While I'm no fan of corporate overlords, you don't just let some high level shirt walk off with all of the trade information about your current and future plans to a competitor and sit idly by. This guy knew exactly what he was doing and decided to roll the dice.
Right. So he'll just take his high level knowledge, experience, and skills to a Chinese company that will rule the non-compete in America unenforceable. If not China, then India, or some other nation hungry for big brains and a global edge. Non-competes are lose/lose for America. Either the slave is prevented from working and generating tax dollars or the slave will flee, ultimately laboring and generating tax dollars for some other nation. That is, of course, overlooking the fact that SLAVERY is wrong. The slave owner's only leverage is that the slave has to leave his home and most of his family behind.
The problem is that none of those solve the issue I described, son.
I don't recall ever referencing that section of your post or saying any of them did. Why should they? iTunes can handle shared library storage quite nicely already.
As much as this will sound like a trolling post, it's not... what is the point of buying a Mac and then triple booting OS X, Windows, and Linux? It seems to be that Linux and OS X are redundant, not to mention that most things you can run on OS X can be run on Windows as well... why buy the Apple hardware?
I dislike Windows, yet I need to test websites under IE.
The only reason I can think of is the image of the Mac, honestly... granted, I don't use Macs much
I'm guessing you've hardly used a Mac at all. The difference is night and day. There really is no comparison. Let's try to make a comparison though.
Choose any PC to match up against a Mac Mini. Now, compare the screen reader options for the two: Mac comes with VoiceOver for free. The most popular screen reader for the PC costs more than the Mini itself. To you, that may not make much difference. To a web developer who needs to test accessibility of websites, or as a blind user, the Mac wins, hands down.
Security: The Mac comes with a built in Keychain. It remembers my passwords for websites and system activities. It keeps those passwords locked up behind _one_ password. So it keeps my secrets safe for me. The PC does not have a keychain bundled.
The Mac comes with FileVault. Full encryption for each individual user's home folder. The PC does not have anything like FileVault bundled.
The Mac can do a randomized N-pass file wipe on trashed files. The PC does not bundle file wiping capability.
These are serious features that are seriously lacking in a typical PC. On Windows you would need to pay extra... a lot extra in some cases, to get features that are bundled on a Mac. On Linux, these features might be available, but you will likely need a considerably higher level of computer skill to install, maintain, and use them.
As such, I prefer a Mac. I get more features that I actually use with a Mac. I can easily maintain the system myself. I don't have to worry about computer viruses. The resale value of Apple is truly magnificent, making upgrades cheaper with Apple hardware than PCs. (When was the last time you saw a 2 year old consumer grade PC sell for $550?) And in a pinch, I can boot into Windows or Linux.
Apple's policy is so extremely lame that you have to pay Apple just to write an app for their phone. You can't even write an app for your OWN phone without paying them a fee. You cannot distribute an app without distrubuting it through the app store and paying Apple about the same percentage as the US government's highest tax bracket. Apple's policy was so lame in fact that developers have only recently been allowed to discuss iPhone development with other developers openly and write books on the subject. Apple policy on the iPhone is tremendously, stupendously, colossally lame. If you aren't a developer... and you don't appear to be... there aren't words for you to grok how lame Apple policy truly is.
You make it sound like there are none at all.
No, s/he doesn't. But you seem to be spoiling for it.. so I will. I've been able to send faxes with my N95 since before iPhone 1.0. Can iPhone do that yet? I've been using speaker independent voice dialing since before the first iPhone's debut. Can iPhone do that? I can stream internet radio wirelessly through A2DP into my car stereo with my Nokia. Can iPhone do that? Too bad iPhone developers are hobbled by lame Apple policy. If they weren't, you might be able to do what the competition has been doing now for years. I'm still waiting for Apple to offer me a reason to 'upgrade' my 18 month old, already a generation out of date, phone.
I've heard statistics from some sources as high as 97% of black voters will be voting for Obama
You've heard? Don't you think it is entirely possible that what you heard was a lie? You know, lies, damned lies, and statistics. The fact that you find such an absurd statistic to be plausible says a lot about you.
A lot of the anti-climate change stuff uses similar tactics -- a couple of dissenting voices are used to support the idea that there is "widespread disagreement" on the topic.
On Wikipedia? Hardly. It has been my observation that Wiki is an echo chamber for the pro-climate change stuff. I had an article to reference, but it's gone. Apparently censored. It did exist on archive.org, but apparently it has been purged there too. Hmm, I wonder why. You can find a digg reference to it here, but again, no article text. I did finally manage to dig up some of the copy here... The cult of climate change has much more effective censors than the scientologists do apparently... For posterity, here's the interesting bit:
In contrast to the high-handed treatment that greet global warming skeptics, those who support the orthodoxy are puffed up and protected from criticism, their errors erased and their controversies hushed. This is the case with Naomi Oreskes, a scientist with a PhD who had arrived at an absurd finding: That no studies in a major scientific database questioned the UN view of climate change."
"For this reason, when visiting Oreskes's page on Wikipedia several weeks ago, I was surprised to read not only that Oreskes had been vindicated but that Peiser had been discredited. More than that, the page portrayed Peiser himself as having grudgingly conceded Oreskes's correctness.
Upon checking with Peiser, I found he had done no such thing. The Wikipedia page had misunderstood or distorted his comments. I then exercised the right to edit Wikipedia that we all have, corrected the Wikipedia entry, and advised Peiser that I had done so.
Peiser wrote back saying he couldn't see my corrections on the Wikipedia page. Had I neglected to save them after editing them?, I wondered. I made the changes again, and this time confirmed that the changes had been saved. But then, in a twinkle, they were gone again! I made other changes. And others. They all disappeared shortly after they were made.
Nonplused, I investigated. Wikipedia logs all changes. I found mine. And then I found Tabletop's. Someone called Tabletop was undoing my edits, and, following what I suppose is Wiki-etiquette, also explained why. "Note that Peiser has retracted this critique and admits that he was wrong!" Tabletop said.
I undid Tabletop's undoing of my edits, thinking I had an unassailable response: "Tabletop's changes claim to represent Peiser's views. I have checked with Peiser and he disputes Tabletop's version."
Tabletop undid my undid, claiming I could not speak for Peiser.
Why can Tabletop speak for Peiser but not I, who have his permission?, I thought. I redid Tabletop's undid and protested: "Tabletop is distorting Peiser. She does not speak for him. Peiser has approved my description of events concerning him."
Tabletop parried: "we have a reliable source to this. What Peiser has said to *you* is irrelevant."
Tabletop, it turns out, has another name: Kim Dabelstein Petersen. She (or he?) is an editor at Wikipedia. What does she edit? Reams and reams of global warming pages. I started checking them. In every instance I checked, she defended those warning of catastrophe and deprecated those who believe the science is not settled. I investigated further. Others had tried to correct her interpretations and had the same experience as I â" no sooner did they make their corrections than she pounced, preventing Wikipedia readers from reading anyone's views but her own. When they protested plaintively, she wore them down and snuffed them out. By patrolling Wikipedia pages and ensur
From my understanding, volunteer work is not tax deductible. Tangible assets and money given (like miles driven, money and items donated) may be deductible in certain situations.
I don't think he is talking about the work done. It sounds like he's referring to the work itself... his "Intellectual Property."
Nixon greatly reduced the real and inflation adjusted federal debt in '74
He didn't reduce the real debt. The debt increased that year. Didn't you even look at the numbers in my last link? As for inflation adjusted debt... That's hardly an accomplishment. He took the country off the gold standard in '71, unconstitutionally I might add. When you're dealing with a fiat currency, it's easy to pay off your debt. Just print the money. In printing the money, you can not only reduce your debt, but you reduce the value of the remaining debt via inflation as well. Unfortunately, you're also ripping off anyone who trusted you and loaned you something of real value in the first place.
decades of "get tough" cheap politics have done little to make people safer, have run up huge bills
They aren't losing money. It's cheap prison slave labor. They're just exploiting the loophole in the 13th Amendment. Why do you think the US has far and away the largest prison population in the world? It isn't accidental.
Stating that Clinton didn't balance the budget is stating a truth denying the greater truth that whether he hit the 0 or not, the graph shows clearly that Carter and Clinton reduced the rate of change of debt substantially and even if he never hit it, he approached 0, whereas Ford, Reagan, Bush I and Bush II have more or less linear rate of change in inflation adjusted debt, and that rate is about twice as much as the democratic presidents.
I never said they didn't. I simply corrected OP when he made the erroneous statement that Clinton had in fact balanced the budget. Clinton never balanced the budget. Period. It didn't happen. There never was the balanced budget or a budget surplus as reported by the American media. If your debt is continuing to rise... then by definition, you have a deficit, not a surplus. This is a very simple concept. The last time this nation had a real budget surplus was over 50 years ago in 1957. That is the simple, unadulterated fact.
Given the present orgy of spending, who cares if Clinton balanced the budget or simply came close to balancing the budget?
I do not carelessly cast aside the truth. Nor did I twist, bend, or spin it. My statement is fact. Easily verifiable fact.
I know it's a hard concept, but why not ignore rhetoric for a moment and actually look at the numbers like a scientist?
I did. He was wrong. I corrected him. I refrained from making a statement of opinion anywhere in that post. The only rhetoric I see is the rest of your post. I'll take your advice and ignore it.
This is the second debt clock. The first version could only count upward, and when the budget had a surplus back in the Clinton years, and the debt began to decrease, the debt clock was shut down
That may have been the reason for the replacement, but the national debt was never decreasing under Clinton. The so called "balanced budget" was only balanced by raiding the social security trust fund. Therefore, the budget was 'balanced' yet the actual gross debt continued to increase each year.
Money is beside the point. Who wants to be forbidden from using their own code? You'll end up like George Clinton, who can't even perform his own work without paying a royalty. I would never sign a non-compete or fork over my copyright on anything for any amount of money. Tell them to come down on their offer and give you more reasonable terms. No amount of money is worth selling yourself into legalized slavery.
Your only hope to truly defeat spam would be to offer a better solution than spam.
Oh, I think imposing draconian penalties on those who go around making countless others' lives less pleasant would help, too.
Ever heard of a bot net or an anonymous proxy? Stopping spam with legislation is not possible. If you live in such a progressive nation, tell me... where are your spam laws? How come they aren't working? Shouldn't you be emailing happily and spam free thanks to your great legislators? Why are you here complaining? By your own logic, you should be spam free by now. What went wrong?
Simply trying to remove junk mail without having a replacement plan is like the RIAA trying to stamp out piracy without offering any alternatives.
Well, not so much, because at least in the RIAA's case a substantial proportion of the population clearly feel justified in violating the current system for one reason or another.
That's why Apple's iTunes store went out of business... oh wait, it didn't. Apple became the number one music retailer in the US by competing with "free music" head on. Obviously, Apple offered people something piracy doesn't give them. So much so that they were willing to pay for it, and purchase from Apple in lieu of traditional means. Your logic is failing again.
Your other mistaken assumption here is that spammers are some small minority. Big successful spammers may be few, but small time spammers who would take up the torch in their absence are legion. You aren't going to take down a handful of spam kings and solve the problem. Tough laws and taking down Napster didn't solve the piracy problem.
Their statement was not 'we are going to brick other people's phones,' but 'if you have messed around in the baseband firmware, we can't promise this upgrade isn't going to break something significantly.'
Their statement went more along the lines of "We know this will brick certain firmware hacks and we will not be taking even the most trivial of steps to prevent that." They could have simply checked the OS and refused to install on a modified phone. Not only did they not do that, but Apple had the great big brass gonads to SAY they were not going to do that INTENTIONALLY. That goes beyond negligence. That's willful destruction. I'd Google the statement, but there's been so much iPhone hype since then, it is proving difficult to find.
They would certainly deserve it for willfully bricking unlocked iPhones the way they did, but this is the US were talking about. The only people who will see any benefit are the lawyers. The rest of the world will get a voucher at the Apple store online or some other equally lame appeasement.
Your protocol is broken and you're asking for *legislators* to fix it?
My protocol isn't broken, it's just being abused.
If it is open to abuse, and that abuse is making it unusable to you, it is broken. That's how the evolution of things work. Bad solutions fail and disappear, good solutions persist.
If someone was driving around town in the middle of the night, shouting obscenities through car-mounted megaphones, then they would be regarded as antisocial, and the police would prevent them from disturbing the peace any further.
That isn't an analogy, it's hyperbole. Unlike sleep, you don't have a biological need for email.
If someone started putting offensive leaflets through a victim's door, hundreds of times per day, then that would be regarded as antisocial, and harassment proceedings and an injunction would probably follow.
You cannot be serious. When you push those leaflets through thousands of doors, it's called junk mail. My mailbox is full of it right now. It has all the same characteristics of spam. It's annoying, it's wasteful, only a fraction of a percent of recipients generate a sale, and disposal of it costs me money. Guess what? I haven't heard of a single case where OfficeMax or Bed, Bath, & Beyond, etc have been taken to court for spamming my mailbox. I think the post office might even be in on the scam. I hear they actually charge these advertisers money to deliver their spam!! Can you believe that?!?
There is a difference between being able to do something and using that freedom responsibly. So it goes with many things in life, and the Internet is no different. We have laws to penalise those who harm others through their failure to act responsibly, and again, the Internet should be no different in this respect.
As I pointed out above, you're clearly arguing for a double standard.
But it is still much better, IMHO, for freedom to be the default and efforts to be concentrated on holding those who abuse the privilege to account, than to make prohibitions and rules and limited functionality the default and hinder constructive use by the overwhelming majority of participants.
So, we'd be 'free' to do whatever you say? Greaaaat! And I'm sure you'll find a legislator who's willing to smile and nod for the right price.
Perhaps you should put your money and mental effort into finding a better technical solution instead of dreaming of a legislative one.
For someone so hot on legislative philosophy, you seem to have missed the old saying about technical solutions to social problems.
People trying to make a living by selling stuff isn't what I would classify as a social problem. Junk mail is as old as mail itself. You're looking at this completely backwards. Your only hope to truly defeat spam would be to offer a better solution than spam. Simply trying to remove junk mail without having a replacement plan is like the RIAA trying to stamp out piracy without offering any alternatives. Either that, or you can quit whining about the failings of SMTP and use/invent a different protocol. Those are your two basic choices. Legislation is a waste of time, money, and effort as this story plainly illustrates.
I have an idea! If you're a band, sell your songs yourself on iTunes! Collect the 70 cents/song yourself, and then arrange your own tours for the ticket sales.
/rocket science, this is not
You forgot to tell them how to sell on iTunes. There, for about $30, you can get an album listed on iTunes for a year.
No, you're telling them that they don't have the right to make everyone listen to what they want to say... which they don't, as far as I'm concerned.
You're the one running a server and listening to any traffic that comes in. Your protocol is broken and you're asking for *legislators* to fix it? I know of one other group that tried to legislate a new reality... it hasn't gone so well for them. Perhaps you should put your money and mental effort into finding a better technical solution instead of dreaming of a legislative one.
I think we're better off in the long run destroying the economics of spam than continuing this arms race. Unfortunately, destroying the economics of spam requires regulation and legislation.
Has anything ever stopped junk mail? Honestly, do you really think you're going to beat junk mail? Do you really think you can stop it at my mail box, you can stop it at my email box, you can stop the junk faxes, the door to door "Have you found Jesus" freaks, and the flyers under my windshield wiper... and you can do ANY of that without stepping on my first amendment rights?
You are an extremely optimistic person. I don't think you'll be able to legislate away bot nets. I don't think American legislation will affect spammers in other nations. I do think you will trample my rights trying it though. I do think you will look like the RIAA trying to legislate a new reality.
I suppose it would make sense if you had to make an exchange of keys with someone before initiating communication. Thus, when you give out your email to people, you could give them a key that they would need in order to send you an email, and similar methods would apply to other communication mechanisms. Now the spammers will need to waste inordinate amounts of computer time computing all kinds of keys, and the practice of spamming will (hopefully) disappear. Now this being/., someone will tell me why such a scheme is impossible.:-)
It already exists. It's called S/Mime. You can learn how to use it here and here. It not only provides you with a way for receivers to know your mail is authentic, but it also allows you to send secure email if you have an S/Mime key for the receiver. (And you'll get their key the first time they sign their message to provide authenticity to you) It's like SSL for email. The major problem is that it is not pre-installed by default and most of the under-30 crowd uses web mail, therefore no one can be bothered to use it.
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While I'm no fan of corporate overlords, you don't just let some high level shirt walk off with all of the trade information about your current and future plans to a competitor and sit idly by. This guy knew exactly what he was doing and decided to roll the dice.
Right. So he'll just take his high level knowledge, experience, and skills to a Chinese company that will rule the non-compete in America unenforceable. If not China, then India, or some other nation hungry for big brains and a global edge. Non-competes are lose/lose for America. Either the slave is prevented from working and generating tax dollars or the slave will flee, ultimately laboring and generating tax dollars for some other nation. That is, of course, overlooking the fact that SLAVERY is wrong. The slave owner's only leverage is that the slave has to leave his home and most of his family behind.
I don't remember any recent file sharing cases ending in jail time.
Wow... really? Let me refresh your memory.
The problem is that none of those solve the issue I described, son.
I don't recall ever referencing that section of your post or saying any of them did. Why should they? iTunes can handle shared library storage quite nicely already.
So I have to write a program to make it act civilly. Wake me up when it's ready for the desktop.
I'm sorry, I assumed you had enough computer savvy to download pre-written scripts from the website I linked to.
On OSX, iTunes _does_ pick things up.
For an extremely small set of "things", sure.
You've never heard of AppleScript, have you?
As much as this will sound like a trolling post, it's not... what is the point of buying a Mac and then triple booting OS X, Windows, and Linux? It seems to be that Linux and OS X are redundant, not to mention that most things you can run on OS X can be run on Windows as well... why buy the Apple hardware?
I dislike Windows, yet I need to test websites under IE.
The only reason I can think of is the image of the Mac, honestly ... granted, I don't use Macs much
I'm guessing you've hardly used a Mac at all. The difference is night and day. There really is no comparison. Let's try to make a comparison though.
Choose any PC to match up against a Mac Mini. Now, compare the screen reader options for the two: Mac comes with VoiceOver for free. The most popular screen reader for the PC costs more than the Mini itself. To you, that may not make much difference. To a web developer who needs to test accessibility of websites, or as a blind user, the Mac wins, hands down.
Like web browsing? Compare the default browsers for supported standards. That chart is for CSS selector support, but in pretty much any comparison, Safari on the Mac wins against IE.
Security: The Mac comes with a built in Keychain. It remembers my passwords for websites and system activities. It keeps those passwords locked up behind _one_ password. So it keeps my secrets safe for me. The PC does not have a keychain bundled.
The Mac comes with FileVault. Full encryption for each individual user's home folder. The PC does not have anything like FileVault bundled.
The Mac can do a randomized N-pass file wipe on trashed files. The PC does not bundle file wiping capability.
These are serious features that are seriously lacking in a typical PC. On Windows you would need to pay extra... a lot extra in some cases, to get features that are bundled on a Mac. On Linux, these features might be available, but you will likely need a considerably higher level of computer skill to install, maintain, and use them.
As such, I prefer a Mac. I get more features that I actually use with a Mac. I can easily maintain the system myself. I don't have to worry about computer viruses. The resale value of Apple is truly magnificent, making upgrades cheaper with Apple hardware than PCs. (When was the last time you saw a 2 year old consumer grade PC sell for $550?) And in a pinch, I can boot into Windows or Linux.
I'm sorry if you mistake that for vanity.
The app potential is wasted thanks to their draconian controls.
There are thousands and thousands of apps in the app store. You make it sound like there are none at all.
No, that isn't what s/he said at all... and whoever modded him/her troll only did so because they disagreed. Cowmonaut isn't trolling. Numerous apps have been killed by Apple because they compete with iTMS, or because they aren't G-rated enough, etc. I'm sure the number of apps on that page represent a tiny portion of apps that were killed or never even attempted because of Apple's lame policies. Other's like TomTom were simply aborted because of Apple's extremely lame policies toward developers. Sun was excited and ready to port a Java to the iPhone, but again, thanks to Apple's lame policies, Sun is not allowed to port Java to the iPhone.
Apple's policy is so extremely lame that you have to pay Apple just to write an app for their phone. You can't even write an app for your OWN phone without paying them a fee. You cannot distribute an app without distrubuting it through the app store and paying Apple about the same percentage as the US government's highest tax bracket. Apple's policy was so lame in fact that developers have only recently been allowed to discuss iPhone development with other developers openly and write books on the subject. Apple policy on the iPhone is tremendously, stupendously, colossally lame. If you aren't a developer... and you don't appear to be... there aren't words for you to grok how lame Apple policy truly is.
You make it sound like there are none at all.
No, s/he doesn't. But you seem to be spoiling for it.. so I will. I've been able to send faxes with my N95 since before iPhone 1.0. Can iPhone do that yet? I've been using speaker independent voice dialing since before the first iPhone's debut. Can iPhone do that? I can stream internet radio wirelessly through A2DP into my car stereo with my Nokia. Can iPhone do that? Too bad iPhone developers are hobbled by lame Apple policy. If they weren't, you might be able to do what the competition has been doing now for years. I'm still waiting for Apple to offer me a reason to 'upgrade' my 18 month old, already a generation out of date, phone.
iPhone? Fail.
I've heard statistics from some sources as high as 97% of black voters will be voting for Obama
You've heard? Don't you think it is entirely possible that what you heard was a lie? You know, lies, damned lies, and statistics. The fact that you find such an absurd statistic to be plausible says a lot about you.
A lot of the anti-climate change stuff uses similar tactics -- a couple of dissenting voices are used to support the idea that there is "widespread disagreement" on the topic.
On Wikipedia? Hardly. It has been my observation that Wiki is an echo chamber for the pro-climate change stuff. I had an article to reference, but it's gone. Apparently censored. It did exist on archive.org, but apparently it has been purged there too. Hmm, I wonder why. You can find a digg reference to it here, but again, no article text. I did finally manage to dig up some of the copy here... The cult of climate change has much more effective censors than the scientologists do apparently... For posterity, here's the interesting bit:
From my understanding, volunteer work is not tax deductible. Tangible assets and money given (like miles driven, money and items donated) may be deductible in certain situations.
I don't think he is talking about the work done. It sounds like he's referring to the work itself... his "Intellectual Property."
Nixon greatly reduced the real and inflation adjusted federal debt in '74
He didn't reduce the real debt. The debt increased that year. Didn't you even look at the numbers in my last link? As for inflation adjusted debt... That's hardly an accomplishment. He took the country off the gold standard in '71, unconstitutionally I might add. When you're dealing with a fiat currency, it's easy to pay off your debt. Just print the money. In printing the money, you can not only reduce your debt, but you reduce the value of the remaining debt via inflation as well. Unfortunately, you're also ripping off anyone who trusted you and loaned you something of real value in the first place.
decades of "get tough" cheap politics have done little to make people safer, have run up huge bills
They aren't losing money. It's cheap prison slave labor. They're just exploiting the loophole in the 13th Amendment. Why do you think the US has far and away the largest prison population in the world? It isn't accidental.
Stating that Clinton didn't balance the budget is stating a truth denying the greater truth that whether he hit the 0 or not, the graph shows clearly that Carter and Clinton reduced the rate of change of debt substantially and even if he never hit it, he approached 0, whereas Ford, Reagan, Bush I and Bush II have more or less linear rate of change in inflation adjusted debt, and that rate is about twice as much as the democratic presidents.
I never said they didn't. I simply corrected OP when he made the erroneous statement that Clinton had in fact balanced the budget. Clinton never balanced the budget. Period. It didn't happen. There never was the balanced budget or a budget surplus as reported by the American media. If your debt is continuing to rise... then by definition, you have a deficit, not a surplus. This is a very simple concept. The last time this nation had a real budget surplus was over 50 years ago in 1957. That is the simple, unadulterated fact.
Given the present orgy of spending, who cares if Clinton balanced the budget or simply came close to balancing the budget?
I do not carelessly cast aside the truth. Nor did I twist, bend, or spin it. My statement is fact. Easily verifiable fact.
I know it's a hard concept, but why not ignore rhetoric for a moment and actually look at the numbers like a scientist?
I did. He was wrong. I corrected him. I refrained from making a statement of opinion anywhere in that post. The only rhetoric I see is the rest of your post. I'll take your advice and ignore it.
This is the second debt clock. The first version could only count upward, and when the budget had a surplus back in the Clinton years, and the debt began to decrease, the debt clock was shut down
That may have been the reason for the replacement, but the national debt was never decreasing under Clinton. The so called "balanced budget" was only balanced by raiding the social security trust fund. Therefore, the budget was 'balanced' yet the actual gross debt continued to increase each year.
Money is beside the point. Who wants to be forbidden from using their own code? You'll end up like George Clinton, who can't even perform his own work without paying a royalty. I would never sign a non-compete or fork over my copyright on anything for any amount of money. Tell them to come down on their offer and give you more reasonable terms. No amount of money is worth selling yourself into legalized slavery.
Your only hope to truly defeat spam would be to offer a better solution than spam.
Oh, I think imposing draconian penalties on those who go around making countless others' lives less pleasant would help, too.
Ever heard of a bot net or an anonymous proxy? Stopping spam with legislation is not possible. If you live in such a progressive nation, tell me... where are your spam laws? How come they aren't working? Shouldn't you be emailing happily and spam free thanks to your great legislators? Why are you here complaining? By your own logic, you should be spam free by now. What went wrong?
Simply trying to remove junk mail without having a replacement plan is like the RIAA trying to stamp out piracy without offering any alternatives.
Well, not so much, because at least in the RIAA's case a substantial proportion of the population clearly feel justified in violating the current system for one reason or another.
That's why Apple's iTunes store went out of business... oh wait, it didn't. Apple became the number one music retailer in the US by competing with "free music" head on. Obviously, Apple offered people something piracy doesn't give them. So much so that they were willing to pay for it, and purchase from Apple in lieu of traditional means. Your logic is failing again.
Your other mistaken assumption here is that spammers are some small minority. Big successful spammers may be few, but small time spammers who would take up the torch in their absence are legion. You aren't going to take down a handful of spam kings and solve the problem. Tough laws and taking down Napster didn't solve the piracy problem.
Thank you. I couldn't have said it better.
Their statement was not 'we are going to brick other people's phones,' but 'if you have messed around in the baseband firmware, we can't promise this upgrade isn't going to break something significantly.'
Their statement went more along the lines of "We know this will brick certain firmware hacks and we will not be taking even the most trivial of steps to prevent that." They could have simply checked the OS and refused to install on a modified phone. Not only did they not do that, but Apple had the great big brass gonads to SAY they were not going to do that INTENTIONALLY. That goes beyond negligence. That's willful destruction. I'd Google the statement, but there's been so much iPhone hype since then, it is proving difficult to find.
They would certainly deserve it for willfully bricking unlocked iPhones the way they did, but this is the US were talking about. The only people who will see any benefit are the lawyers. The rest of the world will get a voucher at the Apple store online or some other equally lame appeasement.
Your protocol is broken and you're asking for *legislators* to fix it?
My protocol isn't broken, it's just being abused.
If it is open to abuse, and that abuse is making it unusable to you, it is broken. That's how the evolution of things work. Bad solutions fail and disappear, good solutions persist.
If someone was driving around town in the middle of the night, shouting obscenities through car-mounted megaphones, then they would be regarded as antisocial, and the police would prevent them from disturbing the peace any further.
That isn't an analogy, it's hyperbole. Unlike sleep, you don't have a biological need for email.
If someone started putting offensive leaflets through a victim's door, hundreds of times per day, then that would be regarded as antisocial, and harassment proceedings and an injunction would probably follow.
You cannot be serious. When you push those leaflets through thousands of doors, it's called junk mail. My mailbox is full of it right now. It has all the same characteristics of spam. It's annoying, it's wasteful, only a fraction of a percent of recipients generate a sale, and disposal of it costs me money. Guess what? I haven't heard of a single case where OfficeMax or Bed, Bath, & Beyond, etc have been taken to court for spamming my mailbox. I think the post office might even be in on the scam. I hear they actually charge these advertisers money to deliver their spam!! Can you believe that?!?
There is a difference between being able to do something and using that freedom responsibly. So it goes with many things in life, and the Internet is no different. We have laws to penalise those who harm others through their failure to act responsibly, and again, the Internet should be no different in this respect.
As I pointed out above, you're clearly arguing for a double standard.
But it is still much better, IMHO, for freedom to be the default and efforts to be concentrated on holding those who abuse the privilege to account, than to make prohibitions and rules and limited functionality the default and hinder constructive use by the overwhelming majority of participants.
So, we'd be 'free' to do whatever you say? Greaaaat! And I'm sure you'll find a legislator who's willing to smile and nod for the right price.
Perhaps you should put your money and mental effort into finding a better technical solution instead of dreaming of a legislative one.
For someone so hot on legislative philosophy, you seem to have missed the old saying about technical solutions to social problems.
People trying to make a living by selling stuff isn't what I would classify as a social problem. Junk mail is as old as mail itself. You're looking at this completely backwards. Your only hope to truly defeat spam would be to offer a better solution than spam. Simply trying to remove junk mail without having a replacement plan is like the RIAA trying to stamp out piracy without offering any alternatives. Either that, or you can quit whining about the failings of SMTP and use/invent a different protocol. Those are your two basic choices. Legislation is a waste of time, money, and effort as this story plainly illustrates.
I have an idea! If you're a band, sell your songs yourself on iTunes! Collect the 70 cents/song yourself, and then arrange your own tours for the ticket sales.
You forgot to tell them how to sell on iTunes. There, for about $30, you can get an album listed on iTunes for a year.
No, you're telling them that they don't have the right to make everyone listen to what they want to say... which they don't, as far as I'm concerned.
You're the one running a server and listening to any traffic that comes in. Your protocol is broken and you're asking for *legislators* to fix it? I know of one other group that tried to legislate a new reality... it hasn't gone so well for them. Perhaps you should put your money and mental effort into finding a better technical solution instead of dreaming of a legislative one.
I think we're better off in the long run destroying the economics of spam than continuing this arms race. Unfortunately, destroying the economics of spam requires regulation and legislation.
Has anything ever stopped junk mail? Honestly, do you really think you're going to beat junk mail? Do you really think you can stop it at my mail box, you can stop it at my email box, you can stop the junk faxes, the door to door "Have you found Jesus" freaks, and the flyers under my windshield wiper... and you can do ANY of that without stepping on my first amendment rights?
You are an extremely optimistic person. I don't think you'll be able to legislate away bot nets. I don't think American legislation will affect spammers in other nations. I do think you will trample my rights trying it though. I do think you will look like the RIAA trying to legislate a new reality.
I suppose it would make sense if you had to make an exchange of keys with someone before initiating communication. Thus, when you give out your email to people, you could give them a key that they would need in order to send you an email, and similar methods would apply to other communication mechanisms. Now the spammers will need to waste inordinate amounts of computer time computing all kinds of keys, and the practice of spamming will (hopefully) disappear. Now this being /., someone will tell me why such a scheme is impossible. :-)
It already exists. It's called S/Mime. You can learn how to use it here and here. It not only provides you with a way for receivers to know your mail is authentic, but it also allows you to send secure email if you have an S/Mime key for the receiver. (And you'll get their key the first time they sign their message to provide authenticity to you) It's like SSL for email. The major problem is that it is not pre-installed by default and most of the under-30 crowd uses web mail, therefore no one can be bothered to use it.