You really don't see it, do you? You just keep pointing to the next guy and passing the buck. "its only our opinion, its the mail admins doing the blocking".
Quary: is SPEWS blind to the extent incompetent ISP's use its list?
If your argument is that ISPs apply spam filtering without informing their users, then I fail to see that that has anything to do with SPEWS. If an ISP uses any blocklist or filter it is their responsibility to inform the user that they have enabled these protections. Spamassassin, Spamcop, MAPS... any of these tools can potentially stop delivery of mail a user was expecting. If the ISP didn't warn the user of this possibility then their customers obviously should complain to the ISP. What does SPEWS have to do with that? Nothing.
That is where you are wrong. I will leave aside for now the issue of what constitutes actually informing users of what SPEWS blocks. As SPEWS, it has a lot to do with them.
SPEWS encourages mail admins to block using there list, without informing people of what is really going on. Then when called on it, they point at the mail admins and say "its only our opinion, its the mail admins doing the blocking". The mail admins (when called on it) say "It's not my fault, I do what I can with SPEWS. Go talk to them!" and the finger pointing continues. Every one dodges taking responcibility.
You will notice that I left out the mail senders ISP here. See, I see this as the receiving systems dropping the ball and screwing up. And I activly encourage people that don't *GET* there mail because of SPEWS (and other blacklists) to contact there ISP and complain. Complain loudly, complain often.
I have a little more respect for the admins that admit to knowingly blocking email. At least I know that when they get complaints (or threats of taking buisness elsewhere) from their own customers about not getting mail they will generally correct it.
You want to block spam, OK - I'll even help you if I can. You want to try and ligit email to 'prove a point', then you are wrong. It is that simple.
It's a boycott system. We as mail server admins are boycotting spam supporting ISPs. The phrase "collateral damage" just isn't involved here. If you are spam supporting ISP, I don't want to talk to you. It's pretty simple. Isn't it obvious that this also means that I do not want to talk to customers of the ISP I am boycotting? What would be the point of an ISP boycott if I still talk to its customers?
And what of your customers? Do you inform THEM of who YOU are boycotting?
Why don't you try a little experiment for us. Monitor the news.admin.net-abuse.email list for a month or two. Take the list of all blocked domains you have gathered and post that to the front page of your ISP with the title:
We partisipate in the SPEWS boycott system. Here are some of the many systems we are boycotting mail from:
If you're unable to use email because of your ISPs negligence, they may have abrogated the contract by failing to provide the level of service you signed up for.
Very doubtfull. Most ISP's indemnify themselves against just about everything. Even if they didn't, the ISP would argue that there system is working properly, it is the receiving systems that are not, and they can not be held liable for that. Unless there is a clear presidence for this that I am unaware of, I am afraid Your logic is seriously flawed.
Let me ask this another way: How can ANY user prove that being blacklisted by SPEWS is negligence? Can you show me ONE case where this was tested? If not, why havent SPEWS suporters tried it?
I can see a user suing there ISP for USING one of SPEWS lists if it causes false positives. I can see a negligence complaint from that. But for being listed by spews? I can't see how you could support that in court.
It's not like a run my own webserver on it (hosting companies), or keep P2P open all day. I do work from home a lot, but I do want to know, how on earth do you use that much traffic?
I mean, even with 5 people on computers all day, the office doesn't do 150GB/month, more like 8 -10GB/month, 15gig at the MOST. Honestly, what do you use that much traffic for?
From a customer service prospective, I agree with you. At the same time, I also understand the investment it would take to do that in a typical city, and that it may not make financial sence for the cable company to do so.
As companies start to look at their options in these situations, we have to understand that they have a responcibility to their share holdres to look at what options make the most financial sence. Cut off one or 2 users who are using 90% of the rings badwidth, or build out a new ring at a cost of X dollars, whe the new ring will have the same problem with those same 2 users?
I personalyy think they should just pay those users to switch to DSL, but thats just me.
And for all of you screaming that "all internet bandwith is shared", in the macro (company or internet wide) sence of the term you are correct. It is when you look at the bandwidth in the micro sence of the word that you start to understand the issue. Cable bandwidth is shared at the ring, under the street, and not back at some central office. That is, IMHO Cables biggest drawback. But it also lets cable go places DSL is not avalible.
I don't think that the cable companies care as much about how much bandwidth we are useing, as they do about how other users are being effected by the bandwidth we use. We have to remember that cable (unlike DSL) is a shared resoure, and our useage effects others around us.
I have Cox high speed internet. In my neighborhood, I am one of only 6 people on the cable ring with high speed cable internet (most of my neighbors with broadband either have DSL or use the other cable provider in town, who until last week offered twice the speed as Cox. I live in apt where the other cable co does not service, and DSL is 44.5 feet away...) However, because there are so few other internet users on my ring, I can use as much bandwith as I want without my use really effect any one else on the local ring. For the last 3 months I used well over 40GB of traffic, no letters of complaint, no calls, nothing.
I have a few friends who live on the other side of town that get letters for using over 20GB/month. One of them is a comercial account that specifies they don't have a limit, but they get letters anyways. Their local ring is fairly saturated, and we know neighbors on the ring are complaining of slow speeds. It seems that after every batch of complaints that they take action. YMMV.
Yeah, I can't for the life of me figure out why they are blocking mail from some hosts, and not others. For example, I have a hosting account with IXWebhosting (currently has 6 domains and 3 subdomains on it). All of the mail goes through the same physical servers. For a while AOL was blocking all mail from IXWebhosting. I got 50+ AOL users to start calling them on a daily basis to complain about missing email from a specific domain. Now that domain can send to AOL, but the others can not.
Having read this entire thread I find yours very enlighting, and perhas the most well thought out reply posted. As such, if you really are only an armchair political scientist, I do wonder what you do for your day job;)
I do want to point out a few things from my post that you may have missed or didn't come across well (more likely the latter). You said "Both sides are wrong, both sides have blood on their hands, everyone's about equally guilty,". While it is a view that many have, it is not my view. I do think that both sides are wrong, and both sides have blood on their hands. What I have never done is assign blame. If you read my first post on the subject (the great great (?) grandparent of this post) you will see that it is my opinion that in the end, it is up each side (all sides?) to come to terms with the part they have played. All of the finger pointing in the world isn't going to help.
I have some good friends from Palestine who are very vocal about the issue. I have some good friends from Israel who are likewise very vocal about the issue. They are all very highly educated, very articulate, and very much believe in their perspective views. As such I have heard countless arguments on both sides over the years. I have seen numbers from both sides proving what they say, but in the end, they don't matter. You can make numbers say what ever you want them to - and both sides do. Both sides put out numbers showing how they were harmed, and how little they have harmed the other. These numbers are not stopping either side from killing the other, just encouraging it.
Numbers like these lead to more donations to Palestine some of which buys more weapons. When Israel does its the same thing - more money to buy weapons. They don't lead to any solutions, only finger pointing, name-calling and more bloodshed.
You know what angers me most? It's my own part in it. The majority of funding for this - both sides of this - comes from the USA. Until a few years ago I contributed to both sides in my charitable giving, and even worse, for a long time I did not take the time to understand the various points of view, and see my own part in it. So yes, I have blood on my hands as well. I often wonder what would happen if the money just stopped flowing.
Before I get off my soapbox, can anyone tell me how much money Israel has spent caring for those Palestinians injured in their various attacks on Palestine? How about telling me how much money Palestine has spent caring for those injured in Israel by suicide Palestinian bombers?
Before we get too far into this Isrial-Palistine debate, let me point out to everyone that neither side has any claim whatsoever to the moral high ground.
Both sides have comited inhumain acts against the other in the name of their cause ('free palistine' and 'national security'). Both sides have too much blood on their hands, including the blood of more inocents than either side can count, to allow either side to make any claim about having some moral high ground to stand on.
The tit-for-tat that has gone on longer than any one can remember needs to stop. Both sides need to accept their history, including their collective deeds, and move forward. Until that happens, with both sides accepting responcibility for the the parts they played, I fear we will never see pease in the region.
For the most part I agree, we really do not want OS becomming political. OTOH, I think that a small change to tax law allowing for donations of money to a 501(c)(3) that is earmarked for an OS project (with a person, charity, orginization, etc getting the tax free funds to help with the project), that might be very helpful.
Can we say "Unreasonable search and seizure". IANAL, but as I understand it the government needs to have a basis to investigate a person for a crime. Using this kind of database match is, in essance, like allowing the government to investigate people without having any basis to do so. If we allow this to be passed, where does this slope end? RFID tags implanted into every person so that the police can see who was in the area when the crime was commited?
Something like this was proposed in my town not too long ago. The idea was to buy a kiskos capible of burning CD's and that could accept cash (to pay for the blank CD's), and then use it to distribute Project Gutenberg texts, city information and the like. OOo and a few other OSS used in the schools was even going to be avalible on these kiskos. The kiskos were all to have been centrally managed (updates pushed out to the Kiskos via a central server), and would even send off an email to say when the system needed new CD's, or it was time to pick up the cash. It would have cost the city a small fortune, but the CD sales would have recouped the cost over about about 5 years. It would have even allowed a patron to take things saved ftom the net on the normal terminals and put it on CD for them. The system was extreamly cool, except that it was vapor. The vendor vanished just as the city (and 3 other cities that were to cooperate on managing these terminals) were ready to buy. Thankfuly they city had not yet paid for the 12 kiskos it was to buy, but it did sour them on things like that happening in the future.
> And since I'm feeling nostalgic I'll just throw > these in at random.
> -Fidonet
About 2 weeks ago I came across a box of old floppy disks containing DOS 6.22 and Synchronet BBS software. Just for old times sake I played with it for a while. Turns out that Synchronet is now an open source software project (www.synchro.net), and Fidonet (www.fidonet.net)is still kicking.
Well, after a few hours I got board with it, so like a good geek I took it one step further, and tried gateing from Fidonet NNTP PHPBB. Scarry part is that it worked, mostly. I gave up before I found a way to append the Fidonet node to the internet address...
> -Horrible misconfigured MajorBBS sites.
Anyone remember the Argus Computerized Exchange? Ahh those were fun days...
My point was not that the tool is at fault, but that that it is far to easy to misuse this tool, and that such misuse can, and often does work against the goals that are so often sighted as the reason for installing them in the first place.
Look, if these tools are to be used in the workplace sucesfully (and I stress sucesfully), then standards need to be adapted as to what is acceptable, and what is not. Right now the GPS companies (at least all of the ones I have dealt with) do nothing in the way of helping companies develop workable standards for useing this tool (YMMV). Nor do I know of any *fair* standards to use as models.
I live in the Boston area. I have to go out on the roads shortly, so I have an actual stake in these roads being cleared. With that said, I have to side with the plow operators. What has been proposed for this contract includes provisions and procedures that are far worse than what happened with my friends pest control company.
Phone die? It take you an hour of plowing before you could get a replacement batery? Oh well, not only do you lose your pay for that time, but all of the time you have worked so far that you have not been paid for. Don't like it? Too bad, because their is not any greviance policy.
No, the tool is not the problem, its the misuse of the tool that creates the problem.
A friend of mine owns a pest control company. His company has over 25 vehicles on the road at any time.
A few years ago his insurance company offered him a very large break on his various insurance policies for 5 years if he could do real time tracking and could document where the vehicles were 24/7 (the savings the first year paid for the GPS systems). We installed some very nice GPS boxes. Every 7 seconds these boxes take a reading. They tell us within 25 feet where the trucks are, the trucks speed, miles and more. We could upgrade the boxes with terminals to allow for fully computerised records. We even tried using this system to track employee hours.
You know what we found? Productivity dropped, quality dropped, employee satisfaction dropped, and revenue dropped.
When we stared to look at why, we discovered the following:
Less employee down time. That extra 5 minutes techs may take to 'wind down' after a tough call was not their, bringing down the overall quality of service. For comparison, office workers could take a walk to the watter bubbler after a tough call.
More fights between the office and techs. Office staff began to think that it was their job to keep the techs going %100 of the time. This led to fights between the office staff (specificly those that answer the phones) and the techs.
The techs spent less time cleaning / organizing their trucks, making the rest of their service time less efficient. Consiquently, they often did not have everything they needed to service a call.
The techs spent less time doing their jobs, and more time going from site to site. Things that should have been done the first time ended up being done on an extra trip back.
Techs were not willing to work as many hours as they had been. During season some of the best employees would work as many as 90 hours a week. This would include taking (company sanctioned) naps on the job from time to time. with the new system they would not take naps, and then would not be willing to work nearly as many hours.
The company almost lost a number of very good people over all of this.
You know what he ended up doing? He stopped using the data on a day to day basis. Paper work is again filled out by hand and time cards are back in use. The data is still collected, it is still used if a customer calls up and says "Your guy never came", but it is not used to track real time positions, its not used for day to day accounting, or anything else like that. It's just not worth it.
Perhaps this will never be adopted, perhaps it will, it really makes no difference. What it does do is begin to open up a new set of possibilities.
The real question is will some one else come up with something else built on the concept? Will it lead to a revolution in DNS system? Or perhaps a new version of Freenet? a new IM project? Perhaps some one will turn the concept into an application-directory-service, one where 500 different distributed apps use it for various things. Or perhaps someone else will look at this and see another new use for some other tried and true tech.
The point is not always that something should be done, but that a potential value exists in a unique idea (or in this case, an extension to an old idea), and should be given a closer look by the community at large.
I agree that it's clever, but like a deadly virus, not something that should leave the lab on a large scale.
See, I think every one is looking at this the wrong way (including the org. author of the concept). Change the peramiters just a bit, and you can see the benifit of such a system more clearly. Instead of using the existing DNS network (which I think is a bad idea), why not take the concept and build a BT-DNS network?
Some root BT-DNS hosts could be established, and network admins could then set up their own BT-DNS servers if they choose to. BT clients could even be modified to use this new BT-DNS network. Not sure how you would deal with adding BT files to the network but I am sure it could be done easily enough (DNS is not my strong point...)
I just had a wild thought. You know, one of those thoughts that just couldn't be true, but are scarry enough that if true it would be really, really bad.
What if SCO's real legal play is not in federal circut court, but federal chapter 7 bankruptsy court? Could they be doing all of this trying to force themselves into bankruptsy, and then get a bankruptsy court to toss provisions of various contracts and settlements? If this is so (and I really hope people can tell me why its not so), it is possible that SCO could then reopen their case, obtaining many of the rights they are now claiming. God I can see it now: "Your honner, In order for us to emerge from chapter 7, we need you to quash the GPL..."
Many readers (like the two reading over my shoulder) are taking this as a cop-out on Barny Franks part. I for one really wish more of our elected leaders understood the seperation of powers. If they did, we would have far fewer problems with the law than we do today.
Slashdot Mirror
You really don't see it, do you? You just keep pointing to the next guy and passing the buck. "its only our opinion, its the mail admins doing the blocking".
Quary: is SPEWS blind to the extent incompetent ISP's use its list?
That is where you are wrong. I will leave aside for now the issue of what constitutes actually informing users of what SPEWS blocks. As SPEWS, it has a lot to do with them.
SPEWS encourages mail admins to block using there list, without informing people of what is really going on. Then when called on it, they point at the mail admins and say "its only our opinion, its the mail admins doing the blocking". The mail admins (when called on it) say "It's not my fault, I do what I can with SPEWS. Go talk to them!" and the finger pointing continues. Every one dodges taking responcibility.
You will notice that I left out the mail senders ISP here. See, I see this as the receiving systems dropping the ball and screwing up. And I activly encourage people that don't *GET* there mail because of SPEWS (and other blacklists) to contact there ISP and complain. Complain loudly, complain often.
I have a little more respect for the admins that admit to knowingly blocking email. At least I know that when they get complaints (or threats of taking buisness elsewhere) from their own customers about not getting mail they will generally correct it.
You want to block spam, OK - I'll even help you if I can. You want to try and ligit email to 'prove a point', then you are wrong. It is that simple.
And what of your customers? Do you inform THEM of who YOU are boycotting?
Why don't you try a little experiment for us. Monitor the news.admin.net-abuse.email list for a month or two. Take the list of all blocked domains you have gathered and post that to the front page of your ISP with the title:
We partisipate in the SPEWS boycott system. Here are some of the many systems we are boycotting mail from:
(list domain names here)
Very doubtfull. Most ISP's indemnify themselves against just about everything. Even if they didn't, the ISP would argue that there system is working properly, it is the receiving systems that are not, and they can not be held liable for that. Unless there is a clear presidence for this that I am unaware of, I am afraid Your logic is seriously flawed.
Let me ask this another way: How can ANY user prove that being blacklisted by SPEWS is negligence? Can you show me ONE case where this was tested? If not, why havent SPEWS suporters tried it?
I can see a user suing there ISP for USING one of SPEWS lists if it causes false positives. I can see a negligence complaint from that. But for being listed by spews? I can't see how you could support that in court.
OK, I can see how you would use that much bandwidth.
It's not like a run my own webserver on it (hosting companies), or keep P2P open all day. I do work from home a lot, but I do want to know, how on earth do you use that much traffic?
I mean, even with 5 people on computers all day, the office doesn't do 150GB/month, more like 8 -10GB/month, 15gig at the MOST. Honestly, what do you use that much traffic for?
Cisco PIX 501. Not sure how you would do it with Linux, though I bet Squid would have tools for this
From a customer service prospective, I agree with you. At the same time, I also understand the investment it would take to do that in a typical city, and that it may not make financial sence for the cable company to do so.
As companies start to look at their options in these situations, we have to understand that they have a responcibility to their share holdres to look at what options make the most financial sence. Cut off one or 2 users who are using 90% of the rings badwidth, or build out a new ring at a cost of X dollars, whe the new ring will have the same problem with those same 2 users?
I personalyy think they should just pay those users to switch to DSL, but thats just me.
And for all of you screaming that "all internet bandwith is shared", in the macro (company or internet wide) sence of the term you are correct. It is when you look at the bandwidth in the micro sence of the word that you start to understand the issue. Cable bandwidth is shared at the ring, under the street, and not back at some central office. That is, IMHO Cables biggest drawback. But it also lets cable go places DSL is not avalible.
If I had mod point right now, I would mod parent WAY up!
I don't think that the cable companies care as much about how much bandwidth we are useing, as they do about how other users are being effected by the bandwidth we use. We have to remember that cable (unlike DSL) is a shared resoure, and our useage effects others around us.
I have Cox high speed internet. In my neighborhood, I am one of only 6 people on the cable ring with high speed cable internet (most of my neighbors with broadband either have DSL or use the other cable provider in town, who until last week offered twice the speed as Cox. I live in apt where the other cable co does not service, and DSL is 44.5 feet away...) However, because there are so few other internet users on my ring, I can use as much bandwith as I want without my use really effect any one else on the local ring. For the last 3 months I used well over 40GB of traffic, no letters of complaint, no calls, nothing.
I have a few friends who live on the other side of town that get letters for using over 20GB/month. One of them is a comercial account that specifies they don't have a limit, but they get letters anyways. Their local ring is fairly saturated, and we know neighbors on the ring are complaining of slow speeds. It seems that after every batch of complaints that they take action. YMMV.
Don't ever count Microsoft out. Like it or not, they still have a lot of very strong people working their, and more money than god to go with it.
Yeah, I can't for the life of me figure out why they are blocking mail from some hosts, and not others. For example, I have a hosting account with IXWebhosting (currently has 6 domains and 3 subdomains on it). All of the mail goes through the same physical servers. For a while AOL was blocking all mail from IXWebhosting. I got 50+ AOL users to start calling them on a daily basis to complain about missing email from a specific domain. Now that domain can send to AOL, but the others can not.
Chops,
;)
Having read this entire thread I find yours very enlighting, and perhas the most well thought out reply posted. As such, if you really are only an armchair political scientist, I do wonder what you do for your day job
I do want to point out a few things from my post that you may have missed or didn't come across well (more likely the latter). You said "Both sides are wrong, both sides have blood on their hands, everyone's about equally guilty,". While it is a view that many have, it is not my view. I do think that both sides are wrong, and both sides have blood on their hands. What I have never done is assign blame. If you read my first post on the subject (the great great (?) grandparent of this post) you will see that it is my opinion that in the end, it is up each side (all sides?) to come to terms with the part they have played. All of the finger pointing in the world isn't going to help.
I have some good friends from Palestine who are very vocal about the issue. I have some good friends from Israel who are likewise very vocal about the issue. They are all very highly educated, very articulate, and very much believe in their perspective views. As such I have heard countless arguments on both sides over the years. I have seen numbers from both sides proving what they say, but in the end, they don't matter. You can make numbers say what ever you want them to - and both sides do. Both sides put out numbers showing how they were harmed, and how little they have harmed the other. These numbers are not stopping either side from killing the other, just encouraging it.
Numbers like these lead to more donations to Palestine some of which buys more weapons. When Israel does its the same thing - more money to buy weapons. They don't lead to any solutions, only finger pointing, name-calling and more bloodshed.
You know what angers me most? It's my own part in it. The majority of funding for this - both sides of this - comes from the USA. Until a few years ago I contributed to both sides in my charitable giving, and even worse, for a long time I did not take the time to understand the various points of view, and see my own part in it. So yes, I have blood on my hands as well. I often wonder what would happen if the money just stopped flowing.
Before I get off my soapbox, can anyone tell me how much money Israel has spent caring for those Palestinians injured in their various attacks on Palestine? How about telling me how much money Palestine has spent caring for those injured in Israel by suicide Palestinian bombers?
And we are surprised this keeps going on?
Before we get too far into this Isrial-Palistine debate, let me point out to everyone that neither side has any claim whatsoever to the moral high ground.
Both sides have comited inhumain acts against the other in the name of their cause ('free palistine' and 'national security'). Both sides have too much blood on their hands, including the blood of more inocents than either side can count, to allow either side to make any claim about having some moral high ground to stand on.
The tit-for-tat that has gone on longer than any one can remember needs to stop. Both sides need to accept their history, including their collective deeds, and move forward. Until that happens, with both sides accepting responcibility for the the parts they played, I fear we will never see pease in the region.
For the most part I agree, we really do not want OS becomming political. OTOH, I think that a small change to tax law allowing for donations of money to a 501(c)(3) that is earmarked for an OS project (with a person, charity, orginization, etc getting the tax free funds to help with the project), that might be very helpful.
Can we say "Unreasonable search and seizure". IANAL, but as I understand it the government needs to have a basis to investigate a person for a crime. Using this kind of database match is, in essance, like allowing the government to investigate people without having any basis to do so. If we allow this to be passed, where does this slope end? RFID tags implanted into every person so that the police can see who was in the area when the crime was commited?
Something like this was proposed in my town not too long ago. The idea was to buy a kiskos capible of burning CD's and that could accept cash (to pay for the blank CD's), and then use it to distribute Project Gutenberg texts, city information and the like. OOo and a few other OSS used in the schools was even going to be avalible on these kiskos. The kiskos were all to have been centrally managed (updates pushed out to the Kiskos via a central server), and would even send off an email to say when the system needed new CD's, or it was time to pick up the cash. It would have cost the city a small fortune, but the CD sales would have recouped the cost over about about 5 years. It would have even allowed a patron to take things saved ftom the net on the normal terminals and put it on CD for them. The system was extreamly cool, except that it was vapor. The vendor vanished just as the city (and 3 other cities that were to cooperate on managing these terminals) were ready to buy. Thankfuly they city had not yet paid for the 12 kiskos it was to buy, but it did sour them on things like that happening in the future.
> And since I'm feeling nostalgic I'll just throw
> these in at random.
> -Fidonet
About 2 weeks ago I came across a box of old floppy disks containing DOS 6.22 and Synchronet BBS software. Just for old times sake I played with it for a while. Turns out that Synchronet is now an open source software project (www.synchro.net), and Fidonet (www.fidonet.net)is still kicking.
Well, after a few hours I got board with it, so like a good geek I took it one step further, and tried gateing from Fidonet NNTP PHPBB. Scarry part is that it worked, mostly. I gave up before I found a way to append the Fidonet node to the internet address...
> -Horrible misconfigured MajorBBS sites.
Anyone remember the Argus Computerized Exchange? Ahh those were fun days...
My point was not that the tool is at fault, but that that it is far to easy to misuse this tool, and that such misuse can, and often does work against the goals that are so often sighted as the reason for installing them in the first place.
Look, if these tools are to be used in the workplace sucesfully (and I stress sucesfully), then standards need to be adapted as to what is acceptable, and what is not. Right now the GPS companies (at least all of the ones I have dealt with) do nothing in the way of helping companies develop workable standards for useing this tool (YMMV). Nor do I know of any *fair* standards to use as models.
I live in the Boston area. I have to go out on the roads shortly, so I have an actual stake in these roads being cleared. With that said, I have to side with the plow operators. What has been proposed for this contract includes provisions and procedures that are far worse than what happened with my friends pest control company.
Phone die? It take you an hour of plowing before you could get a replacement batery? Oh well, not only do you lose your pay for that time, but all of the time you have worked so far that you have not been paid for. Don't like it? Too bad, because their is not any greviance policy.
No, the tool is not the problem, its the misuse of the tool that creates the problem.
A few years ago his insurance company offered him a very large break on his various insurance policies for 5 years if he could do real time tracking and could document where the vehicles were 24/7 (the savings the first year paid for the GPS systems). We installed some very nice GPS boxes. Every 7 seconds these boxes take a reading. They tell us within 25 feet where the trucks are, the trucks speed, miles and more. We could upgrade the boxes with terminals to allow for fully computerised records. We even tried using this system to track employee hours.
You know what we found? Productivity dropped, quality dropped, employee satisfaction dropped, and revenue dropped.
When we stared to look at why, we discovered the following:
The real question is will some one else come up with something else built on the concept? Will it lead to a revolution in DNS system? Or perhaps a new version of Freenet? a new IM project? Perhaps some one will turn the concept into an application-directory-service, one where 500 different distributed apps use it for various things. Or perhaps someone else will look at this and see another new use for some other tried and true tech.
The point is not always that something should be done, but that a potential value exists in a unique idea (or in this case, an extension to an old idea), and should be given a closer look by the community at large.
I just had a wild thought. You know, one of those thoughts that just couldn't be true, but are scarry enough that if true it would be really, really bad.
What if SCO's real legal play is not in federal circut court, but federal chapter 7 bankruptsy court? Could they be doing all of this trying to force themselves into bankruptsy, and then get a bankruptsy court to toss provisions of various contracts and settlements? If this is so (and I really hope people can tell me why its not so), it is possible that SCO could then reopen their case, obtaining many of the rights they are now claiming. God I can see it now: "Your honner, In order for us to emerge from chapter 7, we need you to quash the GPL..."
Many readers (like the two reading over my shoulder) are taking this as a cop-out on Barny Franks part. I for one really wish more of our elected leaders understood the seperation of powers. If they did, we would have far fewer problems with the law than we do today.