I've thought several times that the one media where an open audio license could really work is with vinyl. Think about it... a record company releasing techno/electronic music to club dj's. Distributed under the open audio license so that it actually becomes LEGAL for the dj's to make mixes and sell them, and becomes LEGAL for the dj's to spin in a club without paying any artist collection agency. Legal for fans to listen to however they want, legal for them to share with their friends, suddenly the company doesn't need to be dedicated to stamping out fair use to make a buck selling music.
Club djs worship vinyl, always have, always will. The interface of working with vinyl hasn't been equalled by any of the more technologically sophisticated music formats. So when a dj wants a song, they buy it on vinyl. And they spend like 1000% more on buying music than any normal person would dream of. So yes someone can copy the song into mp3 format and distribute - fine. That's just a promotional freebie if you're planning on making bank from distributing the vinyl. Vinyl (not cheaper acetate) is very hard to copy into new vinyl, you really need a record pressing plant for it to be economical. The record company itself would probably distribute mp3 copies of songs, if 10,000 ravers fall in love with a song, 500 professional dj's will go out and buy it on vinyl, and after hearing their favorite big name club dj spin the track 5000 amateurs will go out and buy it too. The rave scene spends an unbelievable amount of money on music and electronic equipment, and are only served by niche record producers for some reason.
Are there any angel VC's reading this? Call me, let's do lunch.
I have a couple of these at home. They supplement my turntables, mainly for when I only have a song on cd or need to use something I can only find in mp3 format. They're dirt cheap nowadays, under $100. Not great for dj-ing, but they will play ANYTHING. I had a cd I stepped on that cracked almost in half (a crack running from the center all the way to the outside edge) and it didn't even skip. I didn't realize the thing was cracked until I tried to rip a copy of it. Doh! I had copy protected it! But fortunately the cd player itself has a digital output, so I just ran it into my friend's Audigy. I had to record it at 1x speed obviously, but I got a digitally perfect recording. As more people get dvd players and other gizmo's with digital output, sound cards with digital input will explode in popularity. The most copy protection can offer the music industry is that a couple years from now people won't be able to rip at 16x, but they'll be able to copy at 1x. A lot of you out there may have an Audigy or Extigy already. Do you also have a dvd player? I'm sure your dvd player can play cds, so you already have a means of creating digitally perfect copies of protected cds.
I don't think anyone on this forum who is worrying about microsoft 'subverting' xml has any concept of what XML is. You can no more subvert xml than you can subvert text files. Will they use a weird schema? Maybe. But who cares? That's perfectly allowable in xml. XML is a subset of SGML, the Standard Generalized Markup Language - a language that allows you to specify any vocabulary you want. This is XML: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <movie> <movieName>We Were Soldiers</movieName> <movieNote href="http://www.hollywood.com">Vietnam movie staring Mel Gibson</movieNote> <movieType>Action</movieType> <movieId>99</movieId> <show> <showNo>1</showNo> <showDate>3-1-2002</showDate> <showTime>21.00</showTime> <freeseats>10</freeseats> </show> </movie>
How the heck would you subvert that? It's plain text with markup tags that denote logical sections. That's all xml is....
Have you followed the trend of privatizing drinking water? It's being called the next century's gold. The WTO has been involved in several deals where they required a developing country to allow a foreign company to come in and start running the drinking water supply as a for-profit venture. Premium quality spring water - fine as a for-profit. But basic potable water? Horribly ill-suited.
Remember the story about how blonds are going to go extinct? It was in all the major media. Unfortunately it was based on a World Health Organization report that doesn't exist. Nobody knows where the story started. And almost nobody covered the fact that the report didn't exist. When bad info gets out there, getting good info out after the fact usually doesn't help because it doesn't get the attention.
"Clearly we don't want the electric company to hold back its supply of electricity and only give it to those who can afford it. Everyone needs to have electricity."
So where do you fit Enron into that? Didn't they engage in exactly that practice, manipulating the energy market to drive up spot prices?
"Another one: A flat tax actually costs poor people more than rich people."
True... so you'd think the sliding scale made the most sense. But ONLY IF the rich pay the portion they're supposed to by law. If it's possible to hide wealth with offshore holding companies, shell organization etc (which it is - for the wealthy) then the rich can get away with paying ZERO. While if there's a flat tax and you're driving a fleet of mercedes and sailing on your yacht and paying zero, then it's obvious you're lying to the IRS. This is why the alternative minimum tax was created, because the wealthy have a natural tendency to avoid paying their legally mandated share. So with flat versus sliding tax rates, the question becomes 'If I were wealthy, how hard would I try to hide my wealth to avoid a 70% tax rate, versus how hard would I try to hide my wealth to avoid a 12% tax rate?"
The real regressive tax proposals are sin taxes. Legislators are always willing to raise taxes on beer and cigarettes, while avoiding tax hikes on facials, fine wine, yachts, personal jets, etc.
A monopoly isn't always bad, but if the company with the monopoly has no fear of losing it's monopoly status it tends to encourage poor customer service and other business practices that would be weeded out by competition. My cable company sucks. What can I do about it? Nothing. BUT if enough people complain, that company CAN lose it's monopoly status when its license expires. So the county gets the benefits of efficiency you get with a monopoly, but still with a little whip of fear of competition to spur the company on.
Don't you know how cable licenses work? A county government grants a license to one company to operate all the cable in that company in exchange for a large pile of cashola. And that's it. It's illegal for any other cable company to offer service in that county after that until the license expires (and they hardly ever change companies, though it is theoretically possible). Are you asking where are the undercover cops trying to entice other cable companies to offer service in the county or something? If you're going to spew harsh vitriol over the definition of monopolies you really need to know some of the basics here.
The court order about linking only applied to 2600. All other news sources are still free to link to the article, unless they get sued and a new ruling comes down banning them from linking to it.
The rate that a magazine can charge for advertising is directly dependent on the number of subscribers they have - more subscribers, higher ad rates. Probably with under 1000 subscribers they can't charge a high enough ad rate to sustain themselves.
This is why you see airline frequent flier miles can be used for magazine subscriptions. The magazines really want to give away subscriptions to get that subscriber number up, but advertisers insist that the subscribers be 'qualified subscribers' - which is anyone who pays for a subscription, or anyone who meets some other semi-arbitrary standard - like 'a frequent flier with 1000 miles to blow', 'a member of XYZ professional association', etc.
"The idea that wealth "needs" to be spread evenly or that capitalism is unfair is nieve-- and a bill of goods sold to you by people who want your money."
Sounds to me like the idea that wealth doesn't need to be spread evenly is a bill of goods being sold by the rich to those who would like to take their money. I guess where you fall on the income scale determines how you see the issue.
' last 50 years of human existance has seen nearly 50% of the world's population reach a "middle class" income level of the average Portuguese citizen. '
Since when did Portugal become the standard of excellence we measure against? I think I smell some trickery here.
"Rich get richer and the poor get poorer" is backed up by hard numbers in many studies I've seen. What makes you say it's a fallacy? The thing I'm looking at is the relative gap between the rich and the poor and that does seem to be growing. In the US of course... I have no idea what you Portugese fellers are up to.
I have no idea why. I'm not Jewish or anything. It just seems to encapsulate a certain feeling. I didn't consciously start it, it just started to happen. I realize it's weird, but c'est la vie. I blame the media!:)
Normally when the media gets blamed for anything, I shrug it off. But as far as influencing middle class suburban black kids (or even worse, their white neighbors) to act like they're ghetto, I honestly don't see any other source to blame. I grew up in a fairly well off majority black county. In fourth grade all my classmates spoke standard English. By 10th grade only a few percent did. But there's a big difference between talking like a gangsta with your pals and ACTING like a gangsta and buying into that image. Language is very important in bonding groups together and establishing a group identity. When I worked construction in a small southern town I would start work monday morning with a standard accent, and by friday afternoon I'd have a southern accent. I'd never had a southern accent before in my life. It operated on a completely subconscious level. So people may very well not be 'pretending' anything, just beign shaped by their environment.
Or maybe that white yuppie bar just happens to be the hangout of the H-Dawg - "Tha Lowdown Funky-Fresh Gangsta Bad Ass of the Accountz Reeceevable Department of Midstate Office Supply, Tha Righteous Funk Masta, Tha Stone-Cold Muthafuckin' Playa with all tha dope spreadsheets and fly alphabetized invoice files and shit. Y'all be down with the H-Dog, know what I'm sayin'?"
Money spent on flops is not my problem. It's the studios' problem. They seem to think it's okay for them to spend unlimited amounts of money promoting bands and pass the costs on to the consumer. I don't know why they do this. It seems obvious to me that if a record label just signed bands that already had a following and spent zero dollars on promotion, they could sell cds for far below market price and make a profit far above other record labels.
In any true free market there would be labels trying this. There aren't any. Why not? Because the labels collude with each other to prevent this from happening.
If I want to buy a basic black shirt I can go into Wal-Mart or Target and buy a no-name black shirt for $7. Or if I want the fancy version I can go to a boutique and spend $80. The point is I have a choice - that the non-brand name and brand name markets are both being catered to by different companies. So I have no need to complain. With cd's, I want to buy a cd and NOT subsidize the marketing spent on it or a dozen flops. I don't have this choice.
There was a time when record companies provided a service you couldn't get anywhere else - getting the name of a band out nationwide and getting people listening to the music. That is no longer the case. I can post my original music on my website, and put it in my shared folder for P2P services and get it spread to a worldwide audience without giving up any of my copyrights on it.
It doesn't matter if the CARS are different designs, it matters if the ROADS are different designs.
Ever driven in Jersey? It sucks when suddenly you need to be in the right lane to turn left. That, in essence, is Java - or.Net (some parts of it) - or real media, etc. etc. Cars come in all different colors and shapes - and here is where Java wants the cars to all be the same shape. Fuck that. Let the cars run whatever JVM they want - OR release Java as an open standard - only then do you have a good argument for requiring all cars to support the same java code - just like HTML, CSS, ECMAScript, etc.
wow.... sounds like everything else that's downloaded to the client - html, css, javascript, etc. if you don't target the code to the browser's abilities you get broken code. now in developing a standards-based web, which is more important, compliance with open standards like html, css, ecmascript - or compliance with a closed non-standard like Java? I agree the case has legal merit, but it's not a very important case, the focus should be on following OPEN standards.
He wouldn't WANT what he says he wants, something that blocks unsolicited automated email. The filter has nothing, ultimately, to do with the 'spamness' of the message, only with whether you like the content and headers - and I think the inclusion of header filtering is a mistake because it's being included because he thinks he's making a spam filter, when in reality he's making a content filter. My concern is when he defines spam as 'automated unsolicited email' when he should define it as 'any email i don't want'. Sorry Aunt bertha, I've had it with your forwarded joke of the day emails; even though i continue to want personal emails from you, i don't want the forwarded joke of the days - see how header filtering doesn't work there, but pure content filtering does? Or do you think that you should still have to delete the forwarded joke of the day emails manually, every day, for the rest of your life? And why would you want to do that when this could filter them without filtering the personal emails?
I'm saying what he has is NOT a spam filter, it's a trainable content filter. THERE IS A DIFFERENCE! He wouldn't WANT what he says he wants, something that blocks unsolicited automated email. The filter has nothing, ultimately, to do with the 'spamness' of the message, only with whether you like the content and headers - and I think the inclusion of header filtering is a mistake because it's being included because he thinks he's making a spam filter, when in reality he's making a content filter. My concern is when he defines spam as 'automated unsolicited email' when he should define it as 'any email i don't want'. Sorry Aunt bertha, I've had it with your forwarded joke of the day emails; even though i continue to want personal emails from you, i don't want the forwarded joke of the days - see how header filtering doesn't work there, but pure content filtering does?
Like a user agent, yes. Excite used to have a news clipper feature, you could make up a category of keywords to look for "category:cyborg = cyborg, implant, neurochemical, mind-machine interface" and it would grab stories that matched the guidelines. At first it would be a rough fit, but with each story you could mark 'I like it' or 'I don't like it' and it would make some behind the scenes list of other keywords to use or avoid, and over a couple weeks it would start surprising you with all kinds of things you didn't know you wanted, but that you loved as soon as you read. And yes, that's why I'm so insistent that the judgement be just on the content and not on the 'spamness' of the headers, because I had a really positive experience with this kind of technology, and the articles were not rated at all according to their source. Just because I like one story from AMA doesn't mean I'll like others, just because I hated one story from Newsweek didn't mean I'd hate another one, and I think the same is equally true of the mailing source of an email.
You can't encrypt real mail. Real mail takes days to weeks to arrive somewhere. Real mail can also be dangerous (anthrax anyone?). If I read my real mail out at the mall - do I have privacy rights to it? What about if I read my email there? You have a lot of fuzziness about privacy rights being dependent on where you are and what you're doing..... if you have privacy rights at home, then you have privacy rights at home to read you real mail, read your email, and surf the web.
My primary email addresses now are hotmail addresses. Reading my email obviously means going out on the web. So I've already left my 'house' in your terms, and I read my email with a web browser. Are you going to say that email that goes to a real email server is a different animal than email that goes to hotmail/yahoo/etc.? That's a pretty flimsy distinction.... they're SMTP packages in either case, and that's what defines if it's email. Old style email clients work the way they do because of the state of technology at the time... NOT because of specific design decisions.
I also take exception to all these metaphors that rely on the physical universe. In both cases you're sitting in front of your computer, looking at your monitor. You're not 'going out' in one instance and not in the other. Applying old paradigms inappropriately is why legislation on the net is so fscked up.
What makes you think anyone wants to hire you as a consultant?
If you don't have a huge network of clients already, why not become a consultant for one of the big consulting firms? That way you're just a programmer, not a programmer and marketing/business guy. It will be a way to get to know how the industry works and meet some business contacts, and will be a lot easier to get into than starting your own company.
Also with 3 years of C, C++, and Java, I wouldn't think it would be that hard to find a job. I've had to do a job hunt recently and cursed myself for never taking the time to learn Java, I saw so many job postings requiring it.
Slashdot Mirror
I've thought several times that the one media where an open audio license could really work is with vinyl. Think about it... a record company releasing techno/electronic music to club dj's. Distributed under the open audio license so that it actually becomes LEGAL for the dj's to make mixes and sell them, and becomes LEGAL for the dj's to spin in a club without paying any artist collection agency. Legal for fans to listen to however they want, legal for them to share with their friends, suddenly the company doesn't need to be dedicated to stamping out fair use to make a buck selling music.
Club djs worship vinyl, always have, always will. The interface of working with vinyl hasn't been equalled by any of the more technologically sophisticated music formats. So when a dj wants a song, they buy it on vinyl. And they spend like 1000% more on buying music than any normal person would dream of. So yes someone can copy the song into mp3 format and distribute - fine. That's just a promotional freebie if you're planning on making bank from distributing the vinyl. Vinyl (not cheaper acetate) is very hard to copy into new vinyl, you really need a record pressing plant for it to be economical. The record company itself would probably distribute mp3 copies of songs, if 10,000 ravers fall in love with a song, 500 professional dj's will go out and buy it on vinyl, and after hearing their favorite big name club dj spin the track 5000 amateurs will go out and buy it too. The rave scene spends an unbelievable amount of money on music and electronic equipment, and are only served by niche record producers for some reason.
Are there any angel VC's reading this? Call me, let's do lunch.
Why bother with going thru analog?
I have a couple of these at home. They supplement my turntables, mainly for when I only have a song on cd or need to use something I can only find in mp3 format. They're dirt cheap nowadays, under $100. Not great for dj-ing, but they will play ANYTHING. I had a cd I stepped on that cracked almost in half (a crack running from the center all the way to the outside edge) and it didn't even skip. I didn't realize the thing was cracked until I tried to rip a copy of it. Doh! I had copy protected it! But fortunately the cd player itself has a digital output, so I just ran it into my friend's Audigy. I had to record it at 1x speed obviously, but I got a digitally perfect recording. As more people get dvd players and other gizmo's with digital output, sound cards with digital input will explode in popularity. The most copy protection can offer the music industry is that a couple years from now people won't be able to rip at 16x, but they'll be able to copy at 1x. A lot of you out there may have an Audigy or Extigy already. Do you also have a dvd player? I'm sure your dvd player can play cds, so you already have a means of creating digitally perfect copies of protected cds.
I don't think anyone on this forum who is worrying about microsoft 'subverting' xml has any concept of what XML is. You can no more subvert xml than you can subvert text files. Will they use a weird schema? Maybe. But who cares? That's perfectly allowable in xml. XML is a subset of SGML, the Standard Generalized Markup Language - a language that allows you to specify any vocabulary you want.
This is XML:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<movie>
<movieName>We Were Soldiers</movieName>
<movieNote href="http://www.hollywood.com">Vietnam movie staring Mel Gibson</movieNote>
<movieType>Action</movieType>
<movieId>99</movieId>
<show>
<showNo>1</showNo>
<showDate>3-1-2002</showDate>
<showTime>21.00</showTime>
<freeseats>10</freeseats>
</show>
</movie>
How the heck would you subvert that? It's plain text with markup tags that denote logical sections. That's all xml is....
Have you followed the trend of privatizing drinking water? It's being called the next century's gold. The WTO has been involved in several deals where they required a developing country to allow a foreign company to come in and start running the drinking water supply as a for-profit venture. Premium quality spring water - fine as a for-profit. But basic potable water? Horribly ill-suited.
Remember the story about how blonds are going to go extinct? It was in all the major media. Unfortunately it was based on a World Health Organization report that doesn't exist. Nobody knows where the story started. And almost nobody covered the fact that the report didn't exist. When bad info gets out there, getting good info out after the fact usually doesn't help because it doesn't get the attention.
"Clearly we don't want the electric company to hold back its supply of electricity and only give it to those who can afford it. Everyone needs to have electricity."
So where do you fit Enron into that? Didn't they engage in exactly that practice, manipulating the energy market to drive up spot prices?
"Another one: A flat tax actually costs poor people more than rich people."
True... so you'd think the sliding scale made the most sense. But ONLY IF the rich pay the portion they're supposed to by law. If it's possible to hide wealth with offshore holding companies, shell organization etc (which it is - for the wealthy) then the rich can get away with paying ZERO. While if there's a flat tax and you're driving a fleet of mercedes and sailing on your yacht and paying zero, then it's obvious you're lying to the IRS. This is why the alternative minimum tax was created, because the wealthy have a natural tendency to avoid paying their legally mandated share. So with flat versus sliding tax rates, the question becomes 'If I were wealthy, how hard would I try to hide my wealth to avoid a 70% tax rate, versus how hard would I try to hide my wealth to avoid a 12% tax rate?"
The real regressive tax proposals are sin taxes. Legislators are always willing to raise taxes on beer and cigarettes, while avoiding tax hikes on facials, fine wine, yachts, personal jets, etc.
A monopoly isn't always bad, but if the company with the monopoly has no fear of losing it's monopoly status it tends to encourage poor customer service and other business practices that would be weeded out by competition. My cable company sucks. What can I do about it? Nothing. BUT if enough people complain, that company CAN lose it's monopoly status when its license expires. So the county gets the benefits of efficiency you get with a monopoly, but still with a little whip of fear of competition to spur the company on.
Definitions:
de jure = enforced by LAW
de facto = just a general rule, not enforced by life
natural = de facto
government enforced = de jure
de jure != de facto, obviously
Don't you know how cable licenses work? A county government grants a license to one company to operate all the cable in that company in exchange for a large pile of cashola. And that's it. It's illegal for any other cable company to offer service in that county after that until the license expires (and they hardly ever change companies, though it is theoretically possible). Are you asking where are the undercover cops trying to entice other cable companies to offer service in the county or something? If you're going to spew harsh vitriol over the definition of monopolies you really need to know some of the basics here.
"Natural monopolies *do* exist, but essentially only in cases where the good/service provided is a public good or a necessity."
Drinking water is a human necessity. Is there room in the water market for a natural monopoly?
Cable internet is not a human necessity. Is there room in the cable internet market for a natural monopoly?
Why or why not? I am not well versed in finance, so maybe you could explain a little bit more.
You missed one more:
"The last this topic was big"
That's missing a whole huge noun.
Because it's not illegal.
The court order about linking only applied to 2600. All other news sources are still free to link to the article, unless they get sued and a new ruling comes down banning them from linking to it.
The rate that a magazine can charge for advertising is directly dependent on the number of subscribers they have - more subscribers, higher ad rates. Probably with under 1000 subscribers they can't charge a high enough ad rate to sustain themselves.
This is why you see airline frequent flier miles can be used for magazine subscriptions. The magazines really want to give away subscriptions to get that subscriber number up, but advertisers insist that the subscribers be 'qualified subscribers' - which is anyone who pays for a subscription, or anyone who meets some other semi-arbitrary standard - like 'a frequent flier with 1000 miles to blow', 'a member of XYZ professional association', etc.
If you have 1 billion dollars - what motivates yo to work now? It CAN'T be the desire for more money. So what is it?
"The idea that wealth "needs" to be spread evenly or that capitalism is unfair is nieve-- and a bill of goods sold to you by people who want your money."
Sounds to me like the idea that wealth doesn't need to be spread evenly is a bill of goods being sold by the rich to those who would like to take their money. I guess where you fall on the income scale determines how you see the issue.
' last 50 years of human existance has seen nearly 50% of the world's population reach a "middle class" income level of the average Portuguese citizen. '
Since when did Portugal become the standard of excellence we measure against? I think I smell some trickery here.
"Rich get richer and the poor get poorer" is backed up by hard numbers in many studies I've seen. What makes you say it's a fallacy? The thing I'm looking at is the relative gap between the rich and the poor and that does seem to be growing. In the US of course... I have no idea what you Portugese fellers are up to.
I have no idea why. I'm not Jewish or anything. It just seems to encapsulate a certain feeling. I didn't consciously start it, it just started to happen. I realize it's weird, but c'est la vie. I blame the media! :)
Normally when the media gets blamed for anything, I shrug it off. But as far as influencing middle class suburban black kids (or even worse, their white neighbors) to act like they're ghetto, I honestly don't see any other source to blame. I grew up in a fairly well off majority black county. In fourth grade all my classmates spoke standard English. By 10th grade only a few percent did. But there's a big difference between talking like a gangsta with your pals and ACTING like a gangsta and buying into that image. Language is very important in bonding groups together and establishing a group identity. When I worked construction in a small southern town I would start work monday morning with a standard accent, and by friday afternoon I'd have a southern accent. I'd never had a southern accent before in my life. It operated on a completely subconscious level. So people may very well not be 'pretending' anything, just beign shaped by their environment.
Or maybe that white yuppie bar just happens to be the hangout of the H-Dawg - "Tha Lowdown Funky-Fresh Gangsta Bad Ass of the Accountz Reeceevable Department of Midstate Office Supply, Tha Righteous Funk Masta, Tha Stone-Cold Muthafuckin' Playa with all tha dope spreadsheets and fly alphabetized invoice files and shit. Y'all be down with the H-Dog, know what I'm sayin'?"
Money spent on flops is not my problem. It's the studios' problem. They seem to think it's okay for them to spend unlimited amounts of money promoting bands and pass the costs on to the consumer. I don't know why they do this. It seems obvious to me that if a record label just signed bands that already had a following and spent zero dollars on promotion, they could sell cds for far below market price and make a profit far above other record labels.
In any true free market there would be labels trying this. There aren't any. Why not? Because the labels collude with each other to prevent this from happening.
If I want to buy a basic black shirt I can go into Wal-Mart or Target and buy a no-name black shirt for $7. Or if I want the fancy version I can go to a boutique and spend $80. The point is I have a choice - that the non-brand name and brand name markets are both being catered to by different companies. So I have no need to complain. With cd's, I want to buy a cd and NOT subsidize the marketing spent on it or a dozen flops. I don't have this choice.
There was a time when record companies provided a service you couldn't get anywhere else - getting the name of a band out nationwide and getting people listening to the music. That is no longer the case. I can post my original music on my website, and put it in my shared folder for P2P services and get it spread to a worldwide audience without giving up any of my copyrights on it.
The only thing worse is seeing ignorant niggers trying to talk white, right? Acting like theyz erudite and shit.
You must be white, because I'm sure the yuppies at the bar would cut it out as soon as they saw a brother walk by.
The people you need to worry about talking like that are young black kids. The yuppies aren't going to go out tomorrow and start gang-banging.
It doesn't matter if the CARS are different designs, it matters if the ROADS are different designs.
.Net (some parts of it) - or real media, etc. etc. Cars come in all different colors and shapes - and here is where Java wants the cars to all be the same shape. Fuck that. Let the cars run whatever JVM they want - OR release Java as an open standard - only then do you have a good argument for requiring all cars to support the same java code - just like HTML, CSS, ECMAScript, etc.
Ever driven in Jersey? It sucks when suddenly you need to be in the right lane to turn left. That, in essence, is Java - or
wow.... sounds like everything else that's downloaded to the client - html, css, javascript, etc. if you don't target the code to the browser's abilities you get broken code. now in developing a standards-based web, which is more important, compliance with open standards like html, css, ecmascript - or compliance with a closed non-standard like Java? I agree the case has legal merit, but it's not a very important case, the focus should be on following OPEN standards.
He wouldn't WANT what he says he wants, something that blocks unsolicited automated email. The filter has nothing, ultimately, to do with the 'spamness' of the message, only with whether you like the content and headers - and I think the inclusion of header filtering is a mistake because it's being included because he thinks he's making a spam filter, when in reality he's making a content filter. My concern is when he defines spam as 'automated unsolicited email' when he should define it as 'any email i don't want'. Sorry Aunt bertha, I've had it with your forwarded joke of the day emails; even though i continue to want personal emails from you, i don't want the forwarded joke of the days - see how header filtering doesn't work there, but pure content filtering does? Or do you think that you should still have to delete the forwarded joke of the day emails manually, every day, for the rest of your life? And why would you want to do that when this could filter them without filtering the personal emails?
I'm saying what he has is NOT a spam filter, it's a trainable content filter. THERE IS A DIFFERENCE! He wouldn't WANT what he says he wants, something that blocks unsolicited automated email. The filter has nothing, ultimately, to do with the 'spamness' of the message, only with whether you like the content and headers - and I think the inclusion of header filtering is a mistake because it's being included because he thinks he's making a spam filter, when in reality he's making a content filter. My concern is when he defines spam as 'automated unsolicited email' when he should define it as 'any email i don't want'. Sorry Aunt bertha, I've had it with your forwarded joke of the day emails; even though i continue to want personal emails from you, i don't want the forwarded joke of the days - see how header filtering doesn't work there, but pure content filtering does?
Like a user agent, yes. Excite used to have a news clipper feature, you could make up a category of keywords to look for "category:cyborg = cyborg, implant, neurochemical, mind-machine interface" and it would grab stories that matched the guidelines. At first it would be a rough fit, but with each story you could mark 'I like it' or 'I don't like it' and it would make some behind the scenes list of other keywords to use or avoid, and over a couple weeks it would start surprising you with all kinds of things you didn't know you wanted, but that you loved as soon as you read. And yes, that's why I'm so insistent that the judgement be just on the content and not on the 'spamness' of the headers, because I had a really positive experience with this kind of technology, and the articles were not rated at all according to their source. Just because I like one story from AMA doesn't mean I'll like others, just because I hated one story from Newsweek didn't mean I'd hate another one, and I think the same is equally true of the mailing source of an email.
Sorry, it just ain't.
You can't encrypt real mail. Real mail takes days to weeks to arrive somewhere. Real mail can also be dangerous (anthrax anyone?). If I read my real mail out at the mall - do I have privacy rights to it? What about if I read my email there? You have a lot of fuzziness about privacy rights being dependent on where you are and what you're doing..... if you have privacy rights at home, then you have privacy rights at home to read you real mail, read your email, and surf the web.
My primary email addresses now are hotmail addresses. Reading my email obviously means going out on the web. So I've already left my 'house' in your terms, and I read my email with a web browser. Are you going to say that email that goes to a real email server is a different animal than email that goes to hotmail/yahoo/etc.? That's a pretty flimsy distinction.... they're SMTP packages in either case, and that's what defines if it's email. Old style email clients work the way they do because of the state of technology at the time... NOT because of specific design decisions.
I also take exception to all these metaphors that rely on the physical universe. In both cases you're sitting in front of your computer, looking at your monitor. You're not 'going out' in one instance and not in the other. Applying old paradigms inappropriately is why legislation on the net is so fscked up.
What makes you think anyone wants to hire you as a consultant?
If you don't have a huge network of clients already, why not become a consultant for one of the big consulting firms? That way you're just a programmer, not a programmer and marketing/business guy. It will be a way to get to know how the industry works and meet some business contacts, and will be a lot easier to get into than starting your own company.
Also with 3 years of C, C++, and Java, I wouldn't think it would be that hard to find a job. I've had to do a job hunt recently and cursed myself for never taking the time to learn Java, I saw so many job postings requiring it.