this was slashdot-ed back in Nov03
according to MSNBC
"Part of the reason Windows Messenger pop-ups caught the attention of the FTC is that one of the agency's commissioners received one of the advertisements at home"
Around a year ago(or more) one of my housemates, whose only firewall was the WinXP "it's almost a firewall," was getting several dozen a day. I told him to use a real firewall, think it was the free ZoneAlarm. Even after that he was still getting enough to have to tell me he was still getting them, possibly during windows startup before Zone Alarm could start or when he disabled it to run Kazaa. Even with the little extra cash I got installing free firewalls it wasn't worth the number of complaints I was getting.
Funny how you can net send spam millions of the world's computers and get away with it, but spam one gov't agent and you'll be promptly(after months of legal stuff) shutdown. Because of the inconvenience of not being able ignore them like traditional email spam I'm going to side with the FTC on this one.
Microsoft is probably trying to make a few more (million) dollars on the expanding USB/Flash/pen/key chain/thumb/etc. drive market, considering the initial file system is FAT. If portable drive manufacturers don't want to pay M$, they can sell the drives unformatted and hope the average consumer knows enough to click 'yes' when Windows says 'the drive is not formatted do you want to format it now?'
wait...I'm almost agreeing with M$, that can't be a good thing
If you brough enough food and fuel for your party to last a given amount of time in a rather unhospitable place would you give/sell it to some random person who stopped by if it meant you may not be able to get home?
Now would be the time to learn to hunt the local penguin species. That will provide him with some food and maybe a penguin coat or two allowing him to not starve and stop being a freeloader on the resident Americans and New Zealanders. Then he can try modifying his plane to run on penguin fat and other combustable penguin materials.
Slashdot Mirror
CNet/News.com frequently mirrors NYTimes here
Funny how you can net send spam millions of the world's computers and get away with it, but spam one gov't agent and you'll be promptly(after months of legal stuff) shutdown. Because of the inconvenience of not being able ignore them like traditional email spam I'm going to side with the FTC on this one.
hotmail address...isn't that what piracy@M$.com is for?
Microsoft is probably trying to make a few more (million) dollars on the expanding USB/Flash/pen/key chain/thumb/etc. drive market, considering the initial file system is FAT.
If portable drive manufacturers don't want to pay M$, they can sell the drives unformatted and hope the average consumer knows enough to click 'yes' when Windows says 'the drive is not formatted do you want to format it now?'
wait...I'm almost agreeing with M$, that can't be a good thing
If you brough enough food and fuel for your party to last a given amount of time in a rather unhospitable place would you give/sell it to some random person who stopped by if it meant you may not be able to get home?
Now would be the time to learn to hunt the local penguin species.
That will provide him with some food and maybe a penguin coat or two allowing him to not starve and stop being a freeloader on the resident Americans and New Zealanders.
Then he can try modifying his plane to run on penguin fat and other combustable penguin materials.