Obama's as un-American as they come, and if the rumors emanating from Kenya and Indonesia are correct, he's not American either, but he seems to know the right thing to do in every situation... I think your idea would be just as good as his, I mean, at this point in America, from Obama and Pelosi down to Bernanke and the CEOs of BofA, AIG, Chrysler and GM, everyone's just shooting from the hip anyway. If it involves throwing money, it's a plausible solution to whatever the problem. As for choosing Akamai, I'm guessing that Obama must have a friend or favor over at Akamai, or maybe he threw Google/YouTube CEO Erik Schmidt under the bus to join Wright, Daschle, and every other poorly vetted appointee or spokesman.
We're at a turning point in our civilized world. As appointed liberal courts have usurped the powers we granted our elected leaders by overturning our written statutes, issuing edicts and fiats, the very rule of law is in peril. Simultaneously, our laws are being determined (re-determined) by executive order and shaped by special interest lobbyists. At what point does such malformed law become meaningless? That would leave us with just our moral compasses, and therein is the question of copying bits and bytes...
The US Constitution, via the Commerce Clause, simply does not allow states to tax interstate commerce. The US Supreme Court has further clarified this:
"[N]o state has the right to lay a tax on interstate commerce in any form... and the reason is that such taxation is a burden on that commerce, and amounts to a regulation of it, which belongs solely to congress. This is the result of so many recent cases that citation is hardly necessary.â
[Leloup v. Port of Mobile, 127 U.S. 640 (1888)]
In the case above, the State of Alabama tried to levy a tax on a franchise operator of Western Union for out-of-state wire transfers and telegraphs, but with a shake of the naughty finger, got slammed by the supreme court. They'll do exactly the same if Wisconsin tries to levy a tax on downloads and file transfers originating from out of state, and that can actually include Apple iTunes Music Store unless those music and media servers are hosted within Wisconsin.
Regarding the "Use" tax, the constitution exempts that as well with the equal protection clause and the 16th amendments. The state cannot tax one person for one thing and not tax another person for the exact same thing, so the use tax would apply to ALL residents, or none. All of the States use that field on their tax returns to try to "trick" residents into paying sales tax on mail order and outside articles, but it's not enforceable because they'd have to demonstrate that the "use" tax was levied on all citizenry. To make a "use" tax a substitute for a "sales" tax is functionally equivalent to a Sales Tax, and prohibited by the Commerce Clause.
Some very strong proponents of a Federal Sales Tax have completely ignored these precedents and constitutional constructs and seldom confess the need for a major constitutional amendment. Without one, a Federal Sales Tax is impossible as is any uniform state sales tax on mail order and on-line purchases from without the resident's state. They keep extending the moratorium for one reason, because no one has initiated a call for an amendment.
Some have asked why these constitutional provisions exist. If you look at the history of the formation of the United STATES, you see 13 colonies that had to agree to federalized powers while preserving a considerable degree of state sovereignty. It mostly had to do with the rivers that often divided states where smaller states didn't want larger states to usurp control over commerce or control the waterways, which were serious concerns for commerce, where control by one state could decimate a neighboring or downstream state with embargoes and such.
Excellent choice. My recommendation too. It's easy to read and interesting. A friend of mine, his father worked for Mandlebrot at IBM and while those guys are a bit hard to read, James Gleick puts it in easy-to-understand prose.
Flywheels have been around for decades and I was wondering that myself. My neighbor is a mathematician who worked designing flywheels, which when I found out promptly inquired. Apparently they're always breaking down, which takes the entire windmill out of operation. The engineering strength required for these is pretty expensive so they either cut corners or build breakage prone flywheels. Think of the weight necessary to store the energy which needs to be supported for the duration that energy is stored. It needs a large triple thread with bearings so that rather than spin down, it will turn its central axle which takes over the energy production. It also requires a complex clutching mechanism so that it will engage/disengage when it's at the bottom/top of it's lifting range. It's a good idea, just not affordable because of the engineering requirements. I say we drill and go nuclear. Nuclear for the grid, petro/ng for our cars.
As an adjunct to Democracy AND Socialism, something that thrives when people collectively pool their assets and liabilities, is that the people cherry pick the benefits while dumping the costs at the foot of society. Long Live the free market. Vive la liberte des marches.
iTunes DRM prevents people from distributing the downloads for the simple reason that they'd make $.99 off the first download and then people would pass around the file ad infinitum, ad nauseam. That's no model for a business. Even if Apple were so benevolent, the content providers aren't.
HOWEVER, there's an easy work around. Take your downloads, burn a CD and then rip the CD and you can now put your MP3s on any device you'd like. There should be no noticeable degradation in quality because AC3 to CD (AIFF - PCM) gives you CD quality, so it's just as though you bought the CD and ripped and encoded. Now you have all the fair use you paid for.
As for pirates, I have no sympathy. They're already boycotting iTunes so their continuance has null affect.
For Desktops too. Not because I'm a enviro-nazi who buys into Chicken Lil' Gore's Global Warming scheme, but because you want your system to boot fast and applications to launch in no time flat. But go for Single Cell and not Multi Cell Flash architectures. The single cells are the ones that are able to hit the theoretical maximums of the bus interface and don't have the stuttering problems. I think they've worked through a lot of the problems with the read/write cycles of Flash EEPROMs that plagued the technology earlier in the century and with dropping Flash costs, computer manufacturers and not just game enthusiasts could really get serious about fast computers that booted and launched apps from SSDs, while using HDDs for massive storage.
Some manufacturers have talked about hybrid drives, but I think you'll more likely see hybrid computers which employ both drive technologies with better efficiency. And yes, they should see great success in laptops because of energy savings and reduction of moving parts. I think we'll see massive drives used for iPods as well once the prices come down. I'd like to see them in Video Cameras as well, but I hope that the manufacturers don't integrate the drives like they currently do with HDDs, but keep them removable like their smaller cousins, the removable flash "sticks".
Very few courts will uphold default judgments, let alone grant them. They are basically judgments made without any findings of fact and without merit or argument. With a lawyer taking up this case, he'll no doubt file a motion for reconsideration and probably has between 30 and 60 days to file an appeal after the lower court judgment is certified, if it is not already. The Appeals Court will give considerable leniency if the defendant was hospitalized at any time after service was attempted. It will also look into whether or not personal service was actually affected (did a process server hand the complaint and summons to the patient while in bed?). Although the story is alarmist, there's probably no permanent damage done, though the young lady is going to have a harder time having been found in default. God bless the PA attorney who took this up pro-bono. Let's find out who he is and launch a PayPal account to gather donations - anyone with experience setting that up? (IANAL)
Let's say that I monitor incoming SPAM for a while. I pick up a pattern for the DidTheyReadIt relays (that's all they are) by looking at headers or monitoring inbound traffic on my POP server. Then I take one (or many) of those email addresses I've identified as coming through "DidTheyReadIt" and forge it/them in the from: field and then append the appropriate tag to the end of the to: addresses. Now all those will relay through the DidTheyReadIt servers, racking up charges for the forged from: senders and tying up their service. This thing is as doomed to fail as the basically flawed SendMail structure that fails to certify the sender and got us in this mess in the first place.
I could have some fun with this sending email from known spammers back to other known spammers and put it on their tab for a change.
Email is dead as a useful form of communication - let's just face it and find something new!
Now that I have your attention, there's a reason why Apple doesn't discount iPods.
First, the short reason:
- Because they don't have to... everyone wants one and everyone who's had Economics 101 (except for ex-Governor Grey-Out Davis) would know that once a manufacturer finds their sweet spot on the supply curve, only a shift on the demand curve would require them to lower their price. As it stands, demand is high.
Now, the really short reason:
Whaaaaaaah, I want my iPod and I don't want to pay market price for it! Everyone else's MP3 players suck worse than an Oreck!
Hopefully everyone here at Slashdot has had some junior high school science. Remember, first you have a postulation, then a theory, and then if it meets empirical tests, it can someday be considered as a "law". For example, we have the "Theory" of Relativity and the "Theory" of Evolution, because we do not have the means wherewith, nor the time span necessary to prove them as laws. The "Law" of gravity is well established because it has satisfied generation upon generation of empirical tests to that effect.
Well, it just ircks me to no end how a bunch of marketing cadets at Intel start tossing around "Moore's Law", as if it had met the criteria to be classified as an undisputable cannon in the scientific vernacular. What is more bothersome, is when computer scientists and the main stream computing press further buy into it and toss around Moore's name followed by "Law". It's totally unbefitting and that we are someday dissappointed by its lack of fruition is no big surprise in my books.
Call it a theory and when it lives up to little more than a brief region of order on an otherwise chaotic graph of scalar integration, we won't be too dissappointed. It's just semantics until bozos start reporting of it's catostrophic failure. Run Chicken Little, Run!
Ah, Plato. No one ever talks about it so I always thought it was a local system. I used it when I was at the University of Lethbridge to send email to my brother at the University of Alberta (Edmonton) and to play this awesome (for the time) flight emulation program that was truly the first multiplayer game (of which I have any knowledge). This was back in 1982. Anyone know how many/which other universities had Plato terminals? I do remember the flight emulator getting slower and slower until it was no longer playable - possibly due to more people tying up the main frame. But the vector display rocked! I thought that that was the way to go for graphics. Later, ('84), I used a logic program on Plato that would allow you to create circuits using NAND gates and JK Flipflops. That was fun but I remember not being able to save my work - at least not locally. Ahhhh, 8-bit nostalgia!
I'm not blindly accepting the bias of the PCWorld article or their choices for benchmark apps, but Mac users should note two things:
1. Word was written for the Mac long before it was available on Windows. Case in point, it was available for the Mac long before Windows 3.1 was out. I used it back in 1987 for all my word processing. When M$ combined development for both platforms in '95, Word 6 for the Mac was rejected en mass by the Mac community and Word 98 development was taken over by the BMU which now develops (code-wise) independently from Redmond. That there is some lack of features in the Windows version attests to this.
Regarding Word, I think that the biggest doubt is raised in my mind because I know that MS re-writes all of the memory routines in their apps (sometimes jokingly called the "Mac Wait Loop") and doesn't rely upon the system or kernel to do that. That puts something as fundemental as memory management far abstracted from the low level layer where it should remain. I believe the library that MS uses is called "ms_memory_initialize" or at least that's what shows up in MacsBug on my older 8.6 Mac. (I'm surprised they compile their apps with symbols turned on...)
2. Photoshop is a port to the PC from the Mac version. Although it is now highly optimized (Intel sent over some assembly code hacks to Adobe to optimize some of the filters like Gaussian to run faster) for the PC, back in version 4, you would just run an MPW script on the finished Mac binaries to create the Windows version.
3. Premier also started out as a Mac application. I don't have any insight on the porting process, but I assume that rather than a disadvantage to the Mac, there are probably shared libraries. Probably the fact that it is running in Classic is the main contentious point in regards to its inclusion. (I wonder if PCWorld included Classic launch time in their benchmark:)
So, at least historically, the benchmarks aren't totally one-sided, but why would any magazine worth its salt produce such a haphazard set of bench marks. Especially the MS Word scroll test. (wow, I can scroll through a Word document faster than I could ever possibly find useful!)
Rock on Lindon! I think it's the first time we ever made national press (not counting agricultural news stories). I used to work in Scotts Valley, CA and we had lots of former SCO employees at my job there. Then I moved to Lindon, and next thing I know, there's going to be a lot of former SCO employees here as well. I may move to Canada, maybe SCO will follow?...
The first time I did this was back in '93 when transporting around a hard drive in a shoe box from work to another location. I had 3 months of work on a Seagate 1GB SCSI and when I got back to work, it wouldn't mount. Careful examination showed a missing capacitor. Fortunately I was working for a drive/storage company and they had another of the same model in the back. A quick swap of mother boards and I could see the drive again. Then last year, I had three Maxtor 80GB IDE units all fail. In each case it was the electronics. Maxtor shipped out three replacements, of which only one was the identical model, but that was good enough,. One by one I moved the PCBs from the good unit to each of the bad units and backed up the data onto a new hard drive. Now, I always buy hard drives in pairs or triplets in case the board fries, which seems way too commonplace with IDE drives.
You know what really bothers me about the French - they have a different word for everything!
- kirei na hana niwa toge ga arimasu (even pretty flowers have thorns)
No such thing as the Fair Use Act. The Copyright statutes have defined Fair Use under 17 U.S.C. 107 since 1978.
Perhaps you're thinking of the Audio Home Recording Act, which prevents prosecution for making an analog copy or certain digital copies of music.
I may have confused the year with the telecom deregulation, but under Clinton, I remember an act being passed which changed (defined) the application of the copyright act for fair use. Could have been the Audio Home Recording Act.
Well, Napster has been dead for years. I'll assume you mean Kazaa Lite. The difference in the RIAA's eyes is that radio is not on demand. Yeah, you can request a song, but that requires you to get through to fairly busy DJs, where the phone lines are always busy. In addition, the radio stations typically have playlists. If you request a song that is on the playlist, they may play it. If you request one that is not on the play list, they will not play it. Even the so called "alternative" stations would not play obscure music. With Kazaa, you have quick access to the song of your choice without those limitations.
Napster, Kazaa, Gnutella, LimeWire, basically P2P file sharing. If you call waiting 60 minutes for a decent connection to a file host "on demand", i'd argue that calling a DJ is more instantaneous. I've got half downloaded tracks on my drive from over a month ago waiting for someone to get back on-line
My point is that the RIAA and record labels should be exploiting this opportunity. Heck, if they peppered the P2P networks with their own versions of songs, they could totally commandeer the operations with promo tracks. They could embed advertisements and could get low quality tracks into the consumers' hands to promote their bands, probably at a fraction of the cost because there'd be no payola$. They could build graphics and links into the tracks to take you to the site to buy the album, direct other similar artists' work your way - much more targeted and interactive than radio could ever hope to be.
Satelite digital radio stations (I know you pay for them, but remember that you're also paying for bandwidth in a similar way) present a legitimate challenge as well. If we can digitally record television (TiVo, ReplayTV) for later on-demand playback, it won't be long before people are plugging their satelite receiver into the PC to record tunes to their hard drives for later playback. Now, the quality issue is beginning to disolve as well. With satelite radio and a digital recorder, the same consumers have the equivalent of P2P.
This is part of the hole the RIAA is digging for themselves by fighting technology instead of embracing and exploiting it. It would become win-win for RIAA/Artists/Consumers, if they'd get with the program!
The poster has some pretty good questions... I just looked over my Collective Soul (self titled) CD and although copyright is stated, that would only force me to comply to the US Copyright act which was ammended in 1996 with the "Fair Use" act, which allows me to make multiple copies to other media for personal and family use, and I believe also allows me to share my music with friends and acquaintances.
Anyway, to the point, right now the copyright law is somewhat ambiguous and the license (implied, I assume, because inside Collective Soul (self-titled), there doesn't seem to be any license agreeement) doesn't define what I can and cannot do or of what the extent my ownership of the recorded music or media is. It does say "All Rights Reserved", but it can't take away any rights afforded me by the Fair Use act or any local or state laws.
So, I'd surmise that there's a considerable amount of ambiguity in today's world of music and law. What I predict is going to happen, is that the RIAA are going to venture away from the safe ground of this ambiguity in their quest to control and stagnate the current state of the art, to resist the digital medium and that's going to ultimately end up in front of 9 justices, who will be forced to interpret, apply, and define the law. They may toss out or strike some lines from both the Fair Use Act and the DMCA.
What will then happen, if I can see into the future a bit, is that the ambiguity may give way to broader rights for the consumer, under unenforceable terms of both acts. This will be widely disceminated and clarified and the consumer will now know of his/her broader rights, and copying music will become fully legitimized. EVERYONE will do it.
Another possibility, outside of the courts is that the RIAA will lobby congress to the point that the State will impose fixed royalties on all music to allow distribution. Of course, web broadcasters and consumer groups are concurrently lobbying the same congress. So, the best songs will have the same per copy (or per download) license fee as the most hideous crap, and music will become fully commodotized.
The point is that the RIAA and the music industry should give their lawyers pink slips and refocus on making good music once again. Maybe that will bring them out of this current slump, probably surprise their shareholders a bit.
Final word, what's so different between Napster and Radio? I turn on a radio, I can hear the latest (and older) tunes. I can call in and make a request, and almost hear a tune on demand. I can make a recording off of the radio, probably equivalent to 128kbps MP3. If radio ultimately generates record sales, why does the RIAA assume that MP3 and P2P doesn't? I've discovered more music that I've gone out and purchased lately from listening to downloaded MP3s than from radio...
For all the quoting of the constitution, particularly the first ammendment, I'm amazed at how few Americans have actually read it. So, here it is:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise therof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievences."
The first phrase is about the freedom of religion. The second is about the freedom of speech. The final is about freedom assemble and to petition the government. All of what anyone has to say about the right to "free speech" comes from five words "abridging the freedom of speech".
Spam (also known as Unsolicited Commercial EMail) is, by definition, none of the protected rights, most particularly the freedom of speech. Often we discuss "free speech", so let's discern between "free" speech and "commercial" speech*. Free speech doesn't involve commerce, and doesn't cost the listener (or reader) money. SPAM, involves commerce, but not religion, not the press, not the right to assemble, and not the right to petition government (except maybe those government grant scams). In turn, it costs the listener (or reader) money in lost wages and bandwidth. So, it's anything but "free".
Furthermore, the First Ammendment NEVER granted anyone the right to lie. That means the responsibility to tell the truth would remain, even if some liberal judge deemed SPAM constitutionally protected. It would be "illegal" speech if the SPAM message contained lies, fraudulent statements, misleading statements or solicitations to engage in illegal activities. Such is certainly not protected by the first ammendment, similar to liable and slander not being protected.
Sorry for the rant, but the original article brought up first ammendment rights which people toss about way too carelessly. If one person has a right to send me a message, I certainly have a right to curtail it. I have a right to petition the government that I don't want my privacy and time imposed upon by an unsolicited scoundrel type.
* Several supreme court decisions have disected the phraseology and defined "free" vs "commercial" speech, so in light of such precedence, I think it fair to apply similar criteria to SPAM.
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Obama's as un-American as they come, and if the rumors emanating from Kenya and Indonesia are correct, he's not American either, but he seems to know the right thing to do in every situation... I think your idea would be just as good as his, I mean, at this point in America, from Obama and Pelosi down to Bernanke and the CEOs of BofA, AIG, Chrysler and GM, everyone's just shooting from the hip anyway. If it involves throwing money, it's a plausible solution to whatever the problem. As for choosing Akamai, I'm guessing that Obama must have a friend or favor over at Akamai, or maybe he threw Google/YouTube CEO Erik Schmidt under the bus to join Wright, Daschle, and every other poorly vetted appointee or spokesman.
We're at a turning point in our civilized world. As appointed liberal courts have usurped the powers we granted our elected leaders by overturning our written statutes, issuing edicts and fiats, the very rule of law is in peril. Simultaneously, our laws are being determined (re-determined) by executive order and shaped by special interest lobbyists. At what point does such malformed law become meaningless? That would leave us with just our moral compasses, and therein is the question of copying bits and bytes...
The US Constitution, via the Commerce Clause, simply does not allow states to tax interstate commerce. The US Supreme Court has further clarified this: "[N]o state has the right to lay a tax on interstate commerce in any form... and the reason is that such taxation is a burden on that commerce, and amounts to a regulation of it, which belongs solely to congress. This is the result of so many recent cases that citation is hardly necessary.â [Leloup v. Port of Mobile, 127 U.S. 640 (1888)] In the case above, the State of Alabama tried to levy a tax on a franchise operator of Western Union for out-of-state wire transfers and telegraphs, but with a shake of the naughty finger, got slammed by the supreme court. They'll do exactly the same if Wisconsin tries to levy a tax on downloads and file transfers originating from out of state, and that can actually include Apple iTunes Music Store unless those music and media servers are hosted within Wisconsin. Regarding the "Use" tax, the constitution exempts that as well with the equal protection clause and the 16th amendments. The state cannot tax one person for one thing and not tax another person for the exact same thing, so the use tax would apply to ALL residents, or none. All of the States use that field on their tax returns to try to "trick" residents into paying sales tax on mail order and outside articles, but it's not enforceable because they'd have to demonstrate that the "use" tax was levied on all citizenry. To make a "use" tax a substitute for a "sales" tax is functionally equivalent to a Sales Tax, and prohibited by the Commerce Clause. Some very strong proponents of a Federal Sales Tax have completely ignored these precedents and constitutional constructs and seldom confess the need for a major constitutional amendment. Without one, a Federal Sales Tax is impossible as is any uniform state sales tax on mail order and on-line purchases from without the resident's state. They keep extending the moratorium for one reason, because no one has initiated a call for an amendment. Some have asked why these constitutional provisions exist. If you look at the history of the formation of the United STATES, you see 13 colonies that had to agree to federalized powers while preserving a considerable degree of state sovereignty. It mostly had to do with the rivers that often divided states where smaller states didn't want larger states to usurp control over commerce or control the waterways, which were serious concerns for commerce, where control by one state could decimate a neighboring or downstream state with embargoes and such.
Excellent choice. My recommendation too. It's easy to read and interesting. A friend of mine, his father worked for Mandlebrot at IBM and while those guys are a bit hard to read, James Gleick puts it in easy-to-understand prose.
James Gleick, "Chaos". Best darn book about math and science I ever read. Not just numbers, it will change the way you look at the seeming randomness of life and give it new meaning. http://www.amazon.com/Chaos-Making-Science-James-Gleick/dp/0140092501
Flywheels have been around for decades and I was wondering that myself. My neighbor is a mathematician who worked designing flywheels, which when I found out promptly inquired. Apparently they're always breaking down, which takes the entire windmill out of operation. The engineering strength required for these is pretty expensive so they either cut corners or build breakage prone flywheels. Think of the weight necessary to store the energy which needs to be supported for the duration that energy is stored. It needs a large triple thread with bearings so that rather than spin down, it will turn its central axle which takes over the energy production. It also requires a complex clutching mechanism so that it will engage/disengage when it's at the bottom/top of it's lifting range. It's a good idea, just not affordable because of the engineering requirements. I say we drill and go nuclear. Nuclear for the grid, petro/ng for our cars.
As an adjunct to Democracy AND Socialism, something that thrives when people collectively pool their assets and liabilities, is that the people cherry pick the benefits while dumping the costs at the foot of society. Long Live the free market. Vive la liberte des marches.
Democracy (a.k.a. Tyranny of the Majority) sucks! Long live the republic!
iTunes DRM prevents people from distributing the downloads for the simple reason that they'd make $.99 off the first download and then people would pass around the file ad infinitum, ad nauseam. That's no model for a business. Even if Apple were so benevolent, the content providers aren't.
HOWEVER, there's an easy work around. Take your downloads, burn a CD and then rip the CD and you can now put your MP3s on any device you'd like. There should be no noticeable degradation in quality because AC3 to CD (AIFF - PCM) gives you CD quality, so it's just as though you bought the CD and ripped and encoded. Now you have all the fair use you paid for.
As for pirates, I have no sympathy. They're already boycotting iTunes so their continuance has null affect.
For Desktops too. Not because I'm a enviro-nazi who buys into Chicken Lil' Gore's Global Warming scheme, but because you want your system to boot fast and applications to launch in no time flat. But go for Single Cell and not Multi Cell Flash architectures. The single cells are the ones that are able to hit the theoretical maximums of the bus interface and don't have the stuttering problems. I think they've worked through a lot of the problems with the read/write cycles of Flash EEPROMs that plagued the technology earlier in the century and with dropping Flash costs, computer manufacturers and not just game enthusiasts could really get serious about fast computers that booted and launched apps from SSDs, while using HDDs for massive storage.
Some manufacturers have talked about hybrid drives, but I think you'll more likely see hybrid computers which employ both drive technologies with better efficiency. And yes, they should see great success in laptops because of energy savings and reduction of moving parts. I think we'll see massive drives used for iPods as well once the prices come down. I'd like to see them in Video Cameras as well, but I hope that the manufacturers don't integrate the drives like they currently do with HDDs, but keep them removable like their smaller cousins, the removable flash "sticks".
Very few courts will uphold default judgments, let alone grant them. They are basically judgments made without any findings of fact and without merit or argument. With a lawyer taking up this case, he'll no doubt file a motion for reconsideration and probably has between 30 and 60 days to file an appeal after the lower court judgment is certified, if it is not already. The Appeals Court will give considerable leniency if the defendant was hospitalized at any time after service was attempted. It will also look into whether or not personal service was actually affected (did a process server hand the complaint and summons to the patient while in bed?). Although the story is alarmist, there's probably no permanent damage done, though the young lady is going to have a harder time having been found in default. God bless the PA attorney who took this up pro-bono. Let's find out who he is and launch a PayPal account to gather donations - anyone with experience setting that up? (IANAL)
Let's say that I monitor incoming SPAM for a while. I pick up a pattern for the DidTheyReadIt relays (that's all they are) by looking at headers or monitoring inbound traffic on my POP server. Then I take one (or many) of those email addresses I've identified as coming through "DidTheyReadIt" and forge it/them in the from: field and then append the appropriate tag to the end of the to: addresses. Now all those will relay through the DidTheyReadIt servers, racking up charges for the forged from: senders and tying up their service. This thing is as doomed to fail as the basically flawed SendMail structure that fails to certify the sender and got us in this mess in the first place.
I could have some fun with this sending email from known spammers back to other known spammers and put it on their tab for a change.
Email is dead as a useful form of communication - let's just face it and find something new!
Now that I have your attention, there's a reason why Apple doesn't discount iPods.
First, the short reason:
- Because they don't have to... everyone wants one and everyone who's had Economics 101 (except for ex-Governor Grey-Out Davis) would know that once a manufacturer finds their sweet spot on the supply curve, only a shift on the demand curve would require them to lower their price. As it stands, demand is high.
Now, the really short reason:
Whaaaaaaah, I want my iPod and I don't want to pay market price for it! Everyone else's MP3 players suck worse than an Oreck!
Hopefully everyone here at Slashdot has had some junior high school science. Remember, first you have a postulation, then a theory, and then if it meets empirical tests, it can someday be considered as a "law". For example, we have the "Theory" of Relativity and the "Theory" of Evolution, because we do not have the means wherewith, nor the time span necessary to prove them as laws. The "Law" of gravity is well established because it has satisfied generation upon generation of empirical tests to that effect.
Well, it just ircks me to no end how a bunch of marketing cadets at Intel start tossing around "Moore's Law", as if it had met the criteria to be classified as an undisputable cannon in the scientific vernacular. What is more bothersome, is when computer scientists and the main stream computing press further buy into it and toss around Moore's name followed by "Law". It's totally unbefitting and that we are someday dissappointed by its lack of fruition is no big surprise in my books.
Call it a theory and when it lives up to little more than a brief region of order on an otherwise chaotic graph of scalar integration, we won't be too dissappointed. It's just semantics until bozos start reporting of it's catostrophic failure. Run Chicken Little, Run!
Ah, Plato. No one ever talks about it so I always thought it was a local system. I used it when I was at the University of Lethbridge to send email to my brother at the University of Alberta (Edmonton) and to play this awesome (for the time) flight emulation program that was truly the first multiplayer game (of which I have any knowledge). This was back in 1982. Anyone know how many/which other universities had Plato terminals? I do remember the flight emulator getting slower and slower until it was no longer playable - possibly due to more people tying up the main frame. But the vector display rocked! I thought that that was the way to go for graphics.
Later, ('84), I used a logic program on Plato that would allow you to create circuits using NAND gates and JK Flipflops. That was fun but I remember not being able to save my work - at least not locally. Ahhhh, 8-bit nostalgia!
I'm not blindly accepting the bias of the PCWorld article or their choices for benchmark apps, but Mac users should note two things:
1. Word was written for the Mac long before it was available on Windows. Case in point, it was available for the Mac long before Windows 3.1 was out. I used it back in 1987 for all my word processing. When M$ combined development for both platforms in '95, Word 6 for the Mac was rejected en mass by the Mac community and Word 98 development was taken over by the BMU which now develops (code-wise) independently from Redmond. That there is some lack of features in the Windows version attests to this.
Regarding Word, I think that the biggest doubt is raised in my mind because I know that MS re-writes all of the memory routines in their apps (sometimes jokingly called the "Mac Wait Loop") and doesn't rely upon the system or kernel to do that. That puts something as fundemental as memory management far abstracted from the low level layer where it should remain. I believe the library that MS uses is called "ms_memory_initialize" or at least that's what shows up in MacsBug on my older 8.6 Mac. (I'm surprised they compile their apps with symbols turned on...)
2. Photoshop is a port to the PC from the Mac version. Although it is now highly optimized (Intel sent over some assembly code hacks to Adobe to optimize some of the filters like Gaussian to run faster) for the PC, back in version 4, you would just run an MPW script on the finished Mac binaries to create the Windows version.
3. Premier also started out as a Mac application. I don't have any insight on the porting process, but I assume that rather than a disadvantage to the Mac, there are probably shared libraries. Probably the fact that it is running in Classic is the main contentious point in regards to its inclusion. (I wonder if PCWorld included Classic launch time in their benchmark:)
So, at least historically, the benchmarks aren't totally one-sided, but why would any magazine worth its salt produce such a haphazard set of bench marks. Especially the MS Word scroll test. (wow, I can scroll through a Word document faster than I could ever possibly find useful!)
Rock on Lindon! I think it's the first time we ever made national press (not counting agricultural news stories).
I used to work in Scotts Valley, CA and we had lots of former SCO employees at my job there. Then I moved to Lindon, and next thing I know, there's going to be a lot of former SCO employees here as well. I may move to Canada, maybe SCO will follow?...
The first time I did this was back in '93 when transporting around a hard drive in a shoe box from work to another location. I had 3 months of work on a Seagate 1GB SCSI and when I got back to work, it wouldn't mount. Careful examination showed a missing capacitor.
Fortunately I was working for a drive/storage company and they had another of the same model in the back. A quick swap of mother boards and I could see the drive again.
Then last year, I had three Maxtor 80GB IDE units all fail. In each case it was the electronics. Maxtor shipped out three replacements, of which only one was the identical model, but that was good enough,. One by one I moved the PCBs from the good unit to each of the bad units and backed up the data onto a new hard drive.
Now, I always buy hard drives in pairs or triplets in case the board fries, which seems way too commonplace with IDE drives.
You know what really bothers me about the French - they have a different word for everything!
- kirei na hana niwa toge ga arimasu
(even pretty flowers have thorns)
No such thing as the Fair Use Act. The Copyright statutes have defined Fair Use under 17 U.S.C. 107 since 1978.
Perhaps you're thinking of the Audio Home Recording Act, which prevents prosecution for making an analog copy or certain digital copies of music.
I may have confused the year with the telecom deregulation, but under Clinton, I remember an act being passed which changed (defined) the application of the copyright act for fair use. Could have been the Audio Home Recording Act.
Well, Napster has been dead for years. I'll assume you mean Kazaa Lite. The difference in the RIAA's eyes is that radio is not on demand. Yeah, you can request a song, but that requires you to get through to fairly busy DJs, where the phone lines are always busy. In addition, the radio stations typically have playlists. If you request a song that is on the playlist, they may play it. If you request one that is not on the play list, they will not play it. Even the so called "alternative" stations would not play obscure music. With Kazaa, you have quick access to the song of your choice without those limitations.
Napster, Kazaa, Gnutella, LimeWire, basically P2P file sharing. If you call waiting 60 minutes for a decent connection to a file host "on demand", i'd argue that calling a DJ is more instantaneous. I've got half downloaded tracks on my drive from over a month ago waiting for someone to get back on-line
My point is that the RIAA and record labels should be exploiting this opportunity. Heck, if they peppered the P2P networks with their own versions of songs, they could totally commandeer the operations with promo tracks. They could embed advertisements and could get low quality tracks into the consumers' hands to promote their bands, probably at a fraction of the cost because there'd be no payola$. They could build graphics and links into the tracks to take you to the site to buy the album, direct other similar artists' work your way - much more targeted and interactive than radio could ever hope to be.
Satelite digital radio stations (I know you pay for them, but remember that you're also paying for bandwidth in a similar way) present a legitimate challenge as well. If we can digitally record television (TiVo, ReplayTV) for later on-demand playback, it won't be long before people are plugging their satelite receiver into the PC to record tunes to their hard drives for later playback. Now, the quality issue is beginning to disolve as well. With satelite radio and a digital recorder, the same consumers have the equivalent of P2P.
This is part of the hole the RIAA is digging for themselves by fighting technology instead of embracing and exploiting it. It would become win-win for RIAA/Artists/Consumers, if they'd get with the program!
The poster has some pretty good questions... I just looked over my Collective Soul (self titled) CD and although copyright is stated, that would only force me to comply to the US Copyright act which was ammended in 1996 with the "Fair Use" act, which allows me to make multiple copies to other media for personal and family use, and I believe also allows me to share my music with friends and acquaintances.
Anyway, to the point, right now the copyright law is somewhat ambiguous and the license (implied, I assume, because inside Collective Soul (self-titled), there doesn't seem to be any license agreeement) doesn't define what I can and cannot do or of what the extent my ownership of the recorded music or media is. It does say "All Rights Reserved", but it can't take away any rights afforded me by the Fair Use act or any local or state laws.
So, I'd surmise that there's a considerable amount of ambiguity in today's world of music and law. What I predict is going to happen, is that the RIAA are going to venture away from the safe ground of this ambiguity in their quest to control and stagnate the current state of the art, to resist the digital medium and that's going to ultimately end up in front of 9 justices, who will be forced to interpret, apply, and define the law. They may toss out or strike some lines from both the Fair Use Act and the DMCA.
What will then happen, if I can see into the future a bit, is that the ambiguity may give way to broader rights for the consumer, under unenforceable terms of both acts. This will be widely disceminated and clarified and the consumer will now know of his/her broader rights, and copying music will become fully legitimized. EVERYONE will do it.
Another possibility, outside of the courts is that the RIAA will lobby congress to the point that the State will impose fixed royalties on all music to allow distribution. Of course, web broadcasters and consumer groups are concurrently lobbying the same congress. So, the best songs will have the same per copy (or per download) license fee as the most hideous crap, and music will become fully commodotized.
The point is that the RIAA and the music industry should give their lawyers pink slips and refocus on making good music once again. Maybe that will bring them out of this current slump, probably surprise their shareholders a bit.
Final word, what's so different between Napster and Radio? I turn on a radio, I can hear the latest (and older) tunes. I can call in and make a request, and almost hear a tune on demand. I can make a recording off of the radio, probably equivalent to 128kbps MP3. If radio ultimately generates record sales, why does the RIAA assume that MP3 and P2P doesn't? I've discovered more music that I've gone out and purchased lately from listening to downloaded MP3s than from radio...
For all the quoting of the constitution, particularly the first ammendment, I'm amazed at how few Americans have actually read it. So, here it is:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise therof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievences."
The first phrase is about the freedom of religion. The second is about the freedom of speech. The final is about freedom assemble and to petition the government. All of what anyone has to say about the right to "free speech" comes from five words "abridging the freedom of speech".
Spam (also known as Unsolicited Commercial EMail) is, by definition, none of the protected rights, most particularly the freedom of speech. Often we discuss "free speech", so let's discern between "free" speech and "commercial" speech*. Free speech doesn't involve commerce, and doesn't cost the listener (or reader) money. SPAM, involves commerce, but not religion, not the press, not the right to assemble, and not the right to petition government (except maybe those government grant scams). In turn, it costs the listener (or reader) money in lost wages and bandwidth. So, it's anything but "free".
Furthermore, the First Ammendment NEVER granted anyone the right to lie. That means the responsibility to tell the truth would remain, even if some liberal judge deemed SPAM constitutionally protected. It would be "illegal" speech if the SPAM message contained lies, fraudulent statements, misleading statements or solicitations to engage in illegal activities. Such is certainly not protected by the first ammendment, similar to liable and slander not being protected.
Sorry for the rant, but the original article brought up first ammendment rights which people toss about way too carelessly. If one person has a right to send me a message, I certainly have a right to curtail it. I have a right to petition the government that I don't want my privacy and time imposed upon by an unsolicited scoundrel type.
* Several supreme court decisions have disected the phraseology and defined "free" vs "commercial" speech, so in light of such precedence, I think it fair to apply similar criteria to SPAM.