> Pretty much the entire financial cost of sending email, is attributable to the failure of the "free market" to motivate email providers to deliver non-spam emails into their user's inboxes.

To quote Pauli, this is not even wrong. The central fallacy to this entire anti-capitalist rant is that there's some nearly perfect solution to spam that the "market" participants are conspiring to deprive the consumer of. This contention is, not to put too fine a point on it, as deliberately dishonest as similar claims about running cars on water or perpetual motion machines. Spam is an arms race, not a problem with a "solution" that we've just been too lazy to find. Once you dispense with that fallacious premise, this entire screed can be summarized as "I'm butthurt because Spamhaus/Yahoo/Hotmail blocked my spammy-but-not-spam-because-I-said-so emails and they won't take my call" all wrapped up in a "won't someone think of the children...err...dissidents!" bow.

Email account providers have as many automated, heuristic-based blocking techniques as blacklist based. Have you considered that you might have tripped one? Like...a domain that was registered less than a week ago, first mailing we got from them was a carpet-bomb, content we've previously spotted and identified as spam? I mean, it's a lot less sexy than claiming there's a villainous corporate cabal in the back room twirling their mustaches as they condemn some hapless dissident to a life of Internet ignorance, but it is possible.

> Many standards, such as PCI compliance, require that you separate all of your units.

Not that I disagree with your sentiment,but there is nothing in the PCI requirements (or any other compliance regime that I have audited against) that require you separate all of your "units" into individual VMs or physical servers. You can use it as one way of satisfying a couple of the requirements (e.g. securing cardholder data), but you can just as easily satisfy them other ways.

Not only are we going to loose payphones, we are going to quickly loose universal service and probably land lines in many places. The carriers are fighting tooth and nails to be able to forget about all those decades of subsidies and only provide the most profitable services (wireless) and to shed everything else.

I recently did an analysis of the major (and many minor) AV players with respect to detection rates and more importantly to time between when a piece of malware is found and when it is identified by each AV product.

Good News: The free Microsoft AV (MSE) is basically as good as any product we looked at.
Bad News: All AV sucks to varying degrees. Noone consistently had both good detection and quick enough signature updates. We see AV as a small piece of overlapping defense.

At least as important:

- Relentless patching of everything on your box (look at Secuna PSI for home use).
- Use a non-admin account for daily computing. Consider using throw-away Windows VMs when visiting potentially dangerous territory.
- Ad/Flash/Script blockers plugins.
- Disable Java.

Things like this probably have as much bang-for-buck as AV.

Get into something involving large datacenters: building them out, hosting/colo, cloud, companies like Google/Apple/Akimai. Those guys often spend much of their time out on the floor, doing physical things, and there's flat out a lot of walking done in a million square foot DC.

Dr. Dobbs still exists?

Wait a minute: did you just call theft a felony when that isn't stated or implied for histrionic purposes?
Wait a minute: did you just imply it's okay to steal someone elses creative output in toto without credit or compensation because it's just "one file"?

I'm not your mate, asshole.

"If it's digital, I can take it, and use it any way I want, claim credit for it, and not give you anything, no matter what went into it's creation"

Got it. You and your world view sucks just as much as Candice Shwagger.

You don't know that the person didn't get it from another website which claimed the image was under a different license. Or hell, the person could even have paid somebody else that had copied that picture and included it on a batch of stock images they had no rights to.

Irrelevant. All off those are possibilities, but they are NOT get-out-of-jail-free cards. "I didn't know it was a stolen image" doesn't follow with "so I can keep using it" any more than unknowingly buying a stolen laptop on Craigslist mean you get to keep it if the police find it.

Basically, you can't assume that the person knows they are infringing copyright.

Irrelevant. There's nothing in here about intent. People were using Jeff's images unjustly. He followed the law that covers how to deal with that. Period. They how have to stop using them. Period. One sociopath has a problem with that, and that's why we're hearing about it.

Once again, not a lawyer, but it's my understanding that for any civil disagreement, if you show up in front of a judge without first having tried to negotiate and resolve the conflict amicably, the judge is going to be very angry at you, and tell you go try to negotiate first.

Irrelevant. Jeff isn't suing anyone. Jeff isn't taking anyone to court. Jeff is following the law when he issues a legitimate DMCA request. If Jeff ends up in court through some travesty, that's what the judge will care about. The only person talking about going to court is the nutjob who stole his image. And if you want to see a judge get mad, let me assure you that "you used an infringing image, the plaintiff filed a legal and appropriate injunction, and you're suing him because you don't like it, and you're a lawyer" will result in a full-blown melt-down, if not a formal sanction and request for disbarment.

If I discovered all 14 of my sites were taken down, while I'm trying to raise money for Special needs, I'd probably respond in a similar angry fashion.

I'm completely justified in stealing other peoples work, because it's For The Children! Oh...and I used the same stolen image on my business web site. But it's still For The Children, so that's completely cool.

Really?

That said, this is a clear example of the problems with the DMCA. Had the photographer contacted the website admin and requested the picture be taken down or permissions be negotiated before submitting a formal takedown, this whole situation may have been avoided (depending on just how crazy the woman is).

The DMCS is bad. Know that I'm not arguing that point. But not just "no" but "fuck no", it *not* the DMCA that's the problem. The whole situation could have been avoided if the website admin HADN'T STOLEN SOMEONE ELSE'S WORK. Seriously...how the fuck can people here not see that literally dozens of people stole this guys work, knowingly, and then want to put the burden on him to track each of them down, ask them nice to put up or take down, hope they do, "negotiate" something unspecified, lather, rinse, repeat, before he's allowed to use the law specifically intended to protect him in this situation.

What a load of histrionic bullshit. Gitmo? Are you fucking kidding me? You're really lacking an argument so much you have to pull that out? Call him a Nazi child molester and seal the deal while your at it. What, pray tell, is there to "negotiate" here? It's not like she and the others didn't know they were taking someone else's work, without permission or credit, and using it to make money for themselves. If someone steals your wallet, are you obligated to ask nicely for it back before you call the cops? Bullshit. People stole his stuff. There's a law that gives him redress. He used it. Correctly. Period. And you genuinely want to make out that he's the bad guy here? You believe this? And you paint him with the same brush as corrupt and illegal government actions. That is so deeply sad, and reflects so badly on your broken sense of ethics, I lack adequate words...

So if I walk up to you and take something that belongs to you, in your world view I should track you down and ask nicely for it back before I call the cops? It's not like she and the others didn't know they were taking someone else's work, without permission or credit, and using it to make money for themselves. And you genuinely want to make out that he's the bad guy here? You believe this? Really...thanks for making sure I'm not getting out of this week without one more reminder how hopelessly fucked up and bankrupt some peoples moral world view can be.

Didn't read the article, eh? Don't understand the issues I see? How'd you miss your face with that knee-jerk.

Oh, yes. It's all about helping the users get their job done. Let's take a trip through my midsized companies summary of just this months "this phrase 'business need' does not mean what you think it means", edited for clarity of intent. Thank the gods our management know the difference between "facilitating business" and "feckless idiots who are endangering the company".

U: "I need iTunes on my work PC"
IT: "Why would you even *want* to do this. Bring in your iPod."

U: "Full disk encryption is a pain in the ass, what with the second password. Please turn it off on my laptop."
IT: "You carry vast amounts of sensitive employee data on your laptop. And there's no second password. It's just the screen you enter your single password looks different."
U: "So?"
IT: "You've lost your laptop twice in the last 3 years. You leave it in your back seat. Even though we've told you not to."
U: "So?"

U: "I don't like X (the very expensive, very capable software package the whole rest of the team agreed to use, and be trained on at additional great cost). I used Y at my last job and I want to use that. I want you buy it. And I'll probably need some additional training."
IT: Checking records, user missed most of the training on X.

U: "I want to use KTBICS (known to be insecure cloud service) to share files amongst my team"
IT: "You're a finance group. Handling SOX related data. And we already have a corporate approved, secure service that does exactly the same thing."
U: "Well, we're already using the non-commercial free version of KTBICS to share the same data, so we don't see what the problem is."

U: "I want you to install IIS, SQLserver and .NET on my desktop PC for testing."
IT: "We've built a sophisticated, secure dev/test environment to do exactly this."
U: "I forgot about that. But since I have to deliver this week I won't have time to finish the project if I have to learn how to use the approved platform. So just install everything on my machine. And I'll need the Internet to have access."
IT: (check records...user blew off training on the dev platform, which would have allowed them to spin up everything they needed in about 5 minutes).
IT: "Ummm....When is your due date, and what IP addresses need access?"
U: "It's due this Friday. I don't know what IP addresses need access, so just let everyone in.".

U: "I don't want to use X. X is made by Microsoft, and I have moral objections to using Microsoft products. I want to use open source package Y."
IT: "If you have a moral objection to using Microsoft, why did you take a job on a team developing .NET applications on Windows Server 2008R2 in C# using Visual Studio with a SQLServer backend? Something made clear as far back as the job ad you responded to?"