I can hardly believe the lemmings around here posting about Google doing this for altruistic purposes. Let me shake up you lemmings with a couple of facts:
assuming the artists family does own the rights to the work and Google was infringing on those rights, the posters claims here that 'it was good for the artist' is complete crap. You don't get to use other people's works just because you feel it's in there best interests. There's laws about that kind of stuff, designed to protect people. Everyone here OK if I steal *cough* your code for my own business purposes, but suggest that doing so was in your best interests because 'it raises awareness of your wonderful coding capabilites?' If you're OK with that, there's the GPL. Otherwise, keep your hands off of other people's work.
when did Google become a non-profit? You think Google was doing this in the best interests of the artist and not for their own profit motive? Did you know they took the word 'naive' out of the dictionary?
Not the first time Google's trampled on other people's works. Remember when they decided to scan everyone's books in and make them available on their own website? what about the fact that they already republish your entire website on their website (they call it their 'cache'. Scrapers and robots call it 'how to get someone else's website content without being blocked by the content owner).
Calling this an OSS project is misleading at best. Yes they have some free/opensource templates. But the biggest push on that site, and certainly any of their decent looking templates are NOT opensource. You gotta pay to play, no distribution rights, etc. In short, it's a commercial site that's trying to make money with an OS front. (to clarify, they're not making money off of OSS, they're calling their site OS, but offering primarily commerical products). And guess what....now they've got their knickers in a knot over who's making the cash!
Reprint of the forum post from the original article:
Hello everyone, I'm Aaron "MonkeyMan" Nikula, I've been running OSWD for the past 3 years, so here's your authoritative explanation.
On Oct 13th our site was displaying a "Forbidden" error. We tried to contact our host (phpwebhosting.com), but despite our "emergency" support ticket it took them a week to reply to it and they do not have a phone support number. Turns out they had attempted to contact us through an email address that Frank used to create an account years ago. After all that was sorted out it turns out they disabled our account because the website was crashing their server. They have 196 users on that machine, 92 mysqld threads, and 33 apache threads, so I think we just used up too many resources for a shared (and cheap) host.
Regardless, none of that has anything to do with the problems we're having now. A little bit of OSWD history first. OSWD was started by Frank Skettino about 4 years ago. I joined 1 month after the project was created (before we even had the OSWD.org domain) and that's when I started writing PHP code for the project. After a while (months) Frank started doing less and less and I started picking up slack. I think I've written 95% of the code that was running the website. I also maintained the website. About 50% of the designs were approved by me, 45% by various volunteers (Josh, Josh, Locke, and Skatters to name a few), and 5% were done by Frank in the early days. In fact, when I had to take a trip and was away from the internet for about 4 months, nobody maintained the site. There were hundreds of designs in the queue and nobody approved them until I got back. I also started the OSWD design contests, in fact (as Josh mentioned) we were in the middle of one when the site went down.
After OSWD started to gain some steam Frank decided to add our first commercial venture. He added the template monster affiliate program to the website. It has been criticized in the past by our members because it's not open source and people confused them with our free designs. I think it's worth noting that he never told anyone how much money he made and he didn't share the money. He was paying for the hosting, so I was fine with that (although our hosting cost was $10/month, I can assure you he was making more than that).
So, back to the present: all these things were making me upset. When the site went down I thought it would be a nice time to ask Frank to pass the website to me for the benefit of the project. He hasn't talked to me since. Also, I don't have access to OSWD or access to my email account. OSWD DOES have new hosting, the transfer was done 2 weeks ago. The problem is that Frank won't do the work to bring it back up. There are no technical problems anymore, he's just sitting on it. Also, he won't give the project to anyone else to do it for him, I think because he wants to keep as much control on the website as possible.
So that's what's happening guys. I really appreciate all the offers of hosting, but that's not the issue here. And really, unless Frank gives up the website, there's not a whole lot I can do help. Hope that clears things up!
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Your phpbb case is a good case in point. There are lots of folks who take GPL'ed software, modify it and charge a fee for it. As long as you're only distributing the output from the program (i.e. the web page) and not the code itself you're within the limits of the GPL.
I believe this model is very widely used. Disallowing this type of use in the GPL is going to have a lot of far reaching repercussions. Plenty of companies won't have an OSS solution to use as the base for mods. ASP's won't use it because of this, and many companies won't use it because they'd be forced to provide their paid work to their competitors.
End result, a dramatic decline in the use of OSS software. This is A Bad Thing.
(in short, the ideology of forcing release of code in some instances will in effect smother many aspects of opensource due to the reality of how it's used).
This is all good news. It costs me like $400+ to put a tiny job classifieds ad in the local daily paper. What a ripoff - more than many small shops can afford. Craigslist is what - $75? It's called competition, and the print papers need a healthy dose of it.
The other other reason Craiglist does well is they produce results. I've used other online services to source out staff and contractors and gotten nothing but garbage. The two postings I've put on Craigslist in the past month have netted me numerous qualifed and experienced candidates.
Assuming you stick to actual spammers, who's going to sue Lycos over this? The spammers? Doubtful - they'd probably have to give up personal info in such a lawsuit. And my goodness, but wouldn't THAT be some kinda fun that we could all get into?
For those who don't read the article:
1) you put up a website about some subject
2) you call Google and have them serve ads on your site. Everytime someone clicks an ad on your site, Google charges the advertiser and gives you a portion of it.
3) You offshore the work (armies of offshore IT people who's job is to just click on your ads)...
4) Profit!
This can be serious business. In the life insurance industry it costs $7-$20 per click to advertise! It's possible if your site is showing life insurance ads (for example - I'm familiar with these ads) that Google might be passing you a dollar or two for every click. Not too tough to figure out a way to make $20 an hour is it? Just get 10 clicks an hour.
There are plenty of advertisers spending $100K per month on these ads. $20K per month in fraud charges is serious business.
That being said, I don't see Google kicking back a lot of those fraudulent fees. I and my customers have probably spent $100-$200K+ on Google and I've seen back $100 in money back as a result.
If you think the first 50 listings on Google haven't 'paid' to be there, well, in the nicest possible way, you're misinformed. Search engine optimization is big business and on any remotely popular searches the top listings are filled not with 'natural' listings but with websites that have figured out what Google is looking for, and provided it to them.
I for one welcome our new retail overlords! Because that's where this is going.
Maybe your job in retail sucked due to some customers abusing the system. Maybe it's tough on stores. So? Maybe you should find a job where you actually like and respect your customers.
That is not justification for blanket policies that turn around and treat ALL customers like crap.
Exactly. Offshoring is good for one thing: price. As soon as any other issue enters into the equation offshoring loses big time.
Points:
- as parent mentioned, you can't get stuff done on the fly.
- it's dark over there right now and all the programmers are all tucked away in bed dreaming dreams of python function calls. The time differences mean a difficult time with communications. Sometimes it's easier to get stuff done over the phone or in person, particularly when it comes to planning.
- It's questionable whether you'll get the quality. That may change, but right now everything I've seen is comparable to a 70's import car. (that eventually changed, this may too).
- you lose the 'arms-length' ability. That's where you keep the programmer at arms length so you can throttle them if they screw up.
I've seen marketing where the claim is 'we'll do it while you're sleeping, it'll be ready by morning'. Problem is, if it's 10am and you want some bugfixes, you'd probably like them that afternoon, not tomorrow morning.
Plenty of retailers have learned to compete against Walmart who come into town with cheaper prices. If you're a programmer and competing strictly based on price, then yes, you're job is going elsewhere.
I routinely pay $40-$100 hour for contract developers/programmers and don't think twice. And I don't go offshore because paying someone $5 an hour is going to cost me a lot more than I saved in the end.
That being said, competition is healthy and there is a market for lower priced development. So make sure that's not the market you're in.
Mandrake seems to be pulling itself up by it's bootstraps financially. Which is great - because I think Mandrake is Linux's great hope to take on MS.
And they're doing that by doing what MS does - but based on a stable OS. With Mandrake you can get install your desktop from a couple of CD's, with about as much tech knowhow as you need with windows. With Mandrake you get a nice looking desktop right out of the box. And now with Mandrake you can spend $25 a year and get a windoze like auto-security-update feature.
Sure - you can get scatterings of that in other distro's - but not in a format that is good for non-tech loosers such as myself. Mandrake seems to be the last prominent distro that is really focussed on the desktop and doing it right (i.e. dumbed down, but still working.
even their auto updating feature is a fabulous. Yes, we all know you can get that elsewhere - and for free - but by charging for it like MS would, there's a lot more going on. First loosers believe there likely to get a fully tested easy to use product (heck - I believe it myself, I'm just waiting for their server version - and if you think people won't buy the server version of this, then you don't understand why people by MS), and secondly it focusses attention on it - people will buy it just because it's offered and it's a good idea. Offer it for free and it's hard to see the value in it.
And before the purists hack me to tiny little pieces, I'm speaking as a tech manager type who uses mandrake on their desktop. I'm the next wave of converts, and Mandrake is going to do the converting
It may not have anything to do with driving. But you're making a common statistical mistake - confusing causation and correlation. Causation is just like it sounds, A causes B. Correlation means when you find B, you find A - even if A doesn't cause B.
A perfect example of this is credit rating. Doesn't effect your driving does it? Well, apparenlty people with poor credit ratings tend to have poorer driving records. So insurance companies would love to be able to price your auto insurance by looking at your credit rating. Might even be being done where you are. But does bad credit have anything to do with insurance claims? Actually it does. And I suspect the insurance companies have every reason to expect that the presence of black boxes will be correlated with claims.
I've posted this to a forum I run for actuaries - the mathematical types who price insurance. I won't post a link as I'd rather not have the fame. But it will be interesting to see what they have to say
However, in the article, Charles Samuelson makes a point that is well known when it comes to pricing insurance. Progressive is basically selecting the cream of the crop for their clients. That means more money for them (less claims probably), and less for other insurance companies. So the other insurance companies are forced to start underwriting for this as well. Pretty soon, you're screwed because all the insurance companies have to take it into account to remain competitive.
Think that's only a vague thing? At one point nobody priced life insurance by whether or not you smoked. In fact, it was probably only about 30 years ago they started doing that. Now of course, they have two sets of prices - those that smoke and those that don't.
In short, you'd better get used to the idea of having black boxes installed in your car, and having it taken into account on your insurance. It's profitable for the insurance companies, so it's coming to a policy near you.
Mod parent up - absolutely correct. I'm in a Canadian rural community of about 5K people. 4 years ago I was on 56K dialup. 3 years ago I was on 1mb high speed wireless. This year I went to 3mb DSL for about $25US per month. *and* I have the option of bringing fibre right to the house. Expensive as crap ($600Cdn/month) - and a too large installation fee - but it's available to me if I want it.
So what's the excuse of the US for leaving half the folks on dialup and charging outrageous prices? Gotta be the regulations of the baby bells and the like.
Up here the phone companies are legislated that they have to install DSL hardward and allow other's to lease their lines. So I have my choice of providers. Yes, there's a hard bottom limit to the prices (based on what the ISP leases the line for from the telco), but the fact that anyone can lease the lines provides a ton of competition and keeps prices razor sharp.
The Canadian govt has also made substantial investments on wiring the country. You can visit just about any public library - including those in extremely remote locations - and they'll likely have highspeed. In fact, when I go on vacation up in bear country I can enjoy the wilderness and as long as I'm in driving distance to a library (they're everywhere right?), I've got high speed web access.
In short, the US can follow our lead by changing the regulatory structure to allow for intense regional competition, as well as investing in some larger infrastructure which will help foster this longerterm.
Re:One of the unfortunate things about Apache...
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Hardening Apache
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That won't do me much good on a production server that I'm trying to harden. Clearly I can't do that live. I don't know how much time it would take me to produce something that I could migrate to a live system without having nightmares about downtime using this methodology.
Don't get me wrong - the idea is fabulous if you're learning or starting on a new system.
Two points - first, spam doesn't really cost you money directly for 99% of the population. It might cost the ISP some effort and mark up your broadband costs a bit. So? It's a Pita, but it's not the driving cost behind a broadband connection.
Somebody at the ISP has to look after this? So? Your 'paying' in your mailing costs (as directly as you pay to recieve spam) for somebody at the post office to stand there and jam garbage mail in your mailbox. There's no difference.
Secondly, From the article:
"At some level, the folks who are engaged in a business where they are sending out massive volumes that they couldn't possibly have the permission of all those recipients for, they know full well that they are not engaged in legitimate or responsible non-spamming activities," he said. "You don't typically come up with 60 million e-mail addresses through a permission-based process."
So? Where's your gawd given write not to recieve email from someone just because you didn't sign up? It's apparently lost on most of the people here that the internet is a PUBLIC network. That means it's available to the entire public as it's available to you. Don't like it? don't sign on. Or set up spam filters. Or don't get an email account - that'd lower your ISP's costs wouldn't it? Of course, everyone really does in fact want to receive emails from other people, including commericial ones. They just want to decide after the fact which ones they like.
Because email is both a public and international forum, legislation won't solve the problem (and despite my earlier factual comments, I'd like to decrease the 1000+ emails I get a day). The only way this will be corrected is if the community as a whole develops a standard of some sort that prevents spam. That's the way the entire internet works, from TCP/IP to HTML. So everyone who admins an email server, get together and put forth a standard. You don't prevent anyone from doing their own thing, you just don't recieve email(or spam) from those that don't follow the standard.
Can't use this for business. The last thing I want is my customers (or anyone else for that matter) being able to query to see if I have other specific emails in my list. Even worse, a competitor gets their hands on it, and just hammers emails at it, looking for positives.
Open source software is the culmination of capitalism. When you've got your choice of various answers, and (generally) cost is not an issue, then only the strong survive. That kind of Darwinian process isn't communism at all.
Plus, open source software (and particularly as it relates to the web) IMO makes all sorts of capitalistic ventures possible. On the web you're as big as MS or Wallymart - and you can get started in your basement on a shoestring using opensource software. What would apache cost if you actually had to pay what i'ts worth? Instead you can get a $10 hosting account ('cause the webhost didn't spend any money on software), throw up an OSS shopping cart or templated website and voila - you're online and making money. If OSS software wasn't as good as it is and free as in beer, there'd be a lot fewer starter/seed companies than there are.
How many people are running their own business now that they couldn't have done 10 years ago? How many of those are running OSS software? How many would have had problems if they would have had to start off with $10K in software costs? Lots - that's how many. Mine included.
I'm a capitalist, and love OSS because of all this. Help keep the competition fierce!
www.therecord.com (without the copyright violations), is well worth visiting - as it has a front page picture of the remains of the car.
There doesn't seem to be anything left that stands higher than 6 inches high.
Surprisingly this car could do 130KM/hour (roughly 90 miles/hour) - and it clearly didn't have much in terms of protection.
I live about 5 miles from the scene of the accident, and the stretch of road it was on is a very busy, very fast, and very dangerous 20 miles or so. There is also pleny of construction on the side of the road in that area though the report doesn't indicate that was a factor. To give you an idea, the posted speed limit in Shakespeare is 60km/hour. It's not uncommon for people to be travelling 80-100km/h or higher right thorugh there.
Very unfortunate thing, losing a bright studen't live and tarnishing some of the positive karma solar powered cars have.
Huh? As far as I'm concerned, these days Linux IS Windows. I'm happily running Mandrake 10. Great GUI. Installed in a flash. Picked up all my hardware no probs - network card, sound system, monitor, printer etc. And it takes a good while to boot now too. And between urpmi, the occassional program that seems to autoinstall, and reading minimal README's, even an idjit such as I seem to be able to get by.
As for openoffice not handline MS office docs, that's technically true, but not functionally true. I ran opensource programs on Windows to acclimatize myself before switching completely to linux and had (and continue to have) absolutely 0 problems. For 95% of office users,opens source programs available under linux perform indistinguishably from and are compatable with the MS world. I've been running linux as my business computer for about a year now and I have had zero problems interfacing with my customers. Of the few incompatibilities that exist, most are nothing that a normal office user would ever see. Besides, there are still plenty of people using Wordperfect (with the same compatibility probs) without any big problem.
I recently consulted a Canadian copyright lawyer on some matters of U.S. copyright. It turns out that Canada and many states have reciprocal agreements. That means that a case won in Canada CAN be enforced easily in the U.S. And vice versa. It also means you could litigate someplace remote like Hawaii (if they have a reciprocal agreement) and get it enforced in Newfoundland.
I believe spammers in many cases make their money by collecting a portion of sales. So in that sense, it's normal enterprise and must work for some industries. And I'm sure it still works in the drugs/sex industries.
They can resell the list as many times as they want, by my email I'd guess some of these are being sold dozens of times every day. Plus, when one customer drops off, there's probably two more waiting to take their place. $XX for 10 million email addresses just sounds too good for many people.
I've had customers ask me about this, and I've had customers send out spam - they've told me they did. Of course, it wasn't spam, it was a double opt in list. Really? you've got a million people's emails who asked to be sent important information on life insurance? Nevertheless, some continue to try it once. And the new customers I'm sure are substantial.
Linux on the desktop?
As someone who's reasonably technically literate (but am a business owner first) the switch and the installation wasn't bad. Here's what I experienced:
- easy installation (off the shelf distro)
- just about everything I use works fine. Email, openoffice (bits of problems, nothing too serious), web browsing handles the vast majority of what I do in a day.
Reason I switched:
- refused to pay for a license upgrade
- tired of reinstalling win98 every 6 months, and all the associated hassle
- viruses were a BIG concern
Reason I keep a windows box available:
- my bookkeeping software doesn't switch over
- have a proprietary app
- out of the box wine sort of ran my apps, but not perfectly. No time right now to figure this out.
- the odd office app from customers doesn't convert perfectly.
Reason my kids/wife still run non-linux boxes:
- spouse doesn't want to learn something new
- kids games don't run on windows. I think this is the biggest reason home users won't switch.
Having said all that, the relief from worrying so much about exploits, reinstalling all the time and frequent reboots means I can't imagine what it would take for me to pay for an ms os.
In short, I think if you can switch someone to what I believe is a superior product that they'll stick. However they won't switch in droves until the conversion is seamless which it is not right now. That's my experience anyhow.
So I can just buy from a Canadian e-retailer.
U.S. retailers shipping to Canada are required by U.S. law to charge and remit 7% tax to Canada. Revenue Canada has been granted the right to audit and assess U.S. companies for this purpose. Sounds bizarre - but it's true (I got this info right from Revenue Canada - Canada's version of the IRS).
The converse is not true. The U.S. doesn't have a federal sales tax, and if you're out of state you don't have to charge state tax (in some cases anyway). So U.S. to Canada - tax. Canada to U.S. - no tax!
Cross border shipping is cheaper from Canada to the U.S. and with the lower dollar in Canada, Canadian online retailers have a distinct advantage over Americans. Combine all this, and how long before the Americans start to figure out that a good chunk of sales are going north?
Slashdot Mirror
I can hardly believe the lemmings around here posting about Google doing this for altruistic purposes. Let me shake up you lemmings with a couple of facts:
Calling this an OSS project is misleading at best. Yes they have some free/opensource templates. But the biggest push on that site, and certainly any of their decent looking templates are NOT opensource. You gotta pay to play, no distribution rights, etc. In short, it's a commercial site that's trying to make money with an OS front. (to clarify, they're not making money off of OSS, they're calling their site OS, but offering primarily commerical products). And guess what....now they've got their knickers in a knot over who's making the cash!
Reprint of the forum post from the original article:
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I believe this is known as the ASP loophole?
Your phpbb case is a good case in point. There are lots of folks who take GPL'ed software, modify it and charge a fee for it. As long as you're only distributing the output from the program (i.e. the web page) and not the code itself you're within the limits of the GPL.
I believe this model is very widely used. Disallowing this type of use in the GPL is going to have a lot of far reaching repercussions. Plenty of companies won't have an OSS solution to use as the base for mods. ASP's won't use it because of this, and many companies won't use it because they'd be forced to provide their paid work to their competitors.
End result, a dramatic decline in the use of OSS software. This is A Bad Thing.
(in short, the ideology of forcing release of code in some instances will in effect smother many aspects of opensource due to the reality of how it's used).
This is all good news. It costs me like $400+ to put a tiny job classifieds ad in the local daily paper. What a ripoff - more than many small shops can afford. Craigslist is what - $75? It's called competition, and the print papers need a healthy dose of it.
The other other reason Craiglist does well is they produce results. I've used other online services to source out staff and contractors and gotten nothing but garbage. The two postings I've put on Craigslist in the past month have netted me numerous qualifed and experienced candidates.
Assuming you stick to actual spammers, who's going to sue Lycos over this? The spammers? Doubtful - they'd probably have to give up personal info in such a lawsuit. And my goodness, but wouldn't THAT be some kinda fun that we could all get into?
For those who don't read the article: 1) you put up a website about some subject 2) you call Google and have them serve ads on your site. Everytime someone clicks an ad on your site, Google charges the advertiser and gives you a portion of it. 3) You offshore the work (armies of offshore IT people who's job is to just click on your ads) ...
4) Profit!
This can be serious business. In the life insurance industry it costs $7-$20 per click to advertise! It's possible if your site is showing life insurance ads (for example - I'm familiar with these ads) that Google might be passing you a dollar or two for every click. Not too tough to figure out a way to make $20 an hour is it? Just get 10 clicks an hour.
There are plenty of advertisers spending $100K per month on these ads. $20K per month in fraud charges is serious business.
That being said, I don't see Google kicking back a lot of those fraudulent fees. I and my customers have probably spent $100-$200K+ on Google and I've seen back $100 in money back as a result.
If you think the first 50 listings on Google haven't 'paid' to be there, well, in the nicest possible way, you're misinformed. Search engine optimization is big business and on any remotely popular searches the top listings are filled not with 'natural' listings but with websites that have figured out what Google is looking for, and provided it to them.
I for one welcome our new retail overlords! Because that's where this is going. Maybe your job in retail sucked due to some customers abusing the system. Maybe it's tough on stores. So? Maybe you should find a job where you actually like and respect your customers. That is not justification for blanket policies that turn around and treat ALL customers like crap.
Exactly. Offshoring is good for one thing: price. As soon as any other issue enters into the equation offshoring loses big time. Points: - as parent mentioned, you can't get stuff done on the fly. - it's dark over there right now and all the programmers are all tucked away in bed dreaming dreams of python function calls. The time differences mean a difficult time with communications. Sometimes it's easier to get stuff done over the phone or in person, particularly when it comes to planning. - It's questionable whether you'll get the quality. That may change, but right now everything I've seen is comparable to a 70's import car. (that eventually changed, this may too). - you lose the 'arms-length' ability. That's where you keep the programmer at arms length so you can throttle them if they screw up. I've seen marketing where the claim is 'we'll do it while you're sleeping, it'll be ready by morning'. Problem is, if it's 10am and you want some bugfixes, you'd probably like them that afternoon, not tomorrow morning. Plenty of retailers have learned to compete against Walmart who come into town with cheaper prices. If you're a programmer and competing strictly based on price, then yes, you're job is going elsewhere. I routinely pay $40-$100 hour for contract developers/programmers and don't think twice. And I don't go offshore because paying someone $5 an hour is going to cost me a lot more than I saved in the end. That being said, competition is healthy and there is a market for lower priced development. So make sure that's not the market you're in.
Gotta wonder if these folks were using MS Math, like the kind that is used in so many independent studies.
Linux TCO = $5000
MS TCO = $50,000
Kickback from MS to write study: $100,000.
Summary: "Our company saved $45K by switching to MS!
Mandrake seems to be pulling itself up by it's bootstraps financially. Which is great - because I think Mandrake is Linux's great hope to take on MS.
And they're doing that by doing what MS does - but based on a stable OS. With Mandrake you can get install your desktop from a couple of CD's, with about as much tech knowhow as you need with windows. With Mandrake you get a nice looking desktop right out of the box. And now with Mandrake you can spend $25 a year and get a windoze like auto-security-update feature.
Sure - you can get scatterings of that in other distro's - but not in a format that is good for non-tech loosers such as myself. Mandrake seems to be the last prominent distro that is really focussed on the desktop and doing it right (i.e. dumbed down, but still working.
even their auto updating feature is a fabulous. Yes, we all know you can get that elsewhere - and for free - but by charging for it like MS would, there's a lot more going on. First loosers believe there likely to get a fully tested easy to use product (heck - I believe it myself, I'm just waiting for their server version - and if you think people won't buy the server version of this, then you don't understand why people by MS), and secondly it focusses attention on it - people will buy it just because it's offered and it's a good idea. Offer it for free and it's hard to see the value in it.
And before the purists hack me to tiny little pieces, I'm speaking as a tech manager type who uses mandrake on their desktop. I'm the next wave of converts, and Mandrake is going to do the converting
It may not have anything to do with driving. But you're making a common statistical mistake - confusing causation and correlation. Causation is just like it sounds, A causes B. Correlation means when you find B, you find A - even if A doesn't cause B.
A perfect example of this is credit rating. Doesn't effect your driving does it? Well, apparenlty people with poor credit ratings tend to have poorer driving records. So insurance companies would love to be able to price your auto insurance by looking at your credit rating. Might even be being done where you are. But does bad credit have anything to do with insurance claims? Actually it does. And I suspect the insurance companies have every reason to expect that the presence of black boxes will be correlated with claims.
I've posted this to a forum I run for actuaries - the mathematical types who price insurance. I won't post a link as I'd rather not have the fame. But it will be interesting to see what they have to say
However, in the article, Charles Samuelson makes a point that is well known when it comes to pricing insurance. Progressive is basically selecting the cream of the crop for their clients. That means more money for them (less claims probably), and less for other insurance companies. So the other insurance companies are forced to start underwriting for this as well. Pretty soon, you're screwed because all the insurance companies have to take it into account to remain competitive.
Think that's only a vague thing? At one point nobody priced life insurance by whether or not you smoked. In fact, it was probably only about 30 years ago they started doing that. Now of course, they have two sets of prices - those that smoke and those that don't.
In short, you'd better get used to the idea of having black boxes installed in your car, and having it taken into account on your insurance. It's profitable for the insurance companies, so it's coming to a policy near you.
Mod parent up - absolutely correct. I'm in a Canadian rural community of about 5K people. 4 years ago I was on 56K dialup. 3 years ago I was on 1mb high speed wireless. This year I went to 3mb DSL for about $25US per month. *and* I have the option of bringing fibre right to the house. Expensive as crap ($600Cdn/month) - and a too large installation fee - but it's available to me if I want it. So what's the excuse of the US for leaving half the folks on dialup and charging outrageous prices? Gotta be the regulations of the baby bells and the like. Up here the phone companies are legislated that they have to install DSL hardward and allow other's to lease their lines. So I have my choice of providers. Yes, there's a hard bottom limit to the prices (based on what the ISP leases the line for from the telco), but the fact that anyone can lease the lines provides a ton of competition and keeps prices razor sharp. The Canadian govt has also made substantial investments on wiring the country. You can visit just about any public library - including those in extremely remote locations - and they'll likely have highspeed. In fact, when I go on vacation up in bear country I can enjoy the wilderness and as long as I'm in driving distance to a library (they're everywhere right?), I've got high speed web access. In short, the US can follow our lead by changing the regulatory structure to allow for intense regional competition, as well as investing in some larger infrastructure which will help foster this longerterm.
That won't do me much good on a production server that I'm trying to harden. Clearly I can't do that live. I don't know how much time it would take me to produce something that I could migrate to a live system without having nightmares about downtime using this methodology. Don't get me wrong - the idea is fabulous if you're learning or starting on a new system.
Two points - first, spam doesn't really cost you money directly for 99% of the population. It might cost the ISP some effort and mark up your broadband costs a bit. So? It's a Pita, but it's not the driving cost behind a broadband connection. Somebody at the ISP has to look after this? So? Your 'paying' in your mailing costs (as directly as you pay to recieve spam) for somebody at the post office to stand there and jam garbage mail in your mailbox. There's no difference. Secondly, From the article: "At some level, the folks who are engaged in a business where they are sending out massive volumes that they couldn't possibly have the permission of all those recipients for, they know full well that they are not engaged in legitimate or responsible non-spamming activities," he said. "You don't typically come up with 60 million e-mail addresses through a permission-based process." So? Where's your gawd given write not to recieve email from someone just because you didn't sign up? It's apparently lost on most of the people here that the internet is a PUBLIC network. That means it's available to the entire public as it's available to you. Don't like it? don't sign on. Or set up spam filters. Or don't get an email account - that'd lower your ISP's costs wouldn't it? Of course, everyone really does in fact want to receive emails from other people, including commericial ones. They just want to decide after the fact which ones they like. Because email is both a public and international forum, legislation won't solve the problem (and despite my earlier factual comments, I'd like to decrease the 1000+ emails I get a day). The only way this will be corrected is if the community as a whole develops a standard of some sort that prevents spam. That's the way the entire internet works, from TCP/IP to HTML. So everyone who admins an email server, get together and put forth a standard. You don't prevent anyone from doing their own thing, you just don't recieve email(or spam) from those that don't follow the standard.
Can't use this for business. The last thing I want is my customers (or anyone else for that matter) being able to query to see if I have other specific emails in my list. Even worse, a competitor gets their hands on it, and just hammers emails at it, looking for positives.
Open source software is the culmination of capitalism. When you've got your choice of various answers, and (generally) cost is not an issue, then only the strong survive. That kind of Darwinian process isn't communism at all. Plus, open source software (and particularly as it relates to the web) IMO makes all sorts of capitalistic ventures possible. On the web you're as big as MS or Wallymart - and you can get started in your basement on a shoestring using opensource software. What would apache cost if you actually had to pay what i'ts worth? Instead you can get a $10 hosting account ('cause the webhost didn't spend any money on software), throw up an OSS shopping cart or templated website and voila - you're online and making money. If OSS software wasn't as good as it is and free as in beer, there'd be a lot fewer starter/seed companies than there are. How many people are running their own business now that they couldn't have done 10 years ago? How many of those are running OSS software? How many would have had problems if they would have had to start off with $10K in software costs? Lots - that's how many. Mine included. I'm a capitalist, and love OSS because of all this. Help keep the competition fierce!
www.therecord.com (without the copyright violations), is well worth visiting - as it has a front page picture of the remains of the car.
There doesn't seem to be anything left that stands higher than 6 inches high.
Surprisingly this car could do 130KM/hour (roughly 90 miles/hour) - and it clearly didn't have much in terms of protection.
I live about 5 miles from the scene of the accident, and the stretch of road it was on is a very busy, very fast, and very dangerous 20 miles or so. There is also pleny of construction on the side of the road in that area though the report doesn't indicate that was a factor. To give you an idea, the posted speed limit in Shakespeare is 60km/hour. It's not uncommon for people to be travelling 80-100km/h or higher right thorugh there.
Very unfortunate thing, losing a bright studen't live and tarnishing some of the positive karma solar powered cars have.
Huh? As far as I'm concerned, these days Linux IS Windows. I'm happily running Mandrake 10. Great GUI. Installed in a flash. Picked up all my hardware no probs - network card, sound system, monitor, printer etc. And it takes a good while to boot now too. And between urpmi, the occassional program that seems to autoinstall, and reading minimal README's, even an idjit such as I seem to be able to get by. As for openoffice not handline MS office docs, that's technically true, but not functionally true. I ran opensource programs on Windows to acclimatize myself before switching completely to linux and had (and continue to have) absolutely 0 problems. For 95% of office users,opens source programs available under linux perform indistinguishably from and are compatable with the MS world. I've been running linux as my business computer for about a year now and I have had zero problems interfacing with my customers. Of the few incompatibilities that exist, most are nothing that a normal office user would ever see. Besides, there are still plenty of people using Wordperfect (with the same compatibility probs) without any big problem.
I recently consulted a Canadian copyright lawyer on some matters of U.S. copyright. It turns out that Canada and many states have reciprocal agreements. That means that a case won in Canada CAN be enforced easily in the U.S. And vice versa. It also means you could litigate someplace remote like Hawaii (if they have a reciprocal agreement) and get it enforced in Newfoundland.
I believe spammers in many cases make their money by collecting a portion of sales. So in that sense, it's normal enterprise and must work for some industries. And I'm sure it still works in the drugs/sex industries.
They can resell the list as many times as they want, by my email I'd guess some of these are being sold dozens of times every day. Plus, when one customer drops off, there's probably two more waiting to take their place. $XX for 10 million email addresses just sounds too good for many people.
I've had customers ask me about this, and I've had customers send out spam - they've told me they did. Of course, it wasn't spam, it was a double opt in list. Really? you've got a million people's emails who asked to be sent important information on life insurance? Nevertheless, some continue to try it once. And the new customers I'm sure are substantial.
Linux on the desktop? As someone who's reasonably technically literate (but am a business owner first) the switch and the installation wasn't bad. Here's what I experienced: - easy installation (off the shelf distro) - just about everything I use works fine. Email, openoffice (bits of problems, nothing too serious), web browsing handles the vast majority of what I do in a day. Reason I switched: - refused to pay for a license upgrade - tired of reinstalling win98 every 6 months, and all the associated hassle - viruses were a BIG concern Reason I keep a windows box available: - my bookkeeping software doesn't switch over - have a proprietary app - out of the box wine sort of ran my apps, but not perfectly. No time right now to figure this out. - the odd office app from customers doesn't convert perfectly. Reason my kids/wife still run non-linux boxes: - spouse doesn't want to learn something new - kids games don't run on windows. I think this is the biggest reason home users won't switch. Having said all that, the relief from worrying so much about exploits, reinstalling all the time and frequent reboots means I can't imagine what it would take for me to pay for an ms os. In short, I think if you can switch someone to what I believe is a superior product that they'll stick. However they won't switch in droves until the conversion is seamless which it is not right now. That's my experience anyhow.
So I can just buy from a Canadian e-retailer.
U.S. retailers shipping to Canada are required by U.S. law to charge and remit 7% tax to Canada. Revenue Canada has been granted the right to audit and assess U.S. companies for this purpose. Sounds bizarre - but it's true (I got this info right from Revenue Canada - Canada's version of the IRS). The converse is not true. The U.S. doesn't have a federal sales tax, and if you're out of state you don't have to charge state tax (in some cases anyway). So U.S. to Canada - tax. Canada to U.S. - no tax! Cross border shipping is cheaper from Canada to the U.S. and with the lower dollar in Canada, Canadian online retailers have a distinct advantage over Americans. Combine all this, and how long before the Americans start to figure out that a good chunk of sales are going north?