I think others mentioned this, and it certainly is different in different countries, but in many European countries you pay primarily for the amount of data you download, not for the speed of the pipe. This is similar to having a limited number of mobile phone minutes (bytes). Once you exceed the amount in your contract, you pay at a higher rate for more. That means there is a real incentive for many users on a budget to minimize, for example, the size of email and attachments, and forget video downloading. This is the flip side of the proposed tiered pricing: Instead of charging more from the data suppliers, you charge the people who download the data. Either way, if you are a Telco you can make more money without adding any infrastructure.
Another analogy is to a highway system. The European model is like a toll road -- the farther you drive, the more you pay. The current American system is like a freeway -- you can drive as far as you want. The proposed tiered system is like...well...like making roads to different cities and controlling how fast people can drive to the city based on how much the city is willing to pay. That makes no sense, I know, but neither does the tiered pricing idea. (or, more likely, the analogy doesn't make any sense.)
Halving the number of errors is good, but that wouldn't stop my problems with spam. My chief objection to spam now is that there are still too many false positives -- things that show up in the spam box that should not -- so I still have to look through all of the hundreds of spam messages that arrive every day to find the few that are misclassified. Even cutting the number of false positives in half won't solve that problem. If, however, we could eliminate most of the spam, then I would have many fewer false positives and many fewer real spam messages to have to look through to find the false positives (I don't think we will ever eliminate false positives. Some people just label as "spam" anything they don't like. In systems that depend on feedback from users, such as Yahoo mail, that means that one person's valuable message is another's spam, which results in messages from one source sometimes being labeled as spam and other times not.)
Also consider that the net bandwidth is flooded with spam, which slows things down for everyone. Improving the filtering at your mailbox doesn't help with this either.
(x) Brilliant! ( ) I think it is a creative concept, but there is no need to reinvent the wheel. ( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work. ( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it. ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
The "immune system" solution is just another way to detect spam, but it is unlikely to be much more successful than existing methods. As someone else pointed out, SpamAssasin is pretty good already. So what if this new type of filter eventually improves the spam filtering accuracy from 98% to 99%? A more highly-polished rock is still a rock.
The real problem is the sending of spam itself, and that problem arrises from an inability to correctly attribute the spam to the spammers. If we can do that, we can block it, or at least better convict the spammers who violate the law. Things that solve this problem, like Yahoo!'s "DomainKeys", are the future of anti-spam, not more highly-polished rocks.
Oh, yeah. Good point. "Truth in advertising" doesn't matter if the government can do anything it wants to, and make it a crime to tell that they are doing it.
If you are a capitalist and believe in "the magic of the marketplace", you have to believe that this trend will eventually result in ISPs who advertise the opposite: that they don't snoop, that they dump any logs within hours or minutes, and so forth. That is, if they are allowed to do so by law.
10 years until it is done? Or is that just the estimated price to finish the network and to pay for maintenance for 10 years?
The slow project to put WiFi hotspots all over a single city seems likely to be surpassed in a relatively short time by other technologies. For example, I think that within a couple of years just about every business laptop user, at least, will want to have a cell phone Internet modem. Currently, Verizon and Sprint (maybe others) offer 144K connections, and this will (eventually) get faster and work anyplace you can use your cell phone, not just within range of a WiFi hotspot. We may also see power-line broadband within a few years. (That won't help someone running their laptop on battery, of course.)
I had personal experience with Direct Revenue's adware that took many hours to remove. Imagine how many hours have been spent by people trying to clean up their computers from their adware. I think it is a shame that the developers were able to escape with just a fine from the Illinois lawsuit. They should have to do hard time -- at least one hour for every hour spent by people trying to remove their software. How many years do you think that would add up to?
I have the opposite problem. I live in a town that has DSL, for the most part, but DSL is either not available or maxed at 300K in my neighborhood. I began by paying $90 a month just to get 112K ISDN, but eventually was able to get 300K DSL. When fiber cable finally was put in last year, it offered a huge speed increase DSL, so I switched to that. I have to agree, however, that it is not as reliable as the DSL was, but the speed increase is really noticeable and I'm not looking to switch back. I wish that SBC (now ATT) would put in the fiber network that they promised to have installed here by 2007. That way I could get full-speed DSL and I would really have a choice.
I've wanted for a while now to catalog a library for a local genealological society, but didn't know how to go about it, and the answers posted to your questions have saved me a boatload of time. I'll give readerware, collectorz.com, and intelliscanner all a try.
A lot of folks that I went to high school with became lawyers, but almost none of them have practiced law since their late 30s-early 40s. Once they finally paid off their loans, they split for other careers. I think that, as other posters have pointed out, people in every profession tend to have many careers.
On the other hand, at least anecdotally, it seems like there are more people who go to law school and begin to practice law as a second career than there are lawyers who learn programming and become programmers as a second career. What is it about programming that accounts for the difference?
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I think others mentioned this, and it certainly is different in different countries, but in many European countries you pay primarily for the amount of data you download, not for the speed of the pipe. This is similar to having a limited number of mobile phone minutes (bytes). Once you exceed the amount in your contract, you pay at a higher rate for more. That means there is a real incentive for many users on a budget to minimize, for example, the size of email and attachments, and forget video downloading. This is the flip side of the proposed tiered pricing: Instead of charging more from the data suppliers, you charge the people who download the data. Either way, if you are a Telco you can make more money without adding any infrastructure.
Another analogy is to a highway system. The European model is like a toll road -- the farther you drive, the more you pay. The current American system is like a freeway -- you can drive as far as you want. The proposed tiered system is like...well...like making roads to different cities and controlling how fast people can drive to the city based on how much the city is willing to pay. That makes no sense, I know, but neither does the tiered pricing idea. (or, more likely, the analogy doesn't make any sense.)
Halving the number of errors is good, but that wouldn't stop my problems with spam. My chief objection to spam now is that there are still too many false positives -- things that show up in the spam box that should not -- so I still have to look through all of the hundreds of spam messages that arrive every day to find the few that are misclassified. Even cutting the number of false positives in half won't solve that problem. If, however, we could eliminate most of the spam, then I would have many fewer false positives and many fewer real spam messages to have to look through to find the false positives (I don't think we will ever eliminate false positives. Some people just label as "spam" anything they don't like. In systems that depend on feedback from users, such as Yahoo mail, that means that one person's valuable message is another's spam, which results in messages from one source sometimes being labeled as spam and other times not.)
Also consider that the net bandwidth is flooded with spam, which slows things down for everyone. Improving the filtering at your mailbox doesn't help with this either.
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) Brilliant!
( ) I think it is a creative concept, but there is no need to reinvent the wheel.
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
The "immune system" solution is just another way to detect spam, but it is unlikely to be much more successful than existing methods. As someone else pointed out, SpamAssasin is pretty good already. So what if this new type of filter eventually improves the spam filtering accuracy from 98% to 99%? A more highly-polished rock is still a rock.
The real problem is the sending of spam itself, and that problem arrises from an inability to correctly attribute the spam to the spammers. If we can do that, we can block it, or at least better convict the spammers who violate the law. Things that solve this problem, like Yahoo!'s "DomainKeys", are the future of anti-spam, not more highly-polished rocks.
Oh, yeah. Good point. "Truth in advertising" doesn't matter if the government can do anything it wants to, and make it a crime to tell that they are doing it.
If you are a capitalist and believe in "the magic of the marketplace", you have to believe that this trend will eventually result in ISPs who advertise the opposite: that they don't snoop, that they dump any logs within hours or minutes, and so forth. That is, if they are allowed to do so by law.
10 years until it is done? Or is that just the estimated price to finish the network and to pay for maintenance for 10 years?
The slow project to put WiFi hotspots all over a single city seems likely to be surpassed in a relatively short time by other technologies. For example, I think that within a couple of years just about every business laptop user, at least, will want to have a cell phone Internet modem. Currently, Verizon and Sprint (maybe others) offer 144K connections, and this will (eventually) get faster and work anyplace you can use your cell phone, not just within range of a WiFi hotspot. We may also see power-line broadband within a few years. (That won't help someone running their laptop on battery, of course.)
I had personal experience with Direct Revenue's adware that took many hours to remove. Imagine how many hours have been spent by people trying to clean up their computers from their adware. I think it is a shame that the developers were able to escape with just a fine from the Illinois lawsuit. They should have to do hard time -- at least one hour for every hour spent by people trying to remove their software. How many years do you think that would add up to?
I have the opposite problem. I live in a town that has DSL, for the most part, but DSL is either not available or maxed at 300K in my neighborhood. I began by paying $90 a month just to get 112K ISDN, but eventually was able to get 300K DSL. When fiber cable finally was put in last year, it offered a huge speed increase DSL, so I switched to that. I have to agree, however, that it is not as reliable as the DSL was, but the speed increase is really noticeable and I'm not looking to switch back. I wish that SBC (now ATT) would put in the fiber network that they promised to have installed here by 2007. That way I could get full-speed DSL and I would really have a choice.
I've wanted for a while now to catalog a library for a local genealological society, but didn't know how to go about it, and the answers posted to your questions have saved me a boatload of time. I'll give readerware, collectorz.com, and intelliscanner all a try.
A lot of folks that I went to high school with became lawyers, but almost none of them have practiced law since their late 30s-early 40s. Once they finally paid off their loans, they split for other careers. I think that, as other posters have pointed out, people in every profession tend to have many careers. On the other hand, at least anecdotally, it seems like there are more people who go to law school and begin to practice law as a second career than there are lawyers who learn programming and become programmers as a second career. What is it about programming that accounts for the difference?