It's pretty sad when corporations fight for their 'right' to send people crap they don't want, and expect us to pay for the paper they're using up.
It'd be especially bad if you've got you computer and fax on the same line, and you get booted offline in the middle of a big download to get some junk fax. There's plenty of other ways for companys to spew their junk out that are slightly less annoying.
Open source is different than free. Several games (ex: Return to Castle Wolfenstein) have release their sources, but the game still costs money.
And I really shouldn't have to remind you that if you were to sell Office, MS would sue you into the stone age.
Perhaps this is where we need to focus when worrying about copyright length. If businesses can make rational decisions on their own, we don't have to waste our time with the government.
1. Company's confident in their products voluntarily release them after a reasonable time
2. Customer's reward these company's with their business
3. profit
Seems to me that the logical step for IBM now is to settle this suit by simply acquiring the plaintiff.
Except that that's exactly what SCO wants. If IBM buys SCO, they validate this kind of behavior, and encourage other failing businesses to do the same thing. Better to counter-sue for everything they've got left.
The issue is not incoming vs outgoing. What's needed is a way to determine who initiated the transfer. Users should pay for downloading MP3s, but not for someone trying to send spam through their server. Perhaps your ISP should collect $ through the ISP of the spammer.
ISP's are the ones with the hardware and know-how to block spam and viruses. And for the sake of the rest of us, if someone's computer is puking onto the network, they should block all that traffic until it's fixed. But if you get a virus, it came through your ISP. If they couldn't block it, they can't expect the customers to.
multiport repeaters, to plug more than one computer into a single network port.
Who cares? 1,000 computers routed through one port cannot possibly use anymore bandwidth than one computer on the same port. So charging by port makes sense. If there was a device that could magically create bandwidth, everyone on/. would have 3 already.
Last year, users sent more than 100,000 gigabytes worth of KaZaA files from Cornell's network.
Then why not just block outgoing file sharing, like my school did?
And also, charging your employees for bandwidth is ridiculous.
The thing with radio we seem to not be able to do with light yet is frequency modulation. If we can do that, I think we can push some very serious bandwidth through this spectrum.
Not to mention making all kinds of psychadelic colors!
Obviously it's a completely stupid patent, but at least it's not likely to impact anyone. In cases like this (IANAL) showing evidence of prior art (which any of a million software developers could do) would invalidate any claims of patent infringement.
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It'd be especially bad if you've got you computer and fax on the same line, and you get booted offline in the middle of a big download to get some junk fax. There's plenty of other ways for companys to spew their junk out that are slightly less annoying.
Open source is different than free. Several games (ex: Return to Castle Wolfenstein) have release their sources, but the game still costs money. And I really shouldn't have to remind you that if you were to sell Office, MS would sue you into the stone age.
Perhaps this is where we need to focus when worrying about copyright length. If businesses can make rational decisions on their own, we don't have to waste our time with the government. 1. Company's confident in their products voluntarily release them after a reasonable time 2. Customer's reward these company's with their business 3. profit
You mean they're finally going to change the theme song?
Seems to me that the logical step for IBM now is to settle this suit by simply acquiring the plaintiff.
Except that that's exactly what SCO wants. If IBM buys SCO, they validate this kind of behavior, and encourage other failing businesses to do the same thing. Better to counter-sue for everything they've got left.
ISP's are the ones with the hardware and know-how to block spam and viruses. And for the sake of the rest of us, if someone's computer is puking onto the network, they should block all that traffic until it's fixed. But if you get a virus, it came through your ISP. If they couldn't block it, they can't expect the customers to.
Who cares? 1,000 computers routed through one port cannot possibly use anymore bandwidth than one computer on the same port. So charging by port makes sense. If there was a device that could magically create bandwidth, everyone on /. would have 3 already.
Last year, users sent more than 100,000 gigabytes worth of KaZaA files from Cornell's network.
Then why not just block outgoing file sharing, like my school did?
And also, charging your employees for bandwidth is ridiculous.
Not to mention making all kinds of psychadelic colors!
Obviously it's a completely stupid patent, but at least it's not likely to impact anyone. In cases like this (IANAL) showing evidence of prior art (which any of a million software developers could do) would invalidate any claims of patent infringement.
There goes any chance we had of getting the Bush administration to do something about global warming.