I've read the law, and I agree, it certainly seems like it applies to me. However, I've been told that people have repeatedly contacted attorneys to try and use it, and that no attorney yet has believed that the courts would enforce it in a spam case.
If they would a few class action suits would put an end to all large spam operations very quickly.
I think you're wrong for two reasons. OK, make that three.
First I think you overestimate the importance of commercial applications. They're only important when they have a great advantage over their Free competitors, which is the case in a small and shrinking number of areas.
Second, even with poorly written commercial code, it's often fairly simple to port code among similar Free systems. So the cost for a commercial supplier to offer more platforms is very low.
Thirdly, there are more and more compatibility layers that are becoming popular anyway. Novells 'linux' client for groupware, for instance, is written in Java and will run just about anywhere. I expect this will only become more popular as well. And, as BSD (and even SCO Unix) show, Linux binary support itself is becoming a sort of compatibility layer as well - there are many systems already that aren't linux but can run linux binaries without complaint.
What you don't understand is that there is no need for a legal definition of spam, it can be and is defined in terms of contracts and custom already. And the US federal government doesn't have jurisdiction over the internet, neither do the states. It's a worldwide extraterritorial phenomenon.
Now I would personally have no problem with a simple amendment to the US junk fax law making it clear that it does indeed apply to spam. I would have no problem with such a law in any country. But you and I and anyone who knows much about US politics should realise that this isn't going to happen. When congress gets involved they're going to come up with a thousand pages of exemptions and loopholes and legalese, they'll let their campaign contributors have a license to spam, while using the excuse of shutting down the smaller spammers to intrude and monitor everyone. It's a lose-lose proposition. More spam and less privacy.
Looking to the statutory law of any country or group of countries to try and stop spam is not only unlikely to work, it's likely to bring even worse problems. Simple civil liability, on the other hand, might just work, if you can get that and avoid the other. But the real key is simply enforcing the private contracts that already govern the internet.
No, what's acceptable is very clearly defined and has been for decades. The spammers try to pretend otherwise and enlist net-illiterate dupes to spread their obfuscations, and it's really sad.
It's ok to send commercial email. It's ok to send unsolicitied email. It's ok to send bulk email.
It's not ok to send email which is both bulkandunsolicited. It's as simple as that. All mass mailing lists must have proper procedures in place to make sure that they include only addresses that have explicitly asked to be included. When that is not done, the list becomes SPAM. It's as simple as that.
Spammers don't make any attempt to obey the rules we already have, why do you think a bunch of confused legislation would change that?
The people backing the idea of legislation on spam include the really big spammers, and this is the danger. Any national legislation is going to have nice big holes for 'legitimate' corporate spammers to continue to spam, while attempting to put their more entrepeneurial, less established competitors out of business. This is not acceptable at all.
The only thing that will seriously hurt spam will be opt-out lists, just like the new one with the telemarketers. All spammers must check the list before each spam run and clean their databases of those that opt-out.
This, too, is wrongheaded. There is no need for an 'opt-out' list, and only spammers want such a thing. People that run mailing lists of any sort need an 'opt-in' list and they need to retain evidence that every address on it did indeed opt-in, from what IP, in what manner, on what day, and they need to keep the confirmation email that was sent back to them before the name was added. Do that, and this 'opt-out' database is superfulous. All truly legitimate bulk emailers do that. The rest are spammers, whatever their corporate backing and regardless of how many congresscritters they own. There is no need to legitimize the spammers by letting them run a check against this 'opt-out' database and then happily spam everyone that isn't on it.
No, you're wrong on both counts. There is no 'freedom of speech issue' with spam, and filtering doesn't prevent the theft.
This law is idiotic, and very much a step in the wrong direction. If you want a legal solution, ask your congressman to propose an amendment to the junk spam act making it explicit that it applies to email.
It's not a step in the right direction at all. It's a step toward what the spammers want - a legal backdrop to claim that what they're doing is ok. A step in the right direction would be to stop spamming, not to label their spam so they can then claim it's legal for them to steal.
Obviously you aren't an old-school BASIC guy. That's how it worked. If you wanted to do anything fast, you wound up rolling a bunch of machine language inside a BASIC control loop.
I want to be clear that if 'AS is what I'm used to, and I see no reason to switch' is what it boils down to that's fine, I'm not trying to criticise other people's choices. I'm just curious.
But, like the earlier poster, everything you're talking about can be done with WM too. I don't know why you cite this as a difference, because it sounds exactly the same. I'm not sure what the maximum Virtual Desktops is, but 4 is default I think, you can make that number larger or smaller quickly and easily, and whatever the upper limit is I haven't found it. You can switch with a mouseclick, a keystroke, or by moving the mouse pointer off the edge of the screen (the last is configurable, I prefer to keep it off as it leads to accidentally changing for me.) You can move windows by dragging them off the screen or by right-clicking the top border and selecting move to --> desktop x. And not only the BB pager but any Gnome compliant pager will work too. Personally I don't use a pager, the other means are more than sufficient for me, but if you like it, it's there.
So it really sounds like it does just boil down to liking what you're used to. I haven't seen any answers yet that indicate AS does anything WM doesn't.
I understand all that, but all of it could be said for WindowMaker too, which seems to run a bit faster and 'slicker' if you will... for me at least. Just was curious what you might see as a positive difference between the two.
Assuming you're trolling, let me point out that WindowMaker isn't a fork of AfterStep, it's a from-scratch window manager in the same style. AfterStep on the other hand is a fork of another wm, twm was it?
I've always wondered why AfterStep still exists, actually, having tried both AfterStep always struck me as being a bit clumsy and crufty in comparison. Maybe some AfterStep fans want to explain what they like about it compared to WindowMaker?
As far as I'm concerned, anything which runs on Linux without proprietary drivers is a commodity/x86 device.
Hahah well excluding Alpha, PPC, and so forth...
If I'm interpreting you right, I agree, hardware that is too closed to implement proper open drivers for easily really isn't commodity hardware anymore. But unfortunately in many cases it's still considered to be by folks that are happy to run Windows.
That's right, because nVidia drivers have never crashed Linux. Oh wait, they have?
I never said Linux was perfect either. It's obviously far superior to Windows, however.
I don't use proprietary drivers, no one is forced to, and I've never seen Linux crash outside of hardware failure. Never.
Some things, such as drivers, require access to kernel-space, and so can crash the OS.
That's actually false. You apparently don't realise that not all kernels are monolithic. In reality, many OSs don't allow drivers to access kernel space. Early versions of NT, designed by the old VMS team, didn't allow that. MS deliberately sacrificed stability for performance here.
Ironically, modern processors minimise those performance hits all on their own, and state of the art programming techniques minimise them greatly as well. L4 is a remarkably fast kernel, able to emulate Linux with only 5% performance hit relative to the monolithic linux kernel, on modern hardware, without allowing drivers to crash it.
And your statement regarding the causes of your crashes is... unbelievable. Many many people see applications programs crash their computer on a daily basis.
It's a weenie excuse either way, for sure. Who cares about excuses, we don't want excuses, we want the damn thing to work.
And it's perfectly true you can run into the same problem with Linux if you use proprietary drivers so in that case there's something you can do. Don't use those drivers. Don't buy hardware that requires them. Fund development of open drivers. You have lots of options to make the damn thing work. I don't use proprietary drivers in Linux, and I've never seen it crash except when hardware failed.
With windows you don't have those options. Even if you're picky about your hardware it will still crash. And, btw, the crashes the article was talking about were not limited to, and quite possibly didn't even include, those caused by drivers.
Actually the crashes they're reporting are caused by application programs, not drivers - when the drivers take the system out their little report tool won't work.
Actually in my experience Linux achieves near VMS stability pretty easily, as long as you don't use any proprietary drivers. That does require you to be a little selective with your hardware, but it is far from taking you out of the commodity/x86 market altogether.
It's nonsense to say that someone elses code is responsible for your OS crashing - if your OS wasn't at fault it wouldn't crash no matter what the third party code did.
Another link, albeit from the popular press so a bit short on technical details: The truth about polygraphs.
These tests are completely unreliable, and suffer both from false negatives and false positives in abundance. If you're ever asked to take one for any reason you should refuse. If the results favour you they'll be ignored, if they don't you'll never live them down, however wrong they may be. These things are evil.
Okay, you can claim that, but that is simpy not the law, nor has it ever been - DMCA or not.
Copyright predates SmartCards.
It does indeed, but copyright law is more on his side than yours.
Copyright law does indeed prohibit him from making copies of that software and distributing them, sure. He doesn't own the copyright.
But he does own the copy embedded in that hardware, and can do with it as he likes, as long as he doesn't violate copyright. He can make backup copies (as long as they aren't distributed) he can study it, learn from it, even alter it, as long as he doesn't distribute it to others.
I think it's reasonable, yes, but not at all strange.
What's strange is the notion that it's illegal to listen to signals being broadcast through your property without your leave in many jurisdictions. What's strange is the notion that, in many jurisdictions, it is a crime to do math in many contexts, as for instance decrypting a signal that was broadcast through your property without your leave.
The satellite companies like to pretend they couldn't survive without these laws, but that's nonsense. They are perfectly capable of keeping the 'pirating' to a minimum through technological means. They just like to be able to use the law, because it means the rest of us have to pay for their 'countermeasures' rather than them footing the bill themselves. Never mind that it's far more expensive, why should they care, they don't pay it.
Depends on what you mean by use. Anyone can use it 'binary only run only' like SCO is claiming to license. However, modifying and distributing are different situations. Since SCO is openly in breach of the GPL, they have long since lost all legal right to do that. As I understand their products contain substantial cut and pastes from GPL sources particularly in the Linux compatibility sections, they can and should be sued for that.
They can still 'look at' GPL code, but if they copy it they're violating copyright.
SCOs customers are a miniscule source of profit anyway. Their customer base is tiny and shrinking. No one with half a brain has bought it in years, there install base is mostly very old installations that are only there because no one wants to break a working system.
Trying to coerce people like that usually backfires. The people still using SCO, all 10 of them, are already working on installing Linux or *BSD instead. No need to antagonise them. They didn't file the lawsuits, and they didn't buy from the company calling itself SCO in the first place anyway - they bought from what is now Tarantella and while you might not like old SCO either, they're certainly on a different plane from Darl & Co.
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Are you aware of any court tests here?
I've read the law, and I agree, it certainly seems like it applies to me. However, I've been told that people have repeatedly contacted attorneys to try and use it, and that no attorney yet has believed that the courts would enforce it in a spam case.
If they would a few class action suits would put an end to all large spam operations very quickly.
I think you're wrong for two reasons. OK, make that three.
First I think you overestimate the importance of commercial applications. They're only important when they have a great advantage over their Free competitors, which is the case in a small and shrinking number of areas.
Second, even with poorly written commercial code, it's often fairly simple to port code among similar Free systems. So the cost for a commercial supplier to offer more platforms is very low.
Thirdly, there are more and more compatibility layers that are becoming popular anyway. Novells 'linux' client for groupware, for instance, is written in Java and will run just about anywhere. I expect this will only become more popular as well. And, as BSD (and even SCO Unix) show, Linux binary support itself is becoming a sort of compatibility layer as well - there are many systems already that aren't linux but can run linux binaries without complaint.
What you don't understand is that there is no need for a legal definition of spam, it can be and is defined in terms of contracts and custom already. And the US federal government doesn't have jurisdiction over the internet, neither do the states. It's a worldwide extraterritorial phenomenon.
Now I would personally have no problem with a simple amendment to the US junk fax law making it clear that it does indeed apply to spam. I would have no problem with such a law in any country. But you and I and anyone who knows much about US politics should realise that this isn't going to happen. When congress gets involved they're going to come up with a thousand pages of exemptions and loopholes and legalese, they'll let their campaign contributors have a license to spam, while using the excuse of shutting down the smaller spammers to intrude and monitor everyone. It's a lose-lose proposition. More spam and less privacy.
Looking to the statutory law of any country or group of countries to try and stop spam is not only unlikely to work, it's likely to bring even worse problems. Simple civil liability, on the other hand, might just work, if you can get that and avoid the other. But the real key is simply enforcing the private contracts that already govern the internet.
No, what's acceptable is very clearly defined and has been for decades. The spammers try to pretend otherwise and enlist net-illiterate dupes to spread their obfuscations, and it's really sad.
It's ok to send commercial email. It's ok to send unsolicitied email. It's ok to send bulk email.
It's not ok to send email which is both bulk and unsolicited. It's as simple as that. All mass mailing lists must have proper procedures in place to make sure that they include only addresses that have explicitly asked to be included. When that is not done, the list becomes SPAM. It's as simple as that.
Spammers don't make any attempt to obey the rules we already have, why do you think a bunch of confused legislation would change that?
The people backing the idea of legislation on spam include the really big spammers, and this is the danger. Any national legislation is going to have nice big holes for 'legitimate' corporate spammers to continue to spam, while attempting to put their more entrepeneurial, less established competitors out of business. This is not acceptable at all.
This, too, is wrongheaded. There is no need for an 'opt-out' list, and only spammers want such a thing. People that run mailing lists of any sort need an 'opt-in' list and they need to retain evidence that every address on it did indeed opt-in, from what IP, in what manner, on what day, and they need to keep the confirmation email that was sent back to them before the name was added. Do that, and this 'opt-out' database is superfulous. All truly legitimate bulk emailers do that. The rest are spammers, whatever their corporate backing and regardless of how many congresscritters they own. There is no need to legitimize the spammers by letting them run a check against this 'opt-out' database and then happily spam everyone that isn't on it.
No, you're wrong on both counts. There is no 'freedom of speech issue' with spam, and filtering doesn't prevent the theft.
This law is idiotic, and very much a step in the wrong direction. If you want a legal solution, ask your congressman to propose an amendment to the junk spam act making it explicit that it applies to email.
It's not a step in the right direction at all. It's a step toward what the spammers want - a legal backdrop to claim that what they're doing is ok. A step in the right direction would be to stop spamming, not to label their spam so they can then claim it's legal for them to steal.
Obviously you aren't an old-school BASIC guy. That's how it worked. If you wanted to do anything fast, you wound up rolling a bunch of machine language inside a BASIC control loop.
I want to be clear that if 'AS is what I'm used to, and I see no reason to switch' is what it boils down to that's fine, I'm not trying to criticise other people's choices. I'm just curious.
But, like the earlier poster, everything you're talking about can be done with WM too. I don't know why you cite this as a difference, because it sounds exactly the same. I'm not sure what the maximum Virtual Desktops is, but 4 is default I think, you can make that number larger or smaller quickly and easily, and whatever the upper limit is I haven't found it. You can switch with a mouseclick, a keystroke, or by moving the mouse pointer off the edge of the screen (the last is configurable, I prefer to keep it off as it leads to accidentally changing for me.) You can move windows by dragging them off the screen or by right-clicking the top border and selecting move to --> desktop x. And not only the BB pager but any Gnome compliant pager will work too. Personally I don't use a pager, the other means are more than sufficient for me, but if you like it, it's there.
So it really sounds like it does just boil down to liking what you're used to. I haven't seen any answers yet that indicate AS does anything WM doesn't.
I understand all that, but all of it could be said for WindowMaker too, which seems to run a bit faster and 'slicker' if you will... for me at least. Just was curious what you might see as a positive difference between the two.
I corrected myself in a parallel post, but actually, I was in a sense correct to begin with, since fvwm was a fork of twm.
You're completely right, of course. HTML has no place in email period, and no body+html is a sure sign of spam.
This is really the most important test to have available in your filters, yet it seems that almost no email clients include it.
Oops I meant assuming you're not just trolling.
Also I just checked, AfterStep is a fork of fvwm.
Assuming you're trolling, let me point out that WindowMaker isn't a fork of AfterStep, it's a from-scratch window manager in the same style. AfterStep on the other hand is a fork of another wm, twm was it?
I've always wondered why AfterStep still exists, actually, having tried both AfterStep always struck me as being a bit clumsy and crufty in comparison. Maybe some AfterStep fans want to explain what they like about it compared to WindowMaker?
Hahah well excluding Alpha, PPC, and so forth...
If I'm interpreting you right, I agree, hardware that is too closed to implement proper open drivers for easily really isn't commodity hardware anymore. But unfortunately in many cases it's still considered to be by folks that are happy to run Windows.
I never said Linux was perfect either. It's obviously far superior to Windows, however.
I don't use proprietary drivers, no one is forced to, and I've never seen Linux crash outside of hardware failure. Never.
That's actually false. You apparently don't realise that not all kernels are monolithic. In reality, many OSs don't allow drivers to access kernel space. Early versions of NT, designed by the old VMS team, didn't allow that. MS deliberately sacrificed stability for performance here.
Ironically, modern processors minimise those performance hits all on their own, and state of the art programming techniques minimise them greatly as well. L4 is a remarkably fast kernel, able to emulate Linux with only 5% performance hit relative to the monolithic linux kernel, on modern hardware, without allowing drivers to crash it.
And your statement regarding the causes of your crashes is... unbelievable. Many many people see applications programs crash their computer on a daily basis.
It's a weenie excuse either way, for sure. Who cares about excuses, we don't want excuses, we want the damn thing to work.
And it's perfectly true you can run into the same problem with Linux if you use proprietary drivers so in that case there's something you can do. Don't use those drivers. Don't buy hardware that requires them. Fund development of open drivers. You have lots of options to make the damn thing work. I don't use proprietary drivers in Linux, and I've never seen it crash except when hardware failed.
With windows you don't have those options. Even if you're picky about your hardware it will still crash. And, btw, the crashes the article was talking about were not limited to, and quite possibly didn't even include, those caused by drivers.
Actually the crashes they're reporting are caused by application programs, not drivers - when the drivers take the system out their little report tool won't work.
Actually in my experience Linux achieves near VMS stability pretty easily, as long as you don't use any proprietary drivers. That does require you to be a little selective with your hardware, but it is far from taking you out of the commodity/x86 market altogether.
Exactly.
It's nonsense to say that someone elses code is responsible for your OS crashing - if your OS wasn't at fault it wouldn't crash no matter what the third party code did.
Another link, albeit from the popular press so a bit short on technical details: The truth about polygraphs.
These tests are completely unreliable, and suffer both from false negatives and false positives in abundance. If you're ever asked to take one for any reason you should refuse. If the results favour you they'll be ignored, if they don't you'll never live them down, however wrong they may be. These things are evil.
It does indeed, but copyright law is more on his side than yours.
Copyright law does indeed prohibit him from making copies of that software and distributing them, sure. He doesn't own the copyright.
But he does own the copy embedded in that hardware, and can do with it as he likes, as long as he doesn't violate copyright. He can make backup copies (as long as they aren't distributed) he can study it, learn from it, even alter it, as long as he doesn't distribute it to others.
I think it's reasonable, yes, but not at all strange.
What's strange is the notion that it's illegal to listen to signals being broadcast through your property without your leave in many jurisdictions. What's strange is the notion that, in many jurisdictions, it is a crime to do math in many contexts, as for instance decrypting a signal that was broadcast through your property without your leave.
The satellite companies like to pretend they couldn't survive without these laws, but that's nonsense. They are perfectly capable of keeping the 'pirating' to a minimum through technological means. They just like to be able to use the law, because it means the rest of us have to pay for their 'countermeasures' rather than them footing the bill themselves. Never mind that it's far more expensive, why should they care, they don't pay it.
Depends on what you mean by use. Anyone can use it 'binary only run only' like SCO is claiming to license. However, modifying and distributing are different situations. Since SCO is openly in breach of the GPL, they have long since lost all legal right to do that. As I understand their products contain substantial cut and pastes from GPL sources particularly in the Linux compatibility sections, they can and should be sued for that.
They can still 'look at' GPL code, but if they copy it they're violating copyright.
SCOs customers are a miniscule source of profit anyway. Their customer base is tiny and shrinking. No one with half a brain has bought it in years, there install base is mostly very old installations that are only there because no one wants to break a working system.
Trying to coerce people like that usually backfires. The people still using SCO, all 10 of them, are already working on installing Linux or *BSD instead. No need to antagonise them. They didn't file the lawsuits, and they didn't buy from the company calling itself SCO in the first place anyway - they bought from what is now Tarantella and while you might not like old SCO either, they're certainly on a different plane from Darl & Co.