i have a cell phone and a laptop. The batteries for these are expensive and difficult to dispose of properly. However:
I can recharge these batteries practically anywhere. I can plug them into my cigarette lighter in my car or into pretty much any wall socket.
With methanol batteries, i see two possibilities for recharging. One is that i simply don't recharge and swap the containers at the store for new ones, as i would with a propane tank or something similar. The other is that i would refill the "magazine" if you will with fresh methanol, much like a lighter or a gas tank.
neither of these is particularly appealing to me for obvious reasons. I'm simply not going to haul around a bottle of methanol with me everywhere i go.
You know what's really SO great about this proposed file sharing system?
What's so great is that it doesn't actually allow you share anything. OH . . . MY . . . GOD! SIGN ME UP!!!
Now i can make "metadatas" that say things like "Britney Speerz r0XX0rZ! sHe 0wnz j00! loolollllol!!1!!11! omgroflbrb!!111!!!1" and . . . and . . . OMG! i can SHARE these with all my friends!!!
and then, presumably, because they had that metadata, they would now have the permissions necessary to purchase her music from some online music store without getting to listen to it first! Man! I WISH that wal-mart worked that way, but they'll let just ANYBODY come in and buy music without listening to it first, or, or, they try to make you preview it on those nasty headphone things? ew?
And they don't even give you POINTS for it.
God, i love points. One time, i got like, a millions points on pac-man, and i almost creamed my shorts.
unfortunately, most people don't realize that clicking the link to "opt out" is actually only confirming their address as valid.
what i'd really like to see is legislation stopping ANYONE from contacting me unless they know me personally, have done business with me recently, or have my express permission to do so.
yes, and it would also be a problem because email addresses, unlike names, are transient things. one person could have dozens of email addresses, and a list COULD require them to register all of the ones they wished to have protected.
But my list DOESN'T.
My idea is to put your NAME ONLY on this list. All of your email addresses would then be implicitly protected:) This forces the sender to actually know who is at the other end of that addy, or risk the consequences. When you think about it, this makes perfect sense. Sending an unsolicited email to an ADDRESS instead of a PERSON (think "Or Current Resident") is critical to spam and junk mail.
In response to your other point - no national legislation can target foreigners, so trying to take a legal swipe at THEM is a huge waste of time in any case. I'm referring to only US spam (since i live in the US).
The idea here is that spammers are going to ignore the list, get caught doing that, and then get fined an assload or imprisoned. This, in tandem with fines and sanctions for the businesses that are financing and benefitting from spam, COULD theoretically make a huge dent in a spammer's ability to profit. That's the thinking anyway.
This is really just a first generation idea i'm proposing. What i'd like is for people to see this idea and tear it to shreds so that i can see everything that is wrong with it and fix it.
Thanks for the response:)
Maybe this is a gross oversimplification
on
UK Spam Law Goes Live
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
But why not simply form a "National Do Not Spam List"?
This sort of thing allows for blanket rejection of the bulk of spam. Legit companies could of course be made exempt, as with the DNC List (debatable).
We could then levy fines on a per-incident basis.
I'll admit that FINDING the spammers might be more difficult than tracking a telemarketer - but not a hell of a lot more difficult.
You also have to consider that, unless it's an outright scam like #419, somebody is paying the spammer. Making it illegal to purchase "leads" from spammers would also be a REALLY SWELL THING TO TRY. After all, buying stolen property (even if you didn't KNOW for sure that it was stolen) is still illegal. It's not really that hard for these mortgage brokers and discount drug companies to know if they're dealing with a legitimate source or not.
what i meant to say is that the constitution was malleable. i only meant that it could be changed, and that the process for making those changes was written into the document itself.
i'm not an "insane Lawyer" lol:D i actually agree with your point that it is, and was intended to be, very difficult to change. it is our fundamental governing treatise after all - how fluid could it possibly be and still possess any authority?
so perhaps dynamic was the wrong word, as the connotations of that word (though perhaps not the definition itself) do not lend themselves well to the intentions of my statement.
Linus makes an excellent case for the legality of the GPL under the constitution as it stands, but who's to say that the constitution, in its current incarnation, is anywhere close to adequate? What if, for once, Darl actually got something right and the constitution DID say that copyrights REQUIRED a pure profit motive? What sense is there in enforcing an antiquated law if the result of that action ran contrary to the best interest of society, progress, or just general common sense?
I mean, fundamentally speaking, all governments begin with the purest form of democracy - a person or group of persons decide what is in their best interest and then act upon that decision. It is only later, when a group becomes too large to govern itself effectively, that it chooses to allow some other person or group to act on its behalf. There is always choice involved; even dictators would be powerless if their soldiers simply laid down arms and said "screw you buddy".
All i'm saying is that MAYBE we (and by we, i mean "the government") should be debating wether Darl's ideas on copyright are in anyone's best interest other than his OWN rather than trying to decide if he has some shaky, defunct legal leg to stand on.
The constitution is and has always been a dynamic document . . . else women would still be a silent majority.
Give this guy a break. He's saying exactly what he means, and he has very good points (even if he IS a little insensitive).
First, MMORPG's ARE cultural sinks that will eat your soul. Anyone that plays them will freely admit that these things steal countless hours of their lives and make them act in irresponsible ways that they might normally eschew (skipping work/school, eating crap, cancelling dates with RL friends, not sleeping NEARLY enough, etc). Come on guys, they don't call it EverCrack for nothing.
And he's also right that helping the sick children WON'T change anyone's perception of gamers. If you donate gifts to kids specifically to inflate your ego baloon or to raise the social concious up another couple bars in favor of the gaming community then you're wasting your time. Is helping those kids out a good thing? You're damn right it is. I wish more people in the world operated on that level.
He's dead on with the parenting too. Anymore, both parents are working (if there even are two parents), and usually pulling overtime. When kids aren't at school or in daycare, they're usually playing video games. In the 50's, maybe it was cool for a non-working mom to stay home and clean the freaking house or cook up a nice juicy turkey for the family - but when Dad got home, what do you think he did? HE SAT ON THE FREAKING COUCH AND SMOKED HIS PIPE AND READ THE STINKING NEWSPAPER WHILE HE SIPPED HIS MARTINI because he was TOO TIRED to do anything else. Now that moms are working too (and sometimes more if they have to work two jobs just to get the rent paid) they're behaing the same way. There just isn't anyone left to make the turkey, clean the house, and "mother" the children.
All of you that say parents need to get more involved are probably either:
a) wealthy enough and lucky enough to have that luxury as parents yourselves b) young guys and gals who don't actually have children yet. c) hippocrites who like to talk loud about morals while your children slowly turn into monsters in the next room.
or, most likely:
d) absolutely right that parents need to get more involved, but simply not thinking through the sort of sweeping changes that will have to take effect in this country before that can realistically happen.
if you want to blame someone for our screwed up kids, blame our corrupt and inneficient government for fucking up our education, levying ridiculous taxes, letting medical insurance get way out of control, and doing a piss poor job of regulating price inflation and monopolistic corporate practices - leaving struggling parents with few options and little hope.
I love books. Books are great. Books are a condensed source of highly portable knowledge that do not require batteries and will work even if I throw them around a lot, use them to prop up a couch, or get cheeto stains on the corners of their pages.
With that in mind, consider the annoyance of taking a laptop into the restroom, where something like 98% of all human knowledge is obtained. Don't laugh - my office recently installed MAGAZINE RACKS in every stall. Bathrooms aren't just for TV Guide anymore, oh no; we have Discover Magazine, Network Security, and Micro Warehouse in ours.
But I digress.
Books provide answers to questions you don't even know how to ask. For instance, I am teaching myself ASP. I have two books, and I use the internet for free tutorials. Without these books I would use the wrong words in my searches, ask poorly phrased questions and receive irrelevant answers. Internet resources are necessarily compact and specific, usually comprising less than 5 or 6 pages. Compare this with any book ever written on ASP.NET.
I love the internet, and I use it every day. I would be lost without it. But I ain't throwing out my library anytime soon.
ok, i work in a government office (yeah, i know, don't we all . . but unfortunately i actually do) and i can tell you that, while you DO have a valid point regarding our crap IT policy, MS is very much a warstopper.
Every single computer on our network is running some version of windows. Only very old inventory systems and the like are running on other platforms, most likely because their sheer size and complexity makes them too difficult/expensive to convert to something newer.
Blaster seriously pissed in our cheerios. Before that it was some mass-mailing piece of crap that infected a Win 98 classroom computer that hadn't been locked down tight enough. Sure, you can argue that it's the IT guys who are responsible for applying the proper patches and hotfixes and upgrades and DATS, tweaking the port access, blah blah blah BLAH. Try applying that patching logic to a freaking TIRE how about? Yeah, that firestone is prone to explode, but we issued a patch, and if you would have been visiting your mechanic every 3000 miles you might not be dead right now. So there!
What more can i say? think what you will or won't about microsoft, we ARE something like 90% reliant on their products here in my neck of the Gee Oh Vee. That is an indisputable fact.
It's not a big deal that congress is attempting to pass this law. The federal government is never at a loss for new things to tax. internet specific taxation would generally not be welcomed publicly, and our economy could use an e-commerce related boost besides.
all that aside . . .
The idea of an email tax - i'm sorry, the idea may be intriguing? Question Mark? but it's completely worthless.
trying to keep up with who sent an email and when over the ENTIRE INTERNET and then figure out their geographic location would require such massive resources that goverment officials would spend more money enforcing the tax than they would make from collecting it. The tax billing errors would be ridiculous.
this is to say nothing of mass-mailing worms that hijack your email account, or spoofing.
i pity the poor company whose hijacked Exchange server racks up a few hundred thousand dollars in worm-spawned mail activity.
>.
give the email tax a rest, mnk? not happening.
Slashdot Mirror
i have a cell phone and a laptop. The batteries for these are expensive and difficult to dispose of properly. However:
I can recharge these batteries practically anywhere. I can plug them into my cigarette lighter in my car or into pretty much any wall socket.
With methanol batteries, i see two possibilities for recharging. One is that i simply don't recharge and swap the containers at the store for new ones, as i would with a propane tank or something similar. The other is that i would refill the "magazine" if you will with fresh methanol, much like a lighter or a gas tank.
neither of these is particularly appealing to me for obvious reasons. I'm simply not going to haul around a bottle of methanol with me everywhere i go.
Am i missing something?
You know what's really SO great about this proposed file sharing system?
What's so great is that it doesn't actually allow you share anything. OH . . . MY . . . GOD! SIGN ME UP!!!
Now i can make "metadatas" that say things like "Britney Speerz r0XX0rZ! sHe 0wnz j00! loolollllol!!1!!11! omgroflbrb!!111!!!1" and . . . and . . . OMG! i can SHARE these with all my friends!!!
and then, presumably, because they had that metadata, they would now have the permissions necessary to purchase her music from some online music store without getting to listen to it first! Man! I WISH that wal-mart worked that way, but they'll let just ANYBODY come in and buy music without listening to it first, or, or, they try to make you preview it on those nasty headphone things? ew?
And they don't even give you POINTS for it.
God, i love points. One time, i got like, a millions points on pac-man, and i almost creamed my shorts.
iTunes is so dead.
yeah, i feel you.
unfortunately, most people don't realize that clicking the link to "opt out" is actually only confirming their address as valid.
what i'd really like to see is legislation stopping ANYONE from contacting me unless they know me personally, have done business with me recently, or have my express permission to do so.
really, is that so much to ask?
yes, and it would also be a problem because email addresses, unlike names, are transient things. one person could have dozens of email addresses, and a list COULD require them to register all of the ones they wished to have protected.
:) This forces the sender to actually know who is at the other end of that addy, or risk the consequences. When you think about it, this makes perfect sense. Sending an unsolicited email to an ADDRESS instead of a PERSON (think "Or Current Resident") is critical to spam and junk mail.
:)
But my list DOESN'T.
My idea is to put your NAME ONLY on this list. All of your email addresses would then be implicitly protected
In response to your other point - no national legislation can target foreigners, so trying to take a legal swipe at THEM is a huge waste of time in any case. I'm referring to only US spam (since i live in the US).
The idea here is that spammers are going to ignore the list, get caught doing that, and then get fined an assload or imprisoned. This, in tandem with fines and sanctions for the businesses that are financing and benefitting from spam, COULD theoretically make a huge dent in a spammer's ability to profit. That's the thinking anyway.
This is really just a first generation idea i'm proposing. What i'd like is for people to see this idea and tear it to shreds so that i can see everything that is wrong with it and fix it.
Thanks for the response
But why not simply form a "National Do Not Spam List"?
:)
This sort of thing allows for blanket rejection of the bulk of spam. Legit companies could of course be made exempt, as with the DNC List (debatable).
We could then levy fines on a per-incident basis.
I'll admit that FINDING the spammers might be more difficult than tracking a telemarketer - but not a hell of a lot more difficult.
You also have to consider that, unless it's an outright scam like #419, somebody is paying the spammer. Making it illegal to purchase "leads" from spammers would also be a REALLY SWELL THING TO TRY. After all, buying stolen property (even if you didn't KNOW for sure that it was stolen) is still illegal. It's not really that hard for these mortgage brokers and discount drug companies to know if they're dealing with a legitimate source or not.
Just a few thoughts. Comments are encouraged
eh, i'm sorry for the confusion here.
:D i actually agree with your point that it is, and was intended to be, very difficult to change. it is our fundamental governing treatise after all - how fluid could it possibly be and still possess any authority?
what i meant to say is that the constitution was malleable. i only meant that it could be changed, and that the process for making those changes was written into the document itself.
i'm not an "insane Lawyer" lol
so perhaps dynamic was the wrong word, as the connotations of that word (though perhaps not the definition itself) do not lend themselves well to the intentions of my statement.
My filter at work is configured to deny me access to Rolling Stone Magazine. I smell a conspiracy!
isn't government, at best, just a necessary evil?
Linus makes an excellent case for the legality of the GPL under the constitution as it stands, but who's to say that the constitution, in its current incarnation, is anywhere close to adequate? What if, for once, Darl actually got something right and the constitution DID say that copyrights REQUIRED a pure profit motive? What sense is there in enforcing an antiquated law if the result of that action ran contrary to the best interest of society, progress, or just general common sense?
I mean, fundamentally speaking, all governments begin with the purest form of democracy - a person or group of persons decide what is in their best interest and then act upon that decision. It is only later, when a group becomes too large to govern itself effectively, that it chooses to allow some other person or group to act on its behalf. There is always choice involved; even dictators would be powerless if their soldiers simply laid down arms and said "screw you buddy".
All i'm saying is that MAYBE we (and by we, i mean "the government") should be debating wether Darl's ideas on copyright are in anyone's best interest other than his OWN rather than trying to decide if he has some shaky, defunct legal leg to stand on.
The constitution is and has always been a dynamic document . . . else women would still be a silent majority.
Give this guy a break. He's saying exactly what he means, and he has very good points (even if he IS a little insensitive).
First, MMORPG's ARE cultural sinks that will eat your soul. Anyone that plays them will freely admit that these things steal countless hours of their lives and make them act in irresponsible ways that they might normally eschew (skipping work/school, eating crap, cancelling dates with RL friends, not sleeping NEARLY enough, etc). Come on guys, they don't call it EverCrack for nothing.
And he's also right that helping the sick children WON'T change anyone's perception of gamers. If you donate gifts to kids specifically to inflate your ego baloon or to raise the social concious up another couple bars in favor of the gaming community then you're wasting your time. Is helping those kids out a good thing? You're damn right it is. I wish more people in the world operated on that level.
He's dead on with the parenting too. Anymore, both parents are working (if there even are two parents), and usually pulling overtime. When kids aren't at school or in daycare, they're usually playing video games. In the 50's, maybe it was cool for a non-working mom to stay home and clean the freaking house or cook up a nice juicy turkey for the family - but when Dad got home, what do you think he did? HE SAT ON THE FREAKING COUCH AND SMOKED HIS PIPE AND READ THE STINKING NEWSPAPER WHILE HE SIPPED HIS MARTINI because he was TOO TIRED to do anything else. Now that moms are working too (and sometimes more if they have to work two jobs just to get the rent paid) they're behaing the same way. There just isn't anyone left to make the turkey, clean the house, and "mother" the children.
All of you that say parents need to get more involved are probably either:
a) wealthy enough and lucky enough to have that luxury as parents yourselves
b) young guys and gals who don't actually have children yet.
c) hippocrites who like to talk loud about morals while your children slowly turn into monsters in the next room.
or, most likely:
d) absolutely right that parents need to get more involved, but simply not thinking through the sort of sweeping changes that will have to take effect in this country before that can realistically happen.
if you want to blame someone for our screwed up kids, blame our corrupt and inneficient government for fucking up our education, levying ridiculous taxes, letting medical insurance get way out of control, and doing a piss poor job of regulating price inflation and monopolistic corporate practices - leaving struggling parents with few options and little hope.
I love books. Books are great. Books are a condensed source of highly portable knowledge that do not require batteries and will work even if I throw them around a lot, use them to prop up a couch, or get cheeto stains on the corners of their pages.
With that in mind, consider the annoyance of taking a laptop into the restroom, where something like 98% of all human knowledge is obtained. Don't laugh - my office recently installed MAGAZINE RACKS in every stall. Bathrooms aren't just for TV Guide anymore, oh no; we have Discover Magazine, Network Security, and Micro Warehouse in ours.
But I digress.
Books provide answers to questions you don't even know how to ask. For instance, I am teaching myself ASP. I have two books, and I use the internet for free tutorials. Without these books I would use the wrong words in my searches, ask poorly phrased questions and receive irrelevant answers. Internet resources are necessarily compact and specific, usually comprising less than 5 or 6 pages. Compare this with any book ever written on ASP.NET.
I love the internet, and I use it every day. I would be lost without it. But I ain't throwing out my library anytime soon.
ok, i work in a government office (yeah, i know, don't we all . . but unfortunately i actually do) and i can tell you that, while you DO have a valid point regarding our crap IT policy, MS is very much a warstopper.
Every single computer on our network is running some version of windows. Only very old inventory systems and the like are running on other platforms, most likely because their sheer size and complexity makes them too difficult/expensive to convert to something newer.
Blaster seriously pissed in our cheerios. Before that it was some mass-mailing piece of crap that infected a Win 98 classroom computer that hadn't been locked down tight enough. Sure, you can argue that it's the IT guys who are responsible for applying the proper patches and hotfixes and upgrades and DATS, tweaking the port access, blah blah blah BLAH. Try applying that patching logic to a freaking TIRE how about? Yeah, that firestone is prone to explode, but we issued a patch, and if you would have been visiting your mechanic every 3000 miles you might not be dead right now. So there!
What more can i say? think what you will or won't about microsoft, we ARE something like 90% reliant on their products here in my neck of the Gee Oh Vee. That is an indisputable fact.
It's not a big deal that congress is attempting to pass this law. The federal government is never at a loss for new things to tax. internet specific taxation would generally not be welcomed publicly, and our economy could use an e-commerce related boost besides. all that aside . . . The idea of an email tax - i'm sorry, the idea may be intriguing? Question Mark? but it's completely worthless. trying to keep up with who sent an email and when over the ENTIRE INTERNET and then figure out their geographic location would require such massive resources that goverment officials would spend more money enforcing the tax than they would make from collecting it. The tax billing errors would be ridiculous. this is to say nothing of mass-mailing worms that hijack your email account, or spoofing. i pity the poor company whose hijacked Exchange server racks up a few hundred thousand dollars in worm-spawned mail activity. >. give the email tax a rest, mnk? not happening.