im Cranton, Microsoft senior corporate attorney, said the company sought to distinguish between deceptive and fraudulent e-mail ads and those by legitimate businesses.
``We don't think all commercial e-mail should be banned,'' he said. Microsoft favors self regulation by the industry ``to establish standards that can evolve over time,'' he said.
I think this is reasonable. The big difference is that when legitimate businesses are sending me unsolicited email, I can click the "remove" link with confidence that I will be removed, not sent more spam. That, and unlike "Enlarge your member!", and porn spam, I'm not going to get in trouble at work for accidentally looking at the Palm Voice in a shared office.
""" January 2003 draft envisioned regulating only "professional on-line media." Two months later, a March 2003 draft dropped the word "professional" and intentionally covered all "online media" of any type. """
>In both cases, the company is still legally >obligated to honor the warranty
By what law? Maybe if you live in a state like CA that has aggresive consumer-protection laws, but AFAIK this is hard from universal. Unless your state dictates otherwise, if it says in the warantee document that using a third party thermal grease voids the warantee, then it does.
As far as overclocking goes, last I checked overclocking in and of itself voided the warantee on most processors. If you want to push the thing beyond its intended limits, fine, but don't expect me to pay for it (via increased prices) if it breaks. That's like saying that my car warantee should cover the damage from driving off a cliff at 100 mph while fleeing the cops.
I am not a lawyer or a warantee expert, but I don't see what the big deal is, so long as the thing works with the default HS/F.
Actually, if you live in the US, which is where this is taking place, your right (and Verizon's right) to free speech is enshrined in the constitution (First amendment: "The congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech or of the press, or of the people peacably to assemble . .."
Your right to privacy on the other hand, is for the most part a common law right (there are some legislative and administrative laws that secure specific applications of the right to privacy, but none, as far as I know, that specifically guarantee the right to privacy in general.
Having a.kids.us domain won't be the greatest thing since the www, and I think we all know it.
As many people have pointed out in this forum already, Adolescents often _want_ to see the porn that's out there, and are smart enough to just close the window when (if?) they don't want it. While some adolescents may be traumatized by having porn made of them, looking at it certainly won't hurt them. If it broadens their horizons a bit, I would call that a Good Thing (TM).
Now, here's why I'm all for doing this:
Congress has been trying to censor the internet longer than I've been using it. Every time, the supreme court whacks them down, but they just don't seem to get the picture. Instituting.kids.us will placate congress and allow everybody who votes for it to go home and tell their constituents "Yes, I voted to save out children from the internet!" While not infringing on the free speech (and access to speech) rights of adults. On top of that, it has the potential to be a great place for putting fun/educational sites geared at children--real children, like elementary schoolers, as opposed to teenagers who are generally most competent to use the internet in its full capacity. It can't hurt, and it looks like it'll help. Write your congresscritter today and tell them you support.kids.us!
Is it just me, or is that an unbelievably pretentious name for a company, especially one formed for the express purpose of filing IP suits? "We're PanIP, we invented the internet--and everything else"
Reading the replies here, it's obvious that many people are posting without actually reading the decision. I know nobody likes to read convoluted legal documents, but this one is relatively short. The bit that pertains to the legality of upskirt photography took me five minutes to read. The link in the story will take you to the Washington Judiciary page, or you can click here
and go straight to the ruling. It makes much more sense when you read it.
Yeah, and hope they have a laser backup for when those unexpected storms show up out of nowhere:
"We're sorry mister Smith, we got halfway through your emergency solar apendectomy, but it got cloudy, so we just decided to stitch you up and let you die"
Or
"We're sorry mister Smith, but we can't complete or SOLIK eye surgery until the sun comes out. We hope you don't mind being on the table for another couple of days"
SLR Camera 50mm f/2 or faster lense, or even better -- a fisheye lense 400 or faster film -- multiple rolls are good Tripod Cable Release or self-timer
Procedure:
Set up your camera on its tripod outdoors on the night of the 12th or 13th. Point it near the radiant (a few degrees off to one side is good) and wait for the action to start. Then, connect your cable release or set your self-timer and open the lense for a 2-minute or so exposure. Exact times will vary depending on how light-polluted your location is, but that's about good. Then, every two minutes close the shutter and advance the film. You'll get a lot of pictures of star trails and hopefully a few really great shots of streaking meteors. If you see a really great one where your camera is pointing, go ahead and advance right then -- no point in fogging the film further.
They'll beat my last year's leonids hands-down. I stayed out until 3-am staring at an overcast sky hoping against hope that I'd get some patch of clarity with a good view for a second or two. Bugged out when it started raining.
Iowa sucks in the winter. And in the summer. It's not bad in spring and fall though!
The danger is there. The indefinite survival of the species requires dealing with it sometime. Yes, climate change, warfare, disease (AIDS, cancer, et al) are all threats to the survival of our species. So is asteroid impact. We don't know how immediate any of them are, so we had better get planning. Just because something doesn't happen often doesn't mean it won't happen soon.
500-Year floods happen about once every 500 years, right? Doesn't mean it didn't happen in 1993. "A few times every hundred million years" could mean tomorrow. Sky surveys are great, but they don't have the whole sky covered, nor will they in the near future. To quote a popular space-opera, "it's a big-ass sky."
You have the legal right to deny any business or agency your social security number unless it is a government agency with a valid privacy act statement explaining why you are requied by a law to provide your number.
In most cases, that doesn't really mean you have a choice. A few weeks ago I told a video rental company, "sorry, that's private information. I don't give out my SSN," and walked out of the store. This is okay. But when the blood bank asks me for my SSN, I have to give it to them or I can't donate. When my Insurance company asks me for my SSN, I have to give it to them or they won't insure me. When the Power company asks me for my SSN, I have to give it to them or my milk spoils.
So, maybe this represents a change. Maybe we won't have to give out our social security numbers to everybody and her brother anymore. Now it'll be "sure thing, what's your Lexis/Nexis number?" "Oh, you're not a member of the system/don't want to give us that information. Well that's fine, Mr. Smith, I hope you enjoy camping because from now on you will have no power, running water, or telephone service -- you might as well rough it in a park, it's prettier there, and you can light fires without setting off alarms"
It's for tracking fugitives and deadbeats -- just like the Social Security database is for paying government benefits. What does either have to do with your power bill? Jack squat, except that it gives you a unique number linked to something "desireable" (government money/justice for fugitives), and it saves corporate database monkeys the few extra minutes that it would take to add a GUID number to each record.
3) It's good for the environment 2) It supports Iowa's currently not-so-hot economy 2b) This means that my tuition at the University of Iowa doesn't go up as fast But the number one reason that I support ethanol is:
Another good article can be found here, at the home of the American Radio Relay League, the north american Secretariat of the International Amateur Radio Union.
For an excellent article on camera stabilization with high-resolution cameras on helicopters, see
This Article at the New York Times online (login required).
Fighter jets are far more stable than helicopters.
The camera used in the latest search was originally conceived for the space shuttle.
So why aren't they using it on one of our fine fleet of space shuttles? Or better yet, send it up to the ISS for a bit. Sure, that's expensive, but so is fueling and maintaining an F/A-18, paying a highly trained pilot (and her life insurance!), fitting the camera onto the plane before the flight, and dismounting it after.
I believe the point about the free binaries was not that people will be restricted from distributing them, but that THEIR binaries (the ones compiled and distributed by UL) will only come from UL. It won't be like other distros that let you download RPMs or ISOs off of theirs or any other of a dozen websites. When you buy a copy of UL, you get a CD that has UL on it in binary form that you can install on your computer. It will also come with the sources. If you like, you can compile those sources on some other platform and distribute the resulting binaries. The GPL hath spoken, and it hath blessed this technique. But UL hath NOT blessed this technique, and once you do this the binaries that you have compiled cease to be ULs to care about. They are disowned, disinherited, and dis-supported. In other words, they can't stop you from compiling the sources yourself and handing out CDs, but they CAN have a business policy that once you do that it's out of their hands and they have nothing more to do with it.
One should be somewhat wary of buying parts at "bargain basement prices" from transient, often unreliable sources. For instance, make sure you know if a component fails after 10 hours of use, whom and where you can take it back to for a full refund. Local retailers are one thing; street markets and such are another, and somewhat more suspcious.
Also, if the prices are really low, be aware that you may be buying stolen or otherwise less-than-legal components. And, even if you don't know that the parts are stolen and are innocent of any crime, you may be liable for the civil tort of conversion.
I am not a lawyer and the above is not legal advice, just advise to be cautious.
Ah, but that was caused not by NASA's failure to use metric but by Lockheed's. Lockheed figured that since people in the US use the english system, they should translate all of their data to english units before they sent it over to NASA with the probe. NASA assumed the data were metric, because, well, that's what everybody in science uses! This is why NASA people now refer to the English system as the "Lockheed system"
As stated in the article, red represents longer infrared wavelengths, and blue represents shorter ones. This corresponds exactly to what we would see if our eyes picked up the IR part of the spectrum, rather than the visible bit.
Nearly all of the cool astrophotographs that you'll see from Hubble and elsewhere are false-colored, because the visible spectrum is not any more useful than any of the other spectra (microwave, UV, and IR, to name a few), provided you have the proper equipment to capture all of them.
You can see more cool hubble pics (and other astrophotographs), and learn more about false-coloring of astrophotographs at the Astronomy Picture of the Day page.
I am not a lawyer, and the following does not even resemble legal advise.
First off, as some have wondered, this is a denial of a preliminary injunction, which means that the court has only considered preliminary briefs, and found that the briefs were not sufficient to force the site to be taken down while the trial goes forward. This would be done only if (as stated in the opinion):
1) the movant [Ford] has a strong likelihood of success on the merits; (2) the movant would suffer irreparable injury without the injunction;
(3) issuance of the injunction would cause substantial harm to others; and (4) whether the public interest would be served by issuance of the injunction.
Ford failed to prove these things, thus the injunction was denied. It's a nice finding, but the outcome of the trial remains to be seen.
One encouraging footnote in the finding, for those who don't want to read 11 pages of legalese (although it's not nearly as bad as some), reads as follows:
In the offline context, consider a graffiti vandal painting "Fuck General Motors" on a sign at Ford headquarters. While some other law may (or
should) provide a remedy, it would be a stretch to conclude that trademark law had been violated. The same is true in this case.
Also, towards the end of the finding Judge Cleland provides an excellent criticism of the implication in Planned Parenthood and Jews for Jesus that causing commercial harm is sufficient cause for a claim of infringement, pointing out that many uses that are specifically excluded by the FTDA cause commercial harm to the mark holder.
While the case is far from over, it doesn't look good for Ford.
When DS 1 launched in 1998, I was in my junior year of high school, and taking physics, which is now one of my three undergraduate majors. There was a girl in my class whose mother is a JPL scientist, and she and I would always spend our lab times talking about the mission. I remember reading that the ion engine created only as much force as a sheet of paper exerts on the hand of the person holding it, and wondered how in the world they expected anything to come of this. But F = ma, and in space there is practically no friction, so with the hours-long burns that the team discovered they could do, the acceleration added up. (For those of you who have asked, the ion engine is just another Newton's-third-law technology, with the big nuance being that rather than relying on the expansion of hot gases from the burning of fuel to provide the counter-force, the spacecraft uses an electified grid to propel tiny charged ions out the back).
When the star tracker failed in 1999, I wept, for I was sure that the mission was doomed. When the ground crew, in a long stroke of genius, kept it going, I wept for joy.
In the past year and a half or so, DS 1 hasn't been doing so much. WIth most of its objectives achieved, the mission became largely a test of how long it would last. Nevertheless, it was always fun to read Dr. Marc Rayman's mission logs, "widely thought of and commonly spoken of in the spiral arms of the Milky Way galaxy as the most reliable source of information on this bold mission of exploration."
This fall, the probe paid a visit to comet Borrelley. Nobody knew where in the tail the rock itself was, but DS 1's job was to get as close to it as possible, and send back pictures. Nobody expected it to work. If anything, this was supposed to be a dignified death for the bird, which the September 9 log referred to as being "kept flying with duct tape and good wishes." The chances that the probe would do anything but smash into the comet and die, or be pommeled to death by the microdust in the coma, were astronomically slim. But somehow, miraculously, it survived, and with the pictures to prove it.
DS 1 was the stuff of science fiction, and that so many things went right is simply amazing. While I , like Dr. Rayman, am happy that it lived so long, I think we are all somewhat sad to see it go. But we can be consoled by the fact that the funding, the DSN time, the space, and the positively brilliant staff that have kept DS 1 running will now move on to projects that have even more excitement and adventure to offer us, and science will march on, at a steadily accelerating tempo.
Slashdot Mirror
I think this is reasonable. The big difference is that when legitimate businesses are sending me unsolicited email, I can click the "remove" link with confidence that I will be removed, not sent more spam. That, and unlike "Enlarge your member!", and porn spam, I'm not going to get in trouble at work for accidentally looking at the Palm Voice in a shared office.
From the article, about halfway down:
"""
January 2003 draft envisioned regulating only "professional on-line media." Two months later, a March 2003 draft dropped the word "professional" and intentionally covered all "online media" of any type.
"""
Thus, blogs.
>In both cases, the company is still legally
>obligated to honor the warranty
By what law? Maybe if you live in a state like CA that has aggresive consumer-protection laws, but AFAIK this is hard from universal. Unless your state dictates otherwise, if it says in the warantee document that using a third party thermal grease voids the warantee, then it does.
As far as overclocking goes, last I checked overclocking in and of itself voided the warantee on most processors. If you want to push the thing beyond its intended limits, fine, but don't expect me to pay for it (via increased prices) if it breaks. That's like saying that my car warantee should cover the damage from driving off a cliff at 100 mph while fleeing the cops.
I am not a lawyer or a warantee expert, but I don't see what the big deal is, so long as the thing works with the default HS/F.
Actually, if you live in the US, which is where this is taking place, your right (and Verizon's right) to free speech is enshrined in the constitution (First amendment: "The congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech or of the press, or of the people peacably to assemble . . ."
Your right to privacy on the other hand, is for the most part a common law right (there are some legislative and administrative laws that secure specific applications of the right to privacy, but none, as far as I know, that specifically guarantee the right to privacy in general.
Having a .kids.us domain won't be the greatest thing since the www, and I think we all know it.
.kids.us will placate congress and allow everybody who votes for it to go home and tell their constituents "Yes, I voted to save out children from the internet!" While not infringing on the free speech (and access to speech) rights of adults. On top of that, it has the potential to be a great place for putting fun/educational sites geared at children--real children, like elementary schoolers, as opposed to teenagers who are generally most competent to use the internet in its full capacity. It can't hurt, and it looks like it'll help. Write your congresscritter today and tell them you support .kids.us!
As many people have pointed out in this forum already, Adolescents often _want_ to see the porn that's out there, and are smart enough to just close the window when (if?) they don't want it. While some adolescents may be traumatized by having porn made of them, looking at it certainly won't hurt them. If it broadens their horizons a bit, I would call that a Good Thing (TM).
Now, here's why I'm all for doing this:
Congress has been trying to censor the internet longer than I've been using it. Every time, the supreme court whacks them down, but they just don't seem to get the picture. Instituting
Is it just me, or is that an unbelievably pretentious name for a company, especially one formed for the express purpose of filing IP suits? "We're PanIP, we invented the internet--and everything else"
Chia
Cesium in air and water
Was recovering from a nose dive until the 21st, and since then has been plummeting again. See Intentia's investor relations site.
Also see Cowan Research LC, which makes a software package called Eventus to do event studies
Reading the replies here, it's obvious that many people are posting without actually reading the decision. I know nobody likes to read convoluted legal documents, but this one is relatively short. The bit that pertains to the legality of upskirt photography took me five minutes to read. The link in the story will take you to the Washington Judiciary page, or you can click here and go straight to the ruling. It makes much more sense when you read it.
Yeah, and hope they have a laser backup for when those unexpected storms show up out of nowhere:
"We're sorry mister Smith, we got halfway through your emergency solar apendectomy, but it got cloudy, so we just decided to stitch you up and let you die"
Or
"We're sorry mister Smith, but we can't complete or SOLIK eye surgery until the sun comes out. We hope you don't mind being on the table for another couple of days"
(somebody had to say it)
Meteor Photography:
Materials needed:
SLR Camera
50mm f/2 or faster lense, or even better -- a fisheye lense
400 or faster film -- multiple rolls are good
Tripod
Cable Release or self-timer
Procedure:
Set up your camera on its tripod outdoors on the night of the 12th or 13th. Point it near the radiant (a few degrees off to one side is good) and wait for the action to start. Then, connect your cable release or set your self-timer and open the lense for a 2-minute or so exposure. Exact times will vary depending on how light-polluted your location is, but that's about good. Then, every two minutes close the shutter and advance the film. You'll get a lot of pictures of star trails and hopefully a few really great shots of streaking meteors. If you see a really great one where your camera is pointing, go ahead and advance right then -- no point in fogging the film further.
They'll beat my last year's leonids hands-down. I stayed out until 3-am staring at an overcast sky hoping against hope that I'd get some patch of clarity with a good view for a second or two. Bugged out when it started raining.
Iowa sucks in the winter. And in the summer. It's not bad in spring and fall though!
The danger is there. The indefinite survival of the species requires dealing with it sometime. Yes, climate change, warfare, disease (AIDS, cancer, et al) are all threats to the survival of our species. So is asteroid impact. We don't know how immediate any of them are, so we had better get planning. Just because something doesn't happen often doesn't mean it won't happen soon.
500-Year floods happen about once every 500 years, right? Doesn't mean it didn't happen in 1993. "A few times every hundred million years" could mean tomorrow. Sky surveys are great, but they don't have the whole sky covered, nor will they in the near future. To quote a popular space-opera, "it's a big-ass sky."
You have the legal right to deny any business or agency your social security number unless it is a government agency with a valid privacy act statement explaining why you are requied by a law to provide your number.
In most cases, that doesn't really mean you have a choice. A few weeks ago I told a video rental company, "sorry, that's private information. I don't give out my SSN," and walked out of the store. This is okay. But when the blood bank asks me for my SSN, I have to give it to them or I can't donate. When my Insurance company asks me for my SSN, I have to give it to them or they won't insure me. When the Power company asks me for my SSN, I have to give it to them or my milk spoils.
So, maybe this represents a change. Maybe we won't have to give out our social security numbers to everybody and her brother anymore. Now it'll be "sure thing, what's your Lexis/Nexis number?" "Oh, you're not a member of the system/don't want to give us that information. Well that's fine, Mr. Smith, I hope you enjoy camping because from now on you will have no power, running water, or telephone service -- you might as well rough it in a park, it's prettier there, and you can light fires without setting off alarms"
It's for tracking fugitives and deadbeats -- just like the Social Security database is for paying government benefits. What does either have to do with your power bill? Jack squat, except that it gives you a unique number linked to something "desireable" (government money/justice for fugitives), and it saves corporate database monkeys the few extra minutes that it would take to add a GUID number to each record.
Three big reasons that I support ethanol:
3) It's good for the environment
2) It supports Iowa's currently not-so-hot economy
2b) This means that my tuition at the University of Iowa doesn't go up as fast
But the number one reason that I support ethanol is:
It's 5-6 cents cheaper per gallon at the pump!
Another good article can be found here, at the home of the American Radio Relay League, the north american Secretariat of the International Amateur Radio Union.
Fighter jets are far more stable than helicopters.
So why aren't they using it on one of our fine fleet of space shuttles? Or better yet, send it up to the ISS for a bit. Sure, that's expensive, but so is fueling and maintaining an F/A-18, paying a highly trained pilot (and her life insurance!), fitting the camera onto the plane before the flight, and dismounting it after.
I believe the point about the free binaries was not that people will be restricted from distributing them, but that THEIR binaries (the ones compiled and distributed by UL) will only come from UL. It won't be like other distros that let you download RPMs or ISOs off of theirs or any other of a dozen websites. When you buy a copy of UL, you get a CD that has UL on it in binary form that you can install on your computer. It will also come with the sources. If you like, you can compile those sources on some other platform and distribute the resulting binaries. The GPL hath spoken, and it hath blessed this technique. But UL hath NOT blessed this technique, and once you do this the binaries that you have compiled cease to be ULs to care about. They are disowned, disinherited, and dis-supported. In other words, they can't stop you from compiling the sources yourself and handing out CDs, but they CAN have a business policy that once you do that it's out of their hands and they have nothing more to do with it.
Also, if the prices are really low, be aware that you may be buying stolen or otherwise less-than-legal components. And, even if you don't know that the parts are stolen and are innocent of any crime, you may be liable for the civil tort of conversion.
I am not a lawyer and the above is not legal advice, just advise to be cautious.
Ah, but that was caused not by NASA's failure to use metric but by Lockheed's. Lockheed figured that since people in the US use the english system, they should translate all of their data to english units before they sent it over to NASA with the probe. NASA assumed the data were metric, because, well, that's what everybody in science uses! This is why NASA people now refer to the English system as the "Lockheed system"
Nearly all of the cool astrophotographs that you'll see from Hubble and elsewhere are false-colored, because the visible spectrum is not any more useful than any of the other spectra (microwave, UV, and IR, to name a few), provided you have the proper equipment to capture all of them.
You can see more cool hubble pics (and other astrophotographs), and learn more about false-coloring of astrophotographs at the Astronomy Picture of the Day page.
Ford failed to prove these things, thus the injunction was denied. It's a nice finding, but the outcome of the trial remains to be seen.
One encouraging footnote in the finding, for those who don't want to read 11 pages of legalese (although it's not nearly as bad as some), reads as follows:
Also, towards the end of the finding Judge Cleland provides an excellent criticism of the implication in Planned Parenthood and Jews for Jesus that causing commercial harm is sufficient cause for a claim of infringement, pointing out that many uses that are specifically excluded by the FTDA cause commercial harm to the mark holder.
While the case is far from over, it doesn't look good for Ford.
When the star tracker failed in 1999, I wept, for I was sure that the mission was doomed. When the ground crew, in a long stroke of genius, kept it going, I wept for joy.
In the past year and a half or so, DS 1 hasn't been doing so much. WIth most of its objectives achieved, the mission became largely a test of how long it would last. Nevertheless, it was always fun to read Dr. Marc Rayman's mission logs, "widely thought of and commonly spoken of in the spiral arms of the Milky Way galaxy as the most reliable source of information on this bold mission of exploration."
This fall, the probe paid a visit to comet Borrelley. Nobody knew where in the tail the rock itself was, but DS 1's job was to get as close to it as possible, and send back pictures. Nobody expected it to work. If anything, this was supposed to be a dignified death for the bird, which the September 9 log referred to as being "kept flying with duct tape and good wishes." The chances that the probe would do anything but smash into the comet and die, or be pommeled to death by the microdust in the coma, were astronomically slim. But somehow, miraculously, it survived, and with the pictures to prove it.
DS 1 was the stuff of science fiction, and that so many things went right is simply amazing. While I , like Dr. Rayman, am happy that it lived so long, I think we are all somewhat sad to see it go. But we can be consoled by the fact that the funding, the DSN time, the space, and the positively brilliant staff that have kept DS 1 running will now move on to projects that have even more excitement and adventure to offer us, and science will march on, at a steadily accelerating tempo.