Deja vu all over again

Not news, but if the Register insists on doing an article about it, they should try for something a bit more substantive. Not the first time I've noticed this kind of thing, and it's not limited to .NET stuff, and there was a bunch of this going on around the time of Patch Tuesday--though I'm already unsure if it was this month or last.

I'm always interested in hearing more about Microsoft's incompetence. Never liked that company. However, this article was NOT more. The headline actually managed to tell more of the story than the article, which is something of an accomplishment.

Neo-GOP economics: Destroying the jobs to save the jobs!

Why am I not surprised this is the best idea she can come up with? How many jobs will she destroy to save jobs? That kind of strategy just worked so well with the villages in Viet Nam, right?

Isn't she already the poster child for neo-GOP economic incompetence? How much money did she spend NOT becoming governor of California?

Let me guess. It was just building up her personal brand so she could get the HP job, right?

Okay, she was lucky to get a lot of money. ONCE. Mostly I think her luck was good timing, NOT hard work, because the Internet moves in waves and she managed to catch a big one. ONCE.

The interesting aspect to me is that good ideas are almost worthless. I've had LOTS of them--at the WRONG time. My track record is generally from 5 to 10 years out of sync--but it might be larger. I'm still convinced that some of my older good ideas will also come to pass, though the technology and economics aren't quite ripe yet. To make a good idea valuable, you have to have it at the right place and time, and I obviously have NO idea about those parts of it. Seeing the obvious future improvements and solutions to problems avails naught.

Oh well. At least I'm lucky enough not to be working at HP. I certainly think that would be a distinctly unpleasant roller-coaster to be riding...

Does ANYONE believe Microsoft can do anything SMALL?

Not me, and less so after my sad experiences with an earlier incarnation of Microsoft's small Windows. Can't even remember which name it had at that time. Too bad Microsoft can't get me to forget the rest of it, eh?

In summary, Microsoft sees the OS as a weapon against competitors, and that's why they HAVE to make everything too big. That mentality has actually been useful in their BIG upstream efforts against the spammers, but in most cases it FAILS. Today's important failures are small phones and downstream efforts against smaller spammers.

Hey, when you're accustomed to building trench mortars, it's hard to think about flyswatters. How about another another example? Overly BIG thinking is why the Windows 7 WiFi hostednetwork defaults to 100 devices instead of a more realistic 5 or 10.

It's not freedom, it's greedom

It's getting even worse in Japan these days, but at least I think we can blame much of it on the linguistic confusion of English. Yes, information (sort of) wants to be free, but NOT as in beer. The parenthetic "sort of" is because of the anthropomorphic problem, which is a different kind of problem with English imperative syntax.

Third Point is NOT any part of ANY solution

What Yahoo needs is NOT more greed.

Yahoo should focus on their key business as perceived by the customer side. How many of you have found better alternatives than Yahoo for almost everything? Maybe I'm weird, but the only residual value Yahoo has to me is the email address.

What about the spam? Well, I didn't say I actually use Yahoo for email--but if Yahoo really managed to reduce the amount of spam then maybe the value would increase enough that I would use Yahoo email for something other than a registration dropbox on the safe assumption that the Yahoo mail system is worthless because it's full of spam. That's bad enough, but the offensive part is that Yahoo-based spammers are also polluting the rest of the email systems to the point that I suspect the other email companies are looking forward to Yahoo's demise almost as much as I am.

Yahoo could do something useful, though I doubt they have still have the technical resources or sufficient time before their bankruptcy. They certainly don't have the leadership--and Third Point is NOT going to provide it. For example, it was conceivable that Yahoo could have created an integrated spam-fighting tool like SpamCop on steroids, but something that would seek to disrupt ALL of the spammers' infrastructure, pursue ALL of the spammers' accomplices, and even help ALL of the spammers' victims. Too bad it's too late now, eh?

The Register should start a pool and publicize it whenever they publish more bad news about Yahoo. How will Yahoo die and when? At this point I'm predicting a total failure with the only bid coming from a spammer who wants the email addresses. Not the worthless Yahoo ones, but the secondary email addresses linked to most Yahoo accounts.

Poor title selection by Register (again)

From the title my initial guess was that the Russians had created something vastly superior to BitTorrent. After all, that's the only way to actually make a technology go away. However, my initial response to that initial guess was that no one in their right minds would trust ANY Russian programmers these days. This is just one minor reason why spam is bad (and why I wish someone (NOT the Russians)) would provide really effective spam fighting tools. (Yes, I know SpamCop has a major new version rolling out this week, but they have no fire in the belly because they have the wrong economic model.)

When I read that Microsoft was involved, I knew it was very unlikely that it would be anything good. Yes, Microsoft has managed to become less evil in recent years, but given where they started, they have a LONG way to anything like "good". (Actually their upstream work against spammers is about the best thing they've ever done.) Whatever you can say about Microsoft, you have to admit that they have some good economic models, and vampire-like sucking of blood out of creativity has become the main theme of copyright and patent law now.

What I was actually hoping for (in my foolish optimistic way) was a P2P streaming BitTorrent-like video protocol. Basic idea should be localized and automated caching so that popular videos would flow through the system in waves. It should also have an option to prevent peer discovery so that the distributors and owners of the content could reasonably maintain reasonable control by managing the seeds on their website while also minimizing their bandwidth costs.

The current economic models for streaming video are just awesome in their wastefulness. There really is a problem to that could be productively addressed there, but this Russian idea is absolutely NOT the answer to any useful question.

Evolution of Google to the EVIL side

I used to think the trend towards evil wasn't the Google's fault, but then I read that Google has become a major customer of Washington lobbyist firms.

Background: In America, most businesspeople are nice folks who just play the game of business by the rules. Meanwhile, the LEAST ethical businessmen hire lobbyists. The lobbyists bribe the CHEAPEST politicians, mostly through campaign donations (AKA SuperPACs since Citizens United). The corrupt politicians then write laws to protect the quasi-legal business models of the least ethical businessmen. The final result is American companies must become more and more cancerous and EVIL just to survive.

It can be restated as a philosophical version. Do you think that a business is in business soley to make money? I disagree. I think a business should be in business to stay in business, but if a business loses too much money, then it will go out of business. However, the rules of the game as encoded into American laws now require American businesses to grow like cancers (just to avoid being crushed or swallowed).

The greedy out-of-wedlock children who are driving this process now think their "wealth" is insured by being too big to fail. In the sad reality, a cancer always kills its host--and then the cancer also dies, so have a nice day. Google has simply joined the cancer club--and is now paying lots of money to lobbyists. Google is now increasingly at fault for the problems.

My philosophy: Government should act as an impartial referee encouraging fair competition that increases FREEDOM in the form of meaningful and unconstrained choice, while the same competition also drives innovation and improvement. The referees should get a cut of the gate (in the form of taxes) in a system that also encourages the referees to make the pie (and the total gate) bigger. However, what America has now is like a baseball game where the umpire is paid by a few of the richest teams.

It wasn't Googles fault...

I used to think the evil wasn't the Google's fault, but then I read that Google has become a major customer of Washington lobbyist firms.

Since this is a British website, you might not understand how the American system works, so let me try to explain briefly. Most businesspeople just play the game of business by the rules. The LEAST ethical businessmen hire lobbyists. The lobbyists bribe the CHEAPEST politicians, mostly through campaign donations (now mostly disguised within SuperPACs). The corrupt politicians then write laws to favor the business models favored by the least ethical businessmen. The final result is American companies must become more and more cancerous and EVIL just to survive.

It can be restated as a philosophical version. Many people think that businesses are in business to make money. I disagree, since I think businesses should be in business to stay in business (and of course a business that loses too much money will die). However, the rules of the game as encoded into American laws require American businesses to grow like cancers (just to avoid being crushed or swallowed).

The greedy out-of-wedlock children who are driving this process imagine that their wealth is then insured by being too big to fail. In reality, cancers always kill their hosts--and then die. So have a nice day. Google has simply joined the cancer club--and is therefore paying lots of money to lobbyists and is therefore increasingly at fault.

Government should act as an impartial referee encouraging fair competition that provides FREEDOM in the form of meaningful and unconstrained choice. The referees should get a cut of the gate (in the form of taxes) in a system that also encourages them to make the pie (the total gate) bigger. However, what America has now is like a soccer game where the referees are paid by a few of the strongest teams.

Freedom is really about meaningful choice

It's not that I like Ubuntu so much as I love freedom and dislike such anti-choice anti-freedom corporations as Microsoft. For that reason, I really hoped that Ubuntu would succeed. Unfortunately and based on many years of use, I have to conclude that Ubuntu is NOT succeeding. The quality of Microsoft's software doesn't matter as long as their economic models work--and they obviously do.

My experience is that Ubuntu peaked about 4 years ago. It was quite usable and functional, and even something that I could recommend as a possible alternative to Microsoft or Apple. Since then, it has slid downhill, and there is nothing I can do about it. It seems the best think I could do would be to provide some money to support the OLD and more functional versions of Ubuntu, but that is NOT an option. However, I suspect that there are a lot of people who feel the same way, and it is rather unfortunate that there is no mechanism to let us do so.

I still believe a system like this could be adapted to such purposes:

http://eco-epistemology.blogspot.jp/2009/11/economics-of-small-donors-reverse.html

Just par for his stupidity, though I'm surprised he had the guts to try to kill a real bear.

Question: What did the secret service say to Ted Nugent after his insane rant against President Obama?

Answer 1: Now that you have established yourself as a prominent Obama-hater, it is considered likely that you may be contacted by people who are actually dangerous. If so, and you do not inform us immediately, then here are the penalties you could face...

Answer 2: Because of Answer 1, we are also monitoring all of your telephone calls and all of your email, and you are STILL subject to the penalties...

Answer 3: For a good time in Columbia, call...

Yeah, it's a terrible joke, but I think he deserves worse.

Deathtrap of Yahoo

I think Yahoo is in a deathtrap now. Most of their residual value is in email, and email has gone to the spammers. Yahoo can't afford to fix the problems, and as the value of Yahoo email continues to decline, so does Yahoo's value. Another way to think of it is like an underwater mortgage...

There might be a solution, but I'm convinced Yahoo no longer has the resources or competence to implement it. Hint: They would need to INCREASE the value of email by REDUCING the spam. My suggestion would essentially be a kind of neighborhood watch against spammers, though I admit that vigilante justice sounds better. (Of course it wouldn't actually work that way, because Yahoo would be in the middle of the loop and retaining control.)

Imagine an anti-spam solution similar to SpamCop, but on steroids. Rather than a single confirmation targeting a spammer's ISP and webhosts, it would be a multi-pass analysis with gradual refinement and targeting ALL of the spammers' accomplices and breaking ALL of the spammers' infrastructure and helping ALL of the spammers' victims. You don't have to volunteer to help. I would, and I think there are some other people out there who also hate spam, and all I think we really need is more spam haters than suckers who feed the spammers.

Actually, that raises an interesting new question: How many suckers does it take to sustain each spammer? The ratio of spam to sucker is obviously so enormous that it's hard to conceive of, but the ratio of spam-feeder to spammer must be much lower. It actually seems from the recent spam trends that some spammers are deliberately targeting larger fish, as in religious fools who can be conned by pseudo-charity appeals.

Nokia has a good reputation?

Just wait until they get those Microsoft-based so-called smartphones. That will take care of the residual reputation...

Email? What's email?

What is Yahoo's #1 asset? A lot of email users--not mentioned in the article or apparently anywhere.

What is Yahoo's #1 liability? SPAM.

How could Yahoo improve its value? Reduce the liabilities and improve the value of email.

Suggestion: Before they go bankrupt (though I increasingly doubt they have much time left), they should implement POWERFUL anti-spam tools to break and disrupt the spammers' business models. Think of SpamCop on steroids. Rather than one round of analysis targeting ISPs and webhosts, it should be several rounds of increasingly refined analysis and confirmation. A useful spam-fighting system would go after ALL of the spammers' accomplices (escalating upstream as required), recognize ALL of the spammers' infrastructure (with 'other' options to nuke the spammers' new ideas), and seek to help ALL of the spammers' victims (such as by protecting suckers from themselves and by defending the valuable reputations the spammers abuse).

I'm not saying EVERYONE has to fight the spammers, though almost everyone hates them. I'm not even saying we could convert a single spammer into a decent human being. I'm just saying that better spam-fighting tools would make it much less profitable for the spammers and many or possibly even most of them would crawl under other rocks.

Freedom is really about meaningful choice

Freedom is really about meaningful choice

Possession is 9 points of the law. We should possess our personal data, and if anyone wants to see it, they should explain why, what they will use it for, and how long, and we should be able to decide whether or not to let them use our data.

Why does it matter? It's not just that we can be blackmailed by our mistakes or pressured on our weaknesses. It's that our favorite tastes can be used to manipulate our choices and that even our strengths can be turned against us.

The point about the privacy of criminals is easy to address. Any personal information that we share with another person is intrinsically shared. We can both choose to keep it private, and then it should remain private, but if either one of us feels that there was a crime, then the victim will be glad to give permission for the police to look at that information.

Natural business growth from email spam, eh?

Of course the spammers and scammers are looking for new ways to expand their business models. That's mostly because Google has done such a great job of supporting the scammers with Gmail. In the last few minutes I've received several 419 scams routing the replies to Gmail addresses. The response? Have you seen the tedious hideousness of Google's so-called spam reporting webform? GREAT protection for the spammers.

Actually, the same approach that could work to reduce the email spam could be applied to breaking the economic models of the review spammers. For example, Google could create a review-spammer system that would let us report a suspicious review, and then respond with supporting information. Based on the article, one obvious approach would be to use the candidate spam as a search target, and then ask the wannabe spam fighter to rate the similarity to similar reviews in a similar time window, perhaps supported with colorized highlighting of the likely parallel phrases. Lots of possibilities beyond that. I admit that I don't feel the motivation myself, but some people might want better reviews because they do lots of shopping, or maybe Google could provide coupons to people who are especially good at it.

By way of contrast, I am STRONGLY motivated to fight the email spammers, and I really wish SOMEONE offered a really powerful spam-fighting tool. Something like SpamCop, but on steroids. SpamCop is okay, but it doesn't do much. It's just one pass of analysis with a confirmation for the spammer's ISP and webhosts. What I want would be a POWERFUL spam-fighting system that would go through several rounds of analysis and refined targeting going after ALL of the spammers' accomplices, working to break ALL of the spammers' infrastructure, and notifying or helping ALL of the spammers' victims.

Will no one give me a dagger big enough to reach the spammers' hearts? That's a metaphor for stabbing the spammers' business models to death. I'm not saying they should be killed, but I'm sure that such sociopaths cannot be converted into decent human beings. However, if you cut off their money from spam email, they will have to crawl under some other rock.

Where's my hundred bucks?

If you run the ballpark numbers, it appears that Facebook is supposed to be worth around $100/member. Where's my cut?

The funny part is that I don't feel free to ignore and avoid Facebook, though it's certainly an extremely dangerous website collecting extremely dangerous information and controlled by a person who I would never "Friend", even in the diminished Facebook sense of the word. My real friends have asked me to have some sort of presence there, but there is no way that I can regard it as anything like "safe" to be there.

Small OS from Microsoft is worth twice that much!

A small OS from Microsoft? How much is it worth?

Twice nothing is still nothing.

How much will you pay me to use it? Seriously, the only reason I use ANYTHING associated with Microsoft is because someone is forcing me to. I cannot recall the last time I voluntarily bought anything Microsoft was selling. The ONLY good thing I can think of to say about Microsoft is that they have done a little good against the spammers on the upstream end.

How much of Yahoo is email? How much email is spam?

If Yahoo wanted to survive, they would protect their main asset. I think it's email, but spam is NOT an asset. Therefore if Yahoo wants to survive, they should get serious about breaking the spammers. No, you can't exterminate them, but you can destroy their business models until they crawl under other rocks.

How about a REAL anti-spam system built into Yahoo email? Imagine something like SpamCop on steroids. Instead of one round of analysis and confirmation going after the ISP and the webhosts, it should have several rounds of increasingly sophisticated countermeasures targeting ALL of the spammers' accomplices and ALL of the spammers' infrastructure and thinking about ALL of the spammers' victims. Yahoo could try to break EVERY part of the spammers' business model.

Wouldn't you volunteer a bit of your time to help out? Though it's still fine if you don't want to, because there are LOTS of people who hate spam. If only a small fraction of the spam haters had better spam-fighting tools, they would vastly outnumber the spammers' victims.

Come on Yahoo. Are you ready to think about surviving yet?

Never a fan, but now an extremely unhappy owner of an HTC smartphone

Not sure what my data points are worth, but... I bought my HTC partly on their reputation, which I now dismiss. Most of the problem was a HTC-MUST-CONTROL-EVERYTHING support mindset that seems to match with this article. If they were competent in their control, I'd be more forgiving, but it certainly seemed to me that they were just trying to make it more awkward for other people to find out about the problems and their inability to fix any of them. At least I can't remember any case where HTC was helpful, though I've mostly learned to live with the flaws.

As far as preventing me from telling other people about those problems... Hey, HTC, how's that working out for you? I've long since lost count of the number of negative public comments I've made about the company.

Another data point is that, as far as I know, NONE of the carriers in this country still offer any HTC phones, though all of them used to. My hypothesis there is that there is actually some kind of political problem going beyond the language problems. Personal evidence for me was that HTC was clearly having plenty of problem just dealing with the English side of things... Impersonal evidence is that the non-English part of the HTC website is STRONGLY separated from the rest of it. If it isn't international politics then it must be some kind of office politics within HTC.

In conclusion, my carrier now blames HTC for all of the problems I encounter, and I'm mostly inclined to agree with them. However, I still don't forgive my carrier for failing to find solutions, and it has reached the point where I'm just about ready to pay the penalty fee to kill the contract and switch carriers. Needless to say, I will NOT be considering any HTC phones even if my new carrier somehow decided they wanted to give HTC another chance.

I've had this tablet for several months, though the Japanese branding is AT 700. I'm mostly quite satisfied and could provide detailed comments, but my main reaction to the review is that the reviewer has destroyed his credibility with his favorable references to ASUS. It's possible I just had bad luck, but my experience with an ASUS tablet was incredibly negative, and it was at the ASUS end, mostly their so-called support via their website that completely destroyed any value in their specifications.

As regards my AT 200, I mostly use it for email (with voice input), Internet radio (where the speakers are as important as his review suggested), some Web browsing, and some Japanese study games. Overall I'm pretty satisfied with it, but I don't feel like it's as 'mature' as the iPad. If Toshiba is sincere, I think they can push into the market, but it's going to be a tough fight and I wouldn't want to bet on any of the Android horses yet.

Seems Yahoo is the big culprit here

My own sampling indicates that Yahoo is the leading cause of the increase in spam, especially in the increased amount of spam originating on their servers and the increasing preference of spammers to use Yahoo drop-boxes for spam originating on other networks, both supported by Yahoo's recent changes that make it harder to report spam to Yahoo. I'm at a loss to see how providing better infrastructure to the spammers can possibly help Yahoo edge away from bankruptcy--but if it will hurt the spammers, then I have to be in favor of it (as Twain was supposed to have said about a funeral he couldn't attend).

Why don't ANY of the major email providers support effective anti-spam tools? Let US help go after ALL of the spammers' infrastructure and ALL of the spammers accomplices. Basically something like SpamCop on steroids, with multiple passes and confirmations and more "other'" options to trap new spammer wrinkles.

Remember two important characteristics of the spam problem:

1. The spammers can't obfuscate beyond human capacity when they need to reach human suckers.

2. The number of people who hate spam is much larger than the supply of suckers.

In other words, a relatively small tilt in favor of the spam haters could completely cut the spammers off from reaching the suckers.

Rotton core of Yahoo! email = SPAM

My own belief is that Yahoo's #1 problem is a rotten kernel, in this case email as the core of Yahoo's residual business. What's rotten about email? SPAM to the degree where email has lost its value. Actually, Yahoo's filtering is relatively good in terms of false positives. In my experience Gmail has a relatively high false positive rate, so you probably won't lose real email by ignoring the Yahoo spam folder, but Yahoo makes up for it by their support of spammers (as in scam dropboxes) and in their rejection of spam reports (with a labyrinthine and tedious spam-reporting system.

Hey, Yahoo. Do you actually want to survive? If so, why don't you make it so EASY to report spam that the spammers will stop abusing your reputation?

Two things to remember: (1) There are far more people who hate spam than suckers who will send money to the spammers, so even a small percentage of the spam haters could help cut the spammers off from their loot. (2) The spammers can't obfuscate beyond what humans can understand when they are trying to get a human response (and remember that the suckers are way below average intelligence, too).

In conclusion, imagine a spam-fighting system built into Yahoo, something like SpamCop on steroids. Whereas SpamCop just has one round of analysis and confirmation going after the spammers' ISPs and the spammers' webhosts, such a system can and should be strengthened to go after ALL of the spammers' infrastructure and accomplices. Beyond that, it should help the secondary victims (like the slandered or defrauded companies) and even let us know when it is safe to unsubscribe (by testing the unsubscribe mechanisms for address harvesting).

In conclusion, I think Yahoo is earning their imminent bankruptcy. I only hope it inconveniences the spammers more than the rest of us.

An HP shareholder speaks:

Just a minor shareholder, but still..

In general, I think women are morally superior to men, and I think that much of that is just due to lower testosterone levels. I would prefer to see more merit-based pro-freedom competition and less chest-thumping aggressive ads. Therefore, on principle I would like to see more major companies run by women.

Unfortunately, the rules of the game as encoded into American laws are otherwise. This is because those laws are written by the most cheaply bribed professional politicians owned by the LEAST ethical businessmen (and I have never heard of a woman among their greedy ranks). The laws basically require cancerous growth and any company that tries to avoid becoming more and more evil over time will be destroyed. I would go so far as to say that the current American laws implicitly require EVIL maximization even above the explicit profit maximization.

However, in the specific case of Meg Whitman, I think she's a really bad businesswoman, and that this does not bode well for my shares of HP. Consider her recent MAJOR personal investment in trying to become governor of California. I think she was lucky once, and there's no evidence she will be lucky twice.

As far as HP merchandise... My experience with their printers has been mixed. It's really annoying when 3/4-full ink cartridges die of apparent 'old age', but I'm willing to believe they are optimized for more typical users than me. Can't actually expect them to produce special cartridges just for 'people who print quite infrequently', even if that seems to be an increasing number of the customers these days. I actually used to sell their computers when I worked in a computer store, and again my experience was mixed.

Perhaps the bottom line is that I can't recall ever owning an HP (or Compaq) computer, but I've had several of their printers over the years, and I might or might not buy another... I own shares in various companies.

Survey of Japan relevant?

Is this a good place to throw in a bit about the Japanese situation? Though I don't use them, Docomo (the largest mobile carrier and part of NTT, what used to be the old telephone monopoly), has said that they will implement a new unlimited policy this year. The first 7 GB will be unrestricted (though still best effort and so forth), but after that they will selectively throttle you as a 'power' user. In other words, you'll still have unlimited packets, but they will become much slower.

This actually strikes me as a pretty fair policy, though if they have that much control over it, I wish they would be a bit more flexible about the usage times. In other words, as a probable power user (though I'm not sure I get up to 7 GB per month), I'd prefer to have moderate throttling just during the peak times, and since the peak usage defines their network infrastructure cost, that would seem to be a better deal for both of us...

Maybe the Google could use a search engine?

You'd think this should be a kind of simple thing to address. You scan each new app for its search keywords and see how closely it matches the existing apps, and then quarantine it when it comes too close. The idea someone posted about permissions-based quarantines is also excellent. You don't even have to worry about the categories of the apps, but just assume that any app that wants permissions to do something dangerous should be looked at before it is published to the world. There is no legitimate developer who is going to die from a short delay in releasing his great app to the world.

However, I think that if the Google hadn't gone evil, then they would have already acted.

Known as the AT 700 in Japan?

I've had this tablet for a couple of months now. From the specs I'm basically certain it's the same beastie that is marketed in Japan as the Toshiba REGZA AT 700 tablet. In America it will be branded as the Excite X10.

With regards to the concrete question about the battery, for me the battery life has been quite satisfactory. The problem is on the other end when I am networking it off of my phone and the WiFi drains the phone's battery rather quickly. One slightly cumbersome solution is to power the phone off of the microUSB port, but that required a special USB cable. (The same cable allows me to use it with a USB keyboard.)

Mostly I've been using it for email, some news videos, and a bit of Japanese study. Overall I'm pretty well satisfied, but I have to agree that it's a pricey box and it doesn't get enough envious looks from the iPad users to justify such a price. My current general conclusion is that it still lacks maturity, but at least it gave me more freedom than Apple cares to.

<continued in the next post...>

Matches my own experience with ASUS

My own experience with ASUS was also extremely negative. I don' t want to harp on the negative, but I made such a fuss that the store gave me my money back and I bought a new Toshiba, which has mostly been satisfactory. I don't want to say that the Toshiba AT 700 tablet (probably known as the X10 in English) is a perfectly mature machine, but it sure seems to be a heck of a lot better than that ASUS was.

I will say that it was the ASUS website that pushed me over the edge. Living in Japan and having only limited fluency in Japanese, the thought of additional non-Japanese support seemed initially attractive. Turned out I was much better off just relying on my Japanese with a company that apparently cares much more about its reputation than ASUS did.

Having signed the petition, I received a copy of that email

President Obama has been something of a disappointment. The changes are coming, whether or not he wants to get involved. I even believe that the changes will be for the better--but that's only on the long-term average.

In the short term, where we live, right now the important change is that Chris Dodd used to be a good guy and he's changed into the usual form of political scum. I haven't yet decided whether or not Obama has changed for the worst. Maybe he's just like all of the professional politicians (AKA massive liars), and there was just some confusion because he hadn't been a politician for long enough and because he's a much more skilled liar than Mitt Romney.

Really? Is that the choice Americans will face this November? I wouldn't buy a vacuum cleaner from Romney.

This is pretty good for responsible companies

At least the spammers will have to use more spelling variations of the names of the companies that they are abusing. Of course, looking at how the Internet goes these days, I'm beginning to wonder if any company still has a reputation or brand name worth defending...

Hey, why don't they give US some better tools to help fight the spammers? You know the spammers are going to come up with new wrinkles, but there are two fundamental characteristics of the spam situation that can't be changed:

(1) Most of the crucial numbers are actually against the spammers. I think the most important ratio is that there are very few suckers who are sending money to spammers versus a whole lot of people who hate spam. (The main number in favor of the spammers is the marginal cost of additional email, but that's SMTP for you, no matter how much we wish it would go away.)

(2) The spam that has to reach a human sucker can't be obfuscated beyond the capability of the sucker to understand it, and that means that a less foolish human can understand how to fight it.

My suggestion would be for a major non-evil, web-based, competent email company to implement something like SpamCop on steroids. Rather than one iteration looking for ISPs and webhosts, it would go several iterations and go after ALL of the spammers' infrastructure and accomplices (and also help the victimized companies as in this new technique)--along with 'other' options to quickly open fire on any new wrinkle the spammers think up.

I predict that as soon as one of the big boys adopt it, the others would pile on quickly. I'm not saying that we could turn the spammers into decent human beings. I don't believe in such miracles, but I do think we can push them under less visible rocks--and that the Internet would be much more valuable for ALL of us if there were far fewer spammers and scammers being so visible.

Main value of Yahoo! = email = SPAM!

I think Yahoo's cancer is that they never got serious about stopping the spammers. Much as I despise all things Microsoft (including the acquired Hotmail), you have to admit that Microsoft has been quite sincere and effective in going after the spammers upstream. Google has done a better job downstream, though not that good. At least Gmail seems to have fewer false negatives these days, though I'd rate them about equal on false positives.

Consider two characteristics of spam:

(1) The vast majority of recipients hate it, but the spammers profit by reaching the few suckers who will send money (or personal information).

(2) The spammer can't obfuscate beyond what humans can understand because the suckers are human beings. Idiotic human beings, but still human.

If Yahoo had ever offered effective anti-spam tools, would you have volunteered a bit of your time to help put the spammers out of business? I sure would, but it doesn't really matter about you unless you think you speak for something like 99.5% of the people. Even if there were only a small percentage of spam-hating people who were willing to help fight the spammers (with the anti-spammer tools the Yahoo never created), that would still vastly outnumber the suckers and would cut the spammers off from their crass profits. (Hint: Think of SpamCop on steroids, with several rounds of analysis and confirmation and going after ALL of the spammers accomplices.)

Funny, I hadn't noticed the decrease in security patches

I don't suppose a company that specializes in trench mortars would have any trouble in designing effective locks for the doors and windows, eh?

Google didn't want to go evil

I think these are just symptomatic problems of the creeping evil within the Google, but I actually feel Google is innocent, at least for small values of guilt. The rules of the business game as encoded in the American legal system basically require companies to push the evil buttons to make enough profits to survive--by growing like cancers. It isn't even the case that most businessmen want this, but the problem is that the laws are being written by the most corrupt politicians in the pockets of the least ethical and most greedy businessmen. The RoI on buying politicians is just too tempting for these people.

Don't forget Romney's updated version of Lincoln's most famous speech: "...so that government of the corporations, by the lawyers, for the richest 0.1% shall rule the earth."