Are you sure there's *no* good reason? I can understand saying that you think the downsides outweigh the benefits, but they claim that it would help them to "load balance traffic and send users to a nearby server," and it seems very possible that this functionality could be used that way. Yes, I'm sure you could accomplish this in other ways, too, but maybe Google feels like this will help them do it more efficiently. With all the traffic Google gets, efficiency is a big deal.
Maybe there's another solution though? Like providing multiple DNS results for each query with enough information to let the client-side intelligently pick their own server out of the list?
I don't know. I just know enough to know that DNS isn't so perfect as to be beyond improvement.
And I honestly don't mean this as a troll, but anyone who buys an Apple product *NOT* expecting it to be locked down tighter than Ann Coulter's vagina deserves to be disappointed.
I don't think this is quite fair. The only "locked down" part of OSX is that it won't install on non-Appe hardware without hacks. A lot of it is made of FOSS. You can install whatever you want and people have messed around with it quite a bit. Apple doesn't necessarily expose all of the configuration options in any GUI, but you actually have a lot of options.
There hardware for laptops and desktops isn't terribly locked-down. A lot of engineering goes into putting things into tiny packages and so as a result, it may be difficult and dangerous to replace your hard drive, but they don't make any particular effort to keep you from doing it. You can install Windows, Linux, or FreeBSD on your Macbook or iMac if you want.
However, I'm not a fan of the App store-- or rather the App store in iTunes is an ok distribution system and it's perfectly fine in my mind for Apple to offer that distribution channel to developers, taking a cut, but I don't like that being the only distribution channel. It seems unnecessary. Some have speculated that part of their deal with AT&T is that they'll make sure users can't install tethering and VoIP applications, but I think I'd rather have the freedom to install what applications I will than to have 3G service.
Well first, it's funny to talk about the App store being ok because "free markets are great". If free markets are great, then all the more reason why Apple should free the application market.
I wouldn't be so quick to disregard toys. I remember I time when lots of serious people thought that PCs were toys. They thought they were glorified calculators and typewriters, too expensive to justify their use. At the time, those people may have even been right.
And then there's the Internet. Most of the people running our country seem to think that the Internet is an entertainment service for teenagers.
But even toys, genuine toys, sometimes change the way we think about things. That can change our lives. Maybe toys don't deserve so much derision.
What's more, it was pretty well known that Steve Jobs tried to argue against putting DRM in iTunes in the first place. It was only after it became clear that record labels wouldn't allow online sales without DRM that he caved. IIRC the iPod used to allow more free copying from the iPod to the computer, too (you could just browse the directory structure and pull the mp3s out) until the record companies started threatening to sue under the claim that the iPod was a device constructed to aid in piracy, or something along those lines.
Only because its locked down. Remember that. Only because its locked down.
That's a fair point, but on the other hand it still might not be suitable for a general-purpose computer. It's a bit lacking in the mouse/keyboard department, so at least it's not a traditional general purpose computer. What's more, we don't really know how well this would perform running a stock version of OSX, doing normal tasks with unmodified applications.
Arguably the iPhone is only prevented from being a general-purpose computer by the lock-down, but I still wouldn't want to use it as my desktop computer.
As odd as it sounds, I think that news should not ever be tailored to the "consumer". Telling the people only what they want to hear is just as bad (if not worse) than only telling them the news YOU want them to hear...
This whole thing reminds me of a couple of TEDtalks. They're not directly related, but they're some food for thought on the following question: Is it good for us to get what we want?
The big problem with our news these days, in my opinion, is that we're already "getting what we want" and so the "news" that most of us get are in the form of entertainment shows that cater to our emotional needs. Strangely, I'm not talking about the Daily Show or the Colbert Report, but rather of all these news shows who put on vapid (but often attractive) pundits who tell us in snarky tones who we can blame for what's wrong with our lives. News is aimed at the lowest common denominator to such a degree that you *need* a certain level of personalization in order to get real news right now. You need to find a niche news source in order to get anything remotely informative, and increasingly even newspapers are becoming a niche source.
Now I would agree that it would be great if new agencies were independent and credible groups of diverse but intelligent and informed people who told us the things we needed to know about, whether we liked it or not. Part of the problem with that idea, though, is that our current news agencies are entertainment businesses run by entertainment empires for profit. Another part of the problem is that people self-filter anyway-- keep telling people things that they don't want to hear and they stop listening. Even when you get all your news in the form of a newspaper, you might only read the articles you're interested in.
This coming from the same mainstream media that usually just regurgitates whatever the police and prosecutors allege in a criminal report?
Also, in political news, they regurgitate whatever the Democratic party line is followed by whatever the Republican party line is, and then claim to have shown "both sides" as though that means they've provided an in-depth and thorough reporting of all possible opinions on the subject.
Oh, and then there's the constant reporting of the impending doom of the newspaper and how disastrous it would be while I have yet to hear a halfway decent explanation in mainstream media of the importance of net neutrality. Maybe that's not nefarious, but they're just self-involved and technologically ignorant.
On the other hand, all this seems like a failure of the organizations that make up our "mainstream media", but not a failure of the concept of news media organizations. Take what you say farther down:
Excuse me, but if Google or someone can create an active intelligent search agent which will build me a comprehensive list of public corruption news, political news, civil liberties issues, etc., then I'll be a hell of a lot more informed and less "ignorant" than I would be if I had to read a paper or magazine...
It could be possible to have the "intelligent search agent" be a group of people who spend their day searching out the news you really should know about. That would be our current setup. The problem isn't with the configuration of a group of people trying to decide what news is important; the problem is that the groups we have doing that are all obsessed with Tiger Woods' sex life. Or more to the point: the problem is that our news organizations are funded based on their pop-culture popularity, and our culture is obsessed with Tiger Woods' sex life.
If we want better news, we either have to change the way news gets funded and distributed, or we have to change our culture to value more important things.
That's fine, but Flash really still shouldn't be necessary for watching movies anymore than it is for looking at a JPEG or listening to an MP3. In the mean time, it's also a bad movie player.
Yes, but they still sold music with DRM until the labels agreed to sell it without. Right now, they sell movies and TV shows with DRM. This leads me to believe that, though they'd rather go without DRM, Apple is willing to use DRM if content owners insist.
Yes, for the time being this is a different class of device, and people shouldn't expect it to be a general-purpose PC. The aim doesn't seem to be aimed at replacing your desktop or laptop, but functioning more as a Kindle/Internet appliance thingamabob.
On the other hand, there's actually a fair amount of potential to this thing. In addition to the keyboard dock (and maybe the option to use a bluetooth keyboard?), some sites are reporting that the SDK indicates you have the ability to support an external display through the dock. What I would *love* to see is to Apple make use of a patent they hold for a docking station for the iPad, allowing you to plug this thing in and end up with a full desktop configuration.
Theoretically, that would seem like an extremely elegant solution, if you could have the iPad/iPhone UI on the pad itself, but have it present a full desktop UI when you dock it and have a large screen, keyboard, and mouse to work with. Or in a similar way, perhaps they could even have an small portable keyboard accessory that would allow the iPad to be turned into a netbook.
Of course, there are problems with this idea, and I don't know if Apple is thinking along these lines at all.
Yup, done and done. I do watch Hulu, though, and I'd like a better way to watch that; I'd love to be able to watch it on my Apple TV (no, owning an Apple TV isn't THAT pathetic. I tried installing Boxee and it was super-slow and it will play Hulu, but it looks choppy and horrible.
If Apple could negotiate Hulu and Netflix streaming for their AppleTV and iPad, they'd really have something.
Flash video nowadays is H.264. (Older Flash video is H.263.) If Flash Player can't hardware-accelerate H.264 video playback, that's a defect in Flash Player.
Yes, it's a defect in the Flash player, and it's one of the reasons why using Flash video players might not be a great idea if you have a viable alternative.
As far as DRM, I'm sure Apple would be willing to work with studios to make sure their content is protected if it meant they could get free (ad-supported) streaming to the iPad and Apple TV.
It's kind of a big, powerful, expensive iPod touch with better battery life and a big screen and optional 3G networking. Yeah. Of course, the iPod touch is sort of a tiny tablet computer, arguably too small for lots of tasks, so a big one makes a certain amount of sense.
I know you're joking, but it makes more sense in context. He's saying that there's no point in creating a new class of devices unless it actually does something better than the existing classes of devices. So if the iPad doesn't do *something* better than both the iPhone and MacBook, then they wouldn't be releasing it as a product. That doesn't mean that Macbooks and iPhones won't continue to do other things better.
So their hope is that the iPad will be better for reading ebooks (for example) than either the iPhone of MacBook, but the MacBook may still be better for general computing and the iPhone will be better at being a cell phone.
On the plus side, maybe this will start to pressure sites like Hulu to find a better way to handle things.
Also, I bet the 10 hour battery life is based on some decent hardware-accelerated h264 decoding. Watch video in Flash and that number goes out the window.
Right, that's been the conventional thinking and there has been a lot of truth to it. I'm suggesting that now the reality is a little more subtle, and those subtleties are starting to become more pronounced as the game changes. First came cable, and then DVR. Somewhere along the line it became popular to buy/rent DVDs instead of watching the show during its first airing. Now you have all these other distribution channels associated with the Internet.
Sooner or later the industry is going to have to figure out that their business has changed, and they're going to have to change their thinking to go along with it.
So don't tell them they're wrong, tell them they're important.
Sure, that's a good strategy. Still, I've known business owners who wouldn't let you get through that speech, but would just cut you off and say, "Don't worry, I know what I'm doing," or "Stop blowing this out of proportion. This stuff really isn't important." And I'm not talking about situations where the IT guy is being paranoid, I'm talking about things like backing up critical work files, installing antivirus software, or making it so not *every* employee has full local and domain access. Some people just won't understand the importance of backing up their data until their entire business goes under because a hard drive went bad.
You're right that sometimes it's about approaching things the right way, but at other times... there might just not be a "right way". You might just need to learn to pick your battles and learn when to walk away.
After all, Nielsen reports ratings so that shows can sell more advertising.
Yeah, but there's a problem in that Nielsen ratings get treated like the end-all and be-all measurement of a show's popularity and profitability. It's the same problem with a lot of standardized tests-- they evaluate for one specific set of things, which is fine, but then they get applied much more broadly than is applicable.
So if you're an advertiser who wants to place an ad on TV, then web views are fairly irrelevant. However, if your an advertiser who wants to place an ad on Hulu, then these Nielsen ratings are fairly irrelevant. If you're a network executive trying to evaluate the long-term profitability for a given show, then these Nielsen ratings are, at best, an incomplete picture. You have to look at possible syndication deals, DVD sales, iTunes sales, Netflix licensing, Hulu views, merchandising, and probably some other stuff.
XP= probably picked by marking people at least partially because "X" has some subconscious appeal that makes things seem cool (probably also why Mac OS has stayed at version 10 and has been labelled OS X for 10 years now). However, according to old Microsoft marketing material, it was supposed to come from the word "eXPerience". I don't know what sense we were supposed to make of the product being called "Windows eXPerience", but that was the name that Windows v.5.1 was marketed under.
Not only is it true tat you can't make the owners do anything, but it's even very possible that doing the right thing isn't necessarily going to protect you. You could follow very sensible procedures and CYA with all kinds of documentation, and if the owners are petty and childish enough, they might still fire you or at least make your life a living hell.
That said, I think it's important that you find a way to be very very clear with the owners about what you believe the consequences to their actions will be. Do it in writing if possible. Be polite and respectful, but don't be subtle. The more vague you are, the more likely it is that they'll hear what they want to hear and ignore what they don't want to hear. Be as clear as possible without incurring their wrath. If you have to, be repetitive and say the same exact thing 5 different ways, but make sure that they understand how their bad actions put the future of your company in jeopardy.
Also understand that they might not like you afterwards. I've known a number of small business owners who were manipulative and petty and they couldn't tolerate anyone pointing out their flaws or telling them they're wrong. If they were willing to let someone else tell them what to do, they would have gotten a job working for someone else instead of running their own business. Even though you're trying to do the right thing, you might be burning bridges. Make sure it's worth it.
That'd be a great solution if only cell phone companies didn't see SMS messaging as a cash cow. For the cost of a few text messages, you can get the postal service to carry a sheet of paper from Florida to Alaska.
The other person in the car is, well, in the car. They will notice the same dangers you will, and will start to fear for their own safety if you are too distracted.
Yeah, I read an article about a study (can't find it) where they basically had two people talking about a set topic while one of them was driving. Sometimes the non-driver was riding shotgun, and sometimes the driver was talking to him via a bluetooth headset. Like many of these studies, they found that talking on the cellphone was more dangerous.
According to the article, the researchers observed that when the driver encountered some sort of obstacle or tricky situation, the guy riding shotgun would generally notice the obstacle and shut up on his own. The non-driver on the cell phone wouldn't see the obstacle and would continue talking.
The researchers hypothesized that, because the cell phone caller continued talking, the drivers attention was split and his reactions were delayed. Even if the driver stopped the caller from talking by saying something like "hold on a second...." as soon as he noticed the obstacle, it meant that there was a significant delay while the driver subconsciously prioritized how much attention to give to the caller vs. the road, made a decision on how to react to the caller, and then say "hold on a second."
Well it's not too unreasonable to include video in your music file so that you can watch while you listen... it's just a video file then. MPEG4 container files are great, and I have no objection to the existence of video files. I'm just not sure I see the point of confusing audio and video files by trying to embed a video file into an audio-only format.
So it still needs to see a certain volume of spams in order to figure out the template. Then it reacts to the template. Then when the spammers figure out it's uncovered the template, they change the template.
Right, so it seems like one big question is, how long does it take this system to figure out the template? If spammers have to change their template frequently enough, then they either have to pay a guy to come up with a new template, or else they have to develop a system that will auto-generate templates that the system won't detect as being "part of the same template".
If either of these things ends up costing spammers very much, then it's a good tool. The reason spam exists is because it makes a lot of money at a small expense. You don't have to make spam impossible to kill that business, you just have to increase the cost/return ratio to the point where it's not such an attractive business.
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Are you sure there's *no* good reason? I can understand saying that you think the downsides outweigh the benefits, but they claim that it would help them to "load balance traffic and send users to a nearby server," and it seems very possible that this functionality could be used that way. Yes, I'm sure you could accomplish this in other ways, too, but maybe Google feels like this will help them do it more efficiently. With all the traffic Google gets, efficiency is a big deal.
Maybe there's another solution though? Like providing multiple DNS results for each query with enough information to let the client-side intelligently pick their own server out of the list?
I don't know. I just know enough to know that DNS isn't so perfect as to be beyond improvement.
And I honestly don't mean this as a troll, but anyone who buys an Apple product *NOT* expecting it to be locked down tighter than Ann Coulter's vagina deserves to be disappointed.
I don't think this is quite fair. The only "locked down" part of OSX is that it won't install on non-Appe hardware without hacks. A lot of it is made of FOSS. You can install whatever you want and people have messed around with it quite a bit. Apple doesn't necessarily expose all of the configuration options in any GUI, but you actually have a lot of options.
There hardware for laptops and desktops isn't terribly locked-down. A lot of engineering goes into putting things into tiny packages and so as a result, it may be difficult and dangerous to replace your hard drive, but they don't make any particular effort to keep you from doing it. You can install Windows, Linux, or FreeBSD on your Macbook or iMac if you want.
However, I'm not a fan of the App store-- or rather the App store in iTunes is an ok distribution system and it's perfectly fine in my mind for Apple to offer that distribution channel to developers, taking a cut, but I don't like that being the only distribution channel. It seems unnecessary. Some have speculated that part of their deal with AT&T is that they'll make sure users can't install tethering and VoIP applications, but I think I'd rather have the freedom to install what applications I will than to have 3G service.
Well first, it's funny to talk about the App store being ok because "free markets are great". If free markets are great, then all the more reason why Apple should free the application market.
I wouldn't be so quick to disregard toys. I remember I time when lots of serious people thought that PCs were toys. They thought they were glorified calculators and typewriters, too expensive to justify their use. At the time, those people may have even been right.
And then there's the Internet. Most of the people running our country seem to think that the Internet is an entertainment service for teenagers.
But even toys, genuine toys, sometimes change the way we think about things. That can change our lives. Maybe toys don't deserve so much derision.
What's more, it was pretty well known that Steve Jobs tried to argue against putting DRM in iTunes in the first place. It was only after it became clear that record labels wouldn't allow online sales without DRM that he caved. IIRC the iPod used to allow more free copying from the iPod to the computer, too (you could just browse the directory structure and pull the mp3s out) until the record companies started threatening to sue under the claim that the iPod was a device constructed to aid in piracy, or something along those lines.
Only because its locked down. Remember that. Only because its locked down.
That's a fair point, but on the other hand it still might not be suitable for a general-purpose computer. It's a bit lacking in the mouse/keyboard department, so at least it's not a traditional general purpose computer. What's more, we don't really know how well this would perform running a stock version of OSX, doing normal tasks with unmodified applications.
Arguably the iPhone is only prevented from being a general-purpose computer by the lock-down, but I still wouldn't want to use it as my desktop computer.
As odd as it sounds, I think that news should not ever be tailored to the "consumer". Telling the people only what they want to hear is just as bad (if not worse) than only telling them the news YOU want them to hear...
This whole thing reminds me of a couple of TED talks. They're not directly related, but they're some food for thought on the following question: Is it good for us to get what we want?
The big problem with our news these days, in my opinion, is that we're already "getting what we want" and so the "news" that most of us get are in the form of entertainment shows that cater to our emotional needs. Strangely, I'm not talking about the Daily Show or the Colbert Report, but rather of all these news shows who put on vapid (but often attractive) pundits who tell us in snarky tones who we can blame for what's wrong with our lives. News is aimed at the lowest common denominator to such a degree that you *need* a certain level of personalization in order to get real news right now. You need to find a niche news source in order to get anything remotely informative, and increasingly even newspapers are becoming a niche source.
Now I would agree that it would be great if new agencies were independent and credible groups of diverse but intelligent and informed people who told us the things we needed to know about, whether we liked it or not. Part of the problem with that idea, though, is that our current news agencies are entertainment businesses run by entertainment empires for profit. Another part of the problem is that people self-filter anyway-- keep telling people things that they don't want to hear and they stop listening. Even when you get all your news in the form of a newspaper, you might only read the articles you're interested in.
This coming from the same mainstream media that usually just regurgitates whatever the police and prosecutors allege in a criminal report?
Also, in political news, they regurgitate whatever the Democratic party line is followed by whatever the Republican party line is, and then claim to have shown "both sides" as though that means they've provided an in-depth and thorough reporting of all possible opinions on the subject.
Oh, and then there's the constant reporting of the impending doom of the newspaper and how disastrous it would be while I have yet to hear a halfway decent explanation in mainstream media of the importance of net neutrality. Maybe that's not nefarious, but they're just self-involved and technologically ignorant.
On the other hand, all this seems like a failure of the organizations that make up our "mainstream media", but not a failure of the concept of news media organizations. Take what you say farther down:
Excuse me, but if Google or someone can create an active intelligent search agent which will build me a comprehensive list of public corruption news, political news, civil liberties issues, etc., then I'll be a hell of a lot more informed and less "ignorant" than I would be if I had to read a paper or magazine...
It could be possible to have the "intelligent search agent" be a group of people who spend their day searching out the news you really should know about. That would be our current setup. The problem isn't with the configuration of a group of people trying to decide what news is important; the problem is that the groups we have doing that are all obsessed with Tiger Woods' sex life. Or more to the point: the problem is that our news organizations are funded based on their pop-culture popularity, and our culture is obsessed with Tiger Woods' sex life.
If we want better news, we either have to change the way news gets funded and distributed, or we have to change our culture to value more important things.
That's fine, but Flash really still shouldn't be necessary for watching movies anymore than it is for looking at a JPEG or listening to an MP3. In the mean time, it's also a bad movie player.
Yes, but they still sold music with DRM until the labels agreed to sell it without. Right now, they sell movies and TV shows with DRM. This leads me to believe that, though they'd rather go without DRM, Apple is willing to use DRM if content owners insist.
Yes, for the time being this is a different class of device, and people shouldn't expect it to be a general-purpose PC. The aim doesn't seem to be aimed at replacing your desktop or laptop, but functioning more as a Kindle/Internet appliance thingamabob.
On the other hand, there's actually a fair amount of potential to this thing. In addition to the keyboard dock (and maybe the option to use a bluetooth keyboard?), some sites are reporting that the SDK indicates you have the ability to support an external display through the dock. What I would *love* to see is to Apple make use of a patent they hold for a docking station for the iPad, allowing you to plug this thing in and end up with a full desktop configuration.
Theoretically, that would seem like an extremely elegant solution, if you could have the iPad/iPhone UI on the pad itself, but have it present a full desktop UI when you dock it and have a large screen, keyboard, and mouse to work with. Or in a similar way, perhaps they could even have an small portable keyboard accessory that would allow the iPad to be turned into a netbook.
Of course, there are problems with this idea, and I don't know if Apple is thinking along these lines at all.
Yup, done and done. I do watch Hulu, though, and I'd like a better way to watch that; I'd love to be able to watch it on my Apple TV (no, owning an Apple TV isn't THAT pathetic. I tried installing Boxee and it was super-slow and it will play Hulu, but it looks choppy and horrible.
If Apple could negotiate Hulu and Netflix streaming for their AppleTV and iPad, they'd really have something.
Flash video nowadays is H.264. (Older Flash video is H.263.) If Flash Player can't hardware-accelerate H.264 video playback, that's a defect in Flash Player.
Yes, it's a defect in the Flash player, and it's one of the reasons why using Flash video players might not be a great idea if you have a viable alternative.
As far as DRM, I'm sure Apple would be willing to work with studios to make sure their content is protected if it meant they could get free (ad-supported) streaming to the iPad and Apple TV.
It's kind of a big, powerful, expensive iPod touch with better battery life and a big screen and optional 3G networking. Yeah. Of course, the iPod touch is sort of a tiny tablet computer, arguably too small for lots of tasks, so a big one makes a certain amount of sense.
I know you're joking, but it makes more sense in context. He's saying that there's no point in creating a new class of devices unless it actually does something better than the existing classes of devices. So if the iPad doesn't do *something* better than both the iPhone and MacBook, then they wouldn't be releasing it as a product. That doesn't mean that Macbooks and iPhones won't continue to do other things better.
So their hope is that the iPad will be better for reading ebooks (for example) than either the iPhone of MacBook, but the MacBook may still be better for general computing and the iPhone will be better at being a cell phone.
On the plus side, maybe this will start to pressure sites like Hulu to find a better way to handle things.
Also, I bet the 10 hour battery life is based on some decent hardware-accelerated h264 decoding. Watch video in Flash and that number goes out the window.
Right, that's been the conventional thinking and there has been a lot of truth to it. I'm suggesting that now the reality is a little more subtle, and those subtleties are starting to become more pronounced as the game changes. First came cable, and then DVR. Somewhere along the line it became popular to buy/rent DVDs instead of watching the show during its first airing. Now you have all these other distribution channels associated with the Internet.
Sooner or later the industry is going to have to figure out that their business has changed, and they're going to have to change their thinking to go along with it.
So don't tell them they're wrong, tell them they're important.
Sure, that's a good strategy. Still, I've known business owners who wouldn't let you get through that speech, but would just cut you off and say, "Don't worry, I know what I'm doing," or "Stop blowing this out of proportion. This stuff really isn't important." And I'm not talking about situations where the IT guy is being paranoid, I'm talking about things like backing up critical work files, installing antivirus software, or making it so not *every* employee has full local and domain access. Some people just won't understand the importance of backing up their data until their entire business goes under because a hard drive went bad.
You're right that sometimes it's about approaching things the right way, but at other times... there might just not be a "right way". You might just need to learn to pick your battles and learn when to walk away.
After all, Nielsen reports ratings so that shows can sell more advertising.
Yeah, but there's a problem in that Nielsen ratings get treated like the end-all and be-all measurement of a show's popularity and profitability. It's the same problem with a lot of standardized tests-- they evaluate for one specific set of things, which is fine, but then they get applied much more broadly than is applicable.
So if you're an advertiser who wants to place an ad on TV, then web views are fairly irrelevant. However, if your an advertiser who wants to place an ad on Hulu, then these Nielsen ratings are fairly irrelevant. If you're a network executive trying to evaluate the long-term profitability for a given show, then these Nielsen ratings are, at best, an incomplete picture. You have to look at possible syndication deals, DVD sales, iTunes sales, Netflix licensing, Hulu views, merchandising, and probably some other stuff.
XP= probably picked by marking people at least partially because "X" has some subconscious appeal that makes things seem cool (probably also why Mac OS has stayed at version 10 and has been labelled OS X for 10 years now). However, according to old Microsoft marketing material, it was supposed to come from the word "eXPerience". I don't know what sense we were supposed to make of the product being called "Windows eXPerience", but that was the name that Windows v.5.1 was marketed under.
Not only is it true tat you can't make the owners do anything, but it's even very possible that doing the right thing isn't necessarily going to protect you. You could follow very sensible procedures and CYA with all kinds of documentation, and if the owners are petty and childish enough, they might still fire you or at least make your life a living hell.
That said, I think it's important that you find a way to be very very clear with the owners about what you believe the consequences to their actions will be. Do it in writing if possible. Be polite and respectful, but don't be subtle. The more vague you are, the more likely it is that they'll hear what they want to hear and ignore what they don't want to hear. Be as clear as possible without incurring their wrath. If you have to, be repetitive and say the same exact thing 5 different ways, but make sure that they understand how their bad actions put the future of your company in jeopardy.
Also understand that they might not like you afterwards. I've known a number of small business owners who were manipulative and petty and they couldn't tolerate anyone pointing out their flaws or telling them they're wrong. If they were willing to let someone else tell them what to do, they would have gotten a job working for someone else instead of running their own business. Even though you're trying to do the right thing, you might be burning bridges. Make sure it's worth it.
That'd be a great solution if only cell phone companies didn't see SMS messaging as a cash cow. For the cost of a few text messages, you can get the postal service to carry a sheet of paper from Florida to Alaska.
The other person in the car is, well, in the car. They will notice the same dangers you will, and will start to fear for their own safety if you are too distracted.
Yeah, I read an article about a study (can't find it) where they basically had two people talking about a set topic while one of them was driving. Sometimes the non-driver was riding shotgun, and sometimes the driver was talking to him via a bluetooth headset. Like many of these studies, they found that talking on the cellphone was more dangerous.
According to the article, the researchers observed that when the driver encountered some sort of obstacle or tricky situation, the guy riding shotgun would generally notice the obstacle and shut up on his own. The non-driver on the cell phone wouldn't see the obstacle and would continue talking.
The researchers hypothesized that, because the cell phone caller continued talking, the drivers attention was split and his reactions were delayed. Even if the driver stopped the caller from talking by saying something like "hold on a second...." as soon as he noticed the obstacle, it meant that there was a significant delay while the driver subconsciously prioritized how much attention to give to the caller vs. the road, made a decision on how to react to the caller, and then say "hold on a second."
Well it's not too unreasonable to include video in your music file so that you can watch while you listen... it's just a video file then. MPEG4 container files are great, and I have no objection to the existence of video files. I'm just not sure I see the point of confusing audio and video files by trying to embed a video file into an audio-only format.
So it still needs to see a certain volume of spams in order to figure out the template. Then it reacts to the template. Then when the spammers figure out it's uncovered the template, they change the template.
Right, so it seems like one big question is, how long does it take this system to figure out the template? If spammers have to change their template frequently enough, then they either have to pay a guy to come up with a new template, or else they have to develop a system that will auto-generate templates that the system won't detect as being "part of the same template".
If either of these things ends up costing spammers very much, then it's a good tool. The reason spam exists is because it makes a lot of money at a small expense. You don't have to make spam impossible to kill that business, you just have to increase the cost/return ratio to the point where it's not such an attractive business.