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Slashback: Dilemma, Privacy, Chess
Front-row seats. zer0vector writes "The previously mentioned camera that was attached to the external fuel tank on Atlantis gave some great shots of launch this afternoon on NASA TV. During the feed, it looked like the ejection of the solid rocket boosters damaged or obscured the camera, leading to a fuzzy image during the fuel tank separation stage."
SkyNet has not yet achieved consciousness. DrEnter writes "According to this Yahoo article, Vladimir Kramnik has defeated 'Deep Fritz' (apparently the world's most powerful chess computer) to take the lead, 2.5-0.5 (the first game was a draw). You can find out more details at the contest site."
Damned if you do, but also if you don't. cybaea writes "A recent article in InfoWorld argues that the latest Windows 2000 and Windows XP Service Packs may be illegal for health care providers under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. To make matters worse, not installing the Service Packs may also be illegal. Damned if you do, damned if you don't ..."
Dad, please switch to a real operating system. It's still spreading. deego writes " An e-mail-borne computer virus that lets crackers control infected Windoze machines remotely continues to spread and constitutes the most severe attack this year. The worm, known as W32.Bugbear, or I-Worm.Tanatos, infects computers that use Microsoft's Windows operating systems. It was first spotted a week ago and has spread to dozens of countries. Article here."
Please sit down first. calib0r writes "CNN.com is running an article on the most recent events dealing with the nissan.com lawsuit. Salon.com ran an article about this a few months ago. More information can also be found here."
It gets better - Nissan Motor has registered the domain name nissancomputer.com which they'll "give" to Nissan Computers if Nissan Motor get given the nissan.com domain name. Now, if they've brought nissancomputer.com with the express purpose of squatting on it for exchange of monies, services or goods (for example, a domain name) - surley that's a blatant case of cybersquatting by Nissan Motor?
While this isn't man vs machine as the casual observer may think, but chess playing man vs programming man, how long until programming man is able to win soundly all the time? I don't mean to offend the chess players out there, but I find it very hard to believe that the advances in both processing power and programming knowledge will eventually catch up to chess knowledge. According to Moore's law processing powers is doubling every 18 months, and I would venture that programming knowledge of AI's is progressing faster than chess knowledge given the youth of the former's frield and the extensive history of the latter's.
That said, even while as a programmer I'm somewhat rooting for Deep Fritz, as a fellow man I can't help but be in awe of the fact that Kramnik is able to think better than a machine that "thinks" millions of times faster than him.
First off, I believe Deep Fritz has beaten Deep Blue head to head.
Second, the program and the computer it runs on are two different things even if they are closely tied together. In fact, I'm kinda surprised Deep Fritz doesn't run on a more powerful computer. I would imagine that if it scaled well to 8 processors they would at least be able to scale to 16 or 32.
Can I register a domain name SomeCompany.com and then do the following:
My response would have been, "damn right, freedom of speech..."
But now, I'm just confused.
What did he do that violated any laws?
He's paid $2.2 million in legal fees. It's not like he had a choice about showing up in court to defend himself.
Now Nissan motors can take his domain name after all the legal bills? And if not, he'll be ordered to give them financial reparations for "diluting their brand name?"
Does it annoy anyone else that NASA spent $750,000 on the technical equivalent an X-10 webcam?
And it failed! I mean, what the hell?
Private space enterprises deserve to eat NASA's breakfast, dinner AND lunch once they get started.
If evaluating a chess position takes 150 units of processor time, and eliminating a position from consideration takes 1 unit of processor time, we shouldn't prune the decision tree at all! Never mind that as we get a little above a dozen moves into the future, we are considering (and tracking in some sort of memory) more moves than there are molecules in the universe. Posh! All that matters is the number of moves evaluated.
Also:
Jouster
That is a ridiculous statement! If you read through all the things listed maybe you would realise some people _can't_ install microsoft's patches because of there EULA requirements.
It won because the chess algoritms on Deep Fritz are a lot better than the ones on Deep Blue
What use will 200 millon moves per second give if mostly they are wrong or repeated?
Open Source Java Web Forum with LDAP authentication
I believe Clark has the right idea
"...the health care industry needs to go to Microsoft with a joint NDA (nondisclosure agreement) and indemnification agreement, requiring Microsoft to hold their HIPAA-compliant customers harmless should patient information be leaked via this mechanism."
Not a prayer that MS would agree, but it will be interesting when they get pulled into court the first time a provider claims it was the update and MS forced them to allow it.
The regulatory oversight may do more to open MS software than the DOJ. Logic, reason, and innovation are not the watch words of these organizations. Regulations were passed, comply or be destroyed.
It is hard for me to decide who I want to win. MS or the regulators...
Agreed on this. You're not allowed to trademark common words, like orange, hand or March. If your company name happens to be the name of a month in another language, you shouldn't be allowed to go into a fit everytime someone uses it.
Further,
The auto company didn't sue until 1999, but the judge said that five-year wait wasn't too long because Nissan didn't initially know the impact the Internet would have on business.
Then looks like Nissan should have had a little more foresight. IANAL but if you don't defended your trademark when you become aware of someone else using it, then it's become diluted.
Hmm, and why would the person who's about to play Deep Fritz want to claim that Deep Fritz is really strong? :)
Grr! Arg!
Of course, he might actually have a spine (or independant wealth), and wanted the domain more than the money.
This strikes me as no different than the McDonalds (the junk-food chain) vs McDonalds (the family owned restaurant that predates the fast food chain) a while back. The bigger business considers itself more important, and has the money to throw at lawyers to make that delusion a reality.
If *you* had a family domain, and some company offered you what you consider a pittance for it, how would you feel? Would you consider yourself an informed "hardball" player? Would you "cackle with glee" at your great luck in having a valuable name?
It really disgusts me that companies consider themselves more important than individuals. It disgusts me even more that the legal system mostly agrees with them. Neither of those comes *close*, however, to the disgust I feel about actual individual *humans* who agree that companies have more rights than everyone else, and actually criticize other humans for standing up for what few rights we have left.
Exactly.
I start a line of cosmetics called June.
I then make tons of money because my stuff makes old women feel young.
I then say:
Oh, now I am famous, and I ought to be able to use
june.com exclusively because any other use would dilute my brand.
And, oh, by the way, all women named June need to pay me royalties.
And, The Month of June will be renamed in the english language as "The Month formerly known as June".
Nissan is being fucking ridiculous... If they want a unique name that no one else in the world has, why don't they get a catchy IP address?
"Piter, too, is dead."
What I don't understand about the whole lawsuit is how Nissan (motors) can prove that they own the rights to that name. Uzi was apparently around before Nissan became any sort of MAJOR advertising spender ($400 million last year).
.02
The judge decided that the Internet wasn't that big of a deal in 1994, so the 5 year span between the registration of nissan.com and 1999 when they sued was ok. WHAT? Explain to me how this is ok? Uzi had it first, tough shit if they didn't decide that the Internet wasn't all that important.
Early bird gets the worm. Money should have no bearing on who gets what domain.
If I were Uzi, I would tell them to use nissancomputer.com for themselves.
Just my worthless
The fact that this has gone to court tells me that Mr. Nissan played hardball when they were negotiating a payoff;
Or maybe Mr. Nissan said, "No. I'm not selling it at all. It's MY name!"
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Since neither Hebrew nor Arabic is written with Latin characters, I find the "it's the name of a month" argument rather weak. Furthermore, the owner of www.nissan.com is incorporated in the United States, where "Nissan" cannot be considered a common word
As far as the "waiting until 1999" argument goes, it sounds like Nissan is claiming he didn't infringe until 1999 when he started linking to car sites, meaning he was generating revenue based on visitors who were looking for www.nissanmotors.com.
I think this argument holds water.
However, the remedy the company is asking for is way out of proportion. Nissan Motors should be granted an injunction against www.nissan.com being used to adverstise cars.
So? Kramnik can only evaluate three moves per second, and he's kicking Fritz's ass. Moves per second has very little to do with how good a player is.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
There is a nice and simple way around this, though; gcc has a -static flag that compiles required library functions into the binary, removing library dependencies.
Thus, if you were designing a compiled-only, work-for-almost-all-linux-distros, you keep your binaries (relatively) small, and compile them statically.
So--if you can find a good remote-root linux exploit that's rather common, write your virus and compile it with no machine optimizations, ELF binary format, stripped, and static. That should be sufficient to get your payload down to a few kb, if you're not being really extreme. (No optimizations because you don't want to limit yourself to a specfic processor--why target only a Pentium III or higher, when you could target the whole i386/ia64 architecture family? :)
Disclaimer: I do not advocate virus-writing; nor do I, or have ever in the past, actually written malicious code. I am only stating that there's a workaround for dependency issues, even if you aren't gonna pass around the sources. (The virus reference is mostly to keep on topic.)
But '-static' does still make for a larger binary.... This is where you can still shrink it down, though, by specifying that you originally compile your code using the -I/{path-to-library}/ form; use a smaller library, like uClib.
Just because his name is Nissan doesn't mean that he has the exclusive rights to any property with "Nissan" attached to it. He already owns nissan.net as well. Let's look at it from an independent judge's perspective:
Both sides want nissan.com. Why? They either feel that:
A. nissan.com will get more traffic and thus generate more revenue than some alternative, or
B. nissan.com is more representative of their company's name
As for A, what would cause nissan.com to get more traffic than "nissanmotors.com" or "nissancomputer.com"? People around the world recognize the Nissan brand name. Common sense would dictate that an overwhelming percentage of traffic seen to nissan.com [i]stems from that recognition, which Nissan (the car company) has carefully cultivated and paid for since 1933 when Nissan was incorporated in Japan[/i]. To continue to grant Mr. Uzi Nissan a monopoly on the domain "nissan.com" to promote his own company would be to allow his company to capitalize on the name recognition he did not establish. This fact does not seem to be in dispute. (Mr. Nissan would add, however, that the coincidence of his name should not be held against him.)
As for B, both sides feel THEY have the right to use the name Nissan, and they do. As it happens, Mr. Nissan was first to claim nissan.com. Nissan Motors, however, was clearly the first to stake out recognition of "Nissan" as a brand name. Which one should legally be priority?
It is fair to say that Mr. Nissan knew that registering nissan.com would be disputed by Nissan Motors. He chose to register nissan.com anyway, and it must be assumed that he did so because he felt he would be better served by nissan.com than nissancomputers.com or something else. It is also fair to say that he knew that by picking nissan.com he would receive more traffic to his address than a small computer store in North Carolina would normally receive, and that this traffic is a result of the name conflict with Nissan Motors.
Nissan Motors clearly has more at stake in its name than Mr. Nissan has in his company. Forcing Mr. Nissan to relocate to a different address will have some cost, but this cost is small compared to the potential commerce that is being impeded by the naming mismatch. Clearly, the public does not expect to get Nissan Computer Corp of Raleigh, NC when they type "www.nissan.com" into their web browsers.
The cost to commerce as a whole must be taken into consideration, and weighed against the cost to Mr. Nissan for relocation.
Judgment? plaintiff [Nissan Motors] may use nissan.com, but must pay a reasonable fee for costs of relocating Mr. Nissan's site.
just think about your mom, then write a program to do the same thing, assuming infinite time and memory
10 LET A$ = "YOUR_MOM"
A friend of mine pointed out that Domino.com could be easily claimed by any one of several companies: A pizza company, a sugar company, or a software company.
This is a very sordid and very nasty issue. If you want a view from the front lines look here.
Nearly fifty percent of all graduates come from the bottom half of the class!