Is it just me, or does the word "offer" in the article title sound biased?

"Piracy forces upon heavy metal a new business model" might be closer to the truth. At this point the fact is that the music industry must adjust its practices and find revenues outside the sale of physical media. They can turn to live tours, merchandise or whatever else, but calling this an "offer" is just as much a misnomer as "piracy".

Oh my. Did I touch a nerve?

OK, let's go with the car analogy.

You step out of your car, leaving your keys in the ignition. Someone comes up to you and tells you that the area is crawling with pychotic people, and there is a likelihood that one of them will be taking your car and hitting someone with it. You say it's not your problem and you leave the keys anyway. It is my understanding that Spamhaus is suggesting that you should be fined for that. We can argue that makes sense or not, but can we please agree that this is not about free speech?

I would prefer a non-car analogy please. It's been a while since the last good one.

In any case, if the event you described did happen, I would feel VERY bad about it, and would be very careful not to leave the keys in the car again. If one of my servers was hijacked to do bad things, be it DDOS or spamming, I would feel bad about that also.

Let me guess: you call your operation "marketing", right?

Hypocrisy...

This is just a guess, because it has never happened to me before. However, I imagine that after being on a receiving end of a massive DDOS I would no longer think of not patching your servers as a form of free speech. Instead, I would think of it as negligence.

You are merely lucky. I run 3 small mail servers, all very similar in setup. 1 also receives no spam whatsoever, the other two are flooded by it. I need to use Spamhaus's XBL, SPF and graylisting to stem the tide. If I removed either of the three, SPAM volume would exceed regular mail volume about 20x. (This is not because of a lack of regular mail.)

To the lovely people who have moderated this "Insightful" instead of "Funny"... I seriously hope that you have missed the point.

This reminds me of the discredited parable that breaking a window is good for the 'conomy, because it generates business for the repairman, who then buys new shoes from the cobbler, who then bla bla bla. The real economy in the meantime registers the net loss of a window.

You're correct. I had to look this piece of information up in Wikipedia. Oh, PHP.. And to think that I had some interest in the framework a moment earlier...

It you think hotmail is bad for receiving messages, try sending e-mail to a hotmail box as a small independent mail server or website.

What you will find is that hotmail randomly drops your messages. No bounce message, no error, it's not even put in the freaking junk mail folder, it's just plain gone. Have they even heard of RFC 821?? (And yes, you have jumped through all the hoops: you have proper HELO, rdns, spf...)

Then you try to complain to the standard postmaster account, as is a standard and required practice. OK, haha, you didn't really think that would work, did you? Instead, you have to go through customer service, with support drones who ask more and more information from you FOR WEEKS, and never resolve your issue. Infuriating.

Prices are still high, but not as much as they were at the peak last November. Instead of 80-190% above the pre-flood prices, they are now 60-90% up.

This probably should've been part of the article summary.

I created a HTML5 game using canvas and some other technologies. Naturally it requires a modern browser (meaning, anything but Internet Explorer).

The game is called Cities of Apocalypse and it is a relatively simple game that is somewhere between turn-based and real-time. You can have a look and try it out at http://citiesofap.game-host.org/ (please be gentle with my server :)

I hit a few snags while developing the game, such as Firefox 3.0 not having text rendering for canvas, or Opera having a surprisingly slow javascript engine (don't flame me, route calculations take 5x as long with Opera!). All in all, it was an interesting project that I might get back to someday.

Fonic is a service brand of O2 Germany (owned by Telefonica), offering pay as you go prepaid services, both voice and data. Their data offering is 2.50 Euros per calendar day, for a maximum of 1 GB transfer volume

€2.50 a day for 97 kb/s mobile data isn't bad. Sounds quite reasonable to me. The 97 kb/s is the average speed needed to hit 1 GB in a day.

And while 1 GB/day isn't really enough to spend all day on youtube etc., it should be plenty to keep you up-to-date on news, email (just don't download all attached files) and the like.

Here's another thing people don't stop to think about: In a "multitasking" OS (which the iPhone/iPad OS already is!), or more specifically, when "applications" are allowed to "multitask", such as in the desktop version of OS X, I cannot tell you how many times I have looked at the Dock on people's Macs, only to see virtually EVERY application up and running (but with no open windows). An amusing "cluck-cluck" moment in a desktop OS, but, running on extremely low-end (by today's desktop standards) hardware (like a phone), this "app cruft" would probably slow the response of the UI to an unusable crawl (does the iPhone OS even HAVE "virtual memory"?).