It seems entirely reasonable to me, in the first instance, to rule in favour of the spammer.
Spammer: these guys are interfering with my business.
Spamcop: No, we're not.
Judge: Well, just lay off them a bit, while I think about it.
Not it doesn't. Your "conversation" is way out of line. It should be something more like:
Spammer: these guys are interfering with my business.
Spamcop: All the reports we're making are valid, and we're within our rights.
Judge: Well, I'm going to tell you to stop blacklisting him from your own blacklist, even though legally, you should be able to AND GUESS WHAT? I'm also NOT going to tell him to stop sending out fraudulent and/or misleading unsolicited commercial email.
Just do what I've seen on trails before: Put a sign-in book out there.
People can write who they are, where they're going, and when they expect to get there.
The great aspects of this are:
simple
cheap
can provide more information than "3 people walked by on tuesday"
AND the tinfoil hat crowd can CHOOSE not to sign it
I'm pretty sure that Moore's law only applies to cpu speed, not hard drives.
And I'm pretty sure that Moore's Law is not actually a "law". Anyways, it seems to fix pretty well for hard drives, as it has for transistor counts/clock speeds.
It doesn't makes sense to get picky about Moore's law when it was nothing but a SWAG anyways.
What would be interesting is to know the estimated maintenance costs as well. With than many drives, I imagine you'd be changing them like light bulbs, especially as time passes and the probability of each drive failing get's higher and higher.
If one was really clever, they could use the failure rate of a typical hard disk and Moore's Law to estimate monthly replacement costs for the next 100 years or so. I would expect them to rise in the short term as the drives age, but fall in the long term as moore's law catches up.
Transfer memories to Petabox. Sign with your public key, so everyone knows it's you. Don't encrypt!
Don't encrypt! Ye gods man!
I don't know about you, but I have a few things I wouldn't like people to know about, even long after I'm dead.
I mean, let's face it, not all our memories are that flattering.
And anyways, I'm pretty sure some of the memories from my college years are already "encrypted".
No, it's been improving, and ahead of schedule. Word is xbox will profitable sooner than originally expected, due to increased sales and drastically lower production costs. It makes me wonder how much of that includes boxes sold to dorks who think buying xboxes to mod and run linux on "screws microsoft over". It doesnt. An item sold is an item sold.
So if I start buying up gold and selling it for half what I'm paying for it, the more I sell the better?
I don't think so.
As long as the xbox is in active production and you're buying it for less that it cost MS to make it, they're loosing money on the deal (assuming you aren't going to buy games).
I believe it took 3 titles purchased for Microsoft to break even when the XBox was launched. With the reduction in component prices and the increases in manufacturing efficiency, they probably aren't losing much, if any, more than they were when the console was launched.
AFAIK the entire xbox endevor is still in the red, it's just that MS doesn't really care.
The situation reminds me of a quote from the movie Citizen Kane:
"at the rate of a million a year - we'll have to close this place in sixty years."
The xbox has continually been losing money, it's just that MS sees this as "buying in" to the console market. Companies do this all the time, especially large ones who see a particular market as important to their success.
The inconvinience of leaving your house doesn't justify claiming that you were forced to do something, mna. Cope.
You totally missed the point. NOBODY'S CLAIMING THEY WERE "FORCED"!
Obviously you always have a choice.
The debate should not be about whether you have a choice. A MS rep isn't holding a gun to my head frocing me to type this right now, but that doesn't mean MS business practices don't both:
A)Suck ass
and
B)Are illegal
Still, no one "forces" you to use windows, so what's the problem?
(Under this type of stupid logic, it's very hard to do ANYTHING wrong: Sure, I shot you, but no one "forced" you to come to my house.)
This isn't about something becoming obsolete, this is about buying something you know you can't use right now. If you bought a tape, and the guy says "You know that won;t work in your CD player" and you say "Yeah, I know", you have no right to later complain that the tape won't play in your CD player.
No it's not. How the FUCK am I going to buy music with itunes, if I don't have itunes?
This as *absolutely* about being tied to a specfic format and playback hardware.
True. Fairplay LIMITS your right to fair use.
While fairplay doesn't prevent you completely from exercising your fair use rights, it does severely limit them.
Fair use does not gurantee you to the right to a perfect copy.
Actually it does. You have the right to make a perfect digital copy, IF YOU CAN. Playfair makes it so this is possible.
Remind me again how Apple (or anybody) is forcing you to buy music with DRM included?
That's stupid.
Of course no one's FORCING you to buy something.
Even if there was only one place left on the planet to get food, technically you aren't being *forced* to buy food there, as you could always "choose" to starve to death.
I've got an idea, why don't you show me a site where I can legally download major-label music WITHOUT DRM?
I have a hard time having sympathy for someone who knowingly buys something he knows he can't use, and then complains about it.
I knowingly bought tape deck and tapes, knowing that someday CD was going to be coming down the road.
Guess what? There's nothing stopping me from ripping old tapes to mp3 since I now carry an mp3 player instead of a walkman.
If you knowingly buy something that won't work for you, you give up all rights to later complain that it doesn't work based simply on your own stupidity.
When then you're REALLY stupid, because you haven't realized by now that just about ANY format you buy is going to become obsolete and you're either going to convert the info to another format or loose access to it.
Do you really think that in 40 years, you're going to still be able to play these files if you don't convert them to a more portable format? Or are you planning on having you own technological history meuseum in your living room?
Don't forget that it continues to make the community look bad. "See, we made this format so that people could legally download music for a nominal fee and they just keep breaking it so that they can pirate the tunes."
See, but that's stupid. People can already download music for free without playfair.
The only compelling reason for the existence of playfair is so that you can use the music you've legally purchased in whatever format you want. (Maybe you want to buy an Ipaq instead of an ipod for example).
THIS ISN"T ABOUT PIRACY IT'S ABOUT CONTROL.
It's like a "broadcast flag" for music. By claiming it's a pircacy issue, you only HELP the RIAA and hurt those who understand the big picture.
The reason most people buy on eBay is to save money.
Just another point to add here. The reason many people shop on ebay is because they're looking for things they can't find at the mall. I'm perfectly willing to pay an extra few bucks for something like an 80GB hard drive. The thing is, they don't sell replacement windshield wiper switches for an '86 Mazda RX-7 at the mall. THAT'S the type of thing people shop on ebay for.
At least that's what me, and a sizable portion of other people care about. Sure, there are some real chapskates out there willing to risk $200 to get a digicam $10 cheaper than they might at an actual online store, but I believe many of us would be more than happy to pay an extra $5 on even a $20 car part (that would be >$100 at the dealer) just to know we're not going to get ripped off or have to waste a whole bunch of time.
If it's like my cell phone, it's a crippled form of GPS. The phone can receive signals from the GPS constellation but it doesn't have the electronics required to decode and process them. Instead, the GPS data is relayed to the cellular company's cell site, which has the equipment needed to calculate your position.
That's not quite true. The phone has all the electronics necessary to decode GPS, it lacks the software to do so. As an engineer, this annoys the fuck out of me. Everyday, I carray around a device that I *could* use for GPS, but some fuckhead manager decided that only the phone company should be able to tell where I am.
If they didn't do this, then instead of companies paying you in dollars, they could just pay you in "cars" (or something smaller, like bycicles) that you could convert to dollars tax-free. So this really plugs a loophole.
No, because sales tax would have to be paid on the car, bicycle, etc. It might get you out of income tax, but it certanly wouldn't make it tax free.
From the ebay auction:
"The suits are unique because they were built totally out of Hurtubise's mind, with no blueprints, drawings or schematics. "
Excuse me if I pass. I was really looking for a good grizzly bear suit, but how do you expect me to trust this if it's not built under a proper, ISO-9001 certified process?
Seriously, blueprints are a GOOD thing. Without them, you can't do simple things like stress calculations, etc. You kinda want to be able to answer questions like: "If the bear pushed me over and jumped on my chest, would it crush me?" theoretically before you do a real, live test.
If I had to go up against a grizzly bear, I'd rather have nothing but a thong and a Desert Eagle than one of these wacky contraptions.
Sorry if this sounds like flamebait, but the other people invented acutal products while all he did was "Coined the phrase "cyberspace" in the novel "Neuromancer" (1984)"
Did you actually READ any of his books? Gibson could have defined "cyberspace" in one page, but there's more to it than that.
Advancing technology takes not just know-how, but inspiration as well. Gibson's work describes a vision of how humans might one day intereact with technology, one that many would say is quite ahead of his time.
Although he is not in any way directly responsible for the march or Moore's Law, a great number of techies respect him for his vision of what could be achieved with forthcoming technology. His writing speaks more to the "why" than the "how".
Without inspiration and new ideas, all our computers would be doing is computing PI to the bazillionth decimal place. Many inventions that changed the face computing, like the spreadsheet for example, aren't remarkable for their technology as much as their vision.
And what is Mr. Seller's incentive to use this version of Mr. Escrow's service?
The fact that people will do business with him. And proof upfront that I actually have the money to cover the transaction.
What happens if the item disappears?
UPS will have a record of it's delivery/non-delivery.
If you claim to have returned it?
See above.
If everyone used Certifiable delivery of both the money and the goods, that part of the problem would go away escrow or not, but nobody is willing to pay the extra money for certified mail.
I don't think that's a big part of the problem. The problem is that right, now if you use ebay, paypal, and certified mail, you're still fucked if the guy sends you a celeron 600MHz instead of a P4 2.4 GHz. Paypal will not refund your money, ebay won't, and neither will the postal service.
Suffice to say, none of this supports the idea that the government drives the economy in any major way.
Well that's another argument, but one I'm pretty confident you would loose. Even if the gov't didn't make laws which governed the economy or print money, throwing around a "mere" 23% of our nations GDP has a bit of an effect on our economy, much bigger than say, Walmart.
Well for most items, the buyer just isn't going to find it worth it. Are you really going to drop $30-50 in escrow fees on a processor you bought for $100?
No, but I'd be perfectly willing to drop $5.
I (the buyer) send my money to Mr. Escrow. The seller sends me the goods. If I don't like them, I send them back and get my $100 back.
It's not really practical to hold the goods is escrow, just the money.
Slashdot Mirror
That's silly. It's like saying: "The only way to eliminate murder is to make it unprofitable."
It seems entirely reasonable to me, in the first instance, to rule in favour of the spammer.
Spammer: these guys are interfering with my business.
Spamcop: No, we're not.
Judge: Well, just lay off them a bit, while I think about it.
Not it doesn't. Your "conversation" is way out of line. It should be something more like:
Spammer: these guys are interfering with my business.
Spamcop: All the reports we're making are valid, and we're within our rights.
Judge: Well, I'm going to tell you to stop blacklisting him from your own blacklist, even though legally, you should be able to AND GUESS WHAT? I'm also NOT going to tell him to stop sending out fraudulent and/or misleading unsolicited commercial email.
Put a sign-in book out there.
People can write who they are, where they're going, and when they expect to get there.
The great aspects of this are:
I'm pretty sure that Moore's law only applies to cpu speed, not hard drives.
And I'm pretty sure that Moore's Law is not actually a "law". Anyways, it seems to fix pretty well for hard drives, as it has for transistor counts/clock speeds.
It doesn't makes sense to get picky about Moore's law when it was nothing but a SWAG anyways.
So, about $1.3M (10 racks)
What would be interesting is to know the estimated maintenance costs as well. With than many drives, I imagine you'd be changing them like light bulbs, especially as time passes and the probability of each drive failing get's higher and higher.
If one was really clever, they could use the failure rate of a typical hard disk and Moore's Law to estimate monthly replacement costs for the next 100 years or so. I would expect them to rise in the short term as the drives age, but fall in the long term as moore's law catches up.
Transfer memories to Petabox. Sign with your public key, so everyone knows it's you. Don't encrypt!
Don't encrypt! Ye gods man!
I don't know about you, but I have a few things I wouldn't like people to know about, even long after I'm dead.
I mean, let's face it, not all our memories are that flattering.
And anyways, I'm pretty sure some of the memories from my college years are already "encrypted".
No, it's been improving, and ahead of schedule. Word is xbox will profitable sooner than originally expected, due to increased sales and drastically lower production costs. It makes me wonder how much of that includes boxes sold to dorks who think buying xboxes to mod and run linux on "screws microsoft over". It doesnt. An item sold is an item sold.
So if I start buying up gold and selling it for half what I'm paying for it, the more I sell the better?
I don't think so.
As long as the xbox is in active production and you're buying it for less that it cost MS to make it, they're loosing money on the deal (assuming you aren't going to buy games).
I believe it took 3 titles purchased for Microsoft to break even when the XBox was launched. With the reduction in component prices and the increases in manufacturing efficiency, they probably aren't losing much, if any, more than they were when the console was launched.
AFAIK the entire xbox endevor is still in the red, it's just that MS doesn't really care.
The situation reminds me of a quote from the movie Citizen Kane:
"at the rate of a million a year - we'll have to close this place in sixty years."
The xbox has continually been losing money, it's just that MS sees this as "buying in" to the console market. Companies do this all the time, especially large ones who see a particular market as important to their success.
The inconvinience of leaving your house doesn't justify claiming that you were forced to do something, mna. Cope.
You totally missed the point. NOBODY'S CLAIMING THEY WERE "FORCED"!
Obviously you always have a choice.
The debate should not be about whether you have a choice. A MS rep isn't holding a gun to my head frocing me to type this right now, but that doesn't mean MS business practices don't both:
A)Suck ass
and
B)Are illegal
Still, no one "forces" you to use windows, so what's the problem?
(Under this type of stupid logic, it's very hard to do ANYTHING wrong: Sure, I shot you, but no one "forced" you to come to my house.)
This isn't about something becoming obsolete, this is about buying something you know you can't use right now. If you bought a tape, and the guy says "You know that won;t work in your CD player" and you say "Yeah, I know", you have no right to later complain that the tape won't play in your CD player.
No it's not. How the FUCK am I going to buy music with itunes, if I don't have itunes?
This as *absolutely* about being tied to a specfic format and playback hardware.
Fairplay does not deny your right to fair use.
True. Fairplay LIMITS your right to fair use.
While fairplay doesn't prevent you completely from exercising your fair use rights, it does severely limit them.
Fair use does not gurantee you to the right to a perfect copy.
Actually it does. You have the right to make a perfect digital copy, IF YOU CAN. Playfair makes it so this is possible.
Remind me again how Apple (or anybody) is forcing you to buy music with DRM included?
That's stupid.
Of course no one's FORCING you to buy something.
Even if there was only one place left on the planet to get food, technically you aren't being *forced* to buy food there, as you could always "choose" to starve to death.
I've got an idea, why don't you show me a site where I can legally download major-label music WITHOUT DRM?
Then there would be a real alternative.
I have a hard time having sympathy for someone who knowingly buys something he knows he can't use, and then complains about it.
I knowingly bought tape deck and tapes, knowing that someday CD was going to be coming down the road.
Guess what? There's nothing stopping me from ripping old tapes to mp3 since I now carry an mp3 player instead of a walkman.
If you knowingly buy something that won't work for you, you give up all rights to later complain that it doesn't work based simply on your own stupidity.
When then you're REALLY stupid, because you haven't realized by now that just about ANY format you buy is going to become obsolete and you're either going to convert the info to another format or loose access to it.
Do you really think that in 40 years, you're going to still be able to play these files if you don't convert them to a more portable format? Or are you planning on having you own technological history meuseum in your living room?
Don't forget that it continues to make the community look bad. "See, we made this format so that people could legally download music for a nominal fee and they just keep breaking it so that they can pirate the tunes."
See, but that's stupid. People can already download music for free without playfair.
The only compelling reason for the existence of playfair is so that you can use the music you've legally purchased in whatever format you want. (Maybe you want to buy an Ipaq instead of an ipod for example).
THIS ISN"T ABOUT PIRACY IT'S ABOUT CONTROL.
It's like a "broadcast flag" for music. By claiming it's a pircacy issue, you only HELP the RIAA and hurt those who understand the big picture.
It costs the recipient $0.25+ for each call from a payphone. Hit'em where it hurts.
Mod parent up. I believe that it costs them about $0.50 every time you call. One could rack up a very significant phone bill very quickly.
The reason most people buy on eBay is to save money.
Just another point to add here. The reason many people shop on ebay is because they're looking for things they can't find at the mall. I'm perfectly willing to pay an extra few bucks for something like an 80GB hard drive. The thing is, they don't sell replacement windshield wiper switches for an '86 Mazda RX-7 at the mall. THAT'S the type of thing people shop on ebay for.
At least that's what me, and a sizable portion of other people care about. Sure, there are some real chapskates out there willing to risk $200 to get a digicam $10 cheaper than they might at an actual online store, but I believe many of us would be more than happy to pay an extra $5 on even a $20 car part (that would be >$100 at the dealer) just to know we're not going to get ripped off or have to waste a whole bunch of time.
If it's like my cell phone, it's a crippled form of GPS. The phone can receive signals from the GPS constellation but it doesn't have the electronics required to decode and process them. Instead, the GPS data is relayed to the cellular company's cell site, which has the equipment needed to calculate your position.
That's not quite true. The phone has all the electronics necessary to decode GPS, it lacks the software to do so. As an engineer, this annoys the fuck out of me. Everyday, I carray around a device that I *could* use for GPS, but some fuckhead manager decided that only the phone company should be able to tell where I am.
If they didn't do this, then instead of companies paying you in dollars, they could just pay you in "cars" (or something smaller, like bycicles) that you could convert to dollars tax-free. So this really plugs a loophole.
No, because sales tax would have to be paid on the car, bicycle, etc. It might get you out of income tax, but it certanly wouldn't make it tax free.
From the ebay auction:
"The suits are unique because they were built totally out of Hurtubise's mind, with no blueprints, drawings or schematics. "
Excuse me if I pass. I was really looking for a good grizzly bear suit, but how do you expect me to trust this if it's not built under a proper, ISO-9001 certified process?
Seriously, blueprints are a GOOD thing. Without them, you can't do simple things like stress calculations, etc. You kinda want to be able to answer questions like: "If the bear pushed me over and jumped on my chest, would it crush me?" theoretically before you do a real, live test.
If I had to go up against a grizzly bear, I'd rather have nothing but a thong and a Desert Eagle than one of these wacky contraptions.
Sorry if this sounds like flamebait, but the other people invented acutal products while all he did was "Coined the phrase "cyberspace" in the novel "Neuromancer" (1984)"
Did you actually READ any of his books? Gibson could have defined "cyberspace" in one page, but there's more to it than that.
Advancing technology takes not just know-how, but inspiration as well. Gibson's work describes a vision of how humans might one day intereact with technology, one that many would say is quite ahead of his time.
Although he is not in any way directly responsible for the march or Moore's Law, a great number of techies respect him for his vision of what could be achieved with forthcoming technology. His writing speaks more to the "why" than the "how".
Without inspiration and new ideas, all our computers would be doing is computing PI to the bazillionth decimal place. Many inventions that changed the face computing, like the spreadsheet for example, aren't remarkable for their technology as much as their vision.
And what is Mr. Seller's incentive to use this version of Mr. Escrow's service?
The fact that people will do business with him. And proof upfront that I actually have the money to cover the transaction.
What happens if the item disappears?
UPS will have a record of it's delivery/non-delivery.
If you claim to have returned it?
See above.
If everyone used Certifiable delivery of both the money and the goods, that part of the problem would go away escrow or not, but nobody is willing to pay the extra money for certified mail.
I don't think that's a big part of the problem. The problem is that right, now if you use ebay, paypal, and certified mail, you're still fucked if the guy sends you a celeron 600MHz instead of a P4 2.4 GHz. Paypal will not refund your money, ebay won't, and neither will the postal service.
According to these documents [gpo.gov], again from the OMB, the Federal budget for FY2005 will be $2.4 trillion.
I suggest you look at how much money we're ACTUALLY spending. The budget for 2005 could be $20, but that wouldn't reflect or ACTUAL CURRENT SPENDING. The current administration doesn't seem to be very good at sticking to any sort of budget.
Suffice to say, none of this supports the idea that the government drives the economy in any major way.
Well that's another argument, but one I'm pretty confident you would loose. Even if the gov't didn't make laws which governed the economy or print money, throwing around a "mere" 23% of our nations GDP has a bit of an effect on our economy, much bigger than say, Walmart.
Well for most items, the buyer just isn't going to find it worth it. Are you really going to drop $30-50 in escrow fees on a processor you bought for $100?
No, but I'd be perfectly willing to drop $5.
I (the buyer) send my money to Mr. Escrow. The seller sends me the goods. If I don't like them, I send them back and get my $100 back.
It's not really practical to hold the goods is escrow, just the money.
cool. is there an x server for the SL-5500 video hardware?
Yes, someone else posted a link to open zaurus, but I have used one under the sharp ROM as well.
Pffl. Do you honestly think the percentage of GDP that is government spending has changed significantly in three years?
Yes. Do they not have newspapers where you live or something? One would hope you at least heard about Sept. 11th?
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