Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Wireless, Radio, Ralsky
Don't Post While Sleepy: Hi, Chrisd here apologizing about that false post on Sony/Nintendo Playstation Trademark Settlement. Oops. Doh. No excuse. Mea Culpa. I'll be more careful next time.
Is "Rubber stamping everything" a patentable business practice? Brian Dear writes "With all the news these days about the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office issuing a patent to AOL/ICQ/Mirabilis for Instant Messaging, I thought the Slashdot community would be interested in reading about TERM-talk on PLATO, which was announced on the PLATO network on this day in 1973. Here is the URL with a screen shot of the actual announcement."
Turing, Marconi and Rosen: pick any two. squiggleslash writes "Salon is running an informative and sympathetic story about GNU radio. The article discusses how the project could end up pre-empting the Hollywood producers and other content cartel's attempts to destroy modifiable consumer hardware by creating a blatently legitimate space where programmable hardware is a requirement, as well as opening up radio to groups outside of the current cabals. Good stuff."
We've mentioned quite a bit about GNU Radio before (see also Eric Blossom's interview questions and answers; this article delves into the fight that the GNU Radio folks are gearing up for over broadcast flags.
Suiteness and light. To follow up on our mention of the effort to buy from Gobe (and release as Free software) the sourcecode of Gobe Productive, Simon Gauvin of beunited.org writes "beunited.org has been pledged over $10,000.00 by the public and corporate community for the release of Gobe Productive for BeOS. Linux users have also pledged, and we encourage more members of the Linux community to participate for the release of the Linux version. Call all your friends and send them over to beunited.org to help raise awareness!"
Here's the relevant discussion thread if you'd like to learn more about this effort; I wish the site had a bar chart of some sort showing how much money was currently raised, and an obvious PayPal link or similar. Note that for now, beunited's first goal is to open the source for the BeOS version of Productive.
Ralsky, Ralsky, Ralsky ... IsoRashi writes "Over at the Register they have this short article about a guy who took some photos of spammer Alan Ralsky's home. After taking the photographs, the man was chased by someone in a black jaguar and he began receiving threatening phone calls the next day. Here is a direct link to the site the photographer set up."
Read your TOS carefully before you start downloading ... Sergeant Beavis writes "Nate Carlson was kind enough to create a HOWTO for connecting your Linux box to Sprint's Vision network via a Sanyo SCP-4900 phone. However Sanyo's store shows the cable to be out of stock. Now comes FutureDial to the rescue with both the USB cable and SnapDialer software for connecting to the Vision network with Windows instead of Linux. Oh, the cable only cost $19.99 at your local Radio Shack. Enjoy!"
And let this be a lesson (of sorts) to you! gh0ul writes "Looks like Uzi Nissan (for those of you who don't recall owns nissan.com) has lost his fight with Nissan Motors to keep his nissan.com (last name by birthright/company) domain. The site now reads "In compliance with a ruling issued by the United States District Court in Los Angeles on November 14, 2002, in the lawsuit of Nissan Motor Co., Ltd. v. Nissan Computer Corporation, this web site has been converted to non-commercial use." Are we ever going to have any protection against these kind of things?"
The Eye was never there. You never saw it. It was not creepy. Finally, Rob writes "The creepy all-seeing eye logo from John Poindexter and the Total Information Awareness project is suddenly missing from the TIA web site. Old site ; Current site Perhaps TIA is seeking suggestions for a new logo?"
These anti-spam nuts are beginning to act a lot like the anti-abortion nuts. Posting personal information about spammers online, making threats against them. Very similar to the so-called "wanted posters" that anti-abortionists post on their sites.
So this guy goes and plays with fire and he gets burnt. Not too wise.
Some facts regarding the harassing phone calls:
It's fairly easy to turn a license plate number into a name. I figured out how to do it last week trying to reregister my truck. While making the appointment with the DMV, they asked for my plate number, which I gave, and they said my name back to me. I had provided no information other than the plate number. While I'm not absolutely certain, I believe there are a fair number of other ways through which to obtain this someone's name from their plate, e.g. if you have friends in the police or DMV.
The rest of the information used can easily be obtained from semi-public records using services such as Lexis-Nexis. This includes info such as your driver's license number, address, previous addresses, telephone, vehicle registrations, creditors, etc. If you have a state and a name, you can obtain a tremendous amount of info about a person fairly easily. Lawyers and private investigators have accounts with these services.
Overall, Ralsky's tactic is not very impressive. This man really needs to hire some higher quality goons.
What has *science* done?!? -- Dr. Weird (ATHF)
I hate to argue on principle, but I forgot about this whole thing and when I went looking for the official Nissan 350Z page three days ago, I typed in nissan.com. Upon which I remembered and tried nissan-motors.com, which also does not belong to Nissan Motors. Finally, I found nissanmotors.com. I know, I could have used Google, but my habit is typing in URLS if they are familiar. Case in point...it does sort of hijack Nissan's name.
How really strange. I found one particular part of the call transcripts rather interesting...
"You don't know who the hell you were fucking with yesterday, man, you got the wrong guy, you don't even have the guy that you think you have"
Anyone else see a strong possibility of Ralsky having a deep dark secret that someone believed poor Rich had accidentally caught on film? Like meeting with someone to put a hit on Ralsky's detractors, or using the supposedly lucrative spam biz to launder mob money, or the like?
Yeah, slam me for baseless speculation, but the guy doesn't exactly have the cleanest legal record, and that quote just strikes me as so *REALLY* bizarre. Don't have the right guy? What does *that* mean?
I do not condone spam and I hate it. I think it is one of the worst things ever invented. Eats up time and bandwidth.
- 12 -16
We joked the guy good too. Loads of crap delivered to his house. Threatening phone calls. And god knows what else. Fine, he is getting his medicine in spades.
However, if I come home and strange cars are parked in front of my house and people are taking photos. I am gonna be suspicious. Could be crooks, murderers, you name it. So while I might be the ultimate asshole in the unviverse, I am gonna do something. And If I am not an asshole but a regular joe, I am gonna so something.
Take pics of my house(I am a nice guy) while i am pulling up. I am gonna chase you down, get your plate, call a buddy in the dmv. And call you and ask you why the fuck you taking pics of my crib. I will even call the police.
He might be invading our mailboxes but he aint standing on our lawns with an instamatic. That is taking it a step way to far.
He spammed, we junk mailed em. Pretty much quid pro quo. He got the message. But what kinda loser decides to drive by the house and then take pics and then gets pissy when the guy tracks him down? And then whines about it on the net when the guy catches him. Both are assholes in my book.
As for the nintendo thing well penny-arcade had it sorted out a day before the slash dot post.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2002
Puto
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
Read my sig if you like, but I'll never see yours, thanks to Discussions, Viewing, Disable sigs...
IM is actually two independant services coupled together--messaging and notification. AOL's patent is specific to a system that couples these two services together. talk, this TERM-talk thing, IRC, zephyr all all allow for messaging, but none of them allow for presence notification.
"But what about finger, who, IRC's ISON?!!" That's not notification. That's asking the server if someone's available which is DISTINCTLY different than having the server tell you when someone's available.
I'm pretty well knowledgable about Instant Messaging, and I've yet to be shown something that can actually consider prior art.
As for the "rubber stamping everything" comment, do all patents take six years to be processed (the application was made January 97). I hate software patents as much as the next guy, but I really think the USPTO actually did some research on this one, and that AOL deserves the patent.
What I am curious about is whether or not any of the four ICQ/Mirabilis gentlemen, or the investor father of one of them (Vardi), had any exposure to the PLATO system -- specifically, exposure to TERM-talk -- prior to developing ICQ.
I wonder this because Control Data Israel had a PLATO system installed in Israel in the 1980s and it was used extensively by the Israeli Defence Force, and it is known that at least some of ICQ's founders served in the IDF before the founded ICQ.
I've contacted the ICQ folks but none of responded to me.
- Brian (brian@platopeople.com)
The french revolutions major causes were the rising power of the middle class (which economically opposed the power of the old aristocracy), national debts caused by wars after wars (many instigated by Louis 14th in order to demostrate his power), the tax system which had fallen into complete disarray and desperately needed reform, and a slew of terrible kings(but pretty good regents). Beneath these there are at least a dozen more minor causes. If the Illuminati had any influence on this event at all, it was insignificant.
As for why the Illuminati are now obscured, I would assume because the so called "Illuminati conspiracy" has been written off as mostly baseless. There were other so-called conspiracies at the time as well: the communist conspiracy, the anrachist conspiracy, and the democratic conspiracy. Throughout the 1800's there were dozen of revolutions and wars all over Europe(mostly in france) and everyone was paranoid. The upper nobility feared democracy and had claimes of democratic conspiracies, the middle class factory owners feared the communists and hence clamed they had a conspiracy. Dozens if not hundreds of 'conspiracies' were exposed. Saying the Illumanti conspiracy started those events and that there was a big bad conspiracy going on in the 1800's is like saying that a secret government agency in contact with Alien lifeforms were really running the world in the 1900's. If you believe that:
1)you're out of touch with reality
2)you're scapegoating your own problems by claiming they arent really your fault, there such and such's fault
As for the eye, it's easier to borrow an existing symbol than to come up with one of your own. Some desginer probably said 'hey, everyone knows the eye, its on the back of $1's so ppl are familiar with it as a symbol, lets use in this context. As for the eye looking at Europe it is probably looking in the general direction of the middle-east and not so much at Europe. What they were probably trying to do was to blend a nationally recognized symbol (that since its on $1's holds a realtion to the feds) with the old Pinkerton detective agency logo(which was an all-seeing eye). The person who designed probably never even knew what the $1 bill symbol was, he/she probably jsut saw it - thought it was cool - and decided to use it.
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
Have you been through Beverly Hills lately? The McMansions are ALL like that these days -- crammed up side to side like townhouses, with their BMWs parked out in the street because there's no room in the garage.