Exactly. I've found the most effective way to explain Free Software to regular people is a combination of your insight here, and that of another poster who mentioned charging for installation.
Basically, when we get to 'what's the gimmick' I say there are two.
First, if you modify it, you have to give away the modifications. Most end-users aren't going to modify things, yes, but explaining this aspect of the system helps them understand how Free software that doesn't suck can get developed. It's a major convenience to programmers to be able to start from something already developed and add to it instead of starting from scratch, and the gimmick is that to use that advantage they're required to give back their own improvements. You don't need to be a programmer to understand that fact, there are plenty of other fields of endeavor where being able to use prior art is a big advantage too. If you take a couple minutes to explain that to them it goes a long way toward easing the initial dumbfoundment that this stuff could work at all.
That's really as far as it needs to go with something like Mozilla, by that time it's downloaded and set up and running, and it will sell itself.
But if you're talking about converting to a full GNU OS, explain that because this is done by programmers for fun and primarily for their own use, it's usually not so easy to setup and configure as commercial software. But I'd be happy to do that for them for a small fee, and there are plenty of other qualified people to go to if I'm ever unavailable or they aren't satisfied with my work in the future. So, unless they want to spend a lot of time learning, there really is a cost associated - it's just that you spend it on an administrator instead of on the software itself. My prices are very reasonable, and it can still easily save money, depending on circumstances. It's important to be very forthright here, and not too much of a salesman - make sure you have a good idea of what they expect, and make sure that you don't lowball them just to convince them - if you aren't going to be able to make them happy and make yourself happy both on the deal don't push it.
It doesn't take that long to do an install and configure for the typical home user, particularly if you choose a distro like slack say, that doesn't turn on a bunch of crap that you then have to go turn back off. Make a user account, get X running, choose a WM based on what the customer has hardware wise and make sure the menus are populated with the stuff s/he is going to need on a daily basis, make sure the network is setup of course... do a good job here and you'll have one hell of a happy customer. 99% of the 'features' of something like WinXP are never used by the average consumer anyway, they generally just want the regular stuff, email, web, document editing, simple photo manipulation - none of which is rocket science or all that time intensive to setup. Instead of paying MS/Adobe/etc. for every little piece of software, they're paying you to get them the same results, and they get a real custom system, set up by a professional with their needs in mind. There's no reason they have to grab every bleeding edge package update, or even need to know about them, and you can ssh to install security updates or package upgrades that are going to give them real value from wherever you are without much trouble.
I really think this is the way Free systems will eventually take over. It's not something that will just happen overnight, but when you do someone a good job at this the word of mouth sets in. You won't get rich doing it, but you can make a nice supplementary income without spending a lot of time on it. And as your customers become more comfortable and used to the idea of having a system built just for them, personally, the chances of them going back to shrinkwrapped mass-produced junk diminishes.
I've had to call them in official capacities a few times. This was with a service contract, not as a home user. Wait online for hours to finally get a guy that had no clue what he was talking about, just using a script designed to blame someone else and end the call as soon as possible.
Not that I was surprised, but it was a checkbox I had to have checked before I could go on and fix the problem myself.
Bzzt Wrong. Windows style taskbar with start button. Never used it have you?
2) No simple collection of desktop icons
That's not the WMs job, and it's debateable if it's even a good thing. If you think it is, it's simple enough to configure. I did say they would need to spend a little time developing a good default setup.
3) No set of built in apps with unified theme and ways of working
Again not the window managers job, and again perfectly easy to setup. Ice is completely compatible with Gnome and KDE apps, so you could use one or the other set, or built another set of more traditional apps.
4) No obvious choices for web/ftp/local file browsing.
Hello?
File managers; DFM - TkDesk - Xfm - Xplore - FileRunner - kfm - sfm - XNC - Kruiser - gentoo - Gnu Midnight Commander - Nautilus, and more.
Web Browsers; Mozilla and derivitives - Opera - Konq - more there too I'm sure.
All the distro needs to do is choose a set and make sure they're on the menus and setup sanely.
I use a web interface to email, so commenting in newsgroups with the same interface should protect me
Just introduces one more level of removal. Normally, to find out who you are, someone would take the date/time and IP to your ISP. If you use a web interface, they take that to the provider of said interface first, get your IP, then take that to your ISP. Either way, the account can always be traced. But that doesn't have much to do with thieving spammers.
I haven't found anything to compare with the donkey network for large files.
There are a bunch of clients, mldonkey is my favourite for *nix although sometimes the latest releases are a little too bleeding edge. Emule works pretty well on windows. There's a port of emule called lmule that runs on linux too, but I don't know why anyone would bother - if you're on *nix you'd want a decent daemon you can start as a service and forget about instead of a GUI app I would think. There are GUIs to control it, of course, or you can use telnet or http as well.
There are also the commercial, unfree clients, which have the advantage over emule because they can use the kadamelia protocol as well as the servers to find sources, but mldonkey does that too.
At any rate, it doesn't have the instant gratification thing like fastrack, don't expect to just que something up and see it start downloading. It needs to be run in the background and given time to find sources and wait through ques. But it's really quite good at getting loads of very large files reliably.
So I question - what can Microsoft do to usenet? I suspect, nothing
nice. Probably their efforts result in even more MIME/HTML postings,
with binaries attached in non-binary groups (probably something like
"My Signature.exe"). And certainly a lot of proprietarily encapsulated
text, such as.DOC rich text attached to an otherwise empty posting.
And what can *nix contribute after? Serverside filters to nix such things, I hope.
I certainly wish my email provider would implement them. That would cut out about 90% of the Spam I receive.
During the past three months, none of them have been downloaded even once.
Well that would be because you're on the wrong network. K-lite is best for short clips and audio, it's pretty damn sucky for movies, so people that would be interested in your content either don't use it or just don't look for that kind of content on it.
Pick up mldonkey or emule depending on your OS and put it on the donkey network, publish the links, and you'll start seeing lots of hits. I'd be very interested to see what you have.
You raise some good points. But the weakness of the analysis remains - you're analysing how this will affect a particular chunk of code. There's no doubt that -O3 and the architecture flags will do a lot of good on certain segments of code. That's why they're there. Use them on the right chunks and you can do very well.
But we're talking about using them, not just on this piece or that piece that will benefit from them, but globally. And there are plenty of chunks of code where they will hurt as well.
Basically we're both engaging in useless speculation to a degree here - neither one of us (I presume if you had you would have said something) has sat down and built systems, tested them, rebuilt them, retested them, enough to generate the hard data that would allow us to say for sure what's optimal here even on a single hardware setup. And that's what you'd have to do to be certain. And even then, the tests you chose to run would be an important part of the equation as well.
Because -O3 is going to help some code but hurt other, and because -Os is always going to make code more likely to fit in cache, I have a hunch that it's probably more efficient in the context of a global flag used in building the entire system. I have another hunch that -O2 is probably better than -O3 in that case as well, and that posing -O2 vs -Os the results would be very hardware dependent. But it's just hunches. Your points are quite valid, and I don't see any way we could really settle it except by agreeing on fair tests (a rather difficult problem in and of itself) and running them under both conditions, preferably on a wide range of hardware.
-Os decreases cache misses, and that's just as important on a P4 as on any other CPU.
If they really wanted to test performance, they would have used bzip2 -9. I don't even understand what they are testing. Are they testing how long it takes to start an app??? That can depend on where on the disk the files are stored. What a silly test.
Opening applications is something most users probably do a lot more often than running bzip.
If you're compiling your whole system with those flags you are really screwing the pooch when it comes to performance.
O3 gives a great performance boost for certain bits of code, such as your benchmark. It's very counterproductive for other things, however. It turns on things like inlining functions that are not turned on at O2 for good reason. In many cases they do more harm than good.
O3 should only be used when you're dealing with a relatively small program and you can test to make sure it's actually helping. Do your whole system with it and it's going to cause a drastic increase in cache misses, more than outweighing the better performance in certain code segments.
Actually I think the key sentence of the article was this:
The Gentoo setup by Bill Kenworthy was compiled using the "stock" kernel source and the "-march=pentium3 -pipe -O3" compile flags.
Doh! No wonder it sucked.
O3 turns on things like inlining that are only worthwhile in certain circumstances, but are often counterproductive. So the results aren't surprising in the least.
The odd thing is that, from what I've read, a lot of Gentoo folk seem to be trying to compile everything with -O3. This is, frankly, bloody stupid. This turns on a lot of 'optimisations' that are only useful on a few programs and actually harmful for most, and is probably one of the reasons it looked bad in this test.
O1 is the safe level of optimisation. Even O2 runs the risk of doing more harm than good, although it's a fairly low risk. O3 runs a very high risk of doing more harm than good. In many cases Osize is probably the best option anyway, because I/O is more commonly the bottleneck than cpu capability.
And the processor optimisations can also be risky. Every processor out there is designed to run commercial i386 code as fast as possible anyway.
The big wins in compiling yourself are control of configure options, not compiler optimisations. I think source-based distributions are a great idea, but I have to wonder if most people using them right now are getting the benefits.
And just how do you figure that Ice with the menus and basic configuration setup would be harder to use?
I think the opposite is the case. The sort of bloat typical of commercial distros defaults these days are usability nightmares that not only bog the machine down but also bog the users brain down. The easiest way to make a machine easy to use is with a simple and consistent interface that doesn't have too many artifacts simultaneously crying for attention.
Funny thing is, I'm no compiler guy, but even I know that a lot of the optimisation code is inefficient. Notice that Debian came out the best in that little test? And Debian sticks with i386 code. As does most of the commercial software. And Intel and AMD optimise their processors to run that commercial i386 code as fast as possible. Doh!
It wasn't a fair comparison since they were using different video drivers, of course, and also because 'identical machines' never are. To be fair you really have to run the same tests with the same drivers, and swap the installs around to each machine as well, so you can see just how unidentical they really are.
The really interesting thing to do would be to test various compiler settings with gentoo on those machines first. Try 386, 486, 586, 686, try -O2, see what works and what doesn't. Then compare the other distros to Gentoo with the best settings.
At any rate, it's not the processor optimisation flags that are the important part of compiling from source - you're not likely to see really dramatic results from them alone, even if you do take the time to experiment and find the best set for your architecture. Much more important are the configure scripts for individual applications. Leaving out KDE and/or Gnome support, for example, can seriously trim a program up without losing anything if you don't use KDE or Gnome.
Sure, the default is KDE, usually with GNOME also (would you prefer newbies straight from Windows to be dumped into ion?)
KDE AND Gnome?
I'd prefer they be started with something sensible that doesn't cause them to think 'Linux is slow and bloated' right off the bat, frankly.
IceWM maybe. Personally I prefer WindowMaker, but Ice is probably better for the folks that have never used anything but windows. Either way, if they'd put half the time they spend on KDE and Gnome into a sensible default setup with a WM that doesn't require a supercomputer to run at a decent speed, I think it would give a better initial impression to most newbies.
Instead, these things are left exclusively for those of us that know about them, know how to find them and how to configure them on our own time, while the newbies are being given a very bad impression of Linux, if they try to install it on anything but a brand new box at least.
He's basically boiled the thing down to three points, familiar to any regular slashdot reader by now, but put in a nice simple, short, easy to digest form by a qualified lawyer. Great link to send any PHB that is worried by SCOs FUD.
It just smells at the code, looks if it uses vulnerable calls like strcpy, an reports this. But it completely puzzels me how you can use the report to report "this is good" or "this is good enough" or "this is a piece of shit".
Well it looks to me like you wouldn't want to trust a 'this is good' result from this tool, but if it says it's bad it's probably right.
Look up Santa Clara County vs. Southern Pacific Railroad.
I'm not saying I agree with the decision. I'm not saying I agree with the practice of the courts to 'interpret' the constitution to say whatever they think it should say instead of following what it actually does say. But, in terms of how the law is enforced in this country today, that decision means that corporations are considered persons.
Telephones, incidentally, weren't designed for
telemarketers, and I imagine that the postal system predates junk mail as
well.
There's a key difference between the media however. Postal direct-marketeers pay the postage. Telemarketers pay for their calls. Spammers make you pay instead.
You aren't invited, and the two parties that are
privy to the contract can always decide that the spam is a-ok.
Yes they can. And the rest of us can blackhole their entire IP range if they do that, defeating the entire purpose of their agreement. Knowing this, no legitimate ISP would come to such an agreement in the first place.
There is no right to force people to receive your Spam!
I AM defending the right of spammers to spam.
I AM NOT defending the right of spammers to send spam that contains
fraudulent claims, including fraudulent headers, subject lines, or
'opt-out' addresses, etc.
This can only indicate a complete lack of understanding of the situation. Spammers always use these dodges, and in fact must use these dodges in order to continue spamming. If they send with real headers they get shut down by their ISP almost immediately for violating their TOS. If their ISP stoops so low as to allow this use, then instead of the spammer being terminated by the ISP, the ISP is black-holed by a good portion of the internet instead. Either way, they can no longer force their Spam through, and they go out of business.
I AM NOT defending the right of spammers to ignore explicit requests to
stop, provided that the spammer is either actually aware of the request,
or if the request was given in a form that spammers are reasonably likely
to be aware of.
Think about what you're saying here for just a moment. These sort of rules work well enough in meatspace, because you can put up such a sign, and because you aren't likely to have every door to door salesman on your doorstep at once. But on the net these rules are senseless and unworkable.
By your rules I can spam you until you tell me to stop. Then I can spam you again, from a different shell, and you can't prove it's still me, so you have to tell me to stop again. Since you told me to stop, I put you on the 'confirmed good' list I sell to all my spammer buddies, and they spam you too. You have to tell each of us to stop individually. If even 10% of businesses in the US decided to spam, it would take you YEARS to ask them all to stop, even if they were all nice honest folks and took you right off the list and didn't put you on any others. It's absurd.
I admit, this is a subset of all the spammers that there are.
It's a null subset. If there ever were such beasts, they are long since extinct. Get on NANAE and lurk for a few days. Educate yourself.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly. I've found the most effective way to explain Free Software to regular people is a combination of your insight here, and that of another poster who mentioned charging for installation.
Basically, when we get to 'what's the gimmick' I say there are two.
First, if you modify it, you have to give away the modifications. Most end-users aren't going to modify things, yes, but explaining this aspect of the system helps them understand how Free software that doesn't suck can get developed. It's a major convenience to programmers to be able to start from something already developed and add to it instead of starting from scratch, and the gimmick is that to use that advantage they're required to give back their own improvements. You don't need to be a programmer to understand that fact, there are plenty of other fields of endeavor where being able to use prior art is a big advantage too. If you take a couple minutes to explain that to them it goes a long way toward easing the initial dumbfoundment that this stuff could work at all.
That's really as far as it needs to go with something like Mozilla, by that time it's downloaded and set up and running, and it will sell itself.
But if you're talking about converting to a full GNU OS, explain that because this is done by programmers for fun and primarily for their own use, it's usually not so easy to setup and configure as commercial software. But I'd be happy to do that for them for a small fee, and there are plenty of other qualified people to go to if I'm ever unavailable or they aren't satisfied with my work in the future. So, unless they want to spend a lot of time learning, there really is a cost associated - it's just that you spend it on an administrator instead of on the software itself. My prices are very reasonable, and it can still easily save money, depending on circumstances. It's important to be very forthright here, and not too much of a salesman - make sure you have a good idea of what they expect, and make sure that you don't lowball them just to convince them - if you aren't going to be able to make them happy and make yourself happy both on the deal don't push it.
It doesn't take that long to do an install and configure for the typical home user, particularly if you choose a distro like slack say, that doesn't turn on a bunch of crap that you then have to go turn back off. Make a user account, get X running, choose a WM based on what the customer has hardware wise and make sure the menus are populated with the stuff s/he is going to need on a daily basis, make sure the network is setup of course... do a good job here and you'll have one hell of a happy customer. 99% of the 'features' of something like WinXP are never used by the average consumer anyway, they generally just want the regular stuff, email, web, document editing, simple photo manipulation - none of which is rocket science or all that time intensive to setup. Instead of paying MS/Adobe/etc. for every little piece of software, they're paying you to get them the same results, and they get a real custom system, set up by a professional with their needs in mind. There's no reason they have to grab every bleeding edge package update, or even need to know about them, and you can ssh to install security updates or package upgrades that are going to give them real value from wherever you are without much trouble.
I really think this is the way Free systems will eventually take over. It's not something that will just happen overnight, but when you do someone a good job at this the word of mouth sets in. You won't get rich doing it, but you can make a nice supplementary income without spending a lot of time on it. And as your customers become more comfortable and used to the idea of having a system built just for them, personally, the chances of them going back to shrinkwrapped mass-produced junk diminishes.
I've had to call them in official capacities a few times. This was with a service contract, not as a home user. Wait online for hours to finally get a guy that had no clue what he was talking about, just using a script designed to blame someone else and end the call as soon as possible.
Not that I was surprised, but it was a checkbox I had to have checked before I could go on and fix the problem myself.
Bzzt Wrong. Windows style taskbar with start button. Never used it have you?
That's not the WMs job, and it's debateable if it's even a good thing. If you think it is, it's simple enough to configure. I did say they would need to spend a little time developing a good default setup.
Again not the window managers job, and again perfectly easy to setup. Ice is completely compatible with Gnome and KDE apps, so you could use one or the other set, or built another set of more traditional apps.
Hello?
File managers; DFM - TkDesk - Xfm - Xplore - FileRunner - kfm - sfm - XNC - Kruiser - gentoo - Gnu Midnight Commander - Nautilus, and more.
Web Browsers; Mozilla and derivitives - Opera - Konq - more there too I'm sure.
All the distro needs to do is choose a set and make sure they're on the menus and setup sanely.
Just introduces one more level of removal. Normally, to find out who you are, someone would take the date/time and IP to your ISP. If you use a web interface, they take that to the provider of said interface first, get your IP, then take that to your ISP. Either way, the account can always be traced. But that doesn't have much to do with thieving spammers.
Sun was Microsoft before anyone knew what Microsoft was.
And they're still the same, only not as successful.
Doesn't mean they never do anything good, but it's never been smart to trust them.
I haven't found anything to compare with the donkey network for large files.
There are a bunch of clients, mldonkey is my favourite for *nix although sometimes the latest releases are a little too bleeding edge. Emule works pretty well on windows. There's a port of emule called lmule that runs on linux too, but I don't know why anyone would bother - if you're on *nix you'd want a decent daemon you can start as a service and forget about instead of a GUI app I would think. There are GUIs to control it, of course, or you can use telnet or http as well.
There are also the commercial, unfree clients, which have the advantage over emule because they can use the kadamelia protocol as well as the servers to find sources, but mldonkey does that too.
At any rate, it doesn't have the instant gratification thing like fastrack, don't expect to just que something up and see it start downloading. It needs to be run in the background and given time to find sources and wait through ques. But it's really quite good at getting loads of very large files reliably.
And what can *nix contribute after? Serverside filters to nix such things, I hope.
I certainly wish my email provider would implement them. That would cut out about 90% of the Spam I receive.
If you use a bogus address that makes it hard for people to reply privately, but that's it. Your headers still reveal your IP of course.
There shouldn't need to be any reason to hide your address, of course, but the world is overrun with thieves.
Well that would be because you're on the wrong network. K-lite is best for short clips and audio, it's pretty damn sucky for movies, so people that would be interested in your content either don't use it or just don't look for that kind of content on it.
Pick up mldonkey or emule depending on your OS and put it on the donkey network, publish the links, and you'll start seeing lots of hits. I'd be very interested to see what you have.
You raise some good points. But the weakness of the analysis remains - you're analysing how this will affect a particular chunk of code. There's no doubt that -O3 and the architecture flags will do a lot of good on certain segments of code. That's why they're there. Use them on the right chunks and you can do very well.
But we're talking about using them, not just on this piece or that piece that will benefit from them, but globally. And there are plenty of chunks of code where they will hurt as well.
Basically we're both engaging in useless speculation to a degree here - neither one of us (I presume if you had you would have said something) has sat down and built systems, tested them, rebuilt them, retested them, enough to generate the hard data that would allow us to say for sure what's optimal here even on a single hardware setup. And that's what you'd have to do to be certain. And even then, the tests you chose to run would be an important part of the equation as well.
Because -O3 is going to help some code but hurt other, and because -Os is always going to make code more likely to fit in cache, I have a hunch that it's probably more efficient in the context of a global flag used in building the entire system. I have another hunch that -O2 is probably better than -O3 in that case as well, and that posing -O2 vs -Os the results would be very hardware dependent. But it's just hunches. Your points are quite valid, and I don't see any way we could really settle it except by agreeing on fair tests (a rather difficult problem in and of itself) and running them under both conditions, preferably on a wide range of hardware.
Do you?
What exactly are you trying to say?
-Os decreases cache misses, and that's just as important on a P4 as on any other CPU.
Opening applications is something most users probably do a lot more often than running bzip.
Seriously though, doubling the access speed of your RAM is likely to do more good on that sort of task than doubling the CPU speed.
If you're compiling your whole system with those flags you are really screwing the pooch when it comes to performance.
O3 gives a great performance boost for certain bits of code, such as your benchmark. It's very counterproductive for other things, however. It turns on things like inlining functions that are not turned on at O2 for good reason. In many cases they do more harm than good.
O3 should only be used when you're dealing with a relatively small program and you can test to make sure it's actually helping. Do your whole system with it and it's going to cause a drastic increase in cache misses, more than outweighing the better performance in certain code segments.
Actually I think the key sentence of the article was this:
Doh! No wonder it sucked.
O3 turns on things like inlining that are only worthwhile in certain circumstances, but are often counterproductive. So the results aren't surprising in the least.
The odd thing is that, from what I've read, a lot of Gentoo folk seem to be trying to compile everything with -O3. This is, frankly, bloody stupid. This turns on a lot of 'optimisations' that are only useful on a few programs and actually harmful for most, and is probably one of the reasons it looked bad in this test.
O1 is the safe level of optimisation. Even O2 runs the risk of doing more harm than good, although it's a fairly low risk. O3 runs a very high risk of doing more harm than good. In many cases Osize is probably the best option anyway, because I/O is more commonly the bottleneck than cpu capability.
And the processor optimisations can also be risky. Every processor out there is designed to run commercial i386 code as fast as possible anyway.
The big wins in compiling yourself are control of configure options, not compiler optimisations. I think source-based distributions are a great idea, but I have to wonder if most people using them right now are getting the benefits.
And just how do you figure that Ice with the menus and basic configuration setup would be harder to use?
I think the opposite is the case. The sort of bloat typical of commercial distros defaults these days are usability nightmares that not only bog the machine down but also bog the users brain down. The easiest way to make a machine easy to use is with a simple and consistent interface that doesn't have too many artifacts simultaneously crying for attention.
Funny thing is, I'm no compiler guy, but even I know that a lot of the optimisation code is inefficient. Notice that Debian came out the best in that little test? And Debian sticks with i386 code. As does most of the commercial software. And Intel and AMD optimise their processors to run that commercial i386 code as fast as possible. Doh!
It wasn't a fair comparison since they were using different video drivers, of course, and also because 'identical machines' never are. To be fair you really have to run the same tests with the same drivers, and swap the installs around to each machine as well, so you can see just how unidentical they really are.
The really interesting thing to do would be to test various compiler settings with gentoo on those machines first. Try 386, 486, 586, 686, try -O2, see what works and what doesn't. Then compare the other distros to Gentoo with the best settings.
At any rate, it's not the processor optimisation flags that are the important part of compiling from source - you're not likely to see really dramatic results from them alone, even if you do take the time to experiment and find the best set for your architecture. Much more important are the configure scripts for individual applications. Leaving out KDE and/or Gnome support, for example, can seriously trim a program up without losing anything if you don't use KDE or Gnome.
KDE AND Gnome?
I'd prefer they be started with something sensible that doesn't cause them to think 'Linux is slow and bloated' right off the bat, frankly.
IceWM maybe. Personally I prefer WindowMaker, but Ice is probably better for the folks that have never used anything but windows. Either way, if they'd put half the time they spend on KDE and Gnome into a sensible default setup with a WM that doesn't require a supercomputer to run at a decent speed, I think it would give a better initial impression to most newbies.
Instead, these things are left exclusively for those of us that know about them, know how to find them and how to configure them on our own time, while the newbies are being given a very bad impression of Linux, if they try to install it on anything but a brand new box at least.
He's basically boiled the thing down to three points, familiar to any regular slashdot reader by now, but put in a nice simple, short, easy to digest form by a qualified lawyer. Great link to send any PHB that is worried by SCOs FUD.
Well it looks to me like you wouldn't want to trust a 'this is good' result from this tool, but if it says it's bad it's probably right.
What you're talking about isn't new, it's called the subjective theory of value, and the austrian school of economists worked it out a long time ago.
IIRC their cash cow prior to DOS was the BASIC ROM. Also not exactly original work, of course.
Some people have moral objections to voting you know.
Look up Santa Clara County vs. Southern Pacific Railroad.
I'm not saying I agree with the decision. I'm not saying I agree with the practice of the courts to 'interpret' the constitution to say whatever they think it should say instead of following what it actually does say. But, in terms of how the law is enforced in this country today, that decision means that corporations are considered persons.
What this has to do with Spam I still can't see.
There's a key difference between the media however. Postal direct-marketeers pay the postage. Telemarketers pay for their calls. Spammers make you pay instead.
Yes they can. And the rest of us can blackhole their entire IP range if they do that, defeating the entire purpose of their agreement. Knowing this, no legitimate ISP would come to such an agreement in the first place.
There is no right to force people to receive your Spam!
This can only indicate a complete lack of understanding of the situation. Spammers always use these dodges, and in fact must use these dodges in order to continue spamming. If they send with real headers they get shut down by their ISP almost immediately for violating their TOS. If their ISP stoops so low as to allow this use, then instead of the spammer being terminated by the ISP, the ISP is black-holed by a good portion of the internet instead. Either way, they can no longer force their Spam through, and they go out of business.
Think about what you're saying here for just a moment. These sort of rules work well enough in meatspace, because you can put up such a sign, and because you aren't likely to have every door to door salesman on your doorstep at once. But on the net these rules are senseless and unworkable.
By your rules I can spam you until you tell me to stop. Then I can spam you again, from a different shell, and you can't prove it's still me, so you have to tell me to stop again. Since you told me to stop, I put you on the 'confirmed good' list I sell to all my spammer buddies, and they spam you too. You have to tell each of us to stop individually. If even 10% of businesses in the US decided to spam, it would take you YEARS to ask them all to stop, even if they were all nice honest folks and took you right off the list and didn't put you on any others. It's absurd.
It's a null subset. If there ever were such beasts, they are long since extinct. Get on NANAE and lurk for a few days. Educate yourself.