OK, so Microsoft gets the court to agree that the infringment is not against US patents from a US manufacturer, but (for example) a Chinese manufacturer against (???) a Chinese patent. Thus requiring AT&T to file against the Chinese manufacturer in a Chinese court.
Somewhat makes sense, but I would think it would be common sense that the "manufacturer" of a software product was the developer, not the facility where discs are copied. If it was this easy, we could get our product certified as being manufactured in Europe and avoid all those nasty import duties.
No, it isn't illegal except in some very, very rarified circles. If you are trying to sell something to a government agency it isn't illegal but has to be reported on. The paperwork required will make anyone say "No, thanks!" very quickly.
I think it might be illegal above some dollar amount for a government contractor to offer to a member of a foreign government. This would, for example, apply to Boeing selling planes to a government-run airline.
In the US, it is just what it takes to get the sale. Doesn't matter if it is IT or selling toliet paper to the janitorial staff. If it is a big enough deal, the buyer expects something.
About the only place I know of that utterly bans this (other than goverment contracts) is Wal-Mart.
Anything that says I can copy a DVD and play it without the original DVD being involved means I can distribute. I copy it to my server and then pass the physical DVD to a friend, who then copies it to some other hard drive. And so on and so forth. This is distribution, period.
However, this is probably just a small step along the way. Where we are going is clearly if it digitial it is going to be redistributed across the planet. This means that for someone to go to the expense of making a DVD and putting it into stores there has to be some other form of compensation involved - because sales will be a small percentage of the people that have the content. Pay-per-view locking of some sort isn't going to work because it will be cracked and distributed.
I would guess the sorts of DVDs that get made are the ones going around the last election - very one-sided political statements that are distributed for free. What else? Maybe nothing.
OK, so you have a web page that allows anyone to vote. Maybe you restrict it by IP address to a geographical location, as much as that is possible. No restriction in multiple voting.
If you are motivated enough, you can vote 100 times for the same candidate. So what? If you are really motivated or have enough funding, you can get 1000 people to enter votes for you. How is this different from the current situation where party hacks drive around picking up people to take them to the polling place today?
If the election is a complete bore and nobody is really interested, they get maybe 10 votes. Better than the 3 they get today.
If there is a lot of interest, people stay glued to their computers voting over and over again. The interest of those that are motived substitutes for the utter apathy of the majority that don't care. Vote totals go up and maybe next time some more people are interested.
Fraud? What is vote fraud in such an environment? Given there are maybe a million people that are really interested in the US out of 300 million people you would have votes counted in the low billions, assuming some sweatshop places chain people to computers instead of sewing machines. Any attempted fraud would be quickly overwhelmed by real votes coming in.
Popular candidates get lots of votes. Britney Spears (in the US) might end up as a Senator. It would be completely driven by popularity, net exposure and the motivation of people. How many votes does American Idol get vs. the number of people that voted in the last presidential election?
Combine this with a 3 month presidential term so there are lots of elections and we wouldn't have a voter apathy problem in the US. We might have David Duke as president for three months, but what could he do in three months? We might have President Natalie Portman, but again for only three months. The advantages of this would be incredible - a 24 hour cable channel dedicated to candidates, newsletters, stage performances, massive contests and the like all centered around the now-omnipresent election.
Sound silly? How about a country where 20-30% of the people vote and most of them aren't informed past making the "Republican" or "Democrat" mark on the ballot? How about a country where most of the actual people getting elected are unopposed? What would be so wrong with having the candidates sing and dance to get elected if it got 1/10th the interest there is in American Idol?
How do you deal with a large, well-funded organization that says simply "Send us your vote receipt and if you voted for our candidate, we'll send you $10" Or $20. Or $50. The amount isn't really relevent.
How many people will vote "their principals" rather than with their wallet?
It would be almost impossible to prevent this sort of thing once you make voting verifiable in any way after voting. Sure, there might have to be a bit more subtlty with the offer, but it would be impossible to stop completely. This means that anyone with enough money could simply buy the required votes. Easily.
Of course, most people on the Left believe this is already commonplace with Republicans, so maybe they don't see it as anything new.
Sorry, but this is a new feature with credit cards. Once a reoccurring payment has been authorized, canceling the card does not make it go away. You have to get the merchant (AOL in this case) to stop the charges.
Why is this happening? Well, finally after taking up the back end for so long, merchants got their act together and got the credit card companies to accept this. It has nothing to do with your bank, it has to do with Visa, Master Card and the others. What this means is that you can't sign up for some easy payment plan where they charge your card multiple times to get something and then cancel the card. You undoubtably have seen the ads on TV where you can get something that costs $300 but they charge you only $75 four times. Well, plenty of people figured out after they had the goods all they had to do was cancel the card. Worked really well, too. Too well. They got the stuff, and the merchant ended up losing $225 on the deal.
AOL probably cannot look up an account by credit card number, at least not through "normal" means. Yes, someone could sit down and hand-craft some SQL to find the account but you don't let call center people even try to do that. So your mistake was probably trying to deal with someone in the call center below a supervisor level to begin with. They can't help you and will never be able to. A supervisor probably can't help you either.
Unfortunately, these days the folks on the phones are trained that the supervisors are busy people and to never, ever bother them no matter what the customer wants or needs. Often the supervisor or 2nd level are in a different location as well. This makes it even more fun for the customer with an unusual request.
Their choices do not include abandoning "the futile attempt to reign in every pirate." Their choices are pretty much (a) stop widespread piracy of music or (b) close down. There isn't much of a middle ground.
The people that are uploading music to others aren't "potential customers", they are people that want to destroy the business of selling recorded music. Period. Oh, and by the way, so far it looks like they are winning.
This is a fight to the death, pure and simple. The business model of selling recorded music is headed for obsolesence. Once you enable "usable, sharable, transferable music" there is no more money behind music promotion. This is the only thing that drives the current music industry - promotion, fueled by the money from sales. Why buy when you can share? There is no music industry without promotion.
This does enable a whole different kind of promotion, the sort of word-of-mouth person-to-person sort of promotion. But one that doesn't create big names with big sales - it creates small crowds at concerts. Can individual artists live with this? Probably. But it does mean there is no promotion anymore. And promotion is a multi-billion dollar industry right now that interacts with many parts of people's lives.
What right does some corporation have to exploit for financial gain the materials that they are publishing? This is scientific research, probably paid for by tax dollars and therefore belongs to everyone. Just because some journal publishes it doesn't mean the actually have any rights to the material and can keep it away from others, does it?
Just like someone recording music - once it is in digital form it can be shared freely because they owner gave up their rights. You have to give up your rights to put it in digital form, right?
And certainly copying part of something is fair use, even when it is the important part. After all, it is purely subjective what the important part might be so any part should be fair use, even when it is a big part. Right?
The problem is that what the movie companies would be happy with people doing is what maybe 50% of the people want to do. The rest want to share with the world and ensure a single copy of a DVD is sold, period.
You see, to enable format-shifting you need to be able to access the digital content in an unrestricted manner. So that means you can make it into a different format, upload it and share it with the world.
What the movie companies wouldn't mind is if you took the movie in some manner that it could not be shared and put it on a portable device. Not really possible today, because once you can move it, it isn't protected against being shared with the world.
The real answer is (a) nobody buy any DVDs any more or go to theaters and (b) download everything. Sales drop to near zero and it takes 10 minutes to find the latest stuff on web sites worldwide. Movies become 90-minute ads for embedded products and advertising picks up where the ticket and DVD sales left off.
It would be nice if you had a clue what you were talking about.
But sadly, you don't.
Both a DSL line and a T1 are going to terminate at the same CO. No, a T1 isn't using anything other than a conditioned pair in the same cable that your DSL line is going through. The conditioning required might involve either cleaning some contacts along the way or just finding a clean pair. A long, long time ago this involved checking out amplifiers along the way and such, but that is pretty much gone in metro/suburban areas. You might find an amplifier in a far-flung rural area and that might need conditioning.
But a T1 in the middle of nowhere isn't going to be cheap, either. But it might be the best you can get if you don't have cable TV and are miles and miles past 17,000 feet from the CO.
Market share is a factor, but so is compatability.
I can develop a product which is sold to Windows users all over the world and works on Windows 95 through Windows Vista with a single binary that is less than 2MB and can be installed by anyone in 2 minutes.
Yes, the basic API level code hasn't changed that much, so I could probably distribute a Linux application that would work across many distributions and many versions of Linux and some window manager. But it wouldn't work for everyone because the installed KDE instead of GTK. And they would have to compile it and have all of the necessary libraries installed. This can be brutal even for someone that knows how to do it. Trying to get the 60+ retired gentleman with a digital camera to be able to do it is next to impossible.
And until that changes, Linux will be a small niche player.
The problem is that Vonage is relying on Verizon's infrastructure (DSL, PSTN) in order for their business to function. If it wasn't possible for people with Verizon DSL to use Vonage or to call a Verizon PSTN customer from Vonage, Vonage wouldn't have a product.
This is like buying your hamburgers at McDonalds and selling them at a discount from a cart in the parking lot. OK, so McDonalds made a deal with you to sell you the burgers at a big discount because you bought so many. Well, at some point they will notice what you are doing and stop. And like Vonage and Verizon, when the supplier pulls the plug, it's over.
This is what happens when you build a business model leeching off of an established supplier. The established supplier hates you and will do just about anything to get rid of you. It's not like Vonage has a product that can exist independently of Verizon or any other existing telecom company. We have seen this business model go down several times in the past 10-20 years or so and while it is a fun ride for the investors, it has no staying power.
Vonage is going down, it is just a matter of time. If they can't be shut down with patents, they will be shut down by some other means.
The problem is that Vonage relies on Verizon and other telephone companies to be there to support the Vonage product. Without Verizon DSL, they would lose a substantial fraction of their customer base.
This means that Verizon is supporting their competitor, something I bet they would rather not do. They are going to get turned off, somehow or at least prevented from using Verizon's infrastructure to compete with Verizon.
It wouldn't be the end of the world if your phone company went out of business and you had to sign up with a new one. Especially in the age of number portablilty.
Except that Vonage then goes out of business because all you can call are other Vonage customers.
Vonage counts on the existing telephone service being there and working for all non-Vonage customers. This was never about putting the existing tariffed telecoms out of business, it was about reselling their services with a different wrapper.
Problem is the user themselves probably either actually installed or authorized 50% of what you found.
Did they have a clue what they were doing? No. Should they have been allowed to install software on their computer if they didn't know better? No.
If the OS can prevent or allow installation of software, you can't blame the OS for allowing the user to install software. You can lock Windows down so installation of trojans, spyware, etc. is impossible. What you then have is an email/web surfing appliance. Which is probably what your user really needed.
As you have probably discovered by now, the Internet is a consequence-free zone. I can post anything I want about you or anyone else and it will never, ever come back to bite me.
This article is about a guy suing Wikipedia because they can't get at the original posters. If Wikipedia doesn't have a legal disclamer already, I'd be surprised. No, they aren't responsible for material contributed by others. Neither is Slashdot. And since the posting isn't identifiable, it is free game to say or do anything.
If the Internet wasn't so anonymous and free you wouldn't have half the spam and phishing that goes on. Maybe none of the phishing. Would you like to be the child of the spammer that advertises penis patches the day it became known in school? So we have the anonymous nature of the Internet to thank for the very freedoms we cherish. Also, the amount of money made using the Internet wouldn't be as much without this anonymous nature so there is big money behind keeping it every bit as anonymous as it is.
Since you have been attacked, you know how it works. Yes, you get frustrated but you then find out there isn't anything you can do about it. If someone decides to wreck your life, well you shouldn't have pissed them off. If they are a dangerous nutjob, this goes double - don't piss off dangerous nutjobs with Internet access.
The best thing is there are plenty of people that believe everything they read on the Internet. This makes it really nice when someone publically attacks you because you discover there is now a crowd of people that is on their side and against you.
Again, the Internet is a community. Have some community spirit. Don't piss people off. Be well liked. Or else.
A lawyer can face sanctions for really wasting the court's time.
Certainly a lawyer is going to be known in legal circles for bringing cases that have no hope. This is going to mean less respect and less credibility.
So a lawyer has some interest in telling a client they have no hope of winning and their proposed lawsuit is stupid.
Maybe because these cameras might see you? This is the sort of thing that the British folks we take an extremely dim view of, to the extent of taking away your little gun and putting you in jail for a long time.
It isn't just destruction of city/government property but it is also endangering civilians because when you take out a camera they can't see crimes being committed. The assumption being, of course, that the cameras are there for everyone's protection.
I suspect most ordinary people in UK wouldn't even consider doing anything to a camera, ever.
Did anyone think to suggest to them that they shouldn't spread it and the reason they got it was that people gave it to them? People who, in all likelihood, knew they had it and didn't care?
AIDS is a terrible disease but unless it is dealt with as a health crisis and not a badge of honor or rebellion, it isn't going to get much better. And the idea that it is somehow a right to spread the disease uncontrollably is not helping.
The idea that people might be discriminated against because they have AIDS and thus it needs to be a secret is very interesting. It is a state-sanctioned mechanism to insure the disease continues to spread. You do not get AIDS from the environment, you get it from people.
If we treated this disease like the measles were treated in the 1800's AIDS would be gone in 10 years, never to be heard from again.
Africa has national leaders that say there is no link between HIV and AIDS.
In Africa it is a common belief that using a condom is "unmanly" and a woman, even a prostitute, that requests it is likely to get a beating. Condom use is a joke in Africa - it isn't going to happen.
What this means is you have infected people running around loose infecting more people constantly. Sure, there are millions of infected people. People that don't understand how the disease is transmitted and are constantly lied to about it. And people that are so completely caught up in the cultural prohibitions about things like condoms and birth control that it will never stop.
Spending money in Africa to control AIDS is like sending food aid to the warlords in Somalia.
So what? When was the last time you heard about some botnet master getting arrested and charged with 20,000 counts of computer misuse? Oh yeah, the one prosecution there was occurred because the guy bragged on some FBI IRC channel.
These people are immune to prosecution. Let's say I have a 10,000 strong botnet and I am controlling it through my cable modem at home. You can't trace the botnet back to my cable modem, that's not how it works. You can't trace it through the IRC channel used for controlling because the IRC server operator is under no obligation to give me up. And, even if you did Comcast isn't going to give me up because I'm a customer.
Let's say they make a federal case out of it and raid Comcast for the secret logs and find out that BotnetHeader is a Comcast customer at my address. Fine. How do they prove it is me and not someone else in the house? Or, someone outside that is using the wireless connection? They can't and just like the RIAA is finding out, an IP address is not a person. It might get you to an ISP account but you can't prosecute someone for allowing their account to be used for illegal purposes.
So, I would have nothing to worry about. Unless I am stupid and wet my pants when the police come and confess everything. The answer is LATEX!
The one thing you missed is that perhaps 1% of the available machines will really be vulnerable to attacks, either through user stupidity or unpatched security flaws in some product (OS, Browser or whatnot).
This brings the numbers more in line with market share where there might be 200,000 available Mac OS machines and 4,000,000 Windows machines.
Yes, your anonymous rantings and gruntings are real fine. Unfortunately, without the courage to stand behind them, they are meaningless rantings and gruntings.
Anonyminity on the Internet means that you have the same credibility as everyone else and their dog. It also means that I can threaten to kill you, spam you, commit all sorts of crimes against you without any fear of consequences. Without any connection to "reality" the Internet remains a bunch of (possibly overaged) teenaged wankers without any political effect.
And it is a breeding ground for crime because everyone knows there are no consequences on the Internet. This is why we have spam, phishing, botnets and all sorts of other wonderful stuff.
Just try. Is is a crime to disseminate the Bible to Muslims, and it gets you the death penalty. There are plenty of Muslims in Canada that will be happy to enforce this. And, in the spirit of happy multiculturalism no Muslim is ever convicted of practicing their culture.
Cable access is pretty simple. Either the provider offers it or they do not. For the most part, it is system-wide today and not a lot of areas have cable but no Internet connectivity through it.
DSL is not so simple. You need an unbroken copper pair from the CO to the house. Most newer subdivisions in Illinois use a fiber connection to a vault and then copper from the vault to the houses. There is no room in the vault for a DSLAM, so no DSL. Especially there is no room in the vault for multiple DSLAM's so there could be at most one or two providers. This was a clear violation of the rules a few years back and the only way out was "No DSLAM period." So that is how it works in newer areas.
Older areas are generally copper to the CO without any interruptions but you do have the maximum distance limit. Many homes have fine telephone service out past 17,000 feet from the CO - no DSL for them. Past around 12,000 you aren't going to get much beyond 512K anyway, at least without quite a bit of searching for a good pair.
So cable is simple and DSL is complicated. To determine if a given address can get DSL you need to know both the distance to the CO, the facilities in the CO and the type of connectivity to the house. This is not easy outside of major metropolitan areas.
ZIP code is about as close as you could get for an approximation. Anything else would be either block-by-block or individual homes. Maybe they could get this information into the 2010 census because that would be about the only practical way to collect the volume of information that would be needed.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, so Microsoft gets the court to agree that the infringment is not against US patents from a US manufacturer, but (for example) a Chinese manufacturer against (???) a Chinese patent. Thus requiring AT&T to file against the Chinese manufacturer in a Chinese court.
Somewhat makes sense, but I would think it would be common sense that the "manufacturer" of a software product was the developer, not the facility where discs are copied. If it was this easy, we could get our product certified as being manufactured in Europe and avoid all those nasty import duties.
Yes, it is a bribe.
No, it isn't illegal except in some very, very rarified circles. If you are trying to sell something to a government agency it isn't illegal but has to be reported on. The paperwork required will make anyone say "No, thanks!" very quickly.
I think it might be illegal above some dollar amount for a government contractor to offer to a member of a foreign government. This would, for example, apply to Boeing selling planes to a government-run airline.
In the US, it is just what it takes to get the sale. Doesn't matter if it is IT or selling toliet paper to the janitorial staff. If it is a big enough deal, the buyer expects something.
About the only place I know of that utterly bans this (other than goverment contracts) is Wal-Mart.
Anything that says I can copy a DVD and play it without the original DVD being involved means I can distribute. I copy it to my server and then pass the physical DVD to a friend, who then copies it to some other hard drive. And so on and so forth. This is distribution, period.
However, this is probably just a small step along the way. Where we are going is clearly if it digitial it is going to be redistributed across the planet. This means that for someone to go to the expense of making a DVD and putting it into stores there has to be some other form of compensation involved - because sales will be a small percentage of the people that have the content. Pay-per-view locking of some sort isn't going to work because it will be cracked and distributed.
I would guess the sorts of DVDs that get made are the ones going around the last election - very one-sided political statements that are distributed for free. What else? Maybe nothing.
OK, so you have a web page that allows anyone to vote. Maybe you restrict it by IP address to a geographical location, as much as that is possible. No restriction in multiple voting.
If you are motivated enough, you can vote 100 times for the same candidate. So what? If you are really motivated or have enough funding, you can get 1000 people to enter votes for you. How is this different from the current situation where party hacks drive around picking up people to take them to the polling place today?
If the election is a complete bore and nobody is really interested, they get maybe 10 votes. Better than the 3 they get today.
If there is a lot of interest, people stay glued to their computers voting over and over again. The interest of those that are motived substitutes for the utter apathy of the majority that don't care. Vote totals go up and maybe next time some more people are interested.
Fraud? What is vote fraud in such an environment? Given there are maybe a million people that are really interested in the US out of 300 million people you would have votes counted in the low billions, assuming some sweatshop places chain people to computers instead of sewing machines. Any attempted fraud would be quickly overwhelmed by real votes coming in.
Popular candidates get lots of votes. Britney Spears (in the US) might end up as a Senator. It would be completely driven by popularity, net exposure and the motivation of people. How many votes does American Idol get vs. the number of people that voted in the last presidential election?
Combine this with a 3 month presidential term so there are lots of elections and we wouldn't have a voter apathy problem in the US. We might have David Duke as president for three months, but what could he do in three months? We might have President Natalie Portman, but again for only three months. The advantages of this would be incredible - a 24 hour cable channel dedicated to candidates, newsletters, stage performances, massive contests and the like all centered around the now-omnipresent election.
Sound silly? How about a country where 20-30% of the people vote and most of them aren't informed past making the "Republican" or "Democrat" mark on the ballot? How about a country where most of the actual people getting elected are unopposed? What would be so wrong with having the candidates sing and dance to get elected if it got 1/10th the interest there is in American Idol?
How do you deal with a large, well-funded organization that says simply "Send us your vote receipt and if you voted for our candidate, we'll send you $10" Or $20. Or $50. The amount isn't really relevent.
How many people will vote "their principals" rather than with their wallet?
It would be almost impossible to prevent this sort of thing once you make voting verifiable in any way after voting. Sure, there might have to be a bit more subtlty with the offer, but it would be impossible to stop completely. This means that anyone with enough money could simply buy the required votes. Easily.
Of course, most people on the Left believe this is already commonplace with Republicans, so maybe they don't see it as anything new.
Sorry, but this is a new feature with credit cards. Once a reoccurring payment has been authorized, canceling the card does not make it go away. You have to get the merchant (AOL in this case) to stop the charges.
Why is this happening? Well, finally after taking up the back end for so long, merchants got their act together and got the credit card companies to accept this. It has nothing to do with your bank, it has to do with Visa, Master Card and the others. What this means is that you can't sign up for some easy payment plan where they charge your card multiple times to get something and then cancel the card. You undoubtably have seen the ads on TV where you can get something that costs $300 but they charge you only $75 four times. Well, plenty of people figured out after they had the goods all they had to do was cancel the card. Worked really well, too. Too well. They got the stuff, and the merchant ended up losing $225 on the deal.
AOL probably cannot look up an account by credit card number, at least not through "normal" means. Yes, someone could sit down and hand-craft some SQL to find the account but you don't let call center people even try to do that. So your mistake was probably trying to deal with someone in the call center below a supervisor level to begin with. They can't help you and will never be able to. A supervisor probably can't help you either.
Unfortunately, these days the folks on the phones are trained that the supervisors are busy people and to never, ever bother them no matter what the customer wants or needs. Often the supervisor or 2nd level are in a different location as well. This makes it even more fun for the customer with an unusual request.
Their choices do not include abandoning "the futile attempt to reign in every pirate." Their choices are pretty much (a) stop widespread piracy of music or (b) close down. There isn't much of a middle ground.
The people that are uploading music to others aren't "potential customers", they are people that want to destroy the business of selling recorded music. Period. Oh, and by the way, so far it looks like they are winning.
This is a fight to the death, pure and simple. The business model of selling recorded music is headed for obsolesence. Once you enable "usable, sharable, transferable music" there is no more money behind music promotion. This is the only thing that drives the current music industry - promotion, fueled by the money from sales. Why buy when you can share? There is no music industry without promotion.
This does enable a whole different kind of promotion, the sort of word-of-mouth person-to-person sort of promotion. But one that doesn't create big names with big sales - it creates small crowds at concerts. Can individual artists live with this? Probably. But it does mean there is no promotion anymore. And promotion is a multi-billion dollar industry right now that interacts with many parts of people's lives.
What right does some corporation have to exploit for financial gain the materials that they are publishing? This is scientific research, probably paid for by tax dollars and therefore belongs to everyone. Just because some journal publishes it doesn't mean the actually have any rights to the material and can keep it away from others, does it?
Just like someone recording music - once it is in digital form it can be shared freely because they owner gave up their rights. You have to give up your rights to put it in digital form, right?
And certainly copying part of something is fair use, even when it is the important part. After all, it is purely subjective what the important part might be so any part should be fair use, even when it is a big part. Right?
Sure. Keep smoking that stuff and believing.
The problem is that what the movie companies would be happy with people doing is what maybe 50% of the people want to do. The rest want to share with the world and ensure a single copy of a DVD is sold, period.
You see, to enable format-shifting you need to be able to access the digital content in an unrestricted manner. So that means you can make it into a different format, upload it and share it with the world.
What the movie companies wouldn't mind is if you took the movie in some manner that it could not be shared and put it on a portable device. Not really possible today, because once you can move it, it isn't protected against being shared with the world.
The real answer is (a) nobody buy any DVDs any more or go to theaters and (b) download everything. Sales drop to near zero and it takes 10 minutes to find the latest stuff on web sites worldwide. Movies become 90-minute ads for embedded products and advertising picks up where the ticket and DVD sales left off.
It would be nice if you had a clue what you were talking about.
But sadly, you don't.
Both a DSL line and a T1 are going to terminate at the same CO. No, a T1 isn't using anything other than a conditioned pair in the same cable that your DSL line is going through. The conditioning required might involve either cleaning some contacts along the way or just finding a clean pair. A long, long time ago this involved checking out amplifiers along the way and such, but that is pretty much gone in metro/suburban areas. You might find an amplifier in a far-flung rural area and that might need conditioning.
But a T1 in the middle of nowhere isn't going to be cheap, either. But it might be the best you can get if you don't have cable TV and are miles and miles past 17,000 feet from the CO.
Market share is a factor, but so is compatability.
I can develop a product which is sold to Windows users all over the world and works on Windows 95 through Windows Vista with a single binary that is less than 2MB and can be installed by anyone in 2 minutes.
Yes, the basic API level code hasn't changed that much, so I could probably distribute a Linux application that would work across many distributions and many versions of Linux and some window manager. But it wouldn't work for everyone because the installed KDE instead of GTK. And they would have to compile it and have all of the necessary libraries installed. This can be brutal even for someone that knows how to do it. Trying to get the 60+ retired gentleman with a digital camera to be able to do it is next to impossible.
And until that changes, Linux will be a small niche player.
The problem is that Vonage is relying on Verizon's infrastructure (DSL, PSTN) in order for their business to function. If it wasn't possible for people with Verizon DSL to use Vonage or to call a Verizon PSTN customer from Vonage, Vonage wouldn't have a product.
This is like buying your hamburgers at McDonalds and selling them at a discount from a cart in the parking lot. OK, so McDonalds made a deal with you to sell you the burgers at a big discount because you bought so many. Well, at some point they will notice what you are doing and stop. And like Vonage and Verizon, when the supplier pulls the plug, it's over.
This is what happens when you build a business model leeching off of an established supplier. The established supplier hates you and will do just about anything to get rid of you. It's not like Vonage has a product that can exist independently of Verizon or any other existing telecom company. We have seen this business model go down several times in the past 10-20 years or so and while it is a fun ride for the investors, it has no staying power.
Vonage is going down, it is just a matter of time. If they can't be shut down with patents, they will be shut down by some other means.
The problem is that Vonage relies on Verizon and other telephone companies to be there to support the Vonage product. Without Verizon DSL, they would lose a substantial fraction of their customer base.
This means that Verizon is supporting their competitor, something I bet they would rather not do. They are going to get turned off, somehow or at least prevented from using Verizon's infrastructure to compete with Verizon.
Except that Vonage then goes out of business because all you can call are other Vonage customers.
Vonage counts on the existing telephone service being there and working for all non-Vonage customers. This was never about putting the existing tariffed telecoms out of business, it was about reselling their services with a different wrapper.
Problem is the user themselves probably either actually installed or authorized 50% of what you found.
Did they have a clue what they were doing? No. Should they have been allowed to install software on their computer if they didn't know better? No.
If the OS can prevent or allow installation of software, you can't blame the OS for allowing the user to install software. You can lock Windows down so installation of trojans, spyware, etc. is impossible. What you then have is an email/web surfing appliance. Which is probably what your user really needed.
As you have probably discovered by now, the Internet is a consequence-free zone. I can post anything I want about you or anyone else and it will never, ever come back to bite me.
This article is about a guy suing Wikipedia because they can't get at the original posters. If Wikipedia doesn't have a legal disclamer already, I'd be surprised. No, they aren't responsible for material contributed by others. Neither is Slashdot. And since the posting isn't identifiable, it is free game to say or do anything.
If the Internet wasn't so anonymous and free you wouldn't have half the spam and phishing that goes on. Maybe none of the phishing. Would you like to be the child of the spammer that advertises penis patches the day it became known in school? So we have the anonymous nature of the Internet to thank for the very freedoms we cherish. Also, the amount of money made using the Internet wouldn't be as much without this anonymous nature so there is big money behind keeping it every bit as anonymous as it is.
Since you have been attacked, you know how it works. Yes, you get frustrated but you then find out there isn't anything you can do about it. If someone decides to wreck your life, well you shouldn't have pissed them off. If they are a dangerous nutjob, this goes double - don't piss off dangerous nutjobs with Internet access.
The best thing is there are plenty of people that believe everything they read on the Internet. This makes it really nice when someone publically attacks you because you discover there is now a crowd of people that is on their side and against you.
Again, the Internet is a community. Have some community spirit. Don't piss people off. Be well liked. Or else.
A lawyer can face sanctions for really wasting the court's time.
Certainly a lawyer is going to be known in legal circles for bringing cases that have no hope. This is going to mean less respect and less credibility.
So a lawyer has some interest in telling a client they have no hope of winning and their proposed lawsuit is stupid.
Maybe because these cameras might see you? This is the sort of thing that the British folks we take an extremely dim view of, to the extent of taking away your little gun and putting you in jail for a long time.
It isn't just destruction of city/government property but it is also endangering civilians because when you take out a camera they can't see crimes being committed. The assumption being, of course, that the cameras are there for everyone's protection.
I suspect most ordinary people in UK wouldn't even consider doing anything to a camera, ever.
Too bad about your friends.
Did anyone think to suggest to them that they shouldn't spread it and the reason they got it was that people gave it to them? People who, in all likelihood, knew they had it and didn't care?
AIDS is a terrible disease but unless it is dealt with as a health crisis and not a badge of honor or rebellion, it isn't going to get much better. And the idea that it is somehow a right to spread the disease uncontrollably is not helping.
The idea that people might be discriminated against because they have AIDS and thus it needs to be a secret is very interesting. It is a state-sanctioned mechanism to insure the disease continues to spread. You do not get AIDS from the environment, you get it from people.
If we treated this disease like the measles were treated in the 1800's AIDS would be gone in 10 years, never to be heard from again.
Africa has national leaders that say there is no link between HIV and AIDS.
In Africa it is a common belief that using a condom is "unmanly" and a woman, even a prostitute, that requests it is likely to get a beating. Condom use is a joke in Africa - it isn't going to happen.
What this means is you have infected people running around loose infecting more people constantly. Sure, there are millions of infected people. People that don't understand how the disease is transmitted and are constantly lied to about it. And people that are so completely caught up in the cultural prohibitions about things like condoms and birth control that it will never stop.
Spending money in Africa to control AIDS is like sending food aid to the warlords in Somalia.
Yes, but ...
So what? When was the last time you heard about some botnet master getting arrested and charged with 20,000 counts of computer misuse? Oh yeah, the one prosecution there was occurred because the guy bragged on some FBI IRC channel.
These people are immune to prosecution. Let's say I have a 10,000 strong botnet and I am controlling it through my cable modem at home. You can't trace the botnet back to my cable modem, that's not how it works. You can't trace it through the IRC channel used for controlling because the IRC server operator is under no obligation to give me up. And, even if you did Comcast isn't going to give me up because I'm a customer.
Let's say they make a federal case out of it and raid Comcast for the secret logs and find out that BotnetHeader is a Comcast customer at my address. Fine. How do they prove it is me and not someone else in the house? Or, someone outside that is using the wireless connection? They can't and just like the RIAA is finding out, an IP address is not a person. It might get you to an ISP account but you can't prosecute someone for allowing their account to be used for illegal purposes.
So, I would have nothing to worry about. Unless I am stupid and wet my pants when the police come and confess everything. The answer is LATEX!
Yes, but...
The one thing you missed is that perhaps 1% of the available machines will really be vulnerable to attacks, either through user stupidity or unpatched security flaws in some product (OS, Browser or whatnot).
This brings the numbers more in line with market share where there might be 200,000 available Mac OS machines and 4,000,000 Windows machines.
Yes, your anonymous rantings and gruntings are real fine. Unfortunately, without the courage to stand behind them, they are meaningless rantings and gruntings.
Anonyminity on the Internet means that you have the same credibility as everyone else and their dog. It also means that I can threaten to kill you, spam you, commit all sorts of crimes against you without any fear of consequences. Without any connection to "reality" the Internet remains a bunch of (possibly overaged) teenaged wankers without any political effect.
And it is a breeding ground for crime because everyone knows there are no consequences on the Internet. This is why we have spam, phishing, botnets and all sorts of other wonderful stuff.
Just try. Is is a crime to disseminate the Bible to Muslims, and it gets you the death penalty. There are plenty of Muslims in Canada that will be happy to enforce this. And, in the spirit of happy multiculturalism no Muslim is ever convicted of practicing their culture.
Cable access is pretty simple. Either the provider offers it or they do not. For the most part, it is system-wide today and not a lot of areas have cable but no Internet connectivity through it.
DSL is not so simple. You need an unbroken copper pair from the CO to the house. Most newer subdivisions in Illinois use a fiber connection to a vault and then copper from the vault to the houses. There is no room in the vault for a DSLAM, so no DSL. Especially there is no room in the vault for multiple DSLAM's so there could be at most one or two providers. This was a clear violation of the rules a few years back and the only way out was "No DSLAM period." So that is how it works in newer areas.
Older areas are generally copper to the CO without any interruptions but you do have the maximum distance limit. Many homes have fine telephone service out past 17,000 feet from the CO - no DSL for them. Past around 12,000 you aren't going to get much beyond 512K anyway, at least without quite a bit of searching for a good pair.
So cable is simple and DSL is complicated. To determine if a given address can get DSL you need to know both the distance to the CO, the facilities in the CO and the type of connectivity to the house. This is not easy outside of major metropolitan areas.
ZIP code is about as close as you could get for an approximation. Anything else would be either block-by-block or individual homes. Maybe they could get this information into the 2010 census because that would be about the only practical way to collect the volume of information that would be needed.