March 2005 Archives

Admit it. You have broken the law at least once in your life. Maybe you have gone above the speed limit a time or two, or made a copy of your cousin's music CD. The law doesn't have the patience nor the time to worry about these occasional lapses. Society must rely on people's good characters in some instances, lest be crippled under a mountain of enforcement actions. But when an illegal activity reaches critical mass, it is the duty of the law to step in and curb the abuse.

Such is the case heard before the supreme court regarding the file sharing and file swapping products known as P2P or peer to peer software. No one in their right mind is going to admit that the products they create are intended to encourage people to break the law, but actions speak louder than words.

Napster, the original digital piracy tool wasn't heralded as a bootlegging product either, but once its true usage in swapping pirated music became obvious, the law had no choice but to shut it down.

Proponents of P2P products such as Kazaa, Grokster, and eMule claim that their creators have the right to innovate and can't be held liable for people's misuse of their creations. There is some merit to that argument, but when these wares become tools in the hands of millions to break the law and bilk others of their rightful living, the law has no choice but to intercede. If the purveyors of the P2P products are looking the other way and getting rich on the backs of others' hard work, even if it is inadvertent, they must bear some responsibility.

They would holler just the same if someone found a dubious method to unwittingly hijack their creations and dent their pocketbooks.

Checking my mailbox over the weekend, I was greeted with my tax return documents. Only thing is that those were supposed to be delivered to the darlings at the IRS. What steams me is that I made sure to mail my return from another government entity, the post office. They weighed the enveloped, printed the postage stamp, and sent it on its way. I even paid for delivery confirmation. Thankfully I had a return address on the envelope (I normally don't bother), and the envelope returned to me with an insufficient postage sticker. Nice!

Wonder what would have happened if I was at the deadline date (I wasn't) and I owed money (I didn't). I guess on top of the wasted time and postage money, I would have been slapped with late IRS penalties too.

Moral of the story? I'm not sure. I mean how much more certain can you be than taking your tax return envelope to the post office to send to the IRS? Maybe get a second opinion on the postage from a different post office?

For some, e-file may be an option. I tried it a couple of years ago and it worked out great, but last year I had some hassles with it and ended up mailing in the return. It's back to e-file for me this year. And, what are my chances of recovering my postage fee from the USPS? Yeah, right.

Seeing Bernie Ebbers' picture with a gloomy face after the guilty verdict was announced evoked some feelings of sympathy in me. Perhaps I am too sentimental seeing people in distress. I truly felt bad for him. He just doesn't look like a criminal. But the facts spoke for themselves.

Ebbers' star rose at a dizzying speed during the heyday of the telecom era. From a small-time phone company operator, he became the mighty chief of MCI WorldCom and would have nabbed the number one spot had his merger initiatives with Sprint had come to fruition.

We have been a long-time MCI customer and I suppose we should have foreseen such a bleak day for its chief. From our vantage point their accounting department was nothing short of a complete disarray. I can't tell you how many uncounted times we contacted their accounting people to fix a billing problem, only to call again and again after receiving subsequent erroneous invoices. And the bills themselves were impossible to decipher. It's almost as if they were deliberately designed that way to confuse and thus fleece the customers.

Ebbers' anguished face might engender feelings of pity for many, but in the final analysis, the man was in charge of the company and deeply involved in its operation. He could not shirk responsibility of the massive fraud that had overtaken the company, and the jury was observant enough to conclude his guilt.

Now that blogging has taken the Web by storm, in its true, come-from-behind style Microsoft has joined the fray with its MSN Spaces offering and it is rapidly adding subscribers to this free blogging service which is currently in beta.

Spurred by an enticing link in my Hotmail account, I recently paid a visit to MSN Spaces. All I can say is that this service has a long way to go before it can catch up with the other blogosphere titans such as Blogger and Movable Type (and by extension the TypePad service).

MSN Spaces is designed nicely, but it is cluttered and cumbersome to navigate. There are no options to save the blogs to an external site, and the space provided (10 MB) is inadequate for an active blogger who uses lots of images. I use Movable Type at work and Blogger at home, and both of these products provide a superior blogging experience. They have simpler interfaces, provide better functionality, and have more useful options.

I am certain that with time Spaces will improve. Whether or not it can catch up with the old reliables, we'll have to wait and see. For now, this is the only blog I'm going to place in my Spaces account. I must try everything at least once.