or decrease the marginal value, but that's not going to happen, because there's always an idiot out there that can be scammed into sending you a $5 check). Increasing the marginal cost of the email could be done in lots of ways - but they mostly all involve giving up some of the freedoms which we're probably not willing to give up in exchange for freedom from some spam.
You may or may not want to go with something as "different" as SmallTalk - but with ST, the IDE itself runs in the same heavyweight proc as the code you're writing (different lightweight procs). As you develop, you actually "mold" the process image itself into the application you are building. It's VERY powerful as far as extensibility (because you can mold the runtime process image to anything you want it to be, and that includes the IDE).
It's VERY portable. Object Engines (similar in concept to the Java Virtual Machine...and actually a precursor to the JVM) are available for virtually any platform (Win, Mac, all kinds of *nixes, BeOS, Palm, PocketPC, etc, etc, etc). With a tiny bit of careful development, your app will run on any platform for which there is an OE.
Cincom has a non-commerical version of their SmallTalk VisualWorks, which is quite cool.
I wish I had a video of Chiang's reaction to that question ;).
Unfortunately, Lucas Film is once again playing "dictatorial information protector." We were asked to avoid questions directly pertaining to either Episode II or III.
Everyone post here. Whomever is modded up to 5 and down to -5 the most times takes over. Pretty simple, and democratic.
I agree that it's not the same situation, but for a much more important reason.
In the Ford/Firestone situation, people's lives were potentially in immediate danger.
I've been a sysadmin. I know that dealing with the Nimda of the week can be a royal pain in the butt, but in now way is it fair to compare a security weakness in a piece of software with the Ford/Firestone affair.
I'll also agree that it's possible that there is some pretty dang important information being stored/manipulated/otherwise dealt with by the software. If it's potentially life threatening, hire some good architects, developers, and support staff, and do it yourself.
I've seen several flicks on this screen (I live/work right down Central Expressway from it), and I used to be a projectionist in a small, analog only theatre (well...we got digital sound in 1 house right after I quit). I must say, the digital (inexplicably) looks WAY WAY better. I know that in theory the analog film should be better, but the fact is, it isn't. It just takes 1 dumb projectionist to hose a print for the rest of the print's run (hehe..oddly enough, we used to make fun of Cinemark projectionists...the one in competition with us didn't have projectionists, they had concessionaires that knew how to thread up a box...we had a real projectionist for every 6 screens that babysat the boxes for every minute they were on).
It looks like they will be watching the return percentage to see how many people have problems with their CDs....
If we really wanted to get people's attention, we would all buy one or two or three and return them.
Man I wish I had some mod points...this post would get one! I still don't understand how a bunch of supposed software peeps don't get this....ohwell..buhbye karma.
Heck yeah.
:)
Our sales guys have it figured out: DONUTS!
Then, when they come in asking a dev for a new feature for a potential new client, they just remind us of the DONUTS!
It's interesting that I haven't read any posts from anyone claiming that their method of VPNing has been actually disabled.
Having spent a significant amount of time working for a (smaller) ISP, I can tell you that there are many, many people out there who want their residential-class internet service to do business-type things. That's great and fine from the ISPs point of view, so long as it doesn't cost the ISP more money (or resources) to allow the residential user to do so.
What happens all too often is that residential-class customers who aren't capable of supporting themselves call the support line expecting tons of help on business-type services (web design, VPN setup, scripting support, etc).
These customers also tend to demand (understandably) a much higher uptime percentage, much "cleaner" throughput, etc.
Providing this type of support and service guarantees costs the ISP money.
The result is that many ISPs add clauses like this to their Terms of Service simply so that when a customer calls with a problem that is obviously business-related, they can inform them that those services aren't supported on their residential account. This allows the ISP to actually recoup the cost of the additional support.
At least in the case of my former ISP employer, we never would have actually disabled anyone's VPN service, but we sure weren't willing to provide support to residential customers who didn't have the knowledge to set it up themselves, so we included such clauses in our Terms of Service.