A good point, but it doesn't really invalidate the idea of whitelisting personal e-mail addresses. As someone mentioned above, spam is an economic problem. If the only e-mail addresses that weren't using whitelisting were business e-mail addresses (a small fraction of the total e-mail addresses out there) then it would no longer be profitable to send spam.
Unfortunately, coffee-shop type places will still probably have a much higher percentage of campers. Coffee shops tend to have more comfortable chairs and tables than, for example, restaurants which is more condusive to using wi-fi.
If this impacts a coffee shop's business negatively, then I can see one of three things happening:
Owners will have to start closely monitoring for campers and start asking people to leave. All it takes it a few false accusations, though, and it could be even worse for their sales. People don't like being treated as criminals.
Owners will start blocking wifi signals. I believe I remember reading somewhere that movie theatres could use aluminum-style wallpaper to block cell phone signals and I'm betting that the same thing could be used to block ubiquitous wifi. You still have glass, though, which I don't think there's any way to block.
Owners will be able to purchase wifi "blockers" which would transmit continuous static on all the bands that a wifi signal uses. Since these frequencies are unlicensed and as long as they didn't exceed the power output on their signal that's defined by the FCC, I don't even think there would be anything illegal about this or even anything you could do to stop it. Naturally, someone is going to end up living right next door to a shop doing this and not be able to use their own wi-fi in their own apartment. This is when the lawyers will step in.
SBC may be opening up a completely different can of worms, actually. There are several apartment buildings within a block of SBC park (I live in one of them). If people were smart, they'll just subscribe to SBC park's service and use it instead of cable modem or DSL.
This would, of course, depend on if any ports are blocked and what the uptime is. I could imagine, for example, that when the park's closed, they turn it off.
...and the $20/month option is a hell of a lot cheaper than DSL. You can bet your ass I'll be getting an omni-directional antenna and hooking it up to my wifi link to see if I can see this hotspot and what the quality is like.
I've always felt that wireless was the way to go rather than rolling DSL out to everyone. I'll be paranoid and use SSL-enabled e-mail and then I should be good to go.
Yes, this is exactly what they have been doing. ISPs keep track of what IP address is assigned to you when you log in. They also keep track of when you sign in and when you sign out (and give up that IP address).
So it's pretty easy to ask "who had IP address xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx at 12:32 AM on March 10th?" and get an answer.
I like to consider myself one of the middle-of-the-road type of people, but alternative fuels is an interest of mine. I wanted to mention two that might interest you enough to do a little reading on.
First is solar chimneys. Essentially you build a transparent dome with a tall (like a mile tall) chimney in the middle. The sun heats the air which forces up the chimney and generates power using wind. Because the ground (e.g. asphalt) soaks up heat (and if you'd lived in Phoenix like I had, you'd believe it) it supposedly generates power 24/7.
The other is ethanol, which I've read can be produced from corn and probably other bio-mass type materials. The good thing about it is that it's liquid which means we have the infrastructure to transport it (like we do gasoline) and it's renewable. Ethanol could be used in fuel cells to generate electricity for electric cars.
I guess what it really boils down to is one: how far can your car go before you have to stop and refuel/recharge/whatever, and two: how many dollars does it cost me to go a mile. I don't know if rechargeable battery type cars are really the way to go here, I think people are just "stuck" on the idea for some reason. Powering a car by electricity isn't a bad idea, but using batteries to do it isn't going to work.
I actually got an e-mail a few days ago about this "beta test". While I'm all for it and realize that it does provide Phillips useful feedback on their product, I just wanted to point out that the beta test portion of it is really a beneficial side-effect of what they're after.
The actual reason Phillips is doing this is to get people to fill out the very detailed survey regarding what you look for in a portable storage device like the one they're beta testing. They ask what features are important to you, what price you're willing to pay, and other information that's much more valuable to them than the manufacturing cost of 50 or 100 units.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for this (after all, I filled the survey out), but let's realize that they're not trying to give 50 or 100 units away to geeks, they're really just trying to decide where to invest research and development.
I'd like to take a step back from the specifics of who was selling mod chips for which game system and look at the big picture of what's happening here.
Microsoft doesn't want mod-chips to be sold for probably one basic reason: they lose money on the sale of the X-Box unit itself. If someone uses a mod-chip to use the box to run, for example, Linux, then they get a very cheap PC and Microsoft doesn't make any money back on game sales. If someone uses the mod chip to play pirated/burned games, then, again, they lose money on pirated game sales. This is *why* they don't want people using mod-chips. I'm not saying it's right or wrong, I'm just giving their motivation.
If all anyone ever did with mod chips was to run linux, then I doubt Microsoft/DoJ would really care; the small number of people that do this wouldn't make it worth their time to track them down.
However, probably the majority of people using mod chips are also playing pirated games, and this is worth Microsoft/DoJ trying to stop. Everyone knows that it's really not possible to do this. Someone overseas can sell the mod chips and there's not much that Microsoft/DoJ can do about it.
In the long run, I think most games are going to move to more a subscription-based architechture (like Everquest or something similar) where you pay a small fee (or nothing at all) to get the game itself, but you have to pay to actually play it by connecting to a company's servers. I think this is actually a good model because it would encourage companies to constantly provide new content (new quests in role-playing games, new race tracks in racing games, new landscape flight games, etc.). It would also save consumers from paying $70 for the latest uber-game only to play it for 10 hours and put it aside, never to be touched again. If you got bored with a game, you could just cancel your subscription.
This is actually a trend caused by software/music/movie piracy in general. When all music becomes trivial to copy for free, then the producers of music will have to charge for services (i.e. rock concerts). Movie producers will have to provide movie theatres with large screens and great sound systems (they already do this). Game producers will have to provide a live and changing gamescape.
Slashdot Mirror
A good point, but it doesn't really invalidate the idea of whitelisting personal e-mail addresses. As someone mentioned above, spam is an economic problem. If the only e-mail addresses that weren't using whitelisting were business e-mail addresses (a small fraction of the total e-mail addresses out there) then it would no longer be profitable to send spam.
Unfortunately, coffee-shop type places will still probably have a much higher percentage of campers. Coffee shops tend to have more comfortable chairs and tables than, for example, restaurants which is more condusive to using wi-fi.
If this impacts a coffee shop's business negatively, then I can see one of three things happening:
SBC may be opening up a completely different can of worms, actually. There are several apartment buildings within a block of SBC park (I live in one of them). If people were smart, they'll just subscribe to SBC park's service and use it instead of cable modem or DSL.
This would, of course, depend on if any ports are blocked and what the uptime is. I could imagine, for example, that when the park's closed, they turn it off.
...and the $20/month option is a hell of a lot cheaper than DSL. You can bet your ass I'll be getting an omni-directional antenna and hooking it up to my wifi link to see if I can see this hotspot and what the quality is like. I've always felt that wireless was the way to go rather than rolling DSL out to everyone. I'll be paranoid and use SSL-enabled e-mail and then I should be good to go.
Yes, this is exactly what they have been doing. ISPs keep track of what IP address is assigned to you when you log in. They also keep track of when you sign in and when you sign out (and give up that IP address).
So it's pretty easy to ask "who had IP address xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx at 12:32 AM on March 10th?" and get an answer.
I like to consider myself one of the middle-of-the-road type of people, but alternative fuels is an interest of mine. I wanted to mention two that might interest you enough to do a little reading on.
First is solar chimneys. Essentially you build a transparent dome with a tall (like a mile tall) chimney in the middle. The sun heats the air which forces up the chimney and generates power using wind. Because the ground (e.g. asphalt) soaks up heat (and if you'd lived in Phoenix like I had, you'd believe it) it supposedly generates power 24/7.
The other is ethanol, which I've read can be produced from corn and probably other bio-mass type materials. The good thing about it is that it's liquid which means we have the infrastructure to transport it (like we do gasoline) and it's renewable. Ethanol could be used in fuel cells to generate electricity for electric cars.
I guess what it really boils down to is one: how far can your car go before you have to stop and refuel/recharge/whatever, and two: how many dollars does it cost me to go a mile. I don't know if rechargeable battery type cars are really the way to go here, I think people are just "stuck" on the idea for some reason. Powering a car by electricity isn't a bad idea, but using batteries to do it isn't going to work.
I actually got an e-mail a few days ago about this "beta test". While I'm all for it and realize that it does provide Phillips useful feedback on their product, I just wanted to point out that the beta test portion of it is really a beneficial side-effect of what they're after.
The actual reason Phillips is doing this is to get people to fill out the very detailed survey regarding what you look for in a portable storage device like the one they're beta testing. They ask what features are important to you, what price you're willing to pay, and other information that's much more valuable to them than the manufacturing cost of 50 or 100 units.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for this (after all, I filled the survey out), but let's realize that they're not trying to give 50 or 100 units away to geeks, they're really just trying to decide where to invest research and development.
I'd like to take a step back from the specifics of who was selling mod chips for which game system and look at the big picture of what's happening here.
Microsoft doesn't want mod-chips to be sold for probably one basic reason: they lose money on the sale of the X-Box unit itself. If someone uses a mod-chip to use the box to run, for example, Linux, then they get a very cheap PC and Microsoft doesn't make any money back on game sales. If someone uses the mod chip to play pirated/burned games, then, again, they lose money on pirated game sales. This is *why* they don't want people using mod-chips. I'm not saying it's right or wrong, I'm just giving their motivation.
If all anyone ever did with mod chips was to run linux, then I doubt Microsoft/DoJ would really care; the small number of people that do this wouldn't make it worth their time to track them down.
However, probably the majority of people using mod chips are also playing pirated games, and this is worth Microsoft/DoJ trying to stop. Everyone knows that it's really not possible to do this. Someone overseas can sell the mod chips and there's not much that Microsoft/DoJ can do about it.
In the long run, I think most games are going to move to more a subscription-based architechture (like Everquest or something similar) where you pay a small fee (or nothing at all) to get the game itself, but you have to pay to actually play it by connecting to a company's servers. I think this is actually a good model because it would encourage companies to constantly provide new content (new quests in role-playing games, new race tracks in racing games, new landscape flight games, etc.). It would also save consumers from paying $70 for the latest uber-game only to play it for 10 hours and put it aside, never to be touched again. If you got bored with a game, you could just cancel your subscription.
This is actually a trend caused by software/music/movie piracy in general. When all music becomes trivial to copy for free, then the producers of music will have to charge for services (i.e. rock concerts). Movie producers will have to provide movie theatres with large screens and great sound systems (they already do this). Game producers will have to provide a live and changing gamescape.