There is a difference between me allowing n users to upload a given movie from me, and trying to sell it. The point where I draw the line is when money comes into play.
So, you'll download free software, but you draw the line at paying $2 to download pirated stuff, because you are far too honorable for that. Got it.
Either way, if the software author can't sell his software because it's being distributed (for free, or for cheap) by someone else, he ends up out of business.
But your screenshots show 450,000 list members. Dude what legit mail list has 450,000 mail list members?
I'd bet there are lots of them.
Slashdot has more users than that, based on UsedID numbers. Most Slashdot users, I suspect, have Slashdot send them a daily email with the Slashdot stories, and a signifigant number are bound to receive emails when someone replies to a message, as I do.
The NYTimes is bound to have that many people on their mailing list.
Google has their "Google Alerts" feature. Wouldn't surprise me if over 500,000 email addresses have signed up.
Not to mention an inhouse list used for testing purposes or something similar. 450K sounds incredibly *small* for a spam list.
The odds are pretty damn good that if you have been sentenced to do 10-20 for "non-violent" crime a) you are not a first offender, b) you are not small-time, c) and you were tried on distinct, multiple, felony counts.
Even odds are that you are a first time offender, but it was a drug related offense and you are a black guy.
There simply is no property crime that warrants incarceration.
Nonsense. Are you actually saying that if someone steals your car, they shouldn't go to jail? Are you actually saying that if, while you are not home, they burn down your house, it's OK? Jeeze, the criminals in your city must really love you.
I am saying you are not harmed when you receive spam. Period.
You are ignoring the wasted time, the higher ISP bills, the fact that email is already being ruined as a method of communication, and much more. Your "There is no harm in spam" is bullshit. And you know it. Otherwise, you would not hide your email address.
Why? Is it because spammers are honest law abiding citizens?
I assume that most spammers are much more likely to hide their income, pay no taxes if possible, and probably do pay some because they can't avoid it. I suspect that some aren't really worried about the money they make spamming, but are using it to launder drug money.
But unless they are showing a profit, it isn't doing them any good. Last year, (fiscal 2003) they turned a profit for, I believe, the first time. They have 1.78 Billion in outstanding longterm debt.
I'd like to see them do well, and I'm a fan of online shopping, but so far, this looks mostly like a "That's nice, but..." situation.
You never posted a link of any sort, even after I asked.
You'll have to go troll someone else now - you aren't worth talking to, and just want to argue and cuss.
You never gave so much as a single link to information verifying your claims, and have now dropped all attempts at reasonable conversation, and moved to nothing except nonsensical attacks.
So much for reasonable conversation. I can only assume that the fact that you refuse to back any of your claims is because you know they are bullshit.
The service will be free in the five Texas parks for three months; then TengoInternet, the wireless provider, will charge about $15 a day.
Err... doesn't exactly sound all that "free" to me.
It doesn't say it'll be free forever, it says it'll be free for three months and be a pay system after that. A fairly expensive pay system.
Of course, those three months are January, February, and March, hardly the best camping weather.
FACT: lawsuits are declining in number.
FACT: that decline has been over a century
FACT: lawsuit awards have been constant. $30,000 average each. Citation already given.
FACT: The sharp increase in insurance costs has been over the past 10 years.
So far, you haven't posted a link that verifies any of this (including the one you list as "Citation already given") and the link I posted in my last message shows completely different information.
From that article :
The substantial increase in liability is reflected in the extent of litigation. Between 1974 and 1989, product-liability lawsuits in the federal courts increased sixfold. The product-liability share of all federal civil litigation rose from 2 percent in 1975 to 6 percent in 1989. These increases cannot be accounted for by greater product riskiness. For the period 1977 to 1987, federal product-liability lawsuits increased by 400 percent, whereas total U.S. accident rates declined by 20 percent, motor vehicle accidents by 11 percent, work accident rates by 25 percent, and home accident rates by 26 percent.
The price tag associated with liability suits is also substantial. Million-dollar liability awards have become increasingly common, even for less highly publicized accidents. The median verdict in product-liability cases doubled in nominal terms from 1980 to 1988. Whereas the median product-liability verdict was under $100,000 in 1971, it had risen to $405,000 in 1988, a 48 percent increase after adjustment for inflation.
This disagrees with your "awards average $30,000" claim, and your "lawsuits are declining in number" claim. Your claims also do not fit with what I believe to be the truth. Without a link to evidence backing your statements up, I must consider them wrong.
Obviously I can still buy a ladder, so what's the problem?
The problem is that when you buy a ladder, a large portion of what you are paying is only necessary because of BS lawsuits. A company doesn't have to lose a suit for it to cost them money.
Companies who follow your "We don't need insurance" plan will end up out of business after losing one lawsuit. They won't have the insurance company fighting for them, or helping with the costs of paying off that suit, and if they lose just one large suit, then their business is gone. So they can't just say "No, we're going to skip that" without risking their business.
There are now no ladder comanies based in the US. The BS liability laws have raised their costs too far. And this happens in many other industries.
You seem to think I'm defending the insurance companies, which simply isn't the case. I'm arguing against our present liability laws.
All the subtley of the novels were not translated to screen.
Of course not. To do that, you would have needed one movie just to introduce us to hobbits.
He had to cut a lot of things, and they are still much longer movies than most. I read a lot more books than I watch movies, and when I do see a movie where I've already read the book, I expect to be disapointed.
With LOTR's, I was pleasantly surprised. Jackson did a great job. Sure, there were changes, there were parts left out, and I would have done some things different. But the movies were still quite enjoyable, much better than most I've seen in recent years, and MUCH better than I'd expected.
Just because all of this spam is coming from America, doesn't mean Americans are the spammers.
Anyone that pays any attention knows that regardless of where the spam is sent from, and regardless of the hosting of the website being spamvertised, the vast majority is sent on behalf of Americans, and is advertising to Americans.
Also, look at the spamhaus lists or such, how many of them are American? Not many.
Only if by "not many" you mean "the vast majority".
The Spamhaus ROKSO list has 183 entries right now, the vast majority based in the US.
Now an article with research backing it shows the US as the major culprit, and what does everyone do? Make excuses or jokes. What makes you think the Chinese don't have zombie machines? Or is it ok for the US to spam, but no one else?
Having never received a legitimate message from china, if I blacklist all of china, I have roughly a 0% chance of blocking legitimate mail. Over 95% of my legitimate mail comes from the US, so I can hardly block everything that originates in the US.
That doesn't make spam from the US acceptable, by any means. But it does mean that I can't deal with it in the same way.
The US has always been the #1 problem as far as spam goes. The server may be in china, the spam may be sent from russia, but the vast majority of it is sent on behalf of some salesman (or con man) located in the US.
That's why I think that a good US law against spam would be useful. It won't stop it, but it could help. Unfortunatly, the only law the US has passed is the CAN-SPAM act which was written on behalf of the DMA and other scum that want to ensure that they can continue to spam.
If you think that Americans as a whole are in favor of spam, or that they think "spam is OK when it comes from the US", then you are deluding yourself.
Your friend is a bad guy. He is ruining email. The company he works for is bad. And you are count slimeballs amoung your friends. My friends are honest, or they wouldn't be my friends. Yours are conmen.
And in the US, you can't be sued for libel if you're telling the truth.
Nit-pick. In the US, truth is a defense against a libel suit. But in the US, anyone can sue anyone for just about anything. If what you wrote was true, you should be able to win the case, but that won't protect you from getting sued, and you will still have to defend yourself.
Well, y'know, there wouldn't be a lot of sleazy lawyers if there weren't sleazy clients to pay their bills.
I'm not sure that's true. Many of the rediculous cases are sleazy lawyers who find some schmuck who couldn't afford to pay them anyway, and tell them "For 50% of the profit, I'll handle the case for you, and we'll sue them for 50 million". The case may get settled out of court for much less - but it's all profit for the schmuck, and there wouldn't have been a lawsuit at all without the sleazy lawyers.
The system needs a way for lawyers that bring nonsense cases in to end up being punished, and to lose the ability to sue at all if they do it too often.
(Grrrrr. Fogot to add the link. Reposting.)
The truth is that the cost of liability drives companies out of business. Here, for instance, you can read about the oldest ladder company in the US going bankrupt. The cost of the liability was 29.4% of their sales. And this is a ladder company that had been around since 1855 and had _never_ lost a lawsuit. The extra cost involved in liability gets passed on to customers. And it eventually helped to drive the company out of business.
My father worked for Sears and Robuck for many years. One day a guy came in wanting to look at table saws. He wanted to see one run. They don't allow that, for safety reasons. So he moved on. A bit later, he came back - without an employee with him, got an extension cord off the shelf, plugged it in, ran it to the table saw, and cut his small finger off. Sears settled out of court, because the cost of going to court was too high. Those costs get passed on to customers.
The truth is that the cost of liability drives companies out of business. Here, for instance, you can read about the oldest ladder company in the US going bankrupt. The cost of the liability was 29.4% of their sales. And this is a ladder company that had been around since 1855 and had _never_ lost a lawsuit. The extra cost involved in liability gets passed on to customers.
My father worked for Sears and Robuck for many years. One day a guy came in wanting to look at table saws. He wanted to see one run. They don't allow that, for safety reasons. So he moved on. A bit later, he came back - without an employee with him, got an extension cord off the shelf, plugged it in, ran it to the table saw, and cut his small finger off. Sears settled out of court, because the cost of going to court was too high. Those costs get passed on to customers.
Which was a form of tort reform. Seems to have worked, hasn't it? People aren't afraid to give CPR anymore.
I grew up in a small town, and joined the volunteer fire department early on. Naturally, we received various types of first aid training. But we also received warnings that the more training you had, the easier it is for the victim that you were helping to sue you.
It seems a bit backwards, to me, but that's how it works. The most qualified people are the ones that are easiest to sue, and therefore the ones that have the most incentive to not get involved.
Health care professionals do get some coverage under the good samaritan laws, but not as much as John Doe. And the general rule is that if you are well trained and happen across an accident, you should help only if the victim/patient is in a life threatening situation. Any aid you give them beyond that puts you at risk. To a certain extent, that applies to non-professionals, too.
It does irritate me when people try to make themselves look better by professing that they attend church
Attending church just makes them look like bigotted idiots. Look at what the church does.
After attending Trinity Christian Academy from kindergarten,making good grades, doing well in every way, and paying a lot in tuition to go to private school, the school
kicked him out
just before graduation because they found out he was gay. That's your christian values.
Of course, the catholics are no better. They have long supported priests who sexually abused children.
Surely I don't need to link to information about Muslim churches which support terrorism. (Though it wouldn't take long with Google to find a link.)
Religion is about money, power, and control. When people try to pretend that going to church makes them better people, I know that what they mean is "We are better than scum like you, you will burn in hell, so you better do things our way".
All churches are evil. (Sorry mom - it's true. Yours is no exception.)
I was rasied in a heavily baptist town, by religious parents. Luckily, I got over it.
Slashdot Mirror
So, you'll download free software, but you draw the line at paying $2 to download pirated stuff, because you are far too honorable for that. Got it.
Either way, if the software author can't sell his software because it's being distributed (for free, or for cheap) by someone else, he ends up out of business.
I'd bet there are lots of them.
Slashdot has more users than that, based on UsedID numbers. Most Slashdot users, I suspect, have Slashdot send them a daily email with the Slashdot stories, and a signifigant number are bound to receive emails when someone replies to a message, as I do.
The NYTimes is bound to have that many people on their mailing list.
Google has their "Google Alerts" feature. Wouldn't surprise me if over 500,000 email addresses have signed up.
Not to mention an inhouse list used for testing purposes or something similar. 450K sounds incredibly *small* for a spam list.
Even odds are that you are a first time offender, but it was a drug related offense and you are a black guy.
Nonsense. Are you actually saying that if someone steals your car, they shouldn't go to jail? Are you actually saying that if, while you are not home, they burn down your house, it's OK? Jeeze, the criminals in your city must really love you.
I am saying you are not harmed when you receive spam. Period.
You are ignoring the wasted time, the higher ISP bills, the fact that email is already being ruined as a method of communication, and much more. Your "There is no harm in spam" is bullshit. And you know it. Otherwise, you would not hide your email address.
Why? Is it because spammers are honest law abiding citizens?
I assume that most spammers are much more likely to hide their income, pay no taxes if possible, and probably do pay some because they can't avoid it. I suspect that some aren't really worried about the money they make spamming, but are using it to launder drug money.
Spammers are not honest people.
But unless they are showing a profit, it isn't doing them any good. Last year, (fiscal 2003) they turned a profit for, I believe, the first time. They have 1.78 Billion in outstanding longterm debt.
I'd like to see them do well, and I'm a fan of online shopping, but so far, this looks mostly like a "That's nice, but..." situation.
You never posted a link of any sort, even after I asked. You'll have to go troll someone else now - you aren't worth talking to, and just want to argue and cuss.
So much for reasonable conversation. I can only assume that the fact that you refuse to back any of your claims is because you know they are bullshit.
Err... doesn't exactly sound all that "free" to me. It doesn't say it'll be free forever, it says it'll be free for three months and be a pay system after that. A fairly expensive pay system.
Of course, those three months are January, February, and March, hardly the best camping weather.
FACT: that decline has been over a century
FACT: lawsuit awards have been constant. $30,000 average each. Citation already given.
FACT: The sharp increase in insurance costs has been over the past 10 years.
So far, you haven't posted a link that verifies any of this (including the one you list as "Citation already given") and the link I posted in my last message shows completely different information.
From that article :
This disagrees with your "awards average $30,000" claim, and your "lawsuits are declining in number" claim. Your claims also do not fit with what I believe to be the truth. Without a link to evidence backing your statements up, I must consider them wrong.The problem is that when you buy a ladder, a large portion of what you are paying is only necessary because of BS lawsuits. A company doesn't have to lose a suit for it to cost them money.
Companies who follow your "We don't need insurance" plan will end up out of business after losing one lawsuit. They won't have the insurance company fighting for them, or helping with the costs of paying off that suit, and if they lose just one large suit, then their business is gone. So they can't just say "No, we're going to skip that" without risking their business.
There are now no ladder comanies based in the US. The BS liability laws have raised their costs too far. And this happens in many other industries.
You seem to think I'm defending the insurance companies, which simply isn't the case. I'm arguing against our present liability laws.
Here's an article with some info and numbers on various industries.
Of course not. To do that, you would have needed one movie just to introduce us to hobbits.
He had to cut a lot of things, and they are still much longer movies than most. I read a lot more books than I watch movies, and when I do see a movie where I've already read the book, I expect to be disapointed.
With LOTR's, I was pleasantly surprised. Jackson did a great job. Sure, there were changes, there were parts left out, and I would have done some things different. But the movies were still quite enjoyable, much better than most I've seen in recent years, and MUCH better than I'd expected.
Anyone that pays any attention knows that regardless of where the spam is sent from, and regardless of the hosting of the website being spamvertised, the vast majority is sent on behalf of Americans, and is advertising to Americans.
Also, look at the spamhaus lists or such, how many of them are American? Not many.
Only if by "not many" you mean "the vast majority".
The Spamhaus ROKSO list has 183 entries right now, the vast majority based in the US.
Having never received a legitimate message from china, if I blacklist all of china, I have roughly a 0% chance of blocking legitimate mail. Over 95% of my legitimate mail comes from the US, so I can hardly block everything that originates in the US.
That doesn't make spam from the US acceptable, by any means. But it does mean that I can't deal with it in the same way.
The US has always been the #1 problem as far as spam goes. The server may be in china, the spam may be sent from russia, but the vast majority of it is sent on behalf of some salesman (or con man) located in the US.
That's why I think that a good US law against spam would be useful. It won't stop it, but it could help. Unfortunatly, the only law the US has passed is the CAN-SPAM act which was written on behalf of the DMA and other scum that want to ensure that they can continue to spam.
If you think that Americans as a whole are in favor of spam, or that they think "spam is OK when it comes from the US", then you are deluding yourself.
Your friend is a bad guy. He is ruining email. The company he works for is bad. And you are count slimeballs amoung your friends. My friends are honest, or they wouldn't be my friends. Yours are conmen.
Nit-pick. In the US, truth is a defense against a libel suit. But in the US, anyone can sue anyone for just about anything. If what you wrote was true, you should be able to win the case, but that won't protect you from getting sued, and you will still have to defend yourself.
I'm not sure that's true. Many of the rediculous cases are sleazy lawyers who find some schmuck who couldn't afford to pay them anyway, and tell them "For 50% of the profit, I'll handle the case for you, and we'll sue them for 50 million". The case may get settled out of court for much less - but it's all profit for the schmuck, and there wouldn't have been a lawsuit at all without the sleazy lawyers.
The system needs a way for lawyers that bring nonsense cases in to end up being punished, and to lose the ability to sue at all if they do it too often.
My father worked for Sears and Robuck for many years. One day a guy came in wanting to look at table saws. He wanted to see one run. They don't allow that, for safety reasons. So he moved on. A bit later, he came back - without an employee with him, got an extension cord off the shelf, plugged it in, ran it to the table saw, and cut his small finger off. Sears settled out of court, because the cost of going to court was too high. Those costs get passed on to customers.
Stupid liability laws hurt us all.
My father worked for Sears and Robuck for many years. One day a guy came in wanting to look at table saws. He wanted to see one run. They don't allow that, for safety reasons. So he moved on. A bit later, he came back - without an employee with him, got an extension cord off the shelf, plugged it in, ran it to the table saw, and cut his small finger off. Sears settled out of court, because the cost of going to court was too high. Those costs get passed on to customers.
Stupid liability laws hurt us all.
Which was a form of tort reform. Seems to have worked, hasn't it? People aren't afraid to give CPR anymore.
I grew up in a small town, and joined the volunteer fire department early on. Naturally, we received various types of first aid training. But we also received warnings that the more training you had, the easier it is for the victim that you were helping to sue you.
It seems a bit backwards, to me, but that's how it works. The most qualified people are the ones that are easiest to sue, and therefore the ones that have the most incentive to not get involved.
Health care professionals do get some coverage under the good samaritan laws, but not as much as John Doe. And the general rule is that if you are well trained and happen across an accident, you should help only if the victim/patient is in a life threatening situation. Any aid you give them beyond that puts you at risk. To a certain extent, that applies to non-professionals, too.
Sad but true.
So you are proposing a War on War? Are you, by chance, in Bush's cabinet?
If your offense was able to convert 4th and 25, they wouldn't be stuck at 4th and 25 on their 10 yard line.
If the game you are playing requires so little skill to beat, then the game is pointless.
That's your prerogative. Feel free to waste time in any way you see fit.
Attending church just makes them look like bigotted idiots. Look at what the church does.
After attending Trinity Christian Academy from kindergarten,making good grades, doing well in every way, and paying a lot in tuition to go to private school, the school kicked him out just before graduation because they found out he was gay. That's your christian values.
Of course, the catholics are no better. They have long supported priests who sexually abused children.
Surely I don't need to link to information about Muslim churches which support terrorism. (Though it wouldn't take long with Google to find a link.)
Religion is about money, power, and control. When people try to pretend that going to church makes them better people, I know that what they mean is "We are better than scum like you, you will burn in hell, so you better do things our way".
All churches are evil. (Sorry mom - it's true. Yours is no exception.)
I was rasied in a heavily baptist town, by religious parents. Luckily, I got over it.