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The court based its decision on a section of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, or the CDA. That section states, "... no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider." Three cases since then -- Zeran v. AOL, Gentry v. eBay and Schneider v. Amazon -- have granted immunity to commercial online service providers.

How about this one... Bush Administration Stops Microsoft Breakup? Or this one? Or this one?

Let's sum up:
1) George W. says in an interview that, "I hope, though, that whatever settlement is done it won't ruin this company because this company has been a very interesting innovator, and so I hope the judge would keep in mind that this company is an important part of the technological revolution taking place in America." This is politician-speak, of course, but certainly sounds to me like G.W. doesn't want to break up Microsoft.

2) Soon after G.W. takes office, the breakup of Microsoft is cancelled. John Ashcroft personally testifies that the settlement, which I previously characterized as a slap on the wrist, is such that the government "believes it has established a basis for relief that would end Microsoft's unlawful conduct, prevent its recurrence and open the operating-systems market to competition." I personally think that events have disproven this, but you are welcome to disagree.

Now, if you need more convincing, you're more work than I care to do. I haven't proven that G.W. got on the phone and put a fix in. Nor have you disproven it. However, the preponderance of available evidence suggests that the breakup was, in fact, derailed by the Bush administration.

An old article here

Seems like everyone knew about the corporate infighting except AOL. I wonder if there has ever been a set of operating companies that belonged together less than this group. Everyone seems to have protected their fiefdom quite well, at the expense of harmony.

Actually, Austraila is moving toward e-voting for exactly the same reasons that the US, UK, Canada, Ireland and others are--election administrators see advantages to these systems.

As I post below, these advantages usually don't have to do with speed of reporting, but rather long run cost, accessibility, and "second chance" voting.

Yes, it does remind me of someone.

Wired has one on a vigilante group that goes after perverts in chat rooms that prey apon children. As much as I admire the intent of every day people to keep things clean, decent, and honest. I also have to agree with points in this other article where law enforcement is being hampered by scaring off the bad people to go deeper underground and the problem just gets burried and not delt with completely. Next thing you know you have a problem thats 10x's worse then before since it wasn't handled properly to begin with.

In the case of the software vigilantes. They're in for a world of legal hurt I think even though their basic intentions are good.

It's interesting that this story should break at the same time that Wired News is running a story (or rather another story, they ran the first yesterday) about Perverted Justice an organisation that takes it upon itself to expose perverts hunting for children in chatrooms. The techniques and tactics of the two sets of vigilantes are completely different, but both are examples of what are in effect user regulation of the online environment.

I'm thinking the event will be named something else by the time it becomes the 2nd Annual, since the US Olympic Committee has told them they can't use Olympics in their name.

When I was in high school, we saw the name of the Olympics of the Mind program changed to "Odyssey of the Mind" for the same reason.

I fail to understand why so many people believe that these guys give a crap about their country's shrinking level of freedom, when they have clearly demonstrated that they have no intention of stopping it, but rather, ensuring that it continues to shrink.

It's very different than Active Desktop... that was just the idea of letting IE browser windows be part of the Windows Desktop level so that users could have a frequently-refreshed mini-page of content on their desktop.


However, the Active Desktop intiative did result in the development of CDF (W3C Proposal), aka Channel Definition Format, which is likely what the parent poster was talking about.

It's still around, belive it or not. I know that the CBC still uses it for delivering headlines, and I imagine that they're not the only ones.

Ahhhhh! Do you realize how irritated Bob Ballard is going to be when you wreck his perfectly-preserved ancient ship!?! But you can have the Dead Sea Pizza (or other leftovers) in my fridge... heck, I'll save it and donate this stuff if it means cheap tickets to space for me!

According to news release on riskmanagement.com NEWS, the hiring of PJ happened first week of February. Also see this article

Looks like the Interior Department has been having computer problems for a long time (December 2001!):

"Web wanderers looking for information on national parks, government mapping services or geological disasters will need to get their information from non-official websites for a while.

U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth issued the order late Wednesday after a report showed that the computer system which handles $500 million annually in royalties from Indian land has major security holes that make it easy to access the system, alter records and possibly divert funds."

I'm not fucking trolling you.

I'm not fucking trolling you.

Interesting news to coincide with the conflicting, leaked letter from the California attorney general's office (even more interestingly is the indirect way in which one of these stories coincidentally lead me to the other, but I won't get into that). State courts disagree with the feds, I guess... Pretty easy when the MPAA feeds you your opinions, though.

This actually brings to mind a real question:

In your 1994 essay Meme, Counter-meme you seem to suggest a belief that your injection of Godwin's Law actually worked to gradually reduce the incidence of Nazi comparisons on the Internet (especially Usenet). Obviously this was an unscientific observation, but it seemed rather firmly stated in the essay.

Realistically, almost no one knows of Godwin's Law save a small percentage of net.geeks, and particularly not those new discussion participants who are most likely to invoke extreme and inflammatory comparisons (let alone that subset who are new since 1990 on Usenet).

So, do you really believe that your counter-meme had a significant effect, and if so is it not another "self-indulgent meme" (your words)? Or have you reconsidered that position since 1994?

The article leaves out some interesting details. Like--how many antennas per square kilometer do you need to get this kind of speed? When I lived in Santa Cruz, Ricochet did one of their first deployments around town. This was in the early 90s, so you were getting 2400bps (yeah, bps) wireless all over town, which was kind of cool. Except they had to hang transmitters from every other light pole to blanket town. I think that's one of the reasons they never caught on: deploying infrastructure was too expensive.

It sounds to me like Verizon has something with much better range going here, but I guess Pegoraro didn't think to ask.

One of the reasons I'm interested is that my parents live in one of those oft-forgotten places in the US where high speed internet is a far-away dream. The town (population 500) is about an hour's drive over a terrible mountain road from civilization, so the local CLEC never bothered to run phone lines in: they just set up this crappy microwave link on top of a mountain.

No cable, no wired phone lines: needless to say, broadband is impossible (satellite being the unacceptable semi-exception). Which makes going back to hang out at the ranch pretty annoying.

The point (I'm getting there!) is that if these guys have figured out a way to get high speed internet to travel a good long distance, this could help solve the access problem for rural america.

Of course, I've seen so many supposed solutions come and fade away, that I sort of doubt it.

The screenshot of the document properties appears to show that the MPAA guy was not just the original author but the last to edit it. However, since the editing time is shown as only 8 minutes, it may be that he copied text prepared by the AG into a new document which he then circulated.

Speaking of Mike Godwin, and Internet 'laws', I think /. editors will no doubt be comprable to Nazis when judging responses to send to Mike.

(Godwin's Law, for those needing a clue)

So, this discussion has therefore ceased all useful content. But that's not surprising, really, is it?

I think I gave up on Hotmail in early 1999. At that time it was sluggish and unreliable despite the ample internet connection at the university through which I was connecting. At least I didn't regularly experience slow performance on other Internet sites.

I'm not sure where the Spammers were getting my address; I've never received any appreciable volume of spam (more than one or two per week) in any other email account I've held. Apparently however, this sort of experience is all too common. Of course other spam problems have existed with Hotmail, such as this, and this, and this.

But what really finally pushed me over the edge to dump Hotmail was when the company (as far as I could tell) randomly disabled my account for a violation of the terms of service. Which struck me as odd, since I hadn't done anything with the account besides delete spam from it, read one or two messages a day, and even less frequently send someone a message. It took five futile days of emailing and aggravating telephone calls before I was finally able to talk to a human being (now it might be harder; I really don't know, but I'm also fortunately never going to have to find out). Hotmail never did tell me what I had done to violate the ToS, but nonetheless reinstated my account. Still, given the other debilitating problems with the service, and given that I had no idea what I had done or allegedly done to violate my user agreement (and thus had no way of knowing how not to violate it again) I decided it was time to dump Hotmail.

Broadly speaking, the Hotmail service left me with the impression that it was not being carefully managed and maintained, that Microsoft hadn't effectively managed the transition to a MS owned subsidiary, or that the service was growing faster than the systems serving it. There were also rumors that the transition from Sun to Windows servers wasn't too smooth and might have resulted in poor performance during the transition period, but I'm not sure how true those rumors were. Plus, by 1999 there were a lot of other free web-based email services opening up. I eventually settled on an australia.edu account. That service wasn't always really fast, but it was reliable, didn't fill my inbox with spam, I was never accused of violating the terms of service, and it gave me a more unique and memorable email address.

Today I suspect Hotmail works better -- otherwise its downtime wouldn't have made front page news on Slashdot -- but its improvements were too late for me. I was driven away from Hotmail long ago.

...1) Fanboys. I first remember it gaining real popularity among the Apple fanboys when Apple went PPC. They claimed that the PPC showed a positive second derivitave (growth of growth) in Mhz where Intel showed a negative second deravitive and how PPC could scale to huge speeds that CISC just couldn't handle. That of course, neve came to pass. ...

I think what the Apple fanboys were excited about is scalability of the number of processors. An example of this is the Big Mac. x86 architecture has difficulty scaling beyond 8 processors while the G5 architecture scales beautifully.

The "magic" you speak of is quite possible. It would not cost the government much more than five million to develop something similar to T.W.I.N.K.L.E. and since this was proposed about five years ago, they have had plenty of time to build it.

Of course, you are assuming they don't already have backdoors (NSA_KEY) in most people's computers already. Do I even need to mention ECHELON and CARNIVORE?

As an engineer at a leading cable modem company, I can tell you that the first request from the FBI to be able to tap anywhere, anytime was not technically feasable. Tapping into a QAM-256 link at a random point in the cable is next to impossible. To resolve the signal you have to be synchronized exactly with the cable modem and it is already syncronized to the head end. The modulation code can be updated about every 40mS as well. Just to give you an idea how tight the tolerances are, we have to compensate for expansion in the length of the cable due to the sun heating it during the day, every few minutes.

CALEA is in the PacketCable spec, which is the VoIP over cable. is the standards organisation for North America. Euro-DOCSIS specs are usually a close copy to the DOCSIS specs with a few minor differences like 8MHz bands instead of 6MHz bands we enjoy.

That's right.
Nobody's going to revive the draft.
Just like nobody's going support Patriot II.
I mean, this is America. That can't happen here

Agreed: "The Bush administration and the Republican majority in Congress have used the tragedy of 9/11 to spread fear among Americans, and are using that fear to gain control of all three branches of government - legislative, executive and judicial. If we don't stop allowing the right-wing factions in this country to consolidate their power by taking away our freedoms one by one we won't have a country worth saving."

The U.S. government is rapidly becoming more corrupt. Here are just a few examples, which were posted before to another story:

Killing people and destroying their property:
N.Y. Times editorial
"... Americans paid Ahmad Chalabi to gull them into a war that is costing them a billion a week and a precious human cost."

Lying about scientific facts:
"The Bush administration has deliberately and systematically distorted scientific fact in the service of policy goals..."
N.Y. Times
The Guardian
Wired News
Union of Concerned Scientists

The present terrorism against the U.S. people is partly the result of the U.S. government's secret violence:
About a year ago, I hastily put together a short, incomplete history that shows what has happened: History surrounding the U.S. war with Iraq: Four short stories.

If you don't like it, vote accordingly.

Last week in Wired News.

In 1969, the Defense Department commissioned the ARPANET. Gore was 21-years-old at the time. He wasn't even done with law school at Vanderbilt University. It would be eight more years before Gore would be elected to the US House of Representatives as a freshman Democrat with scant experience in passing legislation, let alone ambitious proposals.

"In the early days of the Web," says Hallam-Baker, who was there, "he was a believer, not after the fact when our success was already established -- he gave us help when it counted. He got us the funding to set up at MIT after we got kicked out of CERN for being too successful.

Except that human psychological responses can vary. What I perceive as good quality, you might perceive as unacceptable blocking artifacts.

Nope. If you see blocky artifacts, chances are good I will see blocky artifacts. How annoying they are depends, but if one codec looks worse than another to me, chances are it will look worse to you.

Also, your example about tube amplifiers has nothing to do with this. If you can't hear _any_ differences, you probably aren't listening too well, and you certainly shouldn't be judging amplifiers. Unless you can't tell recorded music from live music, your problem is most likely low-quality equipment.

However, I can easily tell you which amplifier is "better" if I have access to a spectrum analyzer. There is a relationship between actual signal distortion and what we perceive as "distortion" in the quality of the audio. The same of course goes for video.

Wrong. Simply measuring a random distortion number tells you nothing about an amplifier. You could have small amounts of very annoying intermodulation distortion that will make an amplifier with good numbers sound horrible. A transistor amplifier with 5% THD would be painful to listen to. On the other hand, a single-ended tube amplifier might have 5% THD and sound better than a transistor amplifier with 0.01% THD. One reason is that the human ear isn't sensitive to lower harmonics because it produces them itself. Higher harmonics (such as those produced by the feedback loop of any solid state amp) are much more noticeable. However, there might be more to this that we don't know.

The same certainly does not apply to video because we have essentially zero knowledge about how the brain processes visual information. Therefore, the only good way to analyze video quality is through expert evaluations.

My suggestion: stop trying to quantify everything. Even NASA relies on subjective tests in its missions. Do you rely on your sense of taste or a gas chromatograph to tell if your food tastes good? The same applies to anything intended for human consumption. The numbers are irrelevant if something doesn't look good, sound good, or taste good.

And what's more, it doesn't even fully support CSS1, which was released in 1996!

CLICKY HERE

http://www.matrix-at.org/states.htm

Here is the Wired article that was posted here a day or two ago, which has more info on which states are involved...

CLICKY HERE http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,62564,00. html?tw=wn_tophead_1

Microsoft vs The World. Microsoft is arrogant enough to think it will win.

So is the US

Bah, who cares about meter-precision maps and million-dollar vehicles - I'm betting on the one that has BUDDHA POWER!

My credentials are years of programming experience and months of research invested in CF13(TM), my solution to English-language spam.

Part I of the article:

Identity theft - The ones I got were relayed through a 3rd party machine and deemed spam. Should I ever get a 'real one' that would mean either a spammer is using a stolen/throwaway account at a domain with mailserver(s) and easily traceable, or, worse yet, an 'inside job' by someone unscrupulous at the sender domain. The rule of thumb is to not give out sensitive information via email no matter how convincing said email is.

Viruses - All attachments are treated as 'text files' by my program and are 'harmless' provided a certain registry key affecting Notepad hasn't been changed/hijacked (see my website for more details). Also, all email is downloaded and treated as text files, making HTML related exploits impossible as well.

Sender - Anonymous senders are treated as spam. No exceptions. I've only gotten spam from such senders the rare times I recived them before I wrote my program.

Recipient - No 'BCC:' email if desired. In the past, such email I've recieved were spam.

Word lists - My program uses two of them. One of them is the single word list from Grady Ward's Moby project. The other file contains 'spam words' that appear in the first file. Both lists make 'hashbusting' and 'L33T' spelling, two tried and true spammer tactics, impossible.

Black/White lists - Supported at the email address and email domain level. I decided not to support IP level black/whitelisting since the IP source of spam is irrelevant--it is the content of spam that is relevant. Likely, such spam is deemed spam at the email header level anyway--or at the email message content level if need be.

Hash-tables - Pointlest due to 'hashbusting' and 'L33T' spelling. Unecessary in my program.

AI/Probabilistic systems - I researched the Bayesian approach and decided not to use it in my program. Though effective at first, spammers have thoroughly 'poisoning' this method of spam detection. Also, this method requires additional disk storage space, processor time (to do the math calculations on top of the pattern matching), and training time to be effective.

Bypassing filters - A default install of my program should catch almost all spam. Should any get through, one could read through the spam and identify new 'spam words' to be added to that list.

False-positives - Alas, to avoid deleteing such email at the server level, All such email is downloaded and processed. My program displays the subject lines of email messages it process and logs them to a separate file for further review if needed.

Spam filters do not stop spam - Agreed, but they can be as effective as my program which only has one known form of spam it cannot detect sent by a spammer from a stolen/throwaway account.

Reverse lookup - Not supported in my program to avoid slowing my program down and not overburdening the (likely) overtaxed DNS server system. This should be handled at the mailserver level to head off the sending of spam in the first place.

Part II of the article:

Challenge-Response - I considered using this but decided against it. In doing so I avoid 'mail loops' with another Challenge-Response system and outright rejection by email correspondents who hold a dim view of this antispam system.

Computational challenge: Another idea that fell by the wayside due primarily to the wide disparity in the CPU clock speeds of user's systems.

Cryptography - Not used by my program to process incoming email and thus unecessary. The 'bu

Oh I wish I had the article.

At this point in the game, I am honestly surprised that we haven't heard of violence resulting from spam affliction.

At this point in the game, I am honestly surprised that we haven't heard of violence resulting from spam affliction.

Because Google is providing a search engine. Microsoft is providing parts of the firewall and sniffer technology used to trap and jail (or eliminate) people like Stainless Steel Mouse.

"Microsoft has no direct or indirect financial relationship with BayStar."

Those two statements are very close to lies but may just be deceptive statements that omit very important facts. I say this because it actually appears that Paul Allen orchestrated the SCO investment. I say this because:

1. Paul Allen is a former member of the board of directors of MS and the second largest shareholder. Paul Allen now serves as a senior strategy advisor to top Microsoft executives.
2. Paul Allen is one of the largest investors in BayStar Capital.

It is a great market for testing many things because it is such a commoditized and competitive market. The material is all the same boring stuff, so they need to explore new ways to market it. Is there a porn version of Netflix yet? Who is going to be the first in wireless porn?

--------
Create a WAP server

Google's not evil. Their web site says so.

Lengthy Wired article on the challenges they've faced in battling evil.

Then they should have used a self-parking Toyota Prius instead of a Hummer.

Unbelievable. I was sure this was a troll, but discovered that Wired Magazine ran a story in December 2001 called The Geek Syndrome addressing this phenomenon. Amazing.

Lucky for me, my wife has a degree in Communications, and is about as non-technical as they come. :)

Unbelievable. I was sure this was a troll, but discovered that Wired Magazine ran a story in December 2001 called The Geek Syndrome addressing this phenomenon. Amazing.

Lucky for me, my wife has a degree in Communications, and is about as non-technical as they come. :)

Here is an article on a study done by the University of Pittsburg.

The US installed Duvallier. Then they installed Aristide. Twice! Then when he asked for help again, they forcibly removed him and are now supporting the rebels.
Here
Here
Here
Here
Here

Get a clue. Read a newspaper. Turn on the television news. Pull your head out of your ass.

Bill Joy probably made those statements because he isn't familiar with Linux.

Well, except that grandparent post misquoted Bill Joy, I think. The Wired article quote is: "Re-implementing what I designed in 1979 is not interesting to me personally. For kids who are 20 years younger than me, Linux is a great way to cut your teeth. It's a cultural phenomenon and a business phenomenon. Mac OS X is a rock-solid system that's beautifully designed. I much prefer it to Linux."

I don't see anything there as any ringing endorsement of GUI over CLI. The fact that Mac OS X has a terminal just makes it a whole system, in my view. Just like I wouldn't run GNOME without having a terminal window open, neither would I want to be confined to just a BASH shell.

As part of my Ghosts of Slashdot project, I grabbed a copy of this article before it went "live". There was a Slashdot outage at about that time, so I don't know if CmdrTaco & co. decided to change the text, or if it was lost and had to be re-created.

Same submitter, same "dept."... just the title and story text has changed.

Play Those Classic Video Games Virtually Anywhere
Posted by CmdrTaco in The Mysterious Future!
from the emulating-the-classics dept.
Iphtashu Fitz writes "If you're like me your introduction to video games decades ago was something like the Atari 2600, and you also pumped untold hundreds of quarters into arcade games like Space Invaders, Defender, and Asteroids. Well according to a Wired News article you can now play these and many more of those classic games in their original format on your PC, Mac, Playstation, XBox, or Gamecube. X-Arcade has an emulator & arcade-style interface that they claim will let you play over 4000 of the classic games on any of these modern gaming systems. Or if you'd prefer to play the actual arcade games from the 1980's then it might be time for you to take a trip to New York where the American Museum of the Moving Image is holding an exhibition where you can play these classics. Game emulators can be found linked from the museums website as well as through Retrogames." Much easier than building your own Cabinet.

My grandparents have a ColecoVision that they play all the time. But being a 30 year old - and generation X - it seems like a lot of us have gaming addictions.

As always - it comes down to doing things in moderation (coffee, sex, cigars, games) just don't be like the gamer in China who died after 20 straight hours online.

Telling someone that there's something wrong with them because they don't fit into your definition of normal is cruel and ignorant. If someone has trouble fitting in with the jocks and cheerleaders they should be proud, not seek treatment.

Asperger's Syndrome is not a label applied to people who don't fit in. If someone is using it that way, they are wrong. You can have some or all of the symptoms, yet still not have Asperger's.

There was a very good writeup of Asperger's in a Wired article a while ago.

The correct word would be Asperger. And, indeed does it look like the person you're dealing with is showing some of the signs of the Asperger Syndrome.

Check out this Wiredarticle for more information about the Asperger Syndrome. It includes a short test as well to check yourself out.