When you pick up the phone to call ATA, what you are doing is harassment. You have nothing to sell them. In fact, you would almost certainly (with few exceptions) not be calling them unless you knew that thousands of your peers would also be calling. You hope that your actions will cause problems for the ATA. You are participating in mob behavior.
This isn't harassment. This is the American People(tm) making a democratic choice to call and offer their First Amendment right to make their voice heard, much like the ATA states that the First Amendment allows them to call us whenever, whereever. Harassment would be if we, oh, set up an autodialer and called them repeatedly with the intent to break the law/perform illegal activities. Again, it would be harassment if we started swearing, threatening, or performing other acts that the law would discriminate as "offensive". Simply calling a business to voice an opinion about something unpopular is by no means harassment.
By contrast, when a telemarketer calls you, they hope to sell you something. They have had success in this activity in the past, otherwise they would not try; the phone call costs money, as does the equipment, space, human resources staff, benefits, management, etc, not to mention the wages of those making the calls. They are not doing this to make you mad. They don't want to interrupt your dinner. If they could catch you at your most inconvenient time, they would. In fact, if they could tell without having to call that you were not interested, they would not make the call.
I don't know about you, but for every telemarkerter that has called me I have always told them (right noff the bat, before their little spiel) that I do not buy anything over the phone and to please remove my name from the list. I then hang up. (BTW, these are the actions one should take to, in theory, be removed from a list. It doesn't always work, however). Has this eliminated calls from telemerketers? Not in the least. As for the dinner comment, if these guys want to invest so much money into equipment and staffing, why not buy a map of the US marked off by area codes? This, with a little research saying that Americans typically eat dinner from, oh, 5:00 PM to 7:30 PM, would allow them to perhaps avoid those area codes during that time. It still gives them three other time zones to mess with at pretty much any given point.
I am not opposed to a Do Not Call list. I am, however, very much opposed to the legislation of said list. And I am opposed to the kind of mob behavior that caused the ATA to disconnect their phone line.
Again, you say mob behavior. This is not mob behavior, again it is the American People making their voice heard. What if 10,000 telemarketers calling tens of thousands of people called? Business? So it's business if you are paid to call people if they don't want to be called, but it is 'mob behavior' for us to call that company and complain?
And don't bother comparing this to calling your congressperson, they are supposed to hear from you and have budgets and staff explicitely for this purpose. Be honest now. If you called the ATA you weren't really trying to give them any information or state an opinion, you just wanted to inconvenience them. You were just happy for an opportunity to retaliate.
Perhaps you are confused. The ATA has a staff dedicated to answering calls such as these. It is called 'Customer Support', and many, if not most, companies have such a department. Their #1 priority is to handle complaints, comments, etc. from customers. And before you say we aren't customers, just remember that the phone ringing with "Unknown" or "Blocked" is due to some company trying to sell you something whether you like it or not. I am a customer, I never buy anything from them, they continue to call me, and I am fed up. It isn't mob behavior. It's me making my voice heard, and until someone abolishes the First Amendment we are more than welcome to do things such as this.
Here at the university I work for we have had the hardest time trying to get students to look at the big picture, how their obsessive game playing, compulsive downloading of music/movies/porn (sorry, I had an exam in psych today and it appears to be showing!) and obvious script kiddie hacks of other web sites slow down the entire internet for everyone.
Any given day we'll get a call from some kid who's complaining that his WarCraft 3, his KaZaA, and his port scanner are running way too slowly and he wants us to fix it NOW!
Basically what it boils down to is this: The network itself belongs to the university and, as such, must fulfill the mission statement as laid out by the university officials. Here at UWP we state very clearly that the internet/network are to be used for official university business only and incidental personal use of the network/internet is OK as long as it doesn't interfere with university business.
P2P does interfere by drawing bandwidth from, say, Financial Aid, who is, at the same time, trying to submit FAFSAs to the Federal Gov't. Students can be very short-sighted, and while I sympathize with them, I can't see why they don't realize that the other 1600 people on the network besides them all are competeing for the same resources. Maybe someday they'll learn.
The open-source program was developed by campus programmers to cut off the file sharing going on among students. Housing officials say the application educates students as it restricts them from peer-to-peer services.
According to this article on dmusic.com, they say that '"The program's authors are trying to keep its exact workings secret to protect against hackers, who may find a way to bypass it."'
Thus, how can the program be open source if the authors are working to protect the inner workings from being hacked?
Here at the University of Wisconsin Platteville, where I work as a Lead Network Consultant, we recently ran into an intra-LAN file sharing app called UWGO (you can find it on SourceForge). We shut it down almost immediately, but an app like ICARUS would help us immensely. I wonder if the University of Florida would be willing to let other schools try this out....
The Milwaukee Journal/Sentinelran a story about becoming the 2nd US city to offer public WI-FI in two downtown parks last week. According to the article, "Randy Gschwind, the city's chief information officer... said the network serves 20 to 40 users before it becomes clogged."
Taking into consideration that Milwaukee is a city of ~600,000 people, that not many are going to have wireless laptops and even fewer are gonna spend time in a park surfing the web, it still seems like 20-40 users clogging a public WI-FI is a bit odd.
I suppose they can't complain, though, since the city paid less than a couple of hundred dollars for the setup. Still, it just seems somewhat pointless if it's gonna be clogged all the time.
Guy #1: "Oh crap...quick, we need NDAs for everyone who has seen that code on Slashdot!"
Guy #2: "Greg, I wouldn't be so worried about Slashdot...we better get our moles at SCO on the ball to make sure they don't see that code we stole from them!"
IMHO, I've always liked ATI more than nVidia. Do I have any particular reason? Not really. I have had both brands of cards in different machines over the years, and both have performed exceptionally well. The kicker for me was customer service. When I had an issue with the GeForce 2 I had at the time, nVidia was less than helpful, didn't respond to my initial e-mails, and, when they did, basically said try a different machine, motherboard, BIOS setting, all the essential busywork that compaines do to try and ostracize customers. When it came to a driver problem I had with my Radeon 9500 Pro, ATI responded to my e-mail the next day, pointed me to a just-released updated driver, and followed up the next week asking if my problem was resolved.
Sometimes compaines don't realize how importnant customer service really is. In this case, I became a life-long ATI fan after it appeared that someone cared for their product.
I noticed that the IChat and other various windows are censored.
I wonder if the screenshots were taken during the pr0n testing phase, or if a desperate wife was trying to "convince" her husband to come home and stop playing with Panther....
...no on has even so far as mentioned Dean Koontz.
The guy is a genius...at least in his earlier works. Check out Lightning, Darkfall, and The Bad Place if nothing else. While I will admit off the bat that they are not "Hacker Books", they will certainly entertain and keep you up all night!
Besides, I saw Stephen "I pump out a book every month" King mentioned and Koontz certainly ranks up there.
Last year, the IRS was going to have e-file available on their website, open to the public and free of charge to those who made less than a minimum income of around $50,000 or so.
Well, Intuit freaked because they claimed that this practice would put the company out of business AND that the governmaent, by doing this, was monopolizing the practice of electronic filing.
The IRS conceded this and allowed Intuit to do the e-file thing on their web site but had to allow for people who made less than a certain income (lowered to $27,000) file for free. Intuit did this, and called it the "Tax Freedom Project". In theory this was perfect: not only did Intuit retain control of the tax e-file system AND the government saved money by not having to purchase/maintain the equipment to run this system. But Intuit, in all their deviousness, decided that they would like to make money, and they couldn't do that as easily if customers could file for free. So here's what they did: They put the huge "Do your taxes" link right on their web page, and buried the Tax Freedom link off to the right under much a smaller font size. Not only did this help to make finding the Tax Freedom Project harder to find, but in order to continue your taxes for free (one had to continue to allow time for the IRS to accept your e-filed return; generally around 72 hours or so) you had to click on another "Continue my return" link that was buried within the Tax Freedom Project page! Clicking on the "Continue my return" link on the Intuit main page then led to irrevrsible charges placed against you for filing. I consider myself somewhat computer-savvy and I fell for this and ended up paying $40.00 for taxes. A call to Intuit's customer service resulted in a "Yeah, well, you should've continued from the Tax Freedom Project page. There is nothing we can do."
Thus, I still won't use Intuit or Quicken anymore since they try so hard to make a penny. It's rediculous!
First, not everyone is going to want to pay $40.00/month for internet, plain and simple. Unless the condo is designed specifically for high-end users, people will probably feel better and more secure paying $40.00/mo. for their own DSL instead of "sharing".
Secondly, 1 T1 for 160 should be more than enough. Even if every unit was full and everyone was online, the chances of being limited to 10kb/sec is very small (unless that one instant came along where all 160 people were downloading at exactly the same time). Also, 10 kb/sec is not slower than a 14.4 modem...a 14.4 modem would only grab at most 3-4 kbps. Ask anyone running a 56k and they'll tell you that the max we can ever pull on a great day is around 10-15 kbps.
Otherwise, except for wanting to "overdo" it technology-wise, your plan is pretty solid.
But the state, known for its Live Free or Die motto, could become the first in the United States to provide legal protection for people who tap into insecure wireless networks.
Just what I want to do...tap into a network that has self-confidence and low self esteem issues...it'd be like my ex all over again...
My dad, the ever-loving penny pincher, has the best rebate story ever:
One day he went grocery shopping and bought a particular brand of coffee simply becasue it had a rebate of $2.00 or something...something so insignificant I wouldn't have bothered.
Well, my dad took the coffee home and reviewed the reabte form. It asked for the usual contact information (name, address, phone, etc.) as well as a prof of purchase.
They didn't elaborate on the proof of purchase requirement, so my dad emptied the coffee can into a plastic bin, went to his workshop, returned with a pair of tin snips, and cut the steel UPC code off of the coffee can!
Six to eight weeks later...
The coffee company sent my dad a letter explaining to him that the receipt was the proof of purchase that was required, but had found my dad as so dilligent as to have cut off the UPC with a pair of tin snips that they gave him the $2.00 as well as five coupons for free coffee.
I still give my dad shit for that to this day. And kudos to Folgers for seeing past the impending dementia of my father!
SP1 for XP was supposed to address the DHCP problem that Microsoft has had with XP Home. Being a tech guy for a college, I can tell you that the DHCP issue was never corrected and people had to end up upgrading to XP Pro or upgrade to 2000 (yes, XP Home to 2000 is an upgrade, IMHO).
I skipped buying TurboTax this year because of the boot sector issue. And I still got hosed....
As you may or may not know, the IRS was going to allow people who made lass than a certain amount of money in 2002 file for free on their website. Intuit complained, citing that they would take a monetary hit because of the loss of people who would otherwise use their software.
So, an agreement of sorts was made: The IRS wouldn't have e-file on their website, but Intuit had to allow people who made less than $27,000 to file for free (see taxfreedom.com). So Intuit did this.
However, here comes the catch: In order to continue your return without paying, you have to click on a small link back at the taxfreedom website. Instead, when people return to turbotax.com, you are greeted with the "Continue your return" link. And guess what? the second you log back in to check the status of your return, you are billed for $30+!
Granted, Intuit does post a small piece of text on taxfreedom.com that states you must continue from this page, but how many people have actually done this? I feel like a fool for falling for Intuit's deception, so I won't be using their product anymore.
It's just so sad that a company has to stoop to such low levels to make a profit these days.
Dear Self:
You know all those things that you're hiding from your parents (report cards, alcohol, drugs, women) so they won't find out?
Well, they already know.
Have a good day!
A lil something in the food, maybe...
on
Soundless Music?
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Those feeling uncomfortable when the concert began, found their mood turning to anger.
Some physical affects were also experienced, including tingling in the back of the neck and a strange feeling in the stomach.
Is it just me, or do you get the feeling that the pre-concert banquet might've been contaminated with something?
Recovering from current external perceptions of Microsoft as a paranoid, untrustworthy, greedy, petty, and politically inept organization will take years.
IMHO, I think that M$ will never be able to recover from these stigmata because M$ refuses to change. For example, I go to the University of Wisconsin Platteville and we aren't going to be able to renew our M$ contract for next year. Why? Because M$ has decided that the amount we paid a few years ago to renew is no longer sufficient even though we have not deployed any new software from them!
Another unfortunate side effect is that fact that the students who were able to purchase software at discounted educational prices are going to be hurt to discover that their licenses won't be valid any longer! So try explaining to a student who knows nothing about computers that the $30 he forked over for Office XP was just wasted.
I wish the article/README had more information in it about using this, how much it's been tested, if any major businesses/power users are using it, etc.
Otherwise, excpet for the lack of available, easily-accessed FAQ and documentation, this sounds like an awesome idea. How many others have this same opinion?
The major problem with spam these days is that "joe user" supports its use.
I know many people who know little to nothing about computers or the internet. They have not yet been jaded by the flashing banners and e-mail spam messages that promise free programs, trips, prizes etc. So they click away, and before you know it they are getting flooded with hordes of unsolicited e-mail. My aunt recently got a warning from her ISP for exceeding her allotted mail box space 17 times last month. I had to write them a nasty e-mail critisizing the lack of filters (even though it was my aunt's fault for posting to a bunch of newsgroups).
I guess the point is this: As long as people who don't know any better keep clicking on banner ads and checking out spam e-mail, the advertising companies are going to keep flooding people with messages. Their point of view is this: As long as we are getting some kind of return on our investment, we might as well continue to exploit this service. People just need to be educated on techniques designed to avoid supporting spammers, whether purposely or inadvertantly.
I just want to know why M$ has such a problem with industry standards. Is it money? Is it so that documents created with their products can only be opened by their products? If so, why does Gates still do this? He's far richer than anyone else.
As mentioned in a previous port, M$ did their own thing with converting Word docs into HTML. I tend to believe that this is going to happen again, this time with XML. I hate to see technology with two parallels: The one that standards boards such as IEEE create, and those that M$ reinvents just to earn a few more bucks. It's disgusting.
Slashdot Mirror
When you pick up the phone to call ATA, what you are doing is harassment. You have nothing to sell them. In fact, you would almost certainly (with few exceptions) not be calling them unless you knew that thousands of your peers would also be calling. You hope that your actions will cause problems for the ATA. You are participating in mob behavior.
This isn't harassment. This is the American People(tm) making a democratic choice to call and offer their First Amendment right to make their voice heard, much like the ATA states that the First Amendment allows them to call us whenever, whereever. Harassment would be if we, oh, set up an autodialer and called them repeatedly with the intent to break the law/perform illegal activities. Again, it would be harassment if we started swearing, threatening, or performing other acts that the law would discriminate as "offensive". Simply calling a business to voice an opinion about something unpopular is by no means harassment.
By contrast, when a telemarketer calls you, they hope to sell you something. They have had success in this activity in the past, otherwise they would not try; the phone call costs money, as does the equipment, space, human resources staff, benefits, management, etc, not to mention the wages of those making the calls. They are not doing this to make you mad. They don't want to interrupt your dinner. If they could catch you at your most inconvenient time, they would. In fact, if they could tell without having to call that you were not interested, they would not make the call.
I don't know about you, but for every telemarkerter that has called me I have always told them (right noff the bat, before their little spiel) that I do not buy anything over the phone and to please remove my name from the list. I then hang up. (BTW, these are the actions one should take to, in theory, be removed from a list. It doesn't always work, however). Has this eliminated calls from telemerketers? Not in the least. As for the dinner comment, if these guys want to invest so much money into equipment and staffing, why not buy a map of the US marked off by area codes? This, with a little research saying that Americans typically eat dinner from, oh, 5:00 PM to 7:30 PM, would allow them to perhaps avoid those area codes during that time. It still gives them three other time zones to mess with at pretty much any given point.
I am not opposed to a Do Not Call list. I am, however, very much opposed to the legislation of said list. And I am opposed to the kind of mob behavior that caused the ATA to disconnect their phone line.
Again, you say mob behavior. This is not mob behavior, again it is the American People making their voice heard. What if 10,000 telemarketers calling tens of thousands of people called? Business? So it's business if you are paid to call people if they don't want to be called, but it is 'mob behavior' for us to call that company and complain?
And don't bother comparing this to calling your congressperson, they are supposed to hear from you and have budgets and staff explicitely for this purpose. Be honest now. If you called the ATA you weren't really trying to give them any information or state an opinion, you just wanted to inconvenience them. You were just happy for an opportunity to retaliate.
Perhaps you are confused. The ATA has a staff dedicated to answering calls such as these. It is called 'Customer Support', and many, if not most, companies have such a department. Their #1 priority is to handle complaints, comments, etc. from customers. And before you say we aren't customers, just remember that the phone ringing with "Unknown" or "Blocked" is due to some company trying to sell you something whether you like it or not. I am a customer, I never buy anything from them, they continue to call me, and I am fed up. It isn't mob behavior. It's me making my voice heard, and until someone abolishes the First Amendment we are more than welcome to do things such as this.
Here at the university I work for we have had the hardest time trying to get students to look at the big picture, how their obsessive game playing, compulsive downloading of music/movies/porn (sorry, I had an exam in psych today and it appears to be showing!) and obvious script kiddie hacks of other web sites slow down the entire internet for everyone.
Any given day we'll get a call from some kid who's complaining that his WarCraft 3, his KaZaA, and his port scanner are running way too slowly and he wants us to fix it NOW!
Basically what it boils down to is this: The network itself belongs to the university and, as such, must fulfill the mission statement as laid out by the university officials. Here at UWP we state very clearly that the internet/network are to be used for official university business only and incidental personal use of the network/internet is OK as long as it doesn't interfere with university business.
P2P does interfere by drawing bandwidth from, say, Financial Aid, who is, at the same time, trying to submit FAFSAs to the Federal Gov't. Students can be very short-sighted, and while I sympathize with them, I can't see why they don't realize that the other 1600 people on the network besides them all are competeing for the same resources. Maybe someday they'll learn.
According to this article on dmusic.com, they say that '"The program's authors are trying to keep its exact workings secret to protect against hackers, who may find a way to bypass it."'
Thus, how can the program be open source if the authors are working to protect the inner workings from being hacked?
Here at the University of Wisconsin Platteville, where I work as a Lead Network Consultant, we recently ran into an intra-LAN file sharing app called UWGO (you can find it on SourceForge). We shut it down almost immediately, but an app like ICARUS would help us immensely. I wonder if the University of Florida would be willing to let other schools try this out....
Taking into consideration that Milwaukee is a city of ~600,000 people, that not many are going to have wireless laptops and even fewer are gonna spend time in a park surfing the web, it still seems like 20-40 users clogging a public WI-FI is a bit odd.
I suppose they can't complain, though, since the city paid less than a couple of hundred dollars for the setup. Still, it just seems somewhat pointless if it's gonna be clogged all the time.
Well hell then, if all it takes is "You have a new message" we could sue Slashdot! I never asked for those $%#$% metamoderation results...
Yes, I am being sarcastic...
Do not taunt happy fun rock. If happy fun rock starts getting hot, turn and walk calmly but quickly towards the nearest bomb shelter...
Guy #1: "Oh crap...quick, we need NDAs for everyone who has seen that code on Slashdot!"
Guy #2: "Greg, I wouldn't be so worried about Slashdot...we better get our moles at SCO on the ball to make sure they don't see that code we stole from them!"
Guy #1: "Oh, I guess you're right...."
Sometimes compaines don't realize how importnant customer service really is. In this case, I became a life-long ATI fan after it appeared that someone cared for their product.
I wonder if the screenshots were taken during the pr0n testing phase, or if a desperate wife was trying to "convince" her husband to come home and stop playing with Panther....
The guy is a genius...at least in his earlier works. Check out Lightning, Darkfall, and The Bad Place if nothing else. While I will admit off the bat that they are not "Hacker Books", they will certainly entertain and keep you up all night!
Besides, I saw Stephen "I pump out a book every month" King mentioned and Koontz certainly ranks up there.
Last year, the IRS was going to have e-file available on their website, open to the public and free of charge to those who made less than a minimum income of around $50,000 or so.
Well, Intuit freaked because they claimed that this practice would put the company out of business AND that the governmaent, by doing this, was monopolizing the practice of electronic filing.
The IRS conceded this and allowed Intuit to do the e-file thing on their web site but had to allow for people who made less than a certain income (lowered to $27,000) file for free. Intuit did this, and called it the "Tax Freedom Project". In theory this was perfect: not only did Intuit retain control of the tax e-file system AND the government saved money by not having to purchase/maintain the equipment to run this system. But Intuit, in all their deviousness, decided that they would like to make money, and they couldn't do that as easily if customers could file for free. So here's what they did: They put the huge "Do your taxes" link right on their web page, and buried the Tax Freedom link off to the right under much a smaller font size. Not only did this help to make finding the Tax Freedom Project harder to find, but in order to continue your taxes for free (one had to continue to allow time for the IRS to accept your e-filed return; generally around 72 hours or so) you had to click on another "Continue my return" link that was buried within the Tax Freedom Project page! Clicking on the "Continue my return" link on the Intuit main page then led to irrevrsible charges placed against you for filing. I consider myself somewhat computer-savvy and I fell for this and ended up paying $40.00 for taxes. A call to Intuit's customer service resulted in a "Yeah, well, you should've continued from the Tax Freedom Project page. There is nothing we can do."
Thus, I still won't use Intuit or Quicken anymore since they try so hard to make a penny. It's rediculous!
First, not everyone is going to want to pay $40.00/month for internet, plain and simple. Unless the condo is designed specifically for high-end users, people will probably feel better and more secure paying $40.00/mo. for their own DSL instead of "sharing".
Secondly, 1 T1 for 160 should be more than enough. Even if every unit was full and everyone was online, the chances of being limited to 10kb/sec is very small (unless that one instant came along where all 160 people were downloading at exactly the same time). Also, 10 kb/sec is not slower than a 14.4 modem...a 14.4 modem would only grab at most 3-4 kbps. Ask anyone running a 56k and they'll tell you that the max we can ever pull on a great day is around 10-15 kbps.
Otherwise, except for wanting to "overdo" it technology-wise, your plan is pretty solid.
Just what I want to do...tap into a network that has self-confidence and low self esteem issues...it'd be like my ex all over again...
One day he went grocery shopping and bought a particular brand of coffee simply becasue it had a rebate of $2.00 or something...something so insignificant I wouldn't have bothered.
Well, my dad took the coffee home and reviewed the reabte form. It asked for the usual contact information (name, address, phone, etc.) as well as a prof of purchase.
They didn't elaborate on the proof of purchase requirement, so my dad emptied the coffee can into a plastic bin, went to his workshop, returned with a pair of tin snips, and cut the steel UPC code off of the coffee can!
Six to eight weeks later...
The coffee company sent my dad a letter explaining to him that the receipt was the proof of purchase that was required, but had found my dad as so dilligent as to have cut off the UPC with a pair of tin snips that they gave him the $2.00 as well as five coupons for free coffee.
I still give my dad shit for that to this day. And kudos to Folgers for seeing past the impending dementia of my father!
SP1 for XP was supposed to address the DHCP problem that Microsoft has had with XP Home. Being a tech guy for a college, I can tell you that the DHCP issue was never corrected and people had to end up upgrading to XP Pro or upgrade to 2000 (yes, XP Home to 2000 is an upgrade, IMHO).
As you may or may not know, the IRS was going to allow people who made lass than a certain amount of money in 2002 file for free on their website. Intuit complained, citing that they would take a monetary hit because of the loss of people who would otherwise use their software.
So, an agreement of sorts was made: The IRS wouldn't have e-file on their website, but Intuit had to allow people who made less than $27,000 to file for free (see taxfreedom.com). So Intuit did this.
However, here comes the catch: In order to continue your return without paying, you have to click on a small link back at the taxfreedom website. Instead, when people return to turbotax.com, you are greeted with the "Continue your return" link. And guess what? the second you log back in to check the status of your return, you are billed for $30+!
Granted, Intuit does post a small piece of text on taxfreedom.com that states you must continue from this page, but how many people have actually done this? I feel like a fool for falling for Intuit's deception, so I won't be using their product anymore.
It's just so sad that a company has to stoop to such low levels to make a profit these days.
Is this a new way to get around the Amazon patent?
In the future, you are going to write to your nerdy, unpopular self.
In the meantime, think of something witty, cuz this sucks!
Later!
Dear Self: You know all those things that you're hiding from your parents (report cards, alcohol, drugs, women) so they won't find out? Well, they already know. Have a good day!
Some physical affects were also experienced, including tingling in the back of the neck and a strange feeling in the stomach.
Is it just me, or do you get the feeling that the pre-concert banquet might've been contaminated with something?
IMHO, I think that M$ will never be able to recover from these stigmata because M$ refuses to change. For example, I go to the University of Wisconsin Platteville and we aren't going to be able to renew our M$ contract for next year. Why? Because M$ has decided that the amount we paid a few years ago to renew is no longer sufficient even though we have not deployed any new software from them!
Another unfortunate side effect is that fact that the students who were able to purchase software at discounted educational prices are going to be hurt to discover that their licenses won't be valid any longer! So try explaining to a student who knows nothing about computers that the $30 he forked over for Office XP was just wasted.
Hell, P2P would be dead if that were the case!
Otherwise, excpet for the lack of available, easily-accessed FAQ and documentation, this sounds like an awesome idea. How many others have this same opinion?
I know many people who know little to nothing about computers or the internet. They have not yet been jaded by the flashing banners and e-mail spam messages that promise free programs, trips, prizes etc. So they click away, and before you know it they are getting flooded with hordes of unsolicited e-mail. My aunt recently got a warning from her ISP for exceeding her allotted mail box space 17 times last month. I had to write them a nasty e-mail critisizing the lack of filters (even though it was my aunt's fault for posting to a bunch of newsgroups).
I guess the point is this: As long as people who don't know any better keep clicking on banner ads and checking out spam e-mail, the advertising companies are going to keep flooding people with messages. Their point of view is this: As long as we are getting some kind of return on our investment, we might as well continue to exploit this service. People just need to be educated on techniques designed to avoid supporting spammers, whether purposely or inadvertantly.
As mentioned in a previous port, M$ did their own thing with converting Word docs into HTML. I tend to believe that this is going to happen again, this time with XML. I hate to see technology with two parallels: The one that standards boards such as IEEE create, and those that M$ reinvents just to earn a few more bucks. It's disgusting.