Slashdot Mirror

According to another source pharmamaster is a russian spammer, who hates the methods used by Blue Security's client software, which anonymously sends thousands of legal opt-out requests simultaneously to the spammer's website. The thing that pissed him off is that it takes a lot of time to handle all those request!
Finally a legal system which also kicks the spammers in the NUTS. This attack has proven that the system really works.
More can be read at these links http://www.wired.com/news/technology/security/0,70 831-0.html?tw=rss.index
at http://hotwired.com/news/technology/0,70820-0.html
and at http://hotwired.com/news/technology/0,70798-0.html

According to another source pharmamaster is a russian spammer, who hates the methods used by Blue Security's client software, which anonymously sends thousands of legal opt-out requests simultaneously to the spammer's website. The thing that pissed him off is that it takes a lot of time to handle all those request!
Finally a legal system which also kicks the spammers in the NUTS. This attack has proven that the system really works.
More can be read at these links http://www.wired.com/news/technology/security/0,70 831-0.html?tw=rss.index
at http://hotwired.com/news/technology/0,70820-0.html
and at http://hotwired.com/news/technology/0,70798-0.html

dan kohn wrote a nice essay ("steal this essay 1") about why when the marginal cost to produce something is zero, the property regime must be rethought. bradford delong, a berkeley economist (and occasional wired contributor :) in conjunction with froomkin wrote a more detailed piece here. oh and delong also presented with lawrence summers (former treasury secretary, now president of harvard) this stuff at the 2001 annual federal reserve symposium in jackson hole, including an interesting proposal:

"New institutions and new kinds of institutions--perhaps even some that have been tried before, like the French government's purchase and placing in the public domain of the first photographic patents in the early nineteenth century (see Kremer (1998))--may well be necessary to achieve the fourfold objectives of (a) price equal to marginal cost, (b) entrepreneurial energy, (c) accelerating the cumulative process of research, and (d) providing appropriate financial incentives for research and development. The work of Harvard economist Michael Kremer (1998, 2000), both with respect to the possibility of public purchase of patents at auction and of shifting some public research and development funding from effort-oriented to result-oriented processes (that is, holding contests for private companies to develop vaccines instead of funding research directly), is especially intriguing in its attempts to develop institutions that have all the advantages of market competition, natural monopoly, and public provision."

A page that reports what your browser is telling it, and what the page thinks is actually the case, is here Yes, it will detect Opera, even if Opera's masquerading as something else.

I ripped off^H^H^H^H^H re-used the code from elsewhere - leaving attribution in the source, then modified it a bit. If anyone knows a better bit of javascript to do this, I'd be interested.

Any relative novice who aspires to the title of Webmaster could do worse than having a look at the whole About This Site section, which deals with making pages browser-agnostic, fast to download, accessible to the visually impaired, and not reliant on plug-ins or even scripts. I'm the author BTW, and most certainly not an expert, or even good. Just better than the Frontpage scriptkiddies that masquerade as 31337 htmlasters. Anyone who can give me some more tips on how to improve the site, feel free to contact me.

Sorry, I was rushed last time and didn't get a chance to get the link working here's a link to some wired interviews (I coudn't link directly to one) and here's some pics of the actual robots.

#9. Slashdot is a plot by Microsoft to destroy the
productivity of Linux users.

I have friends who were once tremendously productive
programmers, until they started reading Slashdot. Then, the
endless stream of links, updated a dozen times a day no less (so
you don't go once a day to get your fix; instead, you keep a
window open and hit reload every twenty minutes or so), steadily
seduced them, until they eventually became babbling idiots,
dribbling saliva from the corners of their mouths, ranting on
the forums about the relative merits of Karma Whores and
Anonymous Cowards. Can there be any doubt that this website is
anything other than a nefarious ploy to destroy Linux by
undermining the productivity of its developers? And is there
any organization that would like to destroy Linux more than
Microsoft? (Well, maybe the Santa
Cruz Operation...) Is it any coincidence that just as the
Feds were working out Microsoft's sentence, Microsoft sued
Slashdot, resulting in a firestorm of geek ire that totally
overshadowed the monopoly ruling?

#8. Screaming 14-year-old boys attempting to prove to
each other that they are more 3133t than j00.

Need I say more?

#7. Technical opinions refereed by popular vote means
lousy technical opinions.

Before the Internet, a certain breed of deconstructionists
had a lot of fun telling everybody that "privileging of dominant
paradigms" was wrecking the world. The Internet has taught us
that privileging certain views is absolutely crucial to avoid
drowning in the ravings of idiots. On Slashdot, many articles
discuss technical issues---but comments are refereed by popular
vote, and even though the populace of Slashdot readers knows
somewhat more than your average set of people off the street,
they still tend to promote (as in "moderate up") a lot of
technical nonsense. Reading Slashdot can therefore often be
worse than useless, especially to young and budding programmers:
it can give you exactly the wrong idea about the
technical issues it raises.

The pre-Internet publishing world had magazines, newspapers, and
journals with editors. Respectable publications hired
qualified editors. Those qualified editors were educated
enough to make intelligent decisions about the quality of
content. The Slashdot model removes the editors and substitutes
popular vote, and the result (unfortunately) is that the quality
level becomes incredibly inconsistent. It was an interesting
experiment; it didn't work, not for Slashdot (though it might
work in some other population of users). Too bad. Now, it's
time to quit.

#6. Community myth that Linux is technically superior to
any other operating system in the known
universe.

People who do operating
systems research, of course, think this is a joke. Dissent
from this view in Slashdot, however, and you'd better be wearing
your asbestos fatigues.

#5. Butt-ugly visual design.

Of course, this one's a matter of taste. However, in my
analysis, the visual elements of the Slashdot site are basically
hopelessly confused and wrong. From the cryptic links in the
left margin, to the drop-shadowed graphics (hello, digital
design cliche circa 1994?), to the offensively lousy color
scheme (let's use circuit board green, because it's "News for
Nerds", right?) I can't find much to like about the design of
Slashdot.

#4. Gullible editorial staff continues to post links to
any and all articles that vaguely criticize Linux in any
way.

Blowhards (like the flock of irresponsible columnists over
at the Windows-boosterism rag InfoWorld) have had tons of
fun taking advantage of this tendency to drive hits to their
site. On any given day, Slashdot readers are treated to another
link to another column by another self-proclaimed pundit
declaring that Linux is (pick one) unreliable, not scalable, not
user-friendly, doomed, piracy-inducing, foul-smelling, or
un-American. And irony was that the editors of Slashdot are
falling right into the pundits' trap: inciting the Slashdot
community is the one surefire way to drive up your hit count and
hence your revenue from ad banners. Did the Slashdot editors
ever wise up? Not that I ever saw. Given how tiresome the
endless pro-Linux jihad had become by the time I quit, I have
very little desire to go back and find out whether that's
changed.

#3. Gullible editorial staff continues to post links to
bogus pseudoscience articles by crackpots.

At the time I quit, the editors were posting links to
theories of alternate consciousness, unified theories of the
universe made up by people in their garages, and the like at a
rate of two or three a week. And the number was only
increasing. If I want to read articles that promote totally
bogus pseudoscience, I'll open up the Village
Voice. We don't need another webzine filling that
role.

#2. Editorial/comment system pretends to be democratic
but in reality most content remains firmly in the iron clasp of
the editors.

The above problems with editorial could be solved if stories
could be moderated as well as comments, or if editors paid
attention to negative feedback about the posting of certain
articles. However, the editorial staff, while pretending to be
ideology-free selectors of any "interesting" content, in fact
exert tremendous power over the content of the site, because
they are the only ones who can select top-level links. They
have furthermore demonstrated, for all the reasons above, that
they cannot use this power wisely.

In fact, if you think about it, the links on Slashdot are easily
an order of magnitude less interesting, on average, than those
of Suck, Hotwired, or FEED---all of which are run by
smart editors with good taste (and two of which are dead---thus
proving that only the good die young). If you've read any of
these webzines, you'll probably agree. Rob and Hemos simply
don't compare, as editors, to Stephen Johnson or Joey
Anuff.

So, really, it's time to ask yourself: why should I read
Slashdot? Because it targets my demographic? That's a silly
reason. So why not quit today?

#1. Two words: Jon Katz.

Every community has its resident gasbag. The difference
between Slashdot and other communities is that they have the
means to kick their village idiot off his soapbox, but they lack
the will. If Jon Katz is not the single worst writer for any
webzine, anywhere on the planet, alive today, then I am a
penguin. His writing manages to be endlessly meandering and
verbose, and simultaneously utterly content-free.

Notice, by the way, that I have not said a word about his
technical acumen. It's not necessary to. Katz (who, like all
opportunists, likes to paint himself as an innocent victim
whenever he's criticized) makes a big deal about how there are
"technical snobs" in the Linux user population who blast him for
not being a technical genius. To tell the truth, Katz's
inability to install even recent Linux distributions (which are
arguably as easy to install as MacOS or Windows) on a
run-of-the-mill x86 PC does testify to his general cluelessness.
However, Katz is not a programmer or sysadmin; he's a writer.
He must stand or fall based on the quality of his writing. And
his writing is totally the pits. He would never have gotten
published anywhere but Slashdot; even WIRED, cheerleaders of all
things "digital" and "decentralized", finally got tired of his
babbling and let him go. The cheesiest, most blatantly
pandering "Hookers Who Read Proust" article on Salon.com displays more literary
skill than the finest Katz screed ever to see the light of
day.

To make things worse, Katz is also a shameless opportunist who
regularly uses Slashdot to promote his books. And the Slashdot
admins go right along with it. You can't criticize someone for
their taste in friends, but you can criticize them for
continuing in a relentless and blind nepotism that destroys the
quality of the site.

No single factor wase more pivotal in driving me away from
Slashdot than Jon Katz. Even when I registered for an account
and filtered Katz out, still he made it into news items not
labeled Jon Katz---presumably to promote sales of his book.
What other webzine displays such a blatant disrespect for its
readers?

But then again, Katz's pandering, one-note "Ich bin ein Geek"
spiel may be exactly what the Slashdot audience
deserves.

Simply put, it's time to quit Slashdot, once and for
all.

#9. Slashdot is a plot by Microsoft to destroy the
productivity of Linux users.

I have friends who were once tremendously productive
programmers, until they started reading Slashdot. Then, the
endless stream of links, updated a dozen times a day no less (so
you don't go once a day to get your fix; instead, you keep a
window open and hit reload every twenty minutes or so), steadily
seduced them, until they eventually became babbling idiots,
dribbling saliva from the corners of their mouths, ranting on
the forums about the relative merits of Karma Whores and
Anonymous Cowards. Can there be any doubt that this website is
anything other than a nefarious ploy to destroy Linux by
undermining the productivity of its developers? And is there
any organization that would like to destroy Linux more than
Microsoft? (Well, maybe the Santa
Cruz Operation...) Is it any coincidence that just as the
Feds were working out Microsoft's sentence, Microsoft sued
Slashdot, resulting in a firestorm of geek ire that totally
overshadowed the monopoly ruling?

#8. Screaming 14-year-old boys attempting to prove to
each other that they are more 3133t than j00.

Need I say more?

#7. Technical opinions refereed by popular vote means
lousy technical opinions.

Before the Internet, a certain breed of deconstructionists
had a lot of fun telling everybody that "privileging of dominant
paradigms" was wrecking the world. The Internet has taught us
that privileging certain views is absolutely crucial to avoid
drowning in the ravings of idiots. On Slashdot, many articles
discuss technical issues---but comments are refereed by popular
vote, and even though the populace of Slashdot readers knows
somewhat more than your average set of people off the street,
they still tend to promote (as in "moderate up") a lot of
technical nonsense. Reading Slashdot can therefore often be
worse than useless, especially to young and budding programmers:
it can give you exactly the wrong idea about the
technical issues it raises.

The pre-Internet publishing world had magazines, newspapers, and
journals with editors. Respectable publications hired
qualified editors. Those qualified editors were educated
enough to make intelligent decisions about the quality of
content. The Slashdot model removes the editors and substitutes
popular vote, and the result (unfortunately) is that the quality
level becomes incredibly inconsistent. It was an interesting
experiment; it didn't work, not for Slashdot (though it might
work in some other population of users). Too bad. Now, it's
time to quit.

#6. Community myth that Linux is technically superior to
any other operating system in the known
universe.

People who do operating
systems research, of course, think this is a joke. Dissent
from this view in Slashdot, however, and you'd better be wearing
your asbestos fatigues.

#5. Butt-ugly visual design.

Of course, this one's a matter of taste. However, in my
analysis, the visual elements of the Slashdot site are basically
hopelessly confused and wrong. From the cryptic links in the
left margin, to the drop-shadowed graphics (hello, digital
design cliche circa 1994?), to the offensively lousy color
scheme (let's use circuit board green, because it's "News for
Nerds", right?) I can't find much to like about the design of
Slashdot.

#4. Gullible editorial staff continues to post links to
any and all articles that vaguely criticize Linux in any
way.

Blowhards (like the flock of irresponsible columnists over
at the Windows-boosterism rag InfoWorld) have had tons of
fun taking advantage of this tendency to drive hits to their
site. On any given day, Slashdot readers are treated to another
link to another column by another self-proclaimed pundit
declaring that Linux is (pick one) unreliable, not scalable, not
user-friendly, doomed, piracy-inducing, foul-smelling, or
un-American. And irony was that the editors of Slashdot are
falling right into the pundits' trap: inciting the Slashdot
community is the one surefire way to drive up your hit count and
hence your revenue from ad banners. Did the Slashdot editors
ever wise up? Not that I ever saw. Given how tiresome the
endless pro-Linux jihad had become by the time I quit, I have
very little desire to go back and find out whether that's
changed.

#3. Gullible editorial staff continues to post links to
bogus pseudoscience articles by crackpots.

At the time I quit, the editors were posting links to
theories of alternate consciousness, unified theories of the
universe made up by people in their garages, and the like at a
rate of two or three a week. And the number was only
increasing. If I want to read articles that promote totally
bogus pseudoscience, I'll open up the Village
Voice. We don't need another webzine filling that
role.

#2. Editorial/comment system pretends to be democratic
but in reality most content remains firmly in the iron clasp of
the editors.

The above problems with editorial could be solved if stories
could be moderated as well as comments, or if editors paid
attention to negative feedback about the posting of certain
articles. However, the editorial staff, while pretending to be
ideology-free selectors of any "interesting" content, in fact
exert tremendous power over the content of the site, because
they are the only ones who can select top-level links. They
have furthermore demonstrated, for all the reasons above, that
they cannot use this power wisely.

In fact, if you think about it, the links on Slashdot are easily
an order of magnitude less interesting, on average, than those
of Suck, Hotwired, or FEED---all of which are run by
smart editors with good taste (and two of which are dead---thus
proving that only the good die young). If you've read any of
these webzines, you'll probably agree. Rob and Hemos simply
don't compare, as editors, to Stephen Johnson or Joey
Anuff.

So, really, it's time to ask yourself: why should I read
Slashdot? Because it targets my demographic? That's a silly
reason. So why not quit today?

#1. Two words: Jon Katz.

Every community has its resident gasbag. The difference
between Slashdot and other communities is that they have the
means to kick their village idiot off his soapbox, but they lack
the will. If Jon Katz is not the single worst writer for any
webzine, anywhere on the planet, alive today, then I am a
penguin. His writing manages to be endlessly meandering and
verbose, and simultaneously utterly content-free.

Notice, by the way, that I have not said a word about his
technical acumen. It's not necessary to. Katz (who, like all
opportunists, likes to paint himself as an innocent victim
whenever he's criticized) makes a big deal about how there are
"technical snobs" in the Linux user population who blast him for
not being a technical genius. To tell the truth, Katz's
inability to install even recent Linux distributions (which are
arguably as easy to install as MacOS or Windows) on a
run-of-the-mill x86 PC does testify to his general cluelessness.
However, Katz is not a programmer or sysadmin; he's a writer.
He must stand or fall based on the quality of his writing. And
his writing is totally the pits. He would never have gotten
published anywhere but Slashdot; even WIRED, cheerleaders of all
things "digital" and "decentralized", finally got tired of his
babbling and let him go. The cheesiest, most blatantly
pandering "Hookers Who Read Proust" article on Salon.com displays more literary
skill than the finest Katz screed ever to see the light of
day.

To make things worse, Katz is also a shameless opportunist who
regularly uses Slashdot to promote his books. And the Slashdot
admins go right along with it. You can't criticize someone for
their taste in friends, but you can criticize them for
continuing in a relentless and blind nepotism that destroys the
quality of the site.

No single factor wase more pivotal in driving me away from
Slashdot than Jon Katz. Even when I registered for an account
and filtered Katz out, still he made it into news items not
labeled Jon Katz---presumably to promote sales of his book.
What other webzine displays such a blatant disrespect for its
readers?

But then again, Katz's pandering, one-note "Ich bin ein Geek"
spiel may be exactly what the Slashdot audience
deserves.

Simply put, it's time to quit Slashdot, once and for
all.

The story that Al Gore claimed to have invented the Internet has been thoroughly debunked by Phil Agre in http://commons.somewhere.com/rre/2000/RRE.Al.Gore. and.the.Inte.html and rebutted further later
That meme was a creation of Declan McCullagh, a "reporter" for Wired News who is politically a dogmatic Libertarian so extreme that he managed to get a book chapter using him as a poster-boy for Libertarian ideologues, and a different book chapter using him as Libertarian joke-fodder.
If you think this is flame-bait, the aspect of his fabricated story being a Liberatarian hit-piece on Al Gore was extensively discussed in a debunking by Salon

After Declan McCullagh was repeatedly taken to task for his hatchet-job, over more than year, by everyone who was there, from Dave Farberto Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf, Declan finally grudgingly retracted the "story"

But people still repeat it, because urban legends never die.

Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)

On the contrary, it's long-term experience that leads tech-savvy Net users to believe that top-down regulation would be ineffective. And in the wake of the Communications Decency Act, the Telecommunications Act, and the Microsoft trial, why is it naive to doubt the US government could wisely or effectively control the Internet?

Paul Boutin | Wired magazine

You can also link to their sites, raising their rankings in search engines over time.

Paul Boutin | pro journalist | amateur search engine optimization hacker

Paul Boutin | professional journalist, amateur search engine optimization consultant

The idea that Sklyarov is so damaging and dangerous to society that he needs to be physically restrained and detained is hard to swallow. If he were the CEO of an American company that sold the same type of software, I doubt he'd have been arrested. There'd be a brusque exchange of letters among lawyers, maybe a conf call on the Polycom with Adobe and the feds, but no handcuffs and jail. Or if he were a college student giving away free printouts of eBooks on the street in Berkeley, he might get a talking-to. But no, he's a Russian and a computer programmer, which seems to make him doubly dangerous and doubly mistreatable - break out the cuffs.

Paul Boutin | professional journalist and amateur search engine optimization consultant (well, at least to my wife)

Paul Boutin | Wired Magazine | Senior Editor | and amateur search engine optimization consultant

Some usage I remember:

1. (Describing a PC) Equipped with sound, video, and CD-ROM.
2. (Describing a game or web site) Graphically intensive, with sound and/or video.
3. (Describing a data protocol) Able to support multiple services - e.g. ATM, which is designed to support voice, data, and video
4. (Describing an industry segment) Broadly defined to include game developers, web designers, software developers, and editors of fancy magazines about same
5. (Describing a neighborhood) A place where innovative, cutting-edge companies producing 1, 2, and 4 (but not 3) locate.

But it's really obsolete usage by now. I haven't seen it in common usage in several years, except to describe slow, graphically intensive web sites that make me want to uninstall Flash.

(Note that it's 404 in the Jargon File. Probably because it's so amorphous as to be useless as jargon.)

The story that Al Gore claimed to have invented the Internet has been thoroughly debunked by Phil Agre in http://commons.somewhere.com/rre/2000/RRE.Al.Gore. and.the.Inte.html and rebutted further later
That meme was a creation of Declan McCullagh, a "reporter" for Wired News who is a fanatical Libertarian so extreme that he managed to have a chapter of a book using him as a poster-boy for Libertarian ideologues If you think I'm just flaming, this aspect of his fabricated story being a Liberatarian hit-piece was extensively discussed in a debunking by Salon

After Declan McCullagh was repeatedly taken to task for his hatchet-job, over more than year, by everyone who was there, from Dave Farber to Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf he finally grudgingly retracted

But people still repeat it, because urban legends never die.

. .

Trademarks, service marks, and trade names have one particular reason for existing: to help to avoid customer confusion

I think that you will find that your perspective is a byproduct of the development in law, not such perspectives the cause of it.

In fact, if you think about it, your statement / opinion is tortological. You have to think of the sequence causal actions involved in creating a product : It is rather the vendor who decides a name for a product than a consumer who asks for a product of a certain type to be named such and such.

As I already mentioned, the legal form of trademark, derived in case law from the tort of deceipt.

US civil code, Title 15, Section 1125 cites, and its wording echoes this:

False designations of origin, false descriptions, and dilution forbidden.
(a) Civil Action

(1)Any person who Any person who, on or in connection with any goods or services, or any container for goods, uses in commerce any word, term, name, symbol, or device, or any combination thereof, or any false designation of origin, false or misleading description of fact, or false or misleading representation of fact, which -

(A) is likely to cause confusion, or to cause mistake, or to deceive as to the affiliation, connection, or association of such person with another person, or as to the origin, sponsorship, or approval of his or her goods, services, or commercial activities by another person, or

(B) in commercial advertising or promotion, misrepresents the nature, characteristics, qualities, or geographic origin of his or her or another person's goods, services, or commercial activities, shall be liable in a civil action by any person who believes that he or she is or is likely to be damaged by such act.

. .

When you say "When you suggest that International Business Machines, the current holder of the ibm.com domain name, has the right to sue for trademark infringement anyone who registers ibm.com, despite the availability caused by, say, a lapse in the domain registration by International Business Machines, you are falling for a line. I most assure you I am not.

The Federal Trademarks Act of 1995 cited the likelihood of consumer confusion as a means to protect _famous_ marques, in particular it introduced the effect of a larger legal footprint for such marques, such as IBM. Because the collateral value of being able to trade as IBM (and the cost of attaining such wide recognition) is so high , they have been afforded, along with, say Apple Computer, additional protection, against similar or confusing marques _in _any _line of business, and against anyone who seeks to represent a famous marque for their own benefit. Yes, you _could_ try to start a non - profit organisation called, shall we say Imbecilic Burocratic Morons, but obtaining someone else's means to their business would be an infringement and would create a liability for damages. By your argument you could imply that Gary Kremen, the original owner of sex.com should not have it returned. (see Wired's coverage.)

In the next section of your argument, you propose some things which are easily answered : "Why exactly does that IBM have this right? If there's a company in France with the registered French trademark Immeuble Baisemain that puts on a show about selling real-estate, and it's convenient for their customers to call them by a three letter acronym, why shouldn't they have as much right to the domain name as, say, International Business Machines? Can you seriously imagine that their website will confuse people into thinking that they provide computer hardware, software, and consulting services from International Business Machines? And if it somehow does, can't IBM U.S. just sue them?"

First up, IBM has that right because they used a marque to designate products which they maintained in the marketplace. With a high degree of certainty they began using the name when _no-one _else _ did. So we have a designator for a company. By using the marque, they made it distinct _of_their_own actions. To suggest that they should not benefit from this strikes me as unfair on any business.

Now for Immeuble Baisemain (ugh), as a registered marque, you have to ask the question : who has superior rights? For this you would look at the First Use in Commerce rules, and these would, in fact apply internationally, under, originally Treaty of Paris 1846, and - more up to date, US Code Title 15, Chapter 22, SubCh III, Sec 1126, (a).

Because you have not established precedence, or first use in commerce for your example, it is moot.

In so far as you imply that no confusion would exist if I tapped in www.ibm.com and got a French realtor and could not easily find IBM's site or any of my bookmarks to that (or neither could any of IBM's customers or intranet users), I suggest that that would in fact cause a *lot* of confusion. The effect would be tantamount to a stranger taking over your shop-front on main street. Customers would still come, but for all that advertising and promotion, money and goodwill you spent over the years saying "come to 1055 Main and Second for the best firkins in town", you'd have to redo, and *still* you'd loose some business, whatever you did.

"And if it somehow does, can't IBM U.S. just sue them?" - That's the whole point, I was merely showing the basis under which they rightly could.

"Now, modern "intellectual property" lawyers are trying to convince everyone that we should suddenly change everything and ignore the above. Of course, they aren't presenting it that way publicly. What they say is that they are protecting the "intellectual property" and trademark rights of their clients in the new electronic sphere. However, in their actions they are making preposterous claims, and unfortunately many people seem to be accepting their position uncritically

I've taken your paragraph out of sequence, because you were making unsupported and unrelated assertions in aid of your surrounding argument. There is no way that current lawers could easily overturn a history of case law and precedent. That does not preclude the possibility of political lobbying for interpretations, which is a separate and contentious topic. Now, if you are a lawyer employed by a company with a tenuous claim, it may be thought expediant to put out a little propoganda, the sort of which might give rise to the formation of opinions such as yours. However, that alone does not a case make (nor a rebuttal by logical reverse of the said lawyers' corporate polemic). Preposterous claims aside (which are common in times of rapid gain or exchange of wealth (think back to Vanderbilt's day)), the best response is to learn, know and practise the known law. If that doesn't work, you can _base _ on _ that a political response. That may appear to be the course of action you want to take, and whilst I may not endorse the specifics of what you say, debate is *sorely* needed and is one major reason for my long response.

Isn't it much more likely that the lawyers of the world are just stretching the law in this novel area as far as they think they can take it, simply because it is in their interest to provide their clients with the best possible outcome, justified or not?

I'm not so sure there is any "novel idea" involved, except money making. And, dammit, if I employ someone to work for me I sure as heck want them to support my interests. (although I should hope that my interests are properly justifiable before promulgating them).

Finally, I am pleased you agree that SnapNames may not be the best thing under the sun. But I am concerned that you baldly claim I have made such elementary and potentially damaging mistakes in my previous post. Your aside "(and there are plenty who do, you do not need to feel any shame)" is a very smart rhetorical device to imply I should admit (or imply I should admit this, to readers) that I am in fact elementarily mistaken. I don't think so.

Way back before Wired's online presence got bought out by Lycos, they experimented with this format. The interstitial ads were everywhere on the site, but were perhaps most annoying when trying to get to their "Threads" discussions (long since gone). There was an overwhelmingly negative response. One friend of mine went as far as to inject ads for his own nascent web design company into his posts on their discussion groups, then crow, "Let's see how you like it!"

The problem is that regardless of what streaming multimedia enthusiasts would have you believe, the web is most often used like a big phone book. Or a magazine. Sure, more often than not, the magazine is Hustler, but people are flipping through indexes (Yahoo, Google, Alta Vista, AskJeeves, MySimon) to find the content they really want (porn, home electronics, news, music). It's not like a TV where we expect a certain show to be on a certain channel at a certain time, which is exactly what makes television ads work. Banner ads are, in some sense, more appropriate than interstitial ones because they look more like magazine ads.

The only reason magazine-style ads don't work in the online world is because display technology has such a long way to go. Think about the number, density, and (comperable) quality of the quarter or half page ads in the average color glossy monthly publication. Think about putting something like on a single web page, so that you could get ad and content on the screen simultaneously, without compromising the readability or navigability of either. It's enough to give a web designer fits.

Ironically, it looks like Wired has gone back to interstitial ads on their Hotwired site. Pity. It's a long time since that site has been useful for anything (other than as a portal to Webmonkey, Wired, or what appears to be their biggest advertiser, but I remember when there was some pretty good political and social commentary on that site. Sigh.

Way back before Wired's online presence got bought out by Lycos, they experimented with this format. The interstitial ads were everywhere on the site, but were perhaps most annoying when trying to get to their "Threads" discussions (long since gone). There was an overwhelmingly negative response. One friend of mine went as far as to inject ads for his own nascent web design company into his posts on their discussion groups, then crow, "Let's see how you like it!"

The problem is that regardless of what streaming multimedia enthusiasts would have you believe, the web is most often used like a big phone book. Or a magazine. Sure, more often than not, the magazine is Hustler, but people are flipping through indexes (Yahoo, Google, Alta Vista, AskJeeves, MySimon) to find the content they really want (porn, home electronics, news, music). It's not like a TV where we expect a certain show to be on a certain channel at a certain time, which is exactly what makes television ads work. Banner ads are, in some sense, more appropriate than interstitial ones because they look more like magazine ads.

The only reason magazine-style ads don't work in the online world is because display technology has such a long way to go. Think about the number, density, and (comperable) quality of the quarter or half page ads in the average color glossy monthly publication. Think about putting something like on a single web page, so that you could get ad and content on the screen simultaneously, without compromising the readability or navigability of either. It's enough to give a web designer fits.

Ironically, it looks like Wired has gone back to interstitial ads on their Hotwired site. Pity. It's a long time since that site has been useful for anything (other than as a portal to Webmonkey, Wired, or what appears to be their biggest advertiser, but I remember when there was some pretty good political and social commentary on that site. Sigh.

Alright, chances are the growth of the Internet (and particularly the web) will eventually be recognized as one of the major sociological developments of the late 20th century. Someday, we'll want to look back at the roots of the revolution and trace its development through the present day. However, that may well be an impossibility: we still have Gutenburg Bibles, but the original Mosaic/Netscape site is already a dim memory.

The other day, I was browsing through the Hotwired archives. Basically, they have everything to come out of the Wired family of publications for the past five or six years, and that's great: it's fun and oddly fascinating to read an article from early '96 and hear about this fantastic new "push" technology. But, being a Wired venture, many of the stories are gaudily hyperlinked, and very, very few (if any) of those external pages are still extant. Entire dimension to these stories are already lost to the ages.

The are a lot of obvious difficulties in archiving the web, but it's something that probably should be done. I really think not too far down the line, we'll look back and regret that a lot of what we take for granted today wasn't preserved.

-jay

I dunno, it seems like their implementation is pretty obvious to anybody who's read the article. Any patent experts care to educate on how this works?

Interestingly, I read the hotwired article when it came out, and now, nearly 3 years later, I've been thinking of doing some x-mas break hacking to throw together a generic implementation of this very thing! It would have been GPL'ed. Anyone know how different the implementation would have to be to avoid hassles?

This is a perfect example of the "chilling effect" of software patents. As a grad student, I definitely don't have the resources to defend myself against a legal attack from Intel!

J.

Geeks

Nerds

In the majority of cases, if not all, the use of frames can be replaced by nested tables. And there is an increasing trend to do this.

Using tables instead of frames will increase the number of potential users who can make sense of your website. If you have a frames based website, you should also provide a non-frames version out of consideration for people using a browser that doesn't support frames.

Anyone authoring a website with Frontpage (ugggh) will invariably have a frame based website when they don't need to. This means that a lot of mom and pop websites, as well as small commercial websites have frames.

Larger commercial sites are tending to not use frames unless they have a really good reason. Look at the source code for sites such as Oracle TechNet, Wired, and About.com for examples of sites that use tables over frames. Interestingly, Oracle Technet has only recently made the change and Oracle still uses frames.

Many commercial software packages for website design favour tables over frames. Macromedia Dreamweaver will do this I think, although their site uses frames.

Webmonkey has a good guide to how to construct frames, but the article does say
ask yourself: Do I really need frames at all? Most of the time, the answer is no. In my opinion, frames are only appropriate when you have a complex navigation structure going on - especially one that involves retaining a search query while reloading the search results (as in Cocktail or Net Surf Central).

At the end of the day the person you've hired has been asked to provide functionality into your existing web site, and while they shouldn't be stopped from making suggestions on how to improve your site, they do have a job to do. I'd be surprised if having frames actually prevents functionality being added.

Katz, leave Disney World to those who understand it.

Check out the article in hotwired from 1996 that Jon mentions he wrote. At least he's recycling!

Years, ago, when Netscape did their own IPO, there was a list floating around SillyCon valley of calls that Netscape supposedly received before the release. (Someone may still have a copy; if so, please publish the URL.)

As luck would have it, I was just cleaning up my bookmarks and look what I just found...you need to scroll down a bit.

IPO's can be used by *people with a surplus of stored value (ca$h or credit) to multiply said surplus as much and as fast as possible and preferably with the least possible effort. If successful, such users earn themselves even more "freedom". (from what: fear? envy? lack of sex appeal? who knows?;) anyways..

Companies which conduct these IPO's exploit such human virtues to raise money (needed to finance international legal and customer aquisition costs.. (remember, you are now an Internet company dotcom(tm), or you are roadkill, and this web grows global fast)). Founders and early investors of Internet companies can also use these IPO's to amass fabulous fortunes for themselves to diversify and secure by investing in new IPO's, politicians , etc.

Now, partially owned by the "public" (see above*), stock prices reflect "our" confidence in the company's potential to profit. Company managers, typically holding stakes of their own, spur the company to attract the highest possible share price. Bottom line. Period.

Whether our grandchildren or theirs will regard this behavior as blatently criminal is another question.

Whether there are alternatives to inequity exacerbating IPO and "street" methods of idea "ownership" is a question I hope /. will address and soon. After all, the MAN(tm), his law(tm) and by-laws(IPO Corp.) are forms of "code", right? (They instruct energetic systems to behave predictably. Or try to.)

So how do IPO's and like ownership models perpetuate "code"? Openly? How does it affect our capacity to trade our learning and creativity? Are there alternatives? Here may be a interesting one:

"Chaord" or "chaordic". [haHA! 2nd post:] It's shocking that Dotters of Slash completely ignore an archetypical business structure that seems to effectively trade creativity and borderlessly: Visa International. Growth? 20% annually, since way before any long boom, past $ 1.2trillion in '98 sales, no end in sight. Method? Better attract human ingenuity, (the most valuable AND abundant resource on the planet.) Blend competition with cooperation, seamlessly. Failure? Dee Hock, who founded Visa, says it could have been four times more powerful if ownership had been extended to merchants and cardholders.. Customers owning the business? COOL! bu..WTF!? How to hack that???

IPO? Stock? Forget it. Visa can't bought, sold, traded or raided. Ownership is shared in non-transferable rights of participation.

It's a very unusual "learning organization": commanders don't control it from the center. Instead, chaos organizes itself at the edges, adapting locally, learning and evolving. Advantages arise out of individual initiative. Ideally, "chaorganizations" are "equitable owned by all participants." Sound like a more "open source" code for biz? IMHO, /. and RHAT and MP3c may have kinda choked if they didn't consider more "open" ownership models, proven successful by Visa..

Anyway, a more positive way to look at IPO's and Public Companies is as forms of "currency". If you have some to spare, you could buy gold, but you have to pay someone to guard it, and gold's value is dropping. You could guard U.S.Gov't(tm) printed dead prezidents, but why do it when your banker will pay you interest to borrow them? Still, who wants a measly 6% when brand-name "currency" like yahoo! or rhat or idealab! may earn me 600%? In this light, it's more rewarding to invest in people and ideas rather than self-obsoleting systems or hoarding stores of value. Currency users now have more options, can better "vote with their pocketbook", perpetuate what they value, and maybe earn themselves some more "freedom". More options, more freedom? Who knows?

links, again, on dee hock, visa, and chaords:
http://www.chaordic.org/chaordic /chaos_is_good.htm
http://www.cascadepolicy.org/dee_hock.htm ">
http://www.fastcompany.com/online /05/deehock.html

M. Barbrook appears to be a critic of the sort who makes money by selling to lit-crit fans material which would, if posted to Slashdot or USENET, be dismissed as flamage, trolling, or miscellaneous nonsense.

For another example of his postmodern "brilliance", see this Brain Tennis debate between him and Aaron Lynch (also not my favorite guy) on the subject of memetics.

I just saw a Tutorial on this in webmonkey.
IP Masq
It's convenient in that it lays out everything for you.

I think it is a bit in error about the RH 5.2 tho if I rememer correctly ipchains doesnt work on anything less than the 2.2 kernel without patches.

I completely misinterpreted the blurb about this article. I was expecting something like this, or maybe an article about loner geeks who spend their Friday nights digging through server logs.

Katz wrote about Contact when he was on the mountaintop. www.hotwired.com/synapse/katz/97/29/katz4a_text.ht ml

I think it's great that The GIMP is getting recognition from web design sites like Web Review and Webmonkey. Still, it's time to come up with a new title for these articles; "Bring out the GIMP" is getting stale. After all, once Wired does something, it's no longer cool (if it ever was in the first place). Dammit, isn't there at least some line from The Usual Suspects that would make a decent title?

When are you people gonna realize that a nice GUI and Quality software are NOT mutually exclusive?

If noone is gonna use it, why do you mak it?

- Jeff

Webmonkey has a article about PNG at http://www.hotwired.com/webmonkey/99/09/index0a.ht ml that goes into PNG's history and it's failure to penetrate the web. They say that IE mac doesn't support it yet.

Of course, it's the old chicken and egg thing. Part of the problem is that a lot of people haven't updated their browsers. In fact, I still stumble across some old netscape gold (16-bit, even on Windows 95 machines!) and IE 2.0 (back from when it was part of "Microsoft Plus!") browsers here where I work.

1. Lossy or lossless? (I'm guessing lossy, but would like to know for sure.)
   
2. How many colors?
   
3. Does it support alpha transparency?
   
4. Open or Proprietary? (The big one)
   

I agree the way the amazon list is calculated is suspect, but so is the NY Times best seller list and the nielson ratings. Anyway, it is up to number 45 right now.

For people who liked the excerpt, Jon wrote some colums for hotwired in July and August of 1997 that are related to the book. The first was about trying to get wired on the mountain. The second is about the importance of water and the third is about coming down from the mountain.

I agree the way the amazon list is calculated is suspect, but so is the NY Times best seller list and the nielson ratings. Anyway, it is up to number 45 right now.

For people who liked the excerpt, Jon wrote some colums for hotwired in July and August of 1997 that are related to the book. The first was about trying to get wired on the mountain. The second is about the importance of water and the third is about coming down from the mountain.

I agree the way the amazon list is calculated is suspect, but so is the NY Times best seller list and the nielson ratings. Anyway, it is up to number 45 right now.

For people who liked the excerpt, Jon wrote some colums for hotwired in July and August of 1997 that are related to the book. The first was about trying to get wired on the mountain. The second is about the importance of water and the third is about coming down from the mountain.

The best geek show is Nova on PBS. Vampire slaying bimbos and silly space operas will rot your brain. And btw, before you give any credibility to what Jon Katz has to say, remember that he actually liked Armageddon.