ISP Thoughts... (Score 1)

H1-B visas? What?! You mean that our government, our loyal US government wants to let companies have it easy to import new workers if they can't find workers locally? OK, then let's just shut down imigration regulation and we'll have all kinds of cheap IT labor running around to fill those positions. Only in America, only here would a government go for a system that allows us to import workers at will from other countries. There are pleny of IT workers in this country from High School grads to College grads, they just know what they are worth and some companies don't want to pay them what they are worth, or can't because they are not doing business well. That is why I have recently started my own company so I can put my salary and my employees salary where it should be. Spam laws are nice, but come on, as an ISP we like to have laws to fall back on when we try to complain to spammers, but they really do no good. Like someone else mentioned, all they have to do is get a new domain and ignore their incomming mail. Then if we try to block that domain or that origin and the domain is sold we block a legit business now. The only true solution to spam is for the ISPs to stop it. How? Easy. Follow me on this... Who in the world needs to send more than 10 or 20 coppies of any given message out? Maybe a business sending newsletters or something? Most often there is no reason for large numbers of any given message to be sent out. We as the ISP would monitor message numbers going out with a new SMTP server setup and napalm the guys house who tries to send out 10,000 coppies of a message. We would establish a list of companies that send out newsletters and allow that, but each mailing would have to be approved before the SMTP server would allow it to be sent. The only problem is that ALL ISPs have to do the same. We cannot get rid of spam unless everyone wants it gone. Let me say this clearly...ONLY ISPS CAN GET RID OF SPAM. The government can't do anything to get rid of junk mail in our house mailboxes or sales calls to our phones, and we've been trying to do that for eons. ISPs of the world unite and kill spam! Broadband for all would be nice, but it's next to impossible in any less than 10 years. I don't see the phone lines EVER being the total solution, and cable lines are even more scarce, so they're out too. What happened when we needed more communication but phone lines failed to keep us in touch enough? We got cell phones! So let's focus on wireless internet access and let the phone companies and cable companies just sit and be happy with their old systems. As an ISP wireless has solved ALOT of problems and saved THOUSANDS of dollars each and every month. Tower rental and even tower construction plus the wireless equipment to service a 40,000 population city takes a one time investment of less than a year of land based monthly fees. Then year 2 and on is just gravy! There are concerns with line of sight and so forth, but remember cell phones are line of sight too but work most times even without a clear line of sight. If we could get high speed wireless internet access with the same coverage as cell phones today, the country would be almost totally able to be online and with high speed even in rural areas. As far as taxes and the internet, sales tax when purchasing online I would not really object to, sales tax is needed for alot of reasons, but then the question remains...who gets that tax money? If the store that made the sale is in CA and I'm in KS, then if that tax money goes to CA, KS is going to complain. We're opening up for a big debate there. Personally, I think in that case CA should get the money and if KS has a problem with it, then KS should convince their people to do more online commerce, but that's just me. If we did everything my way then we'd all be living in a perfect world and that would put our government out of business so we know they wouldn't let it get that good. %^)