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Sweet, does this mean Alec Baldwin is moving to Canada now??

Slashdot needs a good groupware package to facilitate interdepartment communications.

This wasteful duplication of effort could have all been prevented if Hemos in the Bad-Timing-For-Transmeta Dept. had "touched base" with Timothy in the Oy-Vey-Ist-Mir! Dept.

I recommend Lotus Notes R5, which unlike M$ Exchange is available for Linux.

-the wunderhorn
Or prehaps we need to get on Compaq to add Yiddish capabilities to Babelfish...

-the wunderhorn
#define OH_YES_INDEED 1

With all the companies going bankrupt, does it seem that great domain aren't as hot anymore (See fuckedcompany.com). I found this article which list the Top Ten Most Expensive name purchases. Besides altavista.com which sold for $3.35 million, I haven't been nor need to visit any of the other sites like wallstreet.com (a gambling site nothing about stocks or trading is mentioned there) or drugs.com (there isn't even any information about drugs on the site just click through links to generate money).

I don't believe you need to have "standardize" name as your domain to be sucessful at all. Google.com and C|Net.com are doing pretty good with their branding AND w/o spending $X mil for their domain.

I use to work for a company who bought a "high profile" domain name and it hasn't been as successful as they thought and the company laid off some people, including a good friend. So any company tempting you with their advantage of having a high profile domain instead of their product or whatever...beware.

google
http://www.google.com/searc h?q =phoebe%20cates%20nude

altavista
http://www.altavista.com/cgi-bin/query?q=phoebe%20 cates%20nude&kl=XX&pg=q&a mp;a mp;a mp;a mp;a mp;a mp;Translate=on

yahoo
http://search.yahoo.c om/ bin/search?p=phoebe%20cates%20nude

raging
http://r agi ngsearch.altavista.com/cgi-bin/query?q=phoebe%20ca tes%20nude

lycos
http://www. lycos.c om/srch/?loc=searchbox&query=phoebe+cates+nude

hotbot
h ttp://hotbot.lycos.com/?MT=phoebe+cates+nude&SM=MC &DV=0&LG=any&DC=10&D E=2&AM1=MC

go
http://www.go .com/Split? pat=go&col=WW&qt=phoebe+cates+nude

excite
http://search.excite .co m/search.gw?search=phoebe+cates+nude

askjeeves
h ttp://w ww.ask.com/main/askjeeves.asp?ask=phoebe+cates+nud e&metasearch=yes

alltheweb
http://www.alltheweb.com/cgi-bin/search?exec=FAST+ Search&type=all&query= phoebe+cate s+nude

goto
http://ww w.goto. com/d/search/?type=home&Keywords=phoebe+cates+nude

-- .sig --

google
http://www.google.com/searc h?q =phoebe%20cates%20nude

altavista
http://www.altavista.com/cgi-bin/query?q=phoebe%20 cates%20nude&kl=XX&pg=q&a mp;a mp;a mp;a mp;a mp;a mp;Translate=on

yahoo
http://search.yahoo.c om/ bin/search?p=phoebe%20cates%20nude

raging
http://r agi ngsearch.altavista.com/cgi-bin/query?q=phoebe%20ca tes%20nude

lycos
http://www. lycos.c om/srch/?loc=searchbox&query=phoebe+cates+nude

hotbot
h ttp://hotbot.lycos.com/?MT=phoebe+cates+nude&SM=MC &DV=0&LG=any&DC=10&D E=2&AM1=MC

go
http://www.go .com/Split? pat=go&col=WW&qt=phoebe+cates+nude

excite
http://search.excite .co m/search.gw?search=phoebe+cates+nude

askjeeves
h ttp://w ww.ask.com/main/askjeeves.asp?ask=phoebe+cates+nud e&metasearch=yes

alltheweb
http://www.alltheweb.com/cgi-bin/search?exec=FAST+ Search&type=all&query= phoebe+cate s+nude

goto
http://ww w.goto. com/d/search/?type=home&Keywords=phoebe+cates+nude

-- .sig --

Basically I like the scoring on Google, and I like the absence of commercials, but it looks to me like they didn't finish the job

No, it's sega.

Here's an article explaining Sega's release of the Aibo.
Sony makes car stereo equipment. Why would they be into robotics and stuff?

1. Not "prior art", per se, but if the gene exists naturally, that should invalidate the patent. Otherwise, I call dibs on patenting photosyntesis.
2. I would imagine that, assuming I'm right on the first point, the answer would be no. If our bodies are already doing it, it's unpatentable.
3. LOL. Well, actually, Babelfish says that "gene patent" translates to "genpatent", so you're actually saving two characters on the first bit.

Established became should show the BigBrotherAward Germany to promote around the public discussion around privacy and data protection - it improper use of technology and information and contribute so to its acceptance.

Since 1998 such a "price" in different countries has become lent and this year also in Germany at firms, organizations and persons, that impair in special manner and persistently the privacy of persons, or (personal) accessibly make data of third.

The name is taken, in which the author already end of the vierziger years sketched its vision of a future company that stands under total supervision, from George Orwells of more negative utopia "1984".

The price sculpture to the "BigBrotherAward Germany" was sketched by the Oerlinghauser artist Peter summer. It shows one with lead volume gefesselte figure, that becomes of a glass disk durchtrennt on which a binaryer or hexadezimaler code stands to read: a passage out of Huxleys "quite new world".

The german BigBrotherAward becomes moved itself organized of the Bielefelder FoeBuD e. V., that 1987 as a society the production of the public and established unbewegten data traffic. The society was declared by Vernetzungsarbeit in that "Zerberus-network", its Mailbox "Bionic", the peace network "ZaMir" and its monthly organization row "PUBLIC DOMAIN" for subjects out of the future and technology, science and politics, art and cultivation.

On these pages, you find all information round around this first award of the trophy in Germany. The this year's Nominierungsfrist has been expired for the 25 September, would please us over stimulations and/or criticism under marginal address we.

--

If you're like me, you agonize over what the text actually says on the Micro$oft ad in Germany. Fortunately for me, I've got a father who has a Ph.D in the German language, and he was happy to translate the text for me, and now for all of you: The Sentence at the bottom, underneath the mutated penguins reads (my dad is nontechnical and knows nothing of "open source" so where he says "public", read "open"): "There are not just advantages to public systems." The paragraph at the top reads: "A public operating system can also mutate now and again. In the case of Windows 2000, however, all services and support come from one source. That saves time and money as well. More info at: [MS' German web address]" Those of you who tried babelfish.altavista.com for a translation of German into English (shameless plug: they translate several other languages including Italian, French, Spanish, etc.) would have, like me, received a rather gibberish translation, so its just lucky that some of us have parents who are fluent in German. :)

L'Anglais, Le Langage Internet Global?

The articles are in *cough* English...
use the fish, or maybe if can't read English anyway...
--
There is no K5 cabal.

Don't we already have that? It's called a search engine. If I want to provide a link to something, I just say take a look at entry number 4 on this page

My high school has the privlige of using it for its "net filtering" capabilities, but what really distresses me is that it also blocked the fish. My school had it rigged onto the primary router, and I was able to get around it by incrementing the fourth zone ip number (0.0.0.x) by one and setting the poxy port to 80 to allow for unfiltered internet bandwith. It killed any other useful program, such as ftp, but at least I was able to read my email. :)

Of course, Babelfish uses Systran technology.

an open operating system doesn't have to mutate.
Though at times open operating systems *do* mutate. with Windows 2000 however, you can count service releases on one hand. That saves time, and time is important. For more info, visit www.microsoft.com/germany/windows2000

Or at least that's what the fish makes of it...

OK: I get (L to R) a penguin; a donkpengiger; a reinpenrog; and penpigephant.

Now, *that's* mutation!

t_t_b
--
I think not; therefore I ain't®

Using a proxy server, a web server sees the proxy as the client, not the actual client itself. Effectively, it doesn't matter whether the filter is at the server, or at the client, because any proxy makes it appear that the proxy machine itself is the one making the request, and this machine probably doesn't appear in the list of schools.

What this means in practical terms is that one can still use babelfish.altavista.com to view pornography whether the site is filtered by the client or the server.

Take a look at http://solutions.altavista.com under the heading AltaVista Search Engine 3.0.

A little disclaimer: I work as a developer for that product, so of course I'm biased; however, it really is very powerful.

But my grandest creation, as history will tell,

Then I suggest that Slashdot starts covering other countries' national politics as well,

I think that's a great idea, personally. Maybe Slashdot could look at hiring editors (or at least giving story-posting privileges to a user or two) from Australia, Europe, Japan, etc.?

Part of the problem would be, we'd need international stories that are covered on English-language sites, for us ugly Americans whose second langauges look better compiled than spoken -- but then again, there's always the fish, or the occasional helpful /. reader...

As for "174 little "Kazakhstan" and "Micronesia" customization boxes in Preferences;", start out a little more general;

* Europe
* China
* Japan
* Australia
* International (to cover "those other places", until they warrant a box of their own)

Everyone complains that most Americans don't care what happens outside of their own borders. Here's a chance to change that, at least as far as "geek stories" are concerned.

Jay (=

Here's the page run through BabelFish. Doesn't say much more than what the post already covered:

Echelon: Display approximately unknown

Ilka Schroeder, member of the European parliament, refunded o'clock on today's Monday at 10.00 with the Chief Federal Prosecutor, with the public prosecutor's office trusting stone and with the public prosecutor's office Berlin display against Echelon. The display was issued against " unknown suspects in particular from the USA and Great Britain as well as if necessary the German Federal Government because of operation and tolerating the espionage system ECHELON ".

Schroeder appoints itself thereby to reports of Duncan Campbell and article in Telepolis. The legal lever it sets with the Chief Federal Prosecutor with its competence for the pursuit of certain offences against the patent -, for semiconductor law for the protection and utility model. Schroeder assumes in its charge, which is present Telepolis that " these regulations become obviously hurt by the described restaurant espionage activity of the suspects ".

How Schroeder said this morning opposite Telepolis, she wants to lift the discussion with the charge " over Echelon on another political level ". Since passed week the taking place investigation in the " not-constant committee " of the European parliament is " too little zielorientiert".(Christiane Schulzki Haddouti)

It's interesting to note that he's just 22 and he's taking on his government :o) Oh and mine :o)

MAPS clames to work pritty much the way they should. For the most part thats exactly how they DO work. But it dosn't stop there.
How you are told it works.
SysAdmin are basicly just adding MAPS filter to e-mail filters. Thats what it's for thats how it's used if MAPS makes a few mistakes tuff luck so you can't e-mail a bunch of people if e-mail is really that importent you'll get a more respectable e-mail provider or maybe even a better ISP.
Yes this is certenly part of what MAPS is and it is how it got it's start.
But that is the volintary filter. There is the involintary filter to consider.
Why oh why do sooo many lump AboveNet with MAPS? Look at AboveNets policys and you'll see why. You'd think becouse it's explainned in the AUP that it only effects users of AboveNet however it dosn't. It effects ALL traffic going over AboveNets network.
This has the potental to effect all of the Internet. (At least anyone trying to send packings from North America to Europe)
MAPS dosn't mention this much at all. However explainning why MAPS includes websites of spammers seems to at least acnowladge the fact that Above IS in fact doing this.
For a small part I'm ok with Above filtering the transatlantic linkup for spam. But it would be nice if they'd leave other data packets alone. (A lot of stupid American spammers don't have a clue and are spamming people who must pay for a mettered connection)
However even this makes the notion of a volintary filter a pure facad.
A lot of thies lawsutes are about wanting to spam. Plain and simple.
But there are some who are just saying "Hay I complyed and you guys are ignoring me and I can't afford to keep calling you guys on the phone all day"
And I've said this stuff before and someone invarably replys with a link to the MAPS website. So let me reply to that before it happends.
Someone sould sue MAPS for false advertising over that link. This isn't how things are done over there. Nice idealistic guideline that is 100% ignored.
For a while I maintainned a website with webpages detailling RBL abuses... But I've long ago shut it down. I've fought spam for a long time and to find one of the key forces to fighting spam itself not entirely honnest really bothers me. But this is not my fight and I'm not intrested in fighting for the long term.
Here is a place to start doing some research on RBL abuse.
For more information try Google or AltaVista

Name three in the top fifty.

Alrighty then:

Google
Excite
AltaVista
CNN
ESPN
Go.com
ABC News

These all use CSS.

Your term of 'Significant use' is subjective and thus irrelevant. CSS is used on these sites and used well with the exception of ESPN which is obviously developed and targeted for IE (the site uses CSS Positioning)

These are all high-traffic sites but I don't know who's on your Top50 list.

It is in the parlance of research one area that I can personally re-assure you as totally solvable and surprisingly simple in certain ways.

Perhaps you will come up with your own elegant solution like the 'layer cake' one Sakharov did after knowing about yet another way to get to the same smashing result?

Yes I have considered going open design and open source with a POST-VLIW architectural solution from my 80's research. Any suggestions on others that have gone that way for me to study is appreciated.

Right to the story, correctly translated and without all the fluff around it like ads.

Yeah, you know those people from the Netherlands. They always have perfect English skills

Indeed they do, so much that the fish doesn't have an option for Dutch. Which would come in very handy for some of us :)

In this country (I needn't specify which), we elect representatives. We don't directly vote on most issues, even though it would be technologically feasible for us to do so (especially with the advent of the internet). Why? Because we're not just looking for an accurate measure of what people want. We want what they ought to want, and we hope that representatives will better reflect that than their actual choices.

Advertisers don't just want to know what the most visible piece of real estate is in the world so they can erect a billboard on it. They want to know what the next upcoming innovation is so they can be the first to ride the upsurging wave of popularity. It doesn't help that altavista is the most popular search engine in the world today if placing a big banner ad on google tomorrow will catch the as-yet unseen mobs.

Take Netcraft and server operating systems. You don't just want to know what people are actually running. You want to know what they dare to tell you they're running. This is why it's ok for Netcraft to base its statistics on what servers tell each other they're running, rather than on some complicated fingerprint of their tcp/ip stacks.

It comes down to this: Adam Smith had it wrong with his theory of the invisible hand of market forces. It's not just what the markets do that's interesting; for that tells you nothing more than what, imperically, they do. If you pretend otherwise, then you're behaving no differently from all the Linux bandwagoners or Microsoft bandwagoners who base their decisions only on the herd. Herd mentalities are antithetical to proper advertising, and advertisers are finally waking up to this fact.

Cheers,
Froid

Try the fish. And if you can figure out what language the article was written in please let me know.

To combat this, many 'fake' pictures of the ladies are being added to these 'engines's databases. These 'trojan horse' images feature the same women, however they are fully clothed, and contain advertising links to their homepage.

"This is a just a way for us to combat the theft of our hard work" Wippin' Wendy of HardCoreXXX had to say. "This just helps bring back our real customers."

No-one from any of the engines was avalable to comment.

FYI, the babelfish link should be: http://babelfish.altavista.com

the translated site is here.

FYI, the babelfish link should be: http://babelfish.altavista.com

the translated site is here.

As a side note, the link in the article points to The Babel Fish Corporation(TM), a whole other deal entirely.

It's like when Hemos misspelled Babel Fish in a story.
(Use the Preview Button! Check those URLs! Don't forget the http://!)
TIP: If the URL is valid, the link will be black on the preview (you've been there) instead of blue-green (you haven't).

Of course Babelfish is at babel.altavista.com, not "bable". You'd think with all the bucks in /. the guys could afford to implement a link-checker in their production system.

On another note, I love the quasi-translations out of babelfish; for some reason one of the other mixed headlines makes me crack up: "Network against Kinderporno".

I'm an investigator. I followed a trail there.
Q.Tell me what the trail was.

I think Hemos meant http://babelfish.altavista.com rather than http://bablefish.altavista.com.

Aside from that, this sounds pretty bad... Hopefully with enough protest, and enough signatures on the petition the vote will swing back against software patents.

Other than that, though, the interfaces that most search engines use are pretty bad. There is usually no way to filter through a set of results to eliminate things that are obviously not what the searcher wants. Just being able to eliminate a set of domains from the initial results would make a huge difference for me.

AltaVista has a pretty good set of primitives in its advanced search, including matching against title, the whole URL, the hostname, what sites it links to, and the text in anchors; you can also use "*" to say "search for anything beginning with this". So you could do a serch like:

title:slashdot* AND NOT (host:portman OR host:hot-grits OR host:penis-bird)

I find that being able to search by title helps enourmously, and being able to use "*" saves me from having to search on variations of the same term/prefix.

Tweaking meta tags to ensure high placement in
search results is dead, dead, dead. AltaVista is doing a rank-by-number-of-links thing, just like
Google. ("Raging Search" and "AltaVista" are the same
information, just different layouts.)

You mean this? Follow the Advanced Search link on the left navbar from AV's homepage.

Or, if you prefer text mode, you can get something pretty close to Raging, but with Boolean operators and date ranges.

Every day we're standing in a wind tunnel/Facing down the future coming fast - Rush

You mean this? Follow the Advanced Search link on the left navbar from AV's homepage.

Or, if you prefer text mode, you can get something pretty close to Raging, but with Boolean operators and date ranges.

Every day we're standing in a wind tunnel/Facing down the future coming fast - Rush

What the f[s]ck is pornographic about foreign language translations?!!??!

I believe the reasoning is that you could use the "Translate Web Page" option on BabelFish to translate a porno site's page. Then, since the URL of the page you load comes from babelfish.altavista.com and not blockedpornsite.com, it gets past the filter proxy. What you get back is a page with a bunch of porno pics and some translated text, without setting off the filter proxy.

So, I'm sure that's the suits' reasoning behind it. Of course, it's completely stupid, since there is a huge legitimate use for BabelFish (actually translating pages or text!). I don't agree with this decision at all, but I'm 99% sure it's why they chose to do so.

BTW, good luck trying to convince them to remove CyberPatrol or, even better, get CyberPatrol to deblacklist BabelFish. But just think of all the warm fuzzies you'll have knowing that your inability to translate foreign languages is Protecting The Children (TM).

--

It's preferable if these are open source, but they don't have to be to suit your purpose; for example Metrowerks PowerPlant is the most popular application framework for the MacOS, and although it is a commercial product it is inexpensively available and when you do buy the Codewarrior development system you get the PowerPlant source code on the installation disk.

You can even develop an open source framework yourself and publish it openly, and invite in contributors publicly, and distribute non-subversive demo and test programs. Alternatively, you can add functionality to frameworks that almost suit the purpose and submit your patches back to the original maintainers.

This will save you work, although you may have to write "adapters" to be able to use someone else's library for your own purposes, it will increase reliability of your product, because the framework will have already been debugged by someone else and also tested under a wider variety of circumstances than it will encounter in your code, and you can concentrate your work on the particularly subversive parts.

Then you post only the "interesting" parts of your source code, and provide hyperlinks to the needed application frameworks in your build instructions. Be sure to include the version numbers needed for this build of your program, and if the sources to any of the frameworks are signed with a public key, include the key which those sources were signed with when you got them. That way you can be sure future programmers can rebuild the same program as you did.

It may well be that you have a large application but only a few source files and some build instructions to upload, which could be done off a floppy disk at a public access terminal. If you upload these to a few free webhosting service pages, then email the URL to a bunch of warez site maintainers, your code will be looked after.

Note: to find lots of warez sites (and even more serialz sites) go to Altavista, click on "Advanced Search" and enter:

download and warez and photoshop and illustrator and crack

Note that if you want to build a Windows application you can build it with Cygwin (a GNU shell environment for Windows including gcc) so you can be sure Microsoft doesn't embed Globally Unique Identifiers in your code. I'd also suggest that when you make a windows build, you buy a brand-new copy of windows 98 (pay cash), install it on a freshy formatted hard drive, build your binary, upload it, low-level format the hard disk you built it on and throw away the Windows 98 installation disk and all the materials that came with it. It's probably hard to get away with installing a development system on a public access terminal.

If you don't want to use a public access terminal (after all, you might be recorded on a surveillance camera, or the coffee shop waiters might remember you skulking around), then use Zero Knowledge Systems' Freedom to anonymize your web access.

Note that the way Freedom works is your HTTP packets are multiply encrypted with the public keys of the Freedom Network's servers, then "unwrapped" one by one as they pass through up to three servers until they are passed unencrypted to the public net at a faraway place.

Freedom provides both anonymous web browsing and anonymous email send and receive.

Some sources for open source libraries:

• Available C++ Libraries FAQ
• The Apache XML Project
• The Free Software Foundation software page
• Walnut Creek CDROM Free Software Archive
• SourceForge
• Freshmeat
• Gnome

On the other hand, when you write new code, it is definitely worth while to snip out little bits and make sure that they will compile and run on their own, or depend only on other readily available libraries. That way you can create a library yourself.

The book More C++ Gems has some articles on Large-Scale Software Architecture that discusses reducing cyclic dependencies in software projects, in part so that the projects can be rebuilt faster but also so that they can be unit tested in smaller parts and the parts can be extracted out and reused in other programs - although the claim is often made that object-oriented software is more reusable, this claim is baseless unless good engineering practices are observed.

It's preferable if these are open source, but they don't have to be to suit your purpose; for example Metrowerks PowerPlant is the most popular application framework for the MacOS, and although it is a commercial product it is inexpensively available and when you do buy the Codewarrior development system you get the PowerPlant source code on the installation disk.

You can even develop an open source framework yourself and publish it openly, and invite in contributors publicly, and distribute non-subversive demo and test programs. Alternatively, you can add functionality to frameworks that almost suit the purpose and submit your patches back to the original maintainers.

This will save you work, although you may have to write "adapters" to be able to use someone else's library for your own purposes, it will increase reliability of your product, because the framework will have already been debugged by someone else and also tested under a wider variety of circumstances than it will encounter in your code, and you can concentrate your work on the particularly subversive parts.

Then you post only the "interesting" parts of your source code, and provide hyperlinks to the needed application frameworks in your build instructions. Be sure to include the version numbers needed for this build of your program, and if the sources to any of the frameworks are signed with a public key, include the key which those sources were signed with when you got them. That way you can be sure future programmers can rebuild the same program as you did.

It may well be that you have a large application but only a few source files and some build instructions to upload, which could be done off a floppy disk at a public access terminal. If you upload these to a few free webhosting service pages, then email the URL to a bunch of warez site maintainers, your code will be looked after.

Note: to find lots of warez sites (and even more serialz sites) go to Altavista, click on "Advanced Search" and enter:

download and warez and photoshop and illustrator and crack

Note that if you want to build a Windows application you can build it with Cygwin (a GNU shell environment for Windows including gcc) so you can be sure Microsoft doesn't embed Globally Unique Identifiers in your code. I'd also suggest that when you make a windows build, you buy a brand-new copy of windows 98 (pay cash), install it on a freshy formatted hard drive, build your binary, upload it, low-level format the hard disk you built it on and throw away the Windows 98 installation disk and all the materials that came with it. It's probably hard to get away with installing a development system on a public access terminal.

If you don't want to use a public access terminal (after all, you might be recorded on a surveillance camera, or the coffee shop waiters might remember you skulking around), then use Zero Knowledge Systems' Freedom to anonymize your web access.

Note that the way Freedom works is your HTTP packets are multiply encrypted with the public keys of the Freedom Network's servers, then "unwrapped" one by one as they pass through up to three servers until they are passed unencrypted to the public net at a faraway place.

Freedom provides both anonymous web browsing and anonymous email send and receive.

Some sources for open source libraries:

• Available C++ Libraries FAQ
• The Apache XML Project
• The Free Software Foundation software page
• Walnut Creek CDROM Free Software Archive
• SourceForge
• Freshmeat
• Gnome

On the other hand, when you write new code, it is definitely worth while to snip out little bits and make sure that they will compile and run on their own, or depend only on other readily available libraries. That way you can create a library yourself.

The book More C++ Gems has some articles on Large-Scale Software Architecture that discusses reducing cyclic dependencies in software projects, in part so that the projects can be rebuilt faster but also so that they can be unit tested in smaller parts and the parts can be extracted out and reused in other programs - although the claim is often made that object-oriented software is more reusable, this claim is baseless unless good engineering practices are observed.

This may sound like a good idea, but it has its drawbacks.

The first drawback is granularity.

• If the value of every single card is large (few hundred dollars), it would be a mugger's paradise because people don't usually carry around much in cash, but a potentually valuable payment card would be a good target.
• If the value of every single card is small, no one will use it for larger transactions. You can buy your roll of bread quite comfortable using real money, and if you have to enter a dozen numbers when you buy your new $99 sound card online, the system is not going to be very popular. We've had this in Germany because it was considered to use prepaid phonecards for transactions. The idea was dropped, however.

The second drawback is non-rechargability. If recharging devices were available, people would start stealing those and recharging their cards at will. To make this impossible, one has to provide each card with a sort of "shadow bank account" and have the recharger communicate with some central authority. Then, you could desable known stolen rechargers.

The third and worst drawbacks is that if it's an electronic device, you can fake it. I spent some time in 1996 assembling a microcontroller-based board that could pretend it was a German phonecard. No one would introduce a payment card that could be faked this way. In order to stop this, one has to introduce either advanced secret card signing algorithms, which are sure to either leak out or be faked sooner or later, or use shadow accounting like with the German GeldKarte ("money card"). Again, anonymity and non-traceability can no longer be guaranteed, and the advantage will be gone.

A very good introduction how the German GeldKarte payment card system works can be found here. I'm sorry that it's all in German, but the system is specific to Germany, so most people wouldn't bother to translate it. You can try the fish, though. An English introduction can be found at Manni's page.

(Sorry for posting this multiple times :-))

This may sound like a good idea, but it has its drawbacks.

The first drawback is granularity.

• If the value of every single card is large (few hundred dollars), it would be a mugger's paradise because people don't usually carry around much in cash, but a potentually valuable payment card would be a good target.
• If the value of every single card is small, no one will use it for larger transactions. You can buy your roll of bread quite comfortable using real money, and if you have to enter a dozen numbers when you buy your new $99 sound card online, the system is not going to be very popular. We've had this in Germany because it was considered to use prepaid phonecards for transactions. The idea was dropped, however.

The second drawback is non-rechargability. If recharging devices were available, people would start stealing those and recharging their cards at will. To make this impossible, one has to provide each card with a sort of "shadow bank account" and have the recharger communicate with some central authority. Then, you could desable known stolen rechargers.

The third and worst drawbacks is that if it's an electronic device, you can fake it. I spent some time in 1996 assembling a microcontroller-based board that could pretend it was a German phonecard. No one would introduce a payment card that could be faked this way. In order to stop this, one has to introduce either advanced secret card signing algorithms, which are sure to either leak out or be faked sooner or later, or use shadow accounting like with the German GeldKarte ("money card"). Again, anonymity and non-traceability can no longer be guaranteed, and the advantage will be gone.

A very good introduction how the German GeldKarte payment card system works can be found here. I'm sorry that it's all in German, but the system is specific to Germany, so most people wouldn't bother to translate it. You can try the fish, though. An English introduction can be found at Manni's page

Well, Babelfish tells me that your statement translates to

I do not become loose the impression that your brain is befackt. What want you in these Slashdot? Creeps you gefaelligst into the political or bekloppten groups! Are probably otherwise what? (which??) Moechlich that I think around the topic the USA exactly the same. Perhaps I would like to hang up the responsible persons Zupfer also everything... Concerns however into these Slashdot nobody nix. How does it come only that me with you the Kosewort " schmeissfliege " comes inn heading? Completely unexplainably... Are nevertheless over keinn interpret better than widderliche Spammer. Seiter such, those their opinion by exactly the same force among the people bring wolln? Militant world-better? Importunately, crazy, by verse and bloede exactly like the Regierers and Militers? Habter nix further druff?? Wollter probably everyone, which does not eat your opinion, abknalln (or abfuckn??) Important door. Beschoschissen - creeps you out of unpolitical Shlashdots! Us damischen Kauze are already bad also without you. Only to the information: With Fuck no political problems solve themselves. Hoechstns increases the number fucked of the Peoples (your provenance) thereby. For Wenner no better printouts druffhabt, rather hold the sweet Maeulchen!

But it doesnt make any sense to me

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Well, took that guy's post through Babelfish

To all -- the USA FUCKER -- I do not become loose the impression that your brain is befackt. What want you in these Slashdot? Creeps you gefaelligst into the political or bekloppten groups! Are probably otherwise what? (which??) Moechlich that I think around the topic the USA exactly the same. Perhaps I would like to hang up the responsible persons Zupfer also everything... Concerns however into these Slashdot nobody nix. How does it come only that me with you the Kosewort " schmeissfliege " comes inn heading? Completely unexplainably... Are nevertheless over keinn interpret better than widderliche Spammer. Seiter such, those their opinion by exactly the same force among the people bring wolln? Militant world-better? Importunately, crazy, by verse and bloede exactly like the Regierers and Militers? Habter nix further druff?? Wollter probably everyone, which does not eat your opinion, abknalln (or abfuckn??) Important door. Beschoschissen - creeps you out of unpolitical Shlashdots! Us damischen Kauze are already bad also without you. Only to the information: With Fuck no political problems solve themselves. Hoechstns increases the number fucked of the Peoples (your provenance) thereby. For Wenner no better printouts druffhabt, rather hold the sweet Maeulchen!

Ya know, I think the original German makes more sense than the Babelfish translation. Hehe.
- Amon CMB

So the judge says search engines are not trespassing, since they do not link knowingly. So, I assume I can link to a search enigne without breaking this broken law. What if I link to a search engine, giving it a querystring in addition to the hostname? Like...

• Infoseek/Go
• AltaVista
• Google

I could go on, but I won't. I assume this would be legal, right?

I wouldn't say that this is a safe statement considering the actions lately against Altavista's mp3 search engine as well as the AOL search engine.

Search engines that link to copyrighted files (mp3's) are being witch-hunted.

Are these search engines breaking the law?