Software, especially expensive software is a valuable asset.
I am constantly amazed that so many people put up with software companies wanting to sell you their software for lots of money and then you can't do anything with it when you don't want/need it anymore. What the heck are you supposed to do, buy an extra plot at the cemetary and when you die they'l bury it there next to you?
Imagine if it were that way with your old dishwasher, or your car. "You can get a new car, but you have to keep the old one out back. You can't sell it, ever".
Outrageous.
When people put their foot down and demand ownership of expensive items, or else if you don't own it you should be paying dramatically less for it, this will all change. I'd offer Autodesk $19 for their software, if I don't own it. It can't be worth much more than that. You don't own it, remember?
I heard a story about a company that was bought out by another company, and one of their software providers wanted them to buy the software again. Same desks, chairs, computers, people, building, and software. But the software, that couldn't be "sold".
Outrageous. Any expensive asset should be just that, an asset.
No, most people have no real alternative to buying their phones from their carrier.
We're in complete agreement then. Most phones cost $20-$40. I said $30, with an actual manufacturer cost of about $4 or $6.
This doesn't explain why phones priced at $180-$500 but they will give you a fake discount if you sign a 2 year contract is good for you or me. It's good for the carrier, sure. But it's not good for customers or the phone manufacturer.
The system has become distorted by the phones being only available from the carrier.
I am sure you have noticed how competitively priced computers have become. Imagine if you had Comcast cable internet, and could only buy your computer from Comcast. How much more would they cost than they do right now, with giant manufacturers and retailers duking it out in the Sunday ads and online?
*Lots* more than we are enjoying.
How much do you really think it costs for Motorola to make a phone in a plant in Mexico. $4? $6?
Next, just wave your hand and admit you have no clue. You really think they can make a phone for $4? $6? Sure they abuse their position with their customers...but that hardly means they can magically make products for a small percentage of what the raw materials cost while completely ignoring the cost of design, software creation, testing, certification, packaging, training, documentation, and distribution. Heck, I bet the packaging alone costs them a buck or more.
Ignoring all that, you really think businesses should be in business to give away hundreds of dollars worth of hardware, free of charge, to every Tom, Dick, and Harry that passes through their doors?
You are confusing phone carriers with phone manufacturers. I am sure Motorola can make phones in very large volume at very low cost. Not that they sell them to the carriers quite that cheap. Just that if the phone didn't have to pass through the carrier's hands the prices would be lower and the competitive market would be able to work. But Motorola, as an example, is put in the position of being a contract manufacturer for phone carriers, rather than being an innovative manufacturer making products for us that we actually want.
No, I don't think anyone should "give away" anything.
I think the carriers should be carriers, and the phones should be sold on the competitive market, rather than the no-competition carrier locked fake competition we have now.
The carriers maintain a stranglehold on the equipment. In order to get a new phone you practically have to sign a new contract. It's a distortion of the competitive market, which if it worked would result in better service at lower prices.
Even the iphone, which no one argues you are not paying the full cost of requires a 2 year contract with ATT.
Apple has now sold a million iphones. What do you want to bet ATT has paid Apple at least $100 million for those phone sales?
Where do you think that money comes from? From you and I in our cellphone bills. Our bills could be lower if we paid for our own phone and ATT didn't pay Apple.
Yes, it's exactly right to block ads if you like.
No one has to read someone else's ads.
It's obvious that some television ads are being made much more interesting and clever to combat the tivos. They have to MAKE you WANT TO WATCH THE ADS.
They have been succesfull. I watch more ads now than I did 2 years ago.
Largely gone are the brief playlets and illustrated lectures on the purchase of consumer goods.
If web ads were more interesting and less obnoxious perhaps they would be more successful.
The worst:
Intellitext popup ads.
Catch the monkey animated ads
Those ridiculous floating ads that sit in front of the site and scroll with you.
I put those in adblock right away!
How much do you really think it costs for Motorola to make a phone in a plant in Mexico. $4? $6?
The phones are either subsidized very little or not at all. Walk into any Sprint store, how much do you think it costs to make those phones? Not the $180 or $249 they are trying to charge. Not even $30 for most.
The problem is the only place you can get a phone is from the carrier, the carriers keep a stranglehold on the equipment, and *pretend* they are subsidizing your phone. The *free phone* is really just a mechanism to keep you signed up on long contracts.
If you want real competition the phones should be sold on the wall at Walmart, who would buy them directly from Motorola, Samsung, LG. High volume, the prices would be much lower than they are today because of volume and the lack of shenanigans by phone carriers.
You would activate them on whatever carrier you want, and the carrier would then have to satisfy you with their service or you would switch to a carrier that did better.
The phone would work on whatever network you want it to and you could get a different one when you want at competitive prices.
As it is now, there is *NO COMPETITION*. Not for equipment or service.
You know, there is a solution to that: don't sign a long-term contract. You don't have to, after all. You won't get a free phone, of course, but they won't try to stop you.
Try that with ATT.
Call them up and tell them you already have a suitable phone and you want month to month service with no 2 year contract.
NOPE. Not available. Even without a phone subsidy. Except on a really overpriced prepaid service, that it.
I asked them what the 2 year contract was for if I wasn't getting a free or discounted phone. They had no answer.
But you can't get service from ATT without a contract. Sleazy. And they are not alone. All cellular carriers in the US are sleazy.
The problem I have with your argument is the fact that it assumes that 100% of the people who are on the list deserve to be on there. It does not take into account human error in placing the address into the blocklist, or the fact that maybe the ISP caught the spammers themselves without being notified first and still got blacklisted.
I never said *100%* of the people that might find themselves blacklisted deserved to be there, but different blacklists have different goals. Some, like CBL are purely for blocking spam, list no innocent parties, and are very safe for corporate use.
Some, like SPEWS, and some SORBS zones are not safe for corporate use. Some might have significant intentional false positives. They are there to help put pressure on lax isps and force them to deal with their spammers. If they blocked too much legit mail they would lose their influence if people find them unsafe to use. So they have to walk a fine line. But they are there to enlist your help when you find yourself blocked, to get you to call your ISP.
That's the big reason I have such an issue with SORBS. If you cannot be removed without paying a "donation" no matter what, then that is tantamount to blackmail.
And I said that was wrong. SORBS shouldn't charge for removal, it makes them have unclean hands. Apparently they don't agree with me, or you on that.
Re:Requiring payment for delisting
on
Choosing a Good DNSBL
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
If the true goal is to go after the spammers, how does a DNSBL help this?
ISPs have customers, customers who want their mail to go through. Customers like you.
If an ISP has lax abuse policies (or no abuse policies, or is a willing spam host) and you are a legitimate customer of that ISP, your mail may be blocked with the other legitimate customers of the ISP. You are not being listed, your ISP is.
The DNSBL hopes you will call your ISP, and as a valuable customer demand they cure their spam problem so you will be able to send mail.
If an ISP's customer is spamming me all I can do is complain, and they can ignore me. You are their customer, you are influential and you want your mail to go through, so you are completely within your rights to demand they get rid of their spammers that are causing you problems. Your ISP can make a choice, either deal with spammers and all their legitimate customers go elsewhere or sue them, or get rid of the spammers and have you, legitimate customers.
It makes perfect sense, doesn't it?
If we ever get blacklisted by SORBS or any other extortionist and they ask for money, we'll probably sue and/or file a criminal complaint.
Criminal complaint? Nobody has to accept your email!
If you are a spammer that's what you might do, which is why most of the DNSBLs are in countries other than the US where they are protected by the local laws from lawsuits like that.
What you should do is sue your ISP for getting you listed along with them, or demand they cure their spam problem.
Unless it's you that are the spammers, that is.
Right. I work for a big webhost, which is blacklisted by SORBS from time to time. The problem is that they do not send abuse reports. (I handle abuse@mycompany and I do not miss or ignore one any mails). They blacklist, and expect you to pay....Which makes me think they're interested in the money, not preventing spam.
That is wrong, then. They should send abuse reports.
Are you sure there are no abuse reports?
It's unlikely they would be *From: SORBS*.
They might be anonymous, like the ones SPEWS reportedly used to send before listing a block. Several reports before they listed you, as I recall. If you want to avoid being listed on DNSBLs you cannot just act on the *important* spam abuse reports, like the ones from spamcop and ignore one from someone you don't know, since that might be from the APEWS, SORBS or SPEWS operator. They test your veracity by not telling you they are influential.
Compltely proper, IMHO. Given the true goal is stopping spammers, not blocking spam.
Uh, based on the belief that hardly anyone is actually rabid. I don't think SORBS is rabid. I doubt Matthew Sullivan is listing innocent people out of spite, though it was established that there habe been some DNSBL compilers who have actually done that.
It's pretty much counterproductive, listing people who are innocent, out of spite.
You just get false positives that way. The way a DNSBL becomes "influential" is by getting people to use it. If no one uses a DNSBL because it interferes with legitimate mail who cares what it lists? No one. So no DNSBL would have the goal of interfering with legitimate mail, unless the underlying goal is to change behavior.
CBL.abuseat.org is an example of a mostly (or maybe completely) automated DNSBL which should have NO false positives at all. It works by lots of spamtraps, if botnets hit the spamtraps in a certain "bot-ish" way as I understand it the IP will become listed, for a short time. After the TTL expires the listing falls off. So if someone cleans the trojan off their computer being used by a botnet to send spam that listing will fall off fairly quickly.
It's a pretty much perfect anti bot-based spam solution. Good for blocking spam, not for changing behavior.
Some lists like SPEWS and now APEWS and SBL list based on different criteria, criteria that is obviously designed to change behavior, not to block spam though people use it for that, hopefully in non business critical environments. I wouldn't use that for business. If you are an ISP and you don't resolve your spam problem by terminating your spammers and disabling trojaned machines you get listed, if you don't like that you change your policies to prevent it. Some allow you to request delisting which takes place promptly if your spam has actually stopped. No problems.
The first two I mentioned are anonymous, no one actually knows who is behind them.
This makes perfect sense in light of how MAPS was sued into oblivion by spammers and forced to delist known spam sources because of their legal expenses.
SBL is in UK and the UK loser pays legal system largely prevents foreign entities from affecting their operations, at least legally.
I said SORBS money request is improper. I wish he wouldn't do that. But understand he has been sued and he does likely have some legal expenses so that may be why he is doing it.
As far as I can remember SORBS started out as publishing other's DNSBL zones in a queryable way, for free, he took over when Osorusoft went away. He may have some he maintains himself now.
Remember Osorusoft? They were sued into turning off their zone, they had been providing a free lookup service that SPEWS users could query. That kind of nonsense costs money, and spammers have money. They sue DNSBLS.
A free DNSBL query service like SORBS is a target, has been a target and may be targeted again. Sad, since nobody has to query them on inbound mail. Clearly they block no mail. Their users do, as a conscious decision. But it's too hard for spammers to sue giant ISPs for using SORBS.
Re:Requiring payment for delisting
on
Choosing a Good DNSBL
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
SORBS require a "donation" to get your IP range off their list, and since we refused to hand over extortion money to these gangsters, there was no way for us to deal with them.
Which stinks to high heaven. I wish Matthew Sullivan wouldn't do that.
There are many reasons someone who is not an actual wrongdoer could become listed as a spam source. I have little doubt the parent's organization was such a spam source and did not properly address the issue. They deserved it.
It's not what problems you have, it's how you handle those problems is what matters.
As long as a site addresses the spam problem and gets results, reads their abuse mail and acts like a good net neighbor I have no problems with them. They should be delisted as soon as possible.
There have been times when certain cable modem operators were the major source of spam in the world and they essentially ignored abuse mail. They should have been disciplined until they clean up their act. Anyone who is not addressing the problem promptly deserves to be blackholed until they solve their problems.
There are plenty of clueless sysadmins in the world, people who are in over their head, or dominated by the company sales department so they cannot disable a circuit with deliberate spammers on it.
That's what DNSBLs are supposed to work to change.
For example your supermarket knows what kind of whiskey you like, since they have those "club cards". Personally I always put fake information on those. They give you the card anyway.
There was a legal case about that in Utah, as I recall. A woman sued a marketing company since she was being stalked by one of their prisoner employees, in a prison work program. The marketing company used her buying habits they got from the supermarket card in their case.
I have a pretty good idea that any data gathering the FBI may or may not be doing about us civilians is a fraction of what is being gathered by "marketers" every day.
Now that's a scary thought, huh?
The telephone company should be expressly responsible for allowing any fake caller ID.
Just as they should be responsible for providing copper pairs to send junk faxes over. At least after they know.
If they were responsible for that misuse of the telephone system they would have a technicial out there with a pair of wire cutters, huh?
Yep. Everything you searched for with google came up with *lots* of worthless eBay hits.
Good riddance eBay.
Worthless, eBay was essentially spamming google, and google didn't seem concerned at all.
There is no such thing as an "undocumented worker." We already have a phrase for that, and it's "illegal alien."
That's like calling a drug dealer an Unlicensed Pharmacist
All sillyness aside, take a look at this:
http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0420/p03s01-usec.htm l
about programmer Michael Emmons, who worked for Siemens ICN in Florida.
The company imported Indian workers to sit at the fired American's former desks, and do their jobs.
Not as employees, but as contract employees hired through an Indian agency.
The agency paid their salaries back in India, they made no money in the US, but were paid "expenses" which were then tax free.
So here you have people living here in the US, using our roads, sewage system, police services, etc.
Paying no taxes whatsoever since they made no money here.
The company had to pay no social security or medicare taxes as they did for their American workers. They saved a bundle, even if the salary were the same (but I'm sure it's not).
That's a distortion of the way the system is supposed to work. Outrageous.
The patent examiners I have spoken to on the phone were lawyers. I have not spoken to any that were not lawyers to my knowledge.
But it does appear from the qualifications post that it is not necessary to actually be an attorney to get an entry level job at USPTO as a patent examiner. It does appear necessary to obtain a law degree and maybe a license to get promoted past a certain level in the government.
But whoever they are hiring they are doing a piss poor job of it. It's probably all those inexperienced, entry level patent examiners they are hiring right out of school. If they would hire some old guys to read some of these ridiculous patent applications they might get better results.
Ah heck. I'll do it. I wouldn't mind at all arguing with some lawyer from a law firm trying to get a ridiculous overly broad patent for his client for something that is obvious.
The patent examiners are all lawyers. I doubt government lawyer pay is that horrible, especially compared to software developer pay today. Anyway, you don't actually need software developers to examine those patent applications for uniqueness. I haven't programmed any significant amount in years and I could likely learn to do that. But I read a lot. That's likely an advantage.
They probably hire 23 year old lawyers right out of law school to be patent examiners. They have no experience in the areas they are examining.
Come to think of it, in order to be a member of the patent bar you have to have technical knowledge and experience, it's required. I knew a trademark attorney, he said he was not qualified to do patents since he didn't have the required technical knowledge. I used a patent lawyer years ago on a trademark matter, he was a former chemist.
I bet the standards applied to members of the patent bar are completely lacking in the government lawyer hiring standards for patent examiners at USPTO. Maybe that's the problem that needs to be fixed.
In any case, I would bet these companies are hurrying to get as broad and as many patents as they can before the party is over and it becomes much more difficult to buffalo the cub lawyers at USPTO.
Congress needs to address the problem with broad software patents once and for all.
Most of these software patents the clueless patent examiner lawyers at USPTO are granting are obvious and stupid.
Things that have *always* been done that way by *lots* of people are now patented property, since the patent examiners hardly have the experience and knowledge to tell the difference between the obvious and something actually unique.
Software patents should be either eliminated completely, or should be strictly limited, like a 1 year term and very easy to bring forward information (prior art) to cancel them.
This is absolutely ridiculous. Verizon basically patented an extension of DNS. Mapping addresses to phone numbers? Puleeze. We did that in a database in 1977.
This depreciation is used commonly for work vehicles, computer software, office chairs and stuff like that....So after going this route for three years on a $10,000 car, you have deducted the costs of an asset costing $10,000 to $3500 or so. But if you sell it for $5000, then you have to repay the taxes on the $1500 in deductions for depreciation as income.
That's called recapture.
If the issue is people selling stuff on ebay that they bought for that purpose no problem. They should be paying taxes. They are already required to.
But what may happen here is ebay will be forced to send an information return (1099-ish thing) based on what you sold on ebay. There will be no distinction on that return as to what is crap from your garage, items you used and paid much more for and are **NOT** making a profit on versus those that you bought to resell.
So the IRS gets a paper saying what you sold. They now have to determine whether that is income (which they cannot do), or bother you about it when you don't list the profit from selling your old stereo for $45.
What a nightmare. We would be forced to keep records of how much we paid for that old stereo, how long we had it, and when we sell it on ebay IRS will be demanding we pay as if that were income. Unless we have stellar records, that is.
Do we really want the IRS demanding records from us for the stuff we sold on ebay at a loss after using it? That's what will happen here. There will be 5 million demands for explanation from the IRS. 5 million people will have to jump through hoops.
FWIW the IRS has done onorous things like this before. About 20 years ago they changed the rules as to what kind of records you needed to keep for mileage deductions. They said you had to keep a record of every trip, where you were, where you went, the date, mileage, what you did when you got there, etc. It was impossible, onerous. Luckily congress agreed and reigned in the IRS. You don't have to keep those detailed records for mileage deduction anymore. For a couple years that was the rule however. It was awful!
You would need to keep good records to show that you didn't "make" money on the sale. In your case I would think you could actually report a loss of $100 and that would reduce your taxable income. Keep in mind that I'm not a tax expert or even a tax newbie...
You said it. The problem with all this is ebay reports to IRS that you sold something for $50. What they don't report is that you paid $300 for it, used it, didn't like or need it and are now selling it for $50.
It creates a whole new accounting nightmare for everyone.
What's next, if you sell your old stereo on ebay or craigslist for 75% off that is somehow "income"? What about when you sell your used car? Is that income now?
It's just nuts. I hope congress quashes the whole idea.
Not that professional ebay sellers shouldn't declare their sales, they should.
But there is a difference between that and selling your old stuff at a loss.
The broadband providers are doing everything they can to keep pesky competition away. That's natural and normal for a business, but the facts are they are mostly what has always been regulated utilities. Uh, except in there "new media" markets.
They own the copper wires running all over town to bring you your telephone and your dsl. But they don't really own them, WE the ratepayers hired them to build them. WE own them.
Remember those PUC "rate cases"? Where they say "we had to build new wires here, a new CO there, it cost this much so we need to increase the telephone rates this much".
They are loathe to let any other providers use "their wires" and that makes sense too since they have to maintain them as regulated utilities - for the phone. But this prevents them from having to be troubled by any of that pesky competition in their DSL service.
That would be fine if they weren't the custodians of OUR WIRES, which they were paid to build and are still paid to maintain.
These telcos are and have always been protected from competition by their monopoly status. Now they are big and want to compete, but no one can compete with them on their DSL, since you cannot practically switch. There's really no competition, which is why when you sign up for AT&T DSL it's $12.99 a month, but just for the first year, then they sock it to you. And you have nowhere to go.
I hope this organization gets their information from the FCC that will actually promote competition in the Telco business. Don't get me started on what they are doing to competitive VOIP providers and Net Neutrality! Well, actually I have written on both those extensively.
The trouble with spent nuclear reactor waste is the quantity of the stuff.
In France they reprocess the used fuel, which results in about an 80% conversion to new useable nuclear fuel. So rather than having 100 tons of nuclear waste, they have 20 tons that have to be stored indefinitely.
Here in the US we don't reprocess our spent fuel, because it costs more to reprocess that to just make new.
This is an economic problem that results in us having to stockpile the whole amount of spent fuel, forever.
If it cost less to reprocess, or if reprocessing were required to reduce the amount of spent fuel for storage, we would have and 80% smaller problem.
But we don't.
Personally, I think that would be worthwhile just to reduce the storage requirement.
Prioritizing traffic can be a good thing when properly applied. For example, VoIP services work much better when there is a guarantee that the packet will make it to its destination in a specified period of time. (A bit like how RTOSes guarantee a time slice to a program.) The only reason why we have a problem is because some telco exec got the bright idea of selling this prioritization service in a general-purpose fashion. (Thus negating the purpose of such a service. Genius, pure genius.) They then tried to ram it through as part of Senator Steven's Internet Consumer Right Bill thingymatube.
But the telcos don't really want to do that, though that IS their cover story.
What the telcos actually want is to delay every fourth competitor's VOIP packet 950 ms, so the competitor's service would be unuseable. When you call and complain about the performance of your data line they would just say "switch to our VOIP service and it will work great, you will get great service if you switch to us."
What this actually means is they would stop tampering with your data if you deal with them for your VOIP. It's mischief they want to do.
But they couldn't really admit that.
Remember, their copper plant isn't really theirs, it's ours, the ratepayers. We hired them to build it. The CO was built the same way, with our money at our request.
There's really no competition and there never will be as long as the telcos (the former (sic) regulated utilities) are in control of the critical infrastructure.
The whole idea of "Net Neutrality" is a bogus argument, and basically wrong.
You shouldn't ever have to argue for "Net Neutrality". You are paying them to deliver your data, what you do with it is not anyone else's affair, surely not the regulated monopoly's. They have plenty of capacity, and they got most of it for free, when they were regulated monopolies.
The idea of "hands off the internet" is also a completely bogus argument dredged up mostly by the same phone companies.
If I sound like I consider the telcos a bunch of crooks, well, that's not inacurrate.
Why the programmers would have done it I will never know. I never took a job for an employer that required me to lie, cheat or steal for THEM.
But I bet that kind of thinking is not unknown in the telco industry. They would call it "strategy".
Those are all side issues.
The real issue is they want to use the old easements, cable right-of-ways that they were *given* years and years ago, for free. In fact they were less than free, we hired them and we paid for all that infrastructure in our rates. It's actually ours.
These old "regulated monopolies" want to be unregulated in their "new media" enterprises, but they want to use all the old easements, so they can be protected from competition. Competitors don't have free easements, and even if they did they aren't near strong enough competitors to be able to dig up all their own wireways.
This is exactly why cable TV, Cable Modem and DSL rates are so high. No real competition.
If they want to put cables on my property, whether fiber or otherwise I want some money from them. The easement is available. But it's not free.
Slashdot Mirror
Software, especially expensive software is a valuable asset.
I am constantly amazed that so many people put up with software companies wanting to sell you their software for lots of money and then you can't do anything with it when you don't want/need it anymore. What the heck are you supposed to do, buy an extra plot at the cemetary and when you die they'l bury it there next to you?
Imagine if it were that way with your old dishwasher, or your car. "You can get a new car, but you have to keep the old one out back. You can't sell it, ever".
Outrageous.
When people put their foot down and demand ownership of expensive items, or else if you don't own it you should be paying dramatically less for it, this will all change. I'd offer Autodesk $19 for their software, if I don't own it. It can't be worth much more than that. You don't own it, remember?
I heard a story about a company that was bought out by another company, and one of their software providers wanted them to buy the software again. Same desks, chairs, computers, people, building, and software. But the software, that couldn't be "sold".
Outrageous. Any expensive asset should be just that, an asset.
No, most people have no real alternative to buying their phones from their carrier.
We're in complete agreement then. Most phones cost $20-$40. I said $30, with an actual manufacturer cost of about $4 or $6.
This doesn't explain why phones priced at $180-$500 but they will give you a fake discount if you sign a 2 year contract is good for you or me. It's good for the carrier, sure. But it's not good for customers or the phone manufacturer.
The system has become distorted by the phones being only available from the carrier.
I am sure you have noticed how competitively priced computers have become. Imagine if you had Comcast cable internet, and could only buy your computer from Comcast. How much more would they cost than they do right now, with giant manufacturers and retailers duking it out in the Sunday ads and online?
*Lots* more than we are enjoying.
How much do you really think it costs for Motorola to make a phone in a plant in Mexico. $4? $6?
Next, just wave your hand and admit you have no clue. You really think they can make a phone for $4? $6? Sure they abuse their position with their customers...but that hardly means they can magically make products for a small percentage of what the raw materials cost while completely ignoring the cost of design, software creation, testing, certification, packaging, training, documentation, and distribution. Heck, I bet the packaging alone costs them a buck or more.
Ignoring all that, you really think businesses should be in business to give away hundreds of dollars worth of hardware, free of charge, to every Tom, Dick, and Harry that passes through their doors?
You are confusing phone carriers with phone manufacturers. I am sure Motorola can make phones in very large volume at very low cost. Not that they sell them to the carriers quite that cheap. Just that if the phone didn't have to pass through the carrier's hands the prices would be lower and the competitive market would be able to work. But Motorola, as an example, is put in the position of being a contract manufacturer for phone carriers, rather than being an innovative manufacturer making products for us that we actually want.
No, I don't think anyone should "give away" anything.
I think the carriers should be carriers, and the phones should be sold on the competitive market, rather than the no-competition carrier locked fake competition we have now.
The carriers maintain a stranglehold on the equipment. In order to get a new phone you practically have to sign a new contract. It's a distortion of the competitive market, which if it worked would result in better service at lower prices.
Even the iphone, which no one argues you are not paying the full cost of requires a 2 year contract with ATT.
Apple has now sold a million iphones. What do you want to bet ATT has paid Apple at least $100 million for those phone sales?
Where do you think that money comes from? From you and I in our cellphone bills. Our bills could be lower if we paid for our own phone and ATT didn't pay Apple.
Yes, it's exactly right to block ads if you like.
No one has to read someone else's ads.
It's obvious that some television ads are being made much more interesting and clever to combat the tivos. They have to MAKE you WANT TO WATCH THE ADS.
They have been succesfull. I watch more ads now than I did 2 years ago.
Largely gone are the brief playlets and illustrated lectures on the purchase of consumer goods.
If web ads were more interesting and less obnoxious perhaps they would be more successful.
The worst:
Intellitext popup ads.
Catch the monkey animated ads
Those ridiculous floating ads that sit in front of the site and scroll with you.
I put those in adblock right away!
How much do you really think it costs for Motorola to make a phone in a plant in Mexico. $4? $6?
The phones are either subsidized very little or not at all. Walk into any Sprint store, how much do you think it costs to make those phones? Not the $180 or $249 they are trying to charge. Not even $30 for most.
The problem is the only place you can get a phone is from the carrier, the carriers keep a stranglehold on the equipment, and *pretend* they are subsidizing your phone.
The *free phone* is really just a mechanism to keep you signed up on long contracts.
If you want real competition the phones should be sold on the wall at Walmart, who would buy them directly from Motorola, Samsung, LG. High volume, the prices would be much lower than they are today because of volume and the lack of shenanigans by phone carriers.
You would activate them on whatever carrier you want, and the carrier would then have to satisfy you with their service or you would switch to a carrier that did better.
The phone would work on whatever network you want it to and you could get a different one when you want at competitive prices.
As it is now, there is *NO COMPETITION*. Not for equipment or service.
You know, there is a solution to that: don't sign a long-term contract. You don't have to, after all. You won't get a free phone, of course, but they won't try to stop you.
Try that with ATT.
Call them up and tell them you already have a suitable phone and you want month to month service with no 2 year contract.
NOPE. Not available. Even without a phone subsidy. Except on a really overpriced prepaid service, that it.
I asked them what the 2 year contract was for if I wasn't getting a free or discounted phone. They had no answer. But you can't get service from ATT without a contract. Sleazy. And they are not alone. All cellular carriers in the US are sleazy.
The problem I have with your argument is the fact that it assumes that 100% of the people who are on the list deserve to be on there. It does not take into account human error in placing the address into the blocklist, or the fact that maybe the ISP caught the spammers themselves without being notified first and still got blacklisted.
I never said *100%* of the people that might find themselves blacklisted deserved to be there, but different blacklists have different goals. Some, like CBL are purely for blocking spam, list no innocent parties, and are very safe for corporate use.
Some, like SPEWS, and some SORBS zones are not safe for corporate use. Some might have significant intentional false positives. They are there to help put pressure on lax isps and force them to deal with their spammers. If they blocked too much legit mail they would lose their influence if people find them unsafe to use. So they have to walk a fine line. But they are there to enlist your help when you find yourself blocked, to get you to call your ISP.
That's the big reason I have such an issue with SORBS. If you cannot be removed without paying a "donation" no matter what, then that is tantamount to blackmail.
And I said that was wrong. SORBS shouldn't charge for removal, it makes them have unclean hands. Apparently they don't agree with me, or you on that.
If the true goal is to go after the spammers, how does a DNSBL help this?
ISPs have customers, customers who want their mail to go through. Customers like you. If an ISP has lax abuse policies (or no abuse policies, or is a willing spam host) and you are a legitimate customer of that ISP, your mail may be blocked with the other legitimate customers of the ISP.
You are not being listed, your ISP is.
The DNSBL hopes you will call your ISP, and as a valuable customer demand they cure their spam problem so you will be able to send mail.
If an ISP's customer is spamming me all I can do is complain, and they can ignore me. You are their customer, you are influential and you want your mail to go through, so you are completely within your rights to demand they get rid of their spammers that are causing you problems. Your ISP can make a choice, either deal with spammers and all their legitimate customers go elsewhere or sue them, or get rid of the spammers and have you, legitimate customers.
It makes perfect sense, doesn't it?
If we ever get blacklisted by SORBS or any other extortionist and they ask for money, we'll probably sue and/or file a criminal complaint.
Criminal complaint? Nobody has to accept your email!
If you are a spammer that's what you might do, which is why most of the DNSBLs are in countries other than the US where they are protected by the local laws from lawsuits like that.
What you should do is sue your ISP for getting you listed along with them, or demand they cure their spam problem.
Unless it's you that are the spammers, that is.
Right. I work for a big webhost, which is blacklisted by SORBS from time to time. The problem is that they do not send abuse reports. (I handle abuse@mycompany and I do not miss or ignore one any mails). They blacklist, and expect you to pay. ...Which makes me think they're interested in the money, not preventing spam.
That is wrong, then. They should send abuse reports.
Are you sure there are no abuse reports?
It's unlikely they would be *From: SORBS*.
They might be anonymous, like the ones SPEWS reportedly used to send before listing a block. Several reports before they listed you, as I recall.
If you want to avoid being listed on DNSBLs you cannot just act on the *important* spam abuse reports, like the ones from spamcop and ignore one from someone you don't know, since that might be from the APEWS, SORBS or SPEWS operator. They test your veracity by not telling you they are influential.
Compltely proper, IMHO.
Given the true goal is stopping spammers, not blocking spam.
Uh, based on the belief that hardly anyone is actually rabid. I don't think SORBS is rabid. I doubt Matthew Sullivan is listing innocent people out of spite, though it was established that there habe been some DNSBL compilers who have actually done that.
It's pretty much counterproductive, listing people who are innocent, out of spite.
You just get false positives that way. The way a DNSBL becomes "influential" is by getting people to use it. If no one uses a DNSBL because it interferes with legitimate mail who cares what it lists? No one. So no DNSBL would have the goal of interfering with legitimate mail, unless the underlying goal is to change behavior.
CBL.abuseat.org is an example of a mostly (or maybe completely) automated DNSBL which should have NO false positives at all. It works by lots of spamtraps, if botnets hit the spamtraps in a certain "bot-ish" way as I understand it the IP will become listed, for a short time. After the TTL expires the listing falls off. So if someone cleans the trojan off their computer being used by a botnet to send spam that listing will fall off fairly quickly.
It's a pretty much perfect anti bot-based spam solution. Good for blocking spam, not for changing behavior.
Some lists like SPEWS and now APEWS and SBL list based on different criteria, criteria that is obviously designed to change behavior, not to block spam though people use it for that, hopefully in non business critical environments. I wouldn't use that for business. If you are an ISP and you don't resolve your spam problem by terminating your spammers and disabling trojaned machines you get listed, if you don't like that you change your policies to prevent it. Some allow you to request delisting which takes place promptly if your spam has actually stopped. No problems.
The first two I mentioned are anonymous, no one actually knows who is behind them.
This makes perfect sense in light of how MAPS was sued into oblivion by spammers and forced to delist known spam sources because of their legal expenses.
SBL is in UK and the UK loser pays legal system largely prevents foreign entities from affecting their operations, at least legally.
I said SORBS money request is improper. I wish he wouldn't do that. But understand he has been sued and he does likely have some legal expenses so that may be why he is doing it.
As far as I can remember SORBS started out as publishing other's DNSBL zones in a queryable way, for free, he took over when Osorusoft went away. He may have some he maintains himself now.
Remember Osorusoft? They were sued into turning off their zone, they had been providing a free lookup service that SPEWS users could query. That kind of nonsense costs money, and spammers have money. They sue DNSBLS.
A free DNSBL query service like SORBS is a target, has been a target and may be targeted again. Sad, since nobody has to query them on inbound mail. Clearly they block no mail. Their users do, as a conscious decision. But it's too hard for spammers to sue giant ISPs for using SORBS.
SORBS require a "donation" to get your IP range off their list, and since we refused to hand over extortion money to these gangsters, there was no way for us to deal with them.
Which stinks to high heaven. I wish Matthew Sullivan wouldn't do that.
There are many reasons someone who is not an actual wrongdoer could become listed as a spam source. I have little doubt the parent's organization was such a spam source and did not properly address the issue. They deserved it.
It's not what problems you have, it's how you handle those problems is what matters.
As long as a site addresses the spam problem and gets results, reads their abuse mail and acts like a good net neighbor I have no problems with them. They should be delisted as soon as possible.
There have been times when certain cable modem operators were the major source of spam in the world and they essentially ignored abuse mail. They should have been disciplined until they clean up their act. Anyone who is not addressing the problem promptly deserves to be blackholed until they solve their problems.
There are plenty of clueless sysadmins in the world, people who are in over their head, or dominated by the company sales department so they cannot disable a circuit with deliberate spammers on it.
That's what DNSBLs are supposed to work to change.
For example your supermarket knows what kind of whiskey you like, since they have those "club cards". Personally I always put fake information on those. They give you the card anyway.
There was a legal case about that in Utah, as I recall. A woman sued a marketing company since she was being stalked by one of their prisoner employees, in a prison work program. The marketing company used her buying habits they got from the supermarket card in their case.
I have a pretty good idea that any data gathering the FBI may or may not be doing about us civilians is a fraction of what is being gathered by "marketers" every day.
Now that's a scary thought, huh?
The telephone company should be expressly responsible for allowing any fake caller ID.
Just as they should be responsible for providing copper pairs to send junk faxes over. At least after they know.
If they were responsible for that misuse of the telephone system they would have a technicial out there with a pair of wire cutters, huh?
Yep. Everything you searched for with google came up with *lots* of worthless eBay hits.
Good riddance eBay.
Worthless, eBay was essentially spamming google, and google didn't seem concerned at all.
There is no such thing as an "undocumented worker." We already have a phrase for that, and it's "illegal alien."
m l
That's like calling a drug dealer an Unlicensed Pharmacist
All sillyness aside, take a look at this:
http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0420/p03s01-usec.ht
about programmer Michael Emmons, who worked for Siemens ICN in Florida.
The company imported Indian workers to sit at the fired American's former desks, and do their jobs.
Not as employees, but as contract employees hired through an Indian agency.
The agency paid their salaries back in India, they made no money in the US, but were paid "expenses" which were then tax free.
So here you have people living here in the US, using our roads, sewage system, police services, etc.
Paying no taxes whatsoever since they made no money here. The company had to pay no social security or medicare taxes as they did for their American workers. They saved a bundle, even if the salary were the same (but I'm sure it's not).
That's a distortion of the way the system is supposed to work. Outrageous.
I stand corrected.
The patent examiners I have spoken to on the phone were lawyers. I have not spoken to any that were not lawyers to my knowledge.
But it does appear from the qualifications post that it is not necessary to actually be an attorney to get an entry level job at USPTO as a patent examiner. It does appear necessary to obtain a law degree and maybe a license to get promoted past a certain level in the government.
But whoever they are hiring they are doing a piss poor job of it. It's probably all those inexperienced, entry level patent examiners they are hiring right out of school. If they would hire some old guys to read some of these ridiculous patent applications they might get better results.
Ah heck. I'll do it. I wouldn't mind at all arguing with some lawyer from a law firm trying to get a ridiculous overly broad patent for his client for something that is obvious.
The patent examiners are all lawyers. I doubt government lawyer pay is that horrible, especially compared to software developer pay today. Anyway, you don't actually need software developers to examine those patent applications for uniqueness. I haven't programmed any significant amount in years and I could likely learn to do that. But I read a lot. That's likely an advantage.
They probably hire 23 year old lawyers right out of law school to be patent examiners. They have no experience in the areas they are examining.
Come to think of it, in order to be a member of the patent bar you have to have technical knowledge and experience, it's required. I knew a trademark attorney, he said he was not qualified to do patents since he didn't have the required technical knowledge. I used a patent lawyer years ago on a trademark matter, he was a former chemist.
I bet the standards applied to members of the patent bar are completely lacking in the government lawyer hiring standards for patent examiners at USPTO. Maybe that's the problem that needs to be fixed.
In any case, I would bet these companies are hurrying to get as broad and as many patents as they can before the party is over and it becomes much more difficult to buffalo the cub lawyers at USPTO.
Congress needs to address the problem with broad software patents once and for all.
Most of these software patents the clueless patent examiner lawyers at USPTO are granting are obvious and stupid.
Things that have *always* been done that way by *lots* of people are now patented property, since the patent examiners hardly have the experience and knowledge to tell the difference between the obvious and something actually unique.
Software patents should be either eliminated completely, or should be strictly limited, like a 1 year term and very easy to bring forward information (prior art) to cancel them.
This is absolutely ridiculous. Verizon basically patented an extension of DNS. Mapping addresses to phone numbers? Puleeze. We did that in a database in 1977.
I should have patented it then. Heh.
This depreciation is used commonly for work vehicles, computer software, office chairs and stuff like that....So after going this route for three years on a $10,000 car, you have deducted the costs of an asset costing $10,000 to $3500 or so. But if you sell it for $5000, then you have to repay the taxes on the $1500 in deductions for depreciation as income.
That's called recapture.
If the issue is people selling stuff on ebay that they bought for that purpose no problem. They should be paying taxes. They are already required to.
But what may happen here is ebay will be forced to send an information return (1099-ish thing) based on what you sold on ebay. There will be no distinction on that return as to what is crap from your garage, items you used and paid much more for and are **NOT** making a profit on versus those that you bought to resell.
So the IRS gets a paper saying what you sold. They now have to determine whether that is income (which they cannot do), or bother you about it when you don't list the profit from selling your old stereo for $45.
What a nightmare. We would be forced to keep records of how much we paid for that old stereo, how long we had it, and when we sell it on ebay IRS will be demanding we pay as if that were income. Unless we have stellar records, that is.
Do we really want the IRS demanding records from us for the stuff we sold on ebay at a loss after using it? That's what will happen here. There will be 5 million demands for explanation from the IRS. 5 million people will have to jump through hoops.
FWIW the IRS has done onorous things like this before. About 20 years ago they changed the rules as to what kind of records you needed to keep for mileage deductions. They said you had to keep a record of every trip, where you were, where you went, the date, mileage, what you did when you got there, etc. It was impossible, onerous. Luckily congress agreed and reigned in the IRS. You don't have to keep those detailed records for mileage deduction anymore. For a couple years that was the rule however. It was awful!
You would need to keep good records to show that you didn't "make" money on the sale. In your case I would think you could actually report a loss of $100 and that would reduce your taxable income. Keep in mind that I'm not a tax expert or even a tax newbie...
You said it. The problem with all this is ebay reports to IRS that you sold something for $50. What they don't report is that you paid $300 for it, used it, didn't like or need it and are now selling it for $50.
It creates a whole new accounting nightmare for everyone.
What's next, if you sell your old stereo on ebay or craigslist for 75% off that is somehow "income"? What about when you sell your used car? Is that income now?
It's just nuts. I hope congress quashes the whole idea.
Not that professional ebay sellers shouldn't declare their sales, they should.
But there is a difference between that and selling your old stuff at a loss.
The broadband providers are doing everything they can to keep pesky competition away. That's natural and normal for a business, but the facts are they are mostly what has always been regulated utilities. Uh, except in there "new media" markets.
They own the copper wires running all over town to bring you your telephone and your dsl.
But they don't really own them, WE the ratepayers hired them to build them. WE own them.
Remember those PUC "rate cases"? Where they say "we had to build new wires here, a new CO there, it cost this much so we need to increase the telephone rates this much".
They are loathe to let any other providers use "their wires" and that makes sense too since they have to maintain them as regulated utilities - for the phone. But this prevents them from having to be troubled by any of that pesky competition in their DSL service.
That would be fine if they weren't the custodians of OUR WIRES, which they were paid to build and are still paid to maintain.
These telcos are and have always been protected from competition by their monopoly status. Now they are big and want to compete, but no one can compete with them on their DSL, since you cannot practically switch. There's really no competition, which is why when you sign up for AT&T DSL it's $12.99 a month, but just for the first year, then they sock it to you. And you have nowhere to go.
I hope this organization gets their information from the FCC that will actually promote competition in the Telco business. Don't get me started on what they are doing to competitive VOIP providers and Net Neutrality! Well, actually I have written on both those extensively.
The trouble with spent nuclear reactor waste is the quantity of the stuff.
In France they reprocess the used fuel, which results in about an 80% conversion to new useable nuclear fuel. So rather than having 100 tons of nuclear waste, they have 20 tons that have to be stored indefinitely.
Here in the US we don't reprocess our spent fuel, because it costs more to reprocess that to just make new.
This is an economic problem that results in us having to stockpile the whole amount of spent fuel, forever.
If it cost less to reprocess, or if reprocessing were required to reduce the amount of spent fuel for storage, we would have and 80% smaller problem.
But we don't.
Personally, I think that would be worthwhile just to reduce the storage requirement.
But the telcos don't really want to do that, though that IS their cover story.
What the telcos actually want is to delay every fourth competitor's VOIP packet 950 ms, so the competitor's service would be unuseable. When you call and complain about the performance of your data line they would just say "switch to our VOIP service and it will work great, you will get great service if you switch to us."
What this actually means is they would stop tampering with your data if you deal with them for your VOIP. It's mischief they want to do.
But they couldn't really admit that.
I wrote all about it HERE.
Remember, their copper plant isn't really theirs, it's ours, the ratepayers. We hired them to build it. The CO was built the same way, with our money at our request.There's really no competition and there never will be as long as the telcos (the former (sic) regulated utilities) are in control of the critical infrastructure.
The whole idea of "Net Neutrality" is a bogus argument, and basically wrong.
You shouldn't ever have to argue for "Net Neutrality". You are paying them to deliver your data, what you do with it is not anyone else's affair, surely not the regulated monopoly's. They have plenty of capacity, and they got most of it for free, when they were regulated monopolies.
The idea of "hands off the internet" is also a completely bogus argument dredged up mostly by the same phone companies.
If I sound like I consider the telcos a bunch of crooks, well, that's not inacurrate.
Remember MCI, who had their programmers tamper with billing packets so as to cheat the other phone companies out of revenue they were owed?
Why the programmers would have done it I will never know. I never took a job for an employer that required me to lie, cheat or steal for THEM. But I bet that kind of thinking is not unknown in the telco industry. They would call it "strategy".Those are all side issues.
The real issue is they want to use the old easements, cable right-of-ways that they were *given* years and years ago, for free. In fact they were less than free, we hired them and we paid for all that infrastructure in our rates. It's actually ours.
These old "regulated monopolies" want to be unregulated in their "new media" enterprises, but they want to use all the old easements, so they can be protected from competition. Competitors don't have free easements, and even if they did they aren't near strong enough competitors to be able to dig up all their own wireways.
This is exactly why cable TV, Cable Modem and DSL rates are so high. No real competition.
If they want to put cables on my property, whether fiber or otherwise I want some money from them. The easement is available. But it's not free.