And that would be more sensible, since the device is hard-drive based. "You are free to watch the movie as often as you want until you delete it to make room for something else" would be more reasonable that "24 hours".
It's essentially the electronic version of Netflix. But then, why not just use Netflix? If late fees are the problem, Netflix is certainly a good solution.
Perhaps because shorting a stock is highly risky and not for the faint of heart? Shorting a stock carries the possibility of losing more money than you put into it. It's possible that I short a stock, it goes up significantly, I get a margin call, and my stock broker comes to me and says "You owe us $20,000. You have 5 days to pay." At least with regular investing I only lose what I put into it.
I'm not saying nobody should do it, but it's obviously not for everyone. If you are going to short SCO, make sure you know what you are getting into.
Not only that, but even if you buy a CD from them, the only way to get it is to download it. Not only do you have to have broadband to sample the music, you need to have broadband to buy it, too. I don't think many non-techie people would be interested in buying music this way.
FWIW, I did buy a CD from him (Cargo Cult - Alchemy) and it's good. The site has nice speedy downloads, too. I was able to download the 600MB file at work (where I have a nice fast net connection) in under 15 minutes.
Imagine [how] cool it would be if all the effort thrown into pirating the marketed stuff went into creating an underground force for marketing independent music?
I've been thinking the same thing lately, and it's really cool (for me, at least) that this Slashdot article showed up today.
RIAA is a big corporate-type entity that is free to make its own mistakes. The unfortunate part is that if you are a person who enjoys music but doesn't like the RIAA, there are not a lot of readily available alternatives to the RIAA.
Today, with this Slashdot article about Magnatune, I have found at least one alternative. And from what I've listened to so far, I like it. A lot.
I've considered starting a web site to help promote non-RIAA music. Magnatune would certainly be link-worthy on such a site.
Ahh, yes. *Your* argument, which doesn't refute anything the original poster stated and used a rather weak analogy, is obviously not flawed at all.
Analogies don't prove anything even when they do make sense. But yours doesn't even come close to making sense. First of all, air is essential to life, bandwidth isn't. Second, even the heaviest breathers don't use significantly more air than everybody else. Third, air is a free natural resource, bandwidth is not. Fourth, although air is not unlimited, it is much more adundant and readily available than bandwidth. Fifth, nobody is suggesting killing people for using too much bandwidth.
Perhaps the media is at fault for people making this conclusion, but the point of such research is not "Shame on all of you for eating too much -- if you stop eating so much you will live longer."
The point is more like this: "We've noticed that in controlled lab environments, feeding animals a restricted calorie diet lengthens their life. Our goal is to find out what body process is involved in this so that we can potentially come up with a way to lengthen the life of humans, without having to put ourselves on such a diet."
For example, here is an article about research into using the drug metformin (which is used to treat diabetes) to reproduce the anti-aging effects of a calorie-restricted diet. The article goes into much more technical detail than the NY Times article.
A lot of people in modern society confuse appetite with desire. The food looks good, you desire the taste of it, so you eat it. That whole thought process has nothing to do with hunger or appetite, but it is so common in our society that we assume there is a connection.
I would suggest that most people (in the USA at least) don't have any concept of what a true hunger feeling is. We are so accustomed to eating because our stomach is empty (which is not hunger, btw) or because some food looks tasty, that we never even get to experience hunger.
They either got a hold of a customer list from a former employee or walked our IP space to find our web hosting customers. They then proceeded to sell them monitoring services for things such as server up-time, defacement detection, email up-time and DNS testing.
In other words, they upsold your customers without your consent. That in itself it unethical and any thought in my mind that this is a 'reputable' company would go away at that point.
You go on to describe how they DoS'd your boxes, and complained to your customers when you took action to protect your customers from the DoS attack.
If their behavior is really as you described, why are you bending over backwords to say how reputable and legitimate they are? They are neither.
Do you really think any company that has enough employees to make "$100/employee/year" a lot of money is going to care enough about Sun's pricing to fire all of their employees? They would be more likely to just not choose Sun...
It is perfectly legal for someone to refuse to accept any specific form of payment. Try to pay cash at amazon.com. Try to pay cash for your rent. Try to pay cash at some furniture stores.
Legal tender does not mean you are required to accept it. It only means the U.S. Government is required to recognize it as having value.
There is plenty of case law supporting the right of people or companies to refuse cash as payment.
discrimination 1) The act of discriminating. 2) The ability or power to see or make fine distinctions; discernment. 3) Treatment or consideration based on class or category rather than individual merit; partiality or prejudice: racial discrimination; discrimination against foreigners.
Definition #2 is closest to the original meaning of this word. Discriminating, as in "having discriminating tastes", is a good thing. It is when you discriminate based on unfair criteria that it becomes a bad thing. If you discriminate based on certain legally defined criteria (age, gender, etc.), it becomes illegal.
It seems unfair to me to rule someone out just because they work at SCO, although I can certainly imagine ways to justify it. I don't think it comes anywhere close to being illegal.
The RIAA only wins their battle if people start buying more CDs from RIAA labels.
There is lots of non-RIAA music out there, and that is the way to beat the RIAA. We don't win by continuing to share their music. We will win by sharing our own music.
If you compare it to open-source vs. commercial software: You can't beat Microsoft by pirating Microsoft products. You can only beat them by sharing and using open source products.
This whole p2p music thing is not about free beer, it's about free speech. We have no right to free beer, but we do have a right to free speech.
Perhaps the RIAA is actually doing us a favor. By scaring people into not sharing RIAA music files on p2p networks, people will instead start sharing non-RIAA music. This will bolster the independent music community, giving them more exposure and allowing them to grow. As more and more people recognize that an alternative to RIAA music exists, the RIAA will become less significant.
Lots of posters in this thread seem to be assuming this proposal is to force everyone to buy a cert to be able to send mail. The spec requires mail servers, not individuals, to have certs. Therefore, your ISP would have a cert to say "yes I really am someisp.com" when sending your mail.
As long as there's money in spam, there will be spam.
What if, as some people believe, the spammers aren't in it for the money? What if they are just sending spam as a DoS attack?
I get lots of spam that has no business purpose. "Get out of debt now," "Add length to your member," "Herbal Viagra." I challenge you to actually buy the product or service these emails are supposedly advertising. In many cases, it's simply not possible. They are not actually selling anything; they are just being a nuisance.
First of all, we need good, sound anti-spam laws.
I get lots of other spam that is pure fraud. "Hotmail needs your credit card info to prove you are not a spammer. Just enter your credit card number and click submit" or "Help me launder $20 million from Nigeria. Just give me you bank account number and I'll wire it over." These are already illegal. We don't need new laws for these; we need enforcement of existing laws.
There are always already laws in many jurisdictions outlawing emails with forged headers. Yet such emails proliferate. Again, new laws are not the answer, enforcement of existing laws is needed.
Besides, why do *I* have to jump through hoops to get rid of something I never asked for in the first place?
Because we live in a society that is not utopia. As nice as it would be to live in a world where everybody is good and nobody behaves unethically, such a world does not exist. It is every individual's responsibility to take action to protect or defend themselves. When we sit back an accept something such as massive spamming, we are implicitly saying that the status quo is okay with us.
Yes, this proposal is a drastic move. Quite frankly, I think it's time we start considering drastic solutions to the spam problem. Spam is threatening to collapse our entire email infrastructure. Consider the following:
Some ISPs have long believed that most spam is not about making money but instead is just a massive denial-of-service attack
Recent worms appear to have been designed as a way to send spam through unwitting victims' computers
Spam blocking services are currently combating massive denial of service attacks
Sure, you can track down and go after individual spammers through the legal system, but so far that have proven to be little more than a game of whack-a-mole: knock one down and five more pop up.
AMTP appears to be based on the concept of forcing mail to have accurate headers. To me that seems like a good idea. Unfortunately it does essentially mean replacing the entire email infrastructure. Is it the best solution? I don't know, but it seems to me that it merits serious thought and review.
Why is the media saying this? Of course an adult is going to be charged as an adult!
It's strange to me that so much emphasis is being placed on the suspect's age. If he was, say, 34, would all of the press reports be saying "The 34-year-old suspect will be in custody today and will be charged as an adult."?
And you paid what for it... $20? Something you've used for 4.5 years isn't worth $20 to you? Even at $20/year.. that's less expensive than.. oh.. say.. 2 weeks of cable TV.
I think part of the problem would be keeping virus definitions up-to-date. Anti-virus is not just a piece of software, it is an ongoing service that requires significant effort to keep up-to-date by whatever entity is supporting it.
I see it as more of an attempt to reduce costs, not bolster revenue. The number of non-legit copies of NAV out there is very high, and Symantec is stuck providing virus updates for everybody, because they didn't have a good way of telling legit users from copiers. The cost of bandwidth to allow millions of people to download virus updates weekly has got to be pretty high.
From what I've read, Symantec's activation will be fairly liberal -- not kicking in until an activation code has been used on at least 5 different computers. I'm not a big fan of product activation, but virus protection is more of an ongoing service than a simple software product, and they do not appear to be hard-headed and stupid about it they way Intuit was with TurboTax.
A nuclear plant is going to have lots of failsafe systems built-in, at least one of which is surely to automatically shut things down in an orderly way if something unusual (such as failure of the power grid) happens.
Slashdot Mirror
And that would be more sensible, since the device is hard-drive based. "You are free to watch the movie as often as you want until you delete it to make room for something else" would be more reasonable that "24 hours".
It's essentially the electronic version of Netflix. But then, why not just use Netflix? If late fees are the problem, Netflix is certainly a good solution.
Not even technical books? Those would be kinda of heavy to lug around every day...
Perhaps because shorting a stock is highly risky and not for the faint of heart? Shorting a stock carries the possibility of losing more money than you put into it. It's possible that I short a stock, it goes up significantly, I get a margin call, and my stock broker comes to me and says "You owe us $20,000. You have 5 days to pay." At least with regular investing I only lose what I put into it.
I'm not saying nobody should do it, but it's obviously not for everyone. If you are going to short SCO, make sure you know what you are getting into.
eventually having to pay hundreds of billions of dollars
Umm, no.
Not only that, but even if you buy a CD from them, the only way to get it is to download it. Not only do you have to have broadband to sample the music, you need to have broadband to buy it, too. I don't think many non-techie people would be interested in buying music this way.
FWIW, I did buy a CD from him (Cargo Cult - Alchemy) and it's good. The site has nice speedy downloads, too. I was able to download the 600MB file at work (where I have a nice fast net connection) in under 15 minutes.
Most large cities have a world trade center. The one in New York was just the most well known.
Imagine [how] cool it would be if all the effort thrown into pirating the marketed stuff went into creating an underground force for marketing independent music?
I've been thinking the same thing lately, and it's really cool (for me, at least) that this Slashdot article showed up today.
RIAA is a big corporate-type entity that is free to make its own mistakes. The unfortunate part is that if you are a person who enjoys music but doesn't like the RIAA, there are not a lot of readily available alternatives to the RIAA.
Today, with this Slashdot article about Magnatune, I have found at least one alternative. And from what I've listened to so far, I like it. A lot.
I've considered starting a web site to help promote non-RIAA music. Magnatune would certainly be link-worthy on such a site.
Your argument is flawed big time.
Ahh, yes. *Your* argument, which doesn't refute anything the original poster stated and used a rather weak analogy, is obviously not flawed at all.
Analogies don't prove anything even when they do make sense. But yours doesn't even come close to making sense. First of all, air is essential to life, bandwidth isn't. Second, even the heaviest breathers don't use significantly more air than everybody else. Third, air is a free natural resource, bandwidth is not. Fourth, although air is not unlimited, it is much more adundant and readily available than bandwidth. Fifth, nobody is suggesting killing people for using too much bandwidth.
Flawed argument, indeed.
Perhaps the media is at fault for people making this conclusion, but the point of such research is not "Shame on all of you for eating too much -- if you stop eating so much you will live longer."
The point is more like this: "We've noticed that in controlled lab environments, feeding animals a restricted calorie diet lengthens their life. Our goal is to find out what body process is involved in this so that we can potentially come up with a way to lengthen the life of humans, without having to put ourselves on such a diet."
For example, here is an article about research into using the drug metformin (which is used to treat diabetes) to reproduce the anti-aging effects of a calorie-restricted diet. The article goes into much more technical detail than the NY Times article.
One day there will be a study claiming that bacon is good for you.
:)
It's called the Atkins diet.
A lot of people in modern society confuse appetite with desire. The food looks good, you desire the taste of it, so you eat it. That whole thought process has nothing to do with hunger or appetite, but it is so common in our society that we assume there is a connection.
I would suggest that most people (in the USA at least) don't have any concept of what a true hunger feeling is. We are so accustomed to eating because our stomach is empty (which is not hunger, btw) or because some food looks tasty, that we never even get to experience hunger.
They either got a hold of a customer list from a former employee or walked our IP space to find our web hosting customers. They then proceeded to sell them monitoring services for things such as server up-time, defacement detection, email up-time and DNS testing.
In other words, they upsold your customers without your consent. That in itself it unethical and any thought in my mind that this is a 'reputable' company would go away at that point.
You go on to describe how they DoS'd your boxes, and complained to your customers when you took action to protect your customers from the DoS attack.
If their behavior is really as you described, why are you bending over backwords to say how reputable and legitimate they are? They are neither.
Do you really think any company that has enough employees to make "$100/employee/year" a lot of money is going to care enough about Sun's pricing to fire all of their employees? They would be more likely to just not choose Sun...
It is perfectly legal for someone to refuse to accept any specific form of payment. Try to pay cash at amazon.com. Try to pay cash for your rent. Try to pay cash at some furniture stores.
Legal tender does not mean you are required to accept it. It only means the U.S. Government is required to recognize it as having value.
There is plenty of case law supporting the right of people or companies to refuse cash as payment.
And the U.S. Goverment says so too.
discrimination
1) The act of discriminating. 2) The ability or power to see or make fine distinctions; discernment. 3) Treatment or consideration based on class or category rather than individual merit; partiality or prejudice: racial discrimination; discrimination against foreigners.
Definition #2 is closest to the original meaning of this word. Discriminating, as in "having discriminating tastes", is a good thing. It is when you discriminate based on unfair criteria that it becomes a bad thing. If you discriminate based on certain legally defined criteria (age, gender, etc.), it becomes illegal.
It seems unfair to me to rule someone out just because they work at SCO, although I can certainly imagine ways to justify it. I don't think it comes anywhere close to being illegal.
The RIAA only wins their battle if people start buying more CDs from RIAA labels.
There is lots of non-RIAA music out there, and that is the way to beat the RIAA. We don't win by continuing to share their music. We will win by sharing our own music.
If you compare it to open-source vs. commercial software: You can't beat Microsoft by pirating Microsoft products. You can only beat them by sharing and using open source products.
This whole p2p music thing is not about free beer, it's about free speech. We have no right to free beer, but we do have a right to free speech.
Perhaps the RIAA is actually doing us a favor. By scaring people into not sharing RIAA music files on p2p networks, people will instead start sharing non-RIAA music. This will bolster the independent music community, giving them more exposure and allowing them to grow. As more and more people recognize that an alternative to RIAA music exists, the RIAA will become less significant.
I submitted this story yesterday, but it got rejected.
Maybe the reason it got rejected was because it was already posted the day before.
Lots of posters in this thread seem to be assuming this proposal is to force everyone to buy a cert to be able to send mail. The spec requires mail servers, not individuals, to have certs. Therefore, your ISP would have a cert to say "yes I really am someisp.com" when sending your mail.
As long as there's money in spam, there will be spam.
What if, as some people believe, the spammers aren't in it for the money? What if they are just sending spam as a DoS attack?
I get lots of spam that has no business purpose. "Get out of debt now," "Add length to your member," "Herbal Viagra." I challenge you to actually buy the product or service these emails are supposedly advertising. In many cases, it's simply not possible. They are not actually selling anything; they are just being a nuisance.
First of all, we need good, sound anti-spam laws.
I get lots of other spam that is pure fraud. "Hotmail needs your credit card info to prove you are not a spammer. Just enter your credit card number and click submit" or "Help me launder $20 million from Nigeria. Just give me you bank account number and I'll wire it over." These are already illegal. We don't need new laws for these; we need enforcement of existing laws.
There are always already laws in many jurisdictions outlawing emails with forged headers. Yet such emails proliferate. Again, new laws are not the answer, enforcement of existing laws is needed.
Besides, why do *I* have to jump through hoops to get rid of something I never asked for in the first place?
Because we live in a society that is not utopia. As nice as it would be to live in a world where everybody is good and nobody behaves unethically, such a world does not exist. It is every individual's responsibility to take action to protect or defend themselves. When we sit back an accept something such as massive spamming, we are implicitly saying that the status quo is okay with us.
Some ISPs have long believed that most spam is not about making money but instead is just a massive denial-of-service attack
Recent worms appear to have been designed as a way to send spam through unwitting victims' computers
Spam blocking services are currently combating massive denial of service attacks
Sure, you can track down and go after individual spammers through the legal system, but so far that have proven to be little more than a game of whack-a-mole: knock one down and five more pop up.
AMTP appears to be based on the concept of forcing mail to have accurate headers. To me that seems like a good idea. Unfortunately it does essentially mean replacing the entire email infrastructure. Is it the best solution? I don't know, but it seems to me that it merits serious thought and review.
and will also be charged as an adult
Why is the media saying this? Of course an adult is going to be charged as an adult!
It's strange to me that so much emphasis is being placed on the suspect's age. If he was, say, 34, would all of the press reports be saying "The 34-year-old suspect will be in custody today and will be charged as an adult."?
And you paid what for it... $20? Something you've used for 4.5 years isn't worth $20 to you? Even at $20/year.. that's less expensive than.. oh.. say.. 2 weeks of cable TV.
I think part of the problem would be keeping virus definitions up-to-date. Anti-virus is not just a piece of software, it is an ongoing service that requires significant effort to keep up-to-date by whatever entity is supporting it.
I see it as more of an attempt to reduce costs, not bolster revenue. The number of non-legit copies of NAV out there is very high, and Symantec is stuck providing virus updates for everybody, because they didn't have a good way of telling legit users from copiers. The cost of bandwidth to allow millions of people to download virus updates weekly has got to be pretty high.
From what I've read, Symantec's activation will be fairly liberal -- not kicking in until an activation code has been used on at least 5 different computers. I'm not a big fan of product activation, but virus protection is more of an ongoing service than a simple software product, and they do not appear to be hard-headed and stupid about it they way Intuit was with TurboTax.
A nuclear plant is going to have lots of failsafe systems built-in, at least one of which is surely to automatically shut things down in an orderly way if something unusual (such as failure of the power grid) happens.