Slashback: Legislation, Samplification, Knaves

More information this evening (below) on Daniel Gomez-Ibanez' digital turntable, the Coble-Berman [T: not "Sherman," sorry] bill, moral-free domain registrars, Gator's un-requested link substitutions, and more. Enjoy!

Wouldn't be be nice if this didn't need to be a surprise? dklon writes: "I just got off the phone with Senate Warner's Office (R-VA). Senator Warner, and his compadre, Senator George Allen, both sit on the High Tech Committee, of which Senator Allen is the chairman. After sending them a strongly-worded letter yesterday, Mr. Warner's office was kind enough to call me back and let me know that the likelihood of Coble-Berman becoming law is slim-to-none. It is committee at the moment, and has only 1 sponsor at the moment in the Senate."

Make a joyful noise, and keep repeating it. mrspin writes "stage4 has an interview with Daniel Gomez-Ibanez a graduate from Stanford University who has designed and produced a 'Digital Turntable' that allows DJs to mix and scratch digital music using what looks like a conventional record player.

Daniel recently posted a short piece on Slashdot about his 'Digital Turntable'. In an email interview with stage4 he talks about what makes it different from other such products and the inspiration behind this hardware hack. stage4 is a community site dedicated to creative uses of technology and features a weekly music webcast via PirateTV"

Daniel also says (by email) that if "anyone would want a very unique sampling turntable I would sell more of them for around the cost of the parts because it would be fun to get them out there and get people playing with them." Even those parts aren't cheap (totaling around a thousand dollars) but handcrafted audio tools rarely are. Check his site for email address ;)

Please keep your Gator away from my eyeballs. EyesWideOpen writes "The New York Times is reporting that a preliminary injunction will be issued against Gator Corporation as a result of the company being sued by 10 web site publishers last month because they felt that the company's use of online pop-up ads violated copyright and trademark laws. 'In court Friday, Judge Hilton said that he found enough evidence to support the plaintiffs' claim that Gator's advertisements violated trademark laws in particular...he indicated that one issue was the proximity of Gator's pop-up ads to the publishers' trademarks.'"

You may already have won! We've had to run a number of pieces on unsavory renewal practices among the various registrars competing for your name-claiming business, but domain name scamming is sadly not confined to the U.S. kungfuftr writes: "I'm currently registering all my domains names through a company in the uk called 123reg who are very reasonable and run a good company. Today i got a letter from a company called "Domain Registry of Europe" saying that my domain name "kungfuftr.com" must be renewed. The form they sent looks like a bill and for someone who doesn't know too much about the DNS process it looks like something that should be filled in if they want to keep their domain. Of course if they do this their control of their domain will be transferred to a new registrar. Giving the company an official name as if they are the 'only' registrar in europe is pretty shady. Are companies reaching a new low?"

For when I get a larger hard drive ... TheRedHorse writes "The Yellow Dog Linux 2.3 ISO's have been released . Slashdot did a story about it YDL 2.3 before. Please remember to use the mirrors. Have fun."

You knew this would happen, right? JUSTONEMORELATTE writes "LightReading is reporting today that the EBone portion of KPNQwest's network has been bought for pennies on the dollar (or is that cents on the Euro?) by U.K.-based service provider Interoute Telecommunications. EBone had been valued at EU645 million back in March, today's deal is rumoured to be at about EU15 million, or about a 98% loss of value. Slashdot has covered the heroic efforts to keep the network alive, and talked about the shutdown of the same."

Genetics is never having to say "Am I your type, baby?" Teluial writes "Slashdot's previous story about ColonelPanic's genetic keyboard layout is taking an interesting development. *cue Spidey music* When we last left PMK he was trying his latest layout. Having found it "usable," he is now collecting Dvorak keystroke data and requesting volunteers of the QWERTY breed to also collect data to compare interesting findings against. Details near bottom of project page."

Comments

No surprising....

[neksys]

Are companies reaching a new low?

In an era where billions of dollars are misreported to show a profit, where companies trade our personal data as commodities, where advertising has become universally prevalent (let us not forget TV pop-ups), where predatory business practices are the norm and "moral" is a bad word.... is this truly a low? It seems to me that it is par for the course.

keyboards

[YanceyAI]

I'm glad to see someone is addressing the issue of poorly laid out keyboards. The only shortcoming that I can see is as follows:

More and more in regular usage, I need easy access to numbers. Most of my passwords are number/letter combos, and I'm constantly having to type addresses (often my own for online registration). More importantly, it's nice to be able to quickly type 'l4m3r' into a console while gaming.

Does anyone know of experiments being done to better incorporate numbers into regular type?

Re:keyboards

[bentini]

And it won't fix the problem. The reason those characters get used is because they weren't used before and hence can be given a new meaning without ruining old communication as well as seeming new.

So what happens when we move x,z, other letters not frequently used to the outside and start writing uber-dense perl code where the $, [,], etc. keys are in the center of the keyboard?
The x and z keys will be used in l33t speak. It's just language evolution, all over. They use the meta-characters in their meta-language to describe the language.

Linguistics is cool.

Gator: unpopular, but in the right?

[Palarran]

Gator may be unsavory, but it looks to me like this lawsuit is yet another display of cluelessness by the Powers That Be. It ranks up there with deep linking in my sight.

Displaying pop up ads over web sites without publisher's permission...

So when I'm browsing in multiple windows, and a background page pops up an ad over top of someone else's page, that could be a violation of trademark law? (this is a far fetched analogy, but:)

At best, it(Gator) is one program watching and responding to the actions of a separate program.

this is insightful?

[JeanBaptiste]

I agree the trading of personal data sucks, not sure I agree with the advertising statement, but

predatory buisness practices are not the norm.
Name me 50 companies that have predatory buisness practices and I will name you 50,000 that dont. This is the norm? I agree those that dont play by the rules need to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. And you show me one person that says "moral" is a bad word and I can show you ~30 million.
Buisness!=Evil, as much as some wish it was the case.

keyboards ... and games

[drDugan]

As I break from America's Army Shooting Range (Try number 39 to qualify), I wonder:

it seems that if I have a wierd (non QWERTY) keyboard layout, I'd have to remap
the controls on all those games that use keyboard layout for controls (W == forward,
S== back, A/D for left/right)

That would get annoying and possibly would eliminate the time savings gained by
normal typing. Just no way to win.