The connection between what is yours and what belongs to others is easily made when you pay for it with your credit card, or use your club card and pay cash. Sure some items like ties and underwear may be presents, but how often do you buy tires for someone else? Or conversely, this enables the interested parties, without effort to establish connections between people. Customer A bougth item I1 that is now being worn by Customer B. And suddenly people you have no relation to whatsoever know who bought you a tie as a present around Valentine's day.
Granted, your boss may not easily get access to this data if you are some small company, but the bigger that company is, the farther they can reach. And if you don't already know - you'd be surprised how willing large companies are to sell access to their customer databases.
The problem is that tracking license plates, cell phones etc, is - as you say - a huge effort that isn't worth it, not even for the government, unless you are a suspected murdere etc.
RFID tags make this much much easier - so much, that tracking the general public as a side effect is technically and financially plausible.
Batteries? Have you ever even read anything about RFID technology? They don't have batteries, which is the only reason for their limited range. They get power directly from the radio waves.
RFID tags in the packaging? They are now weaving them into of clothing, they are inside your tires, and in the handle of your razor.
Disable them? Try microwaving your tire...
The concern is that they don't deactivate themselves. And almost any RFID tag can be read by almost any RFID reader. So your boss can start checking how often you change your underwear, and indirectly can track you around the building by the tags in your clothing. Your car could be tracked at every intersection.
It's not that there is an inherent problem, it's just ripe for abuse, and big step towards slipping into a police state.
Most of us just don't want to get anywhere near there. There is most definitely a need for concern.
For one, there is really not much that supports your argument in that developing 'issues' has anything to do with the sexual preference of the "parents" (in quotes because i'm using it in the wider sense of... rolemodels that spend most of their time and energy with the children - ie not necessarily biological parents). Children in perfectly "normal" families develop issues as well.
And secondly, even if a child develops issues "because of the sexual choices of thier guardians", I bet in most cases it's not directly that, but instead the stigmatized social responses and pre-conceptions they have to deal with day by day.
Lastly, excuse my repetitive use of quotes. Also, I'm not saying you're wrong, I just believe that in and of itself there are no disadvantages to children raised by gay couples (as it seemed to me you implied). I blame those problems more on the extra hurdles that society puts in those people's paths to happyness - and less on their personal choices (which by the way is a great thing to implicitly teach your children).
While I think you're right about the targeting, nukes don't fall ONTO anything per se, that's a common misperception. Nukes explode several hundred and sometimes thousand feet up in the air to maximize the destructive potential.
"In fact, when the USCCR held hearings on the Florida elections, they were unable to interview a single person that was incorrectly prevented from voting because of the felon list."
Umm... I thought their votes were removed *after* they voted. And since probably not each voter in Floria has a list of all convicted fellons handy, how would they know (especially in cases where a vote was crossed out because of a *similar* name)? Your point is analogous to "They randomly crossed out 10000 votes after voting, but before counting, but not one of those crossed out complained."
Yes, the same lines that are already regulated, and that I'm already paying about 20 different taxes on. Why do you think it makes sense to take a service that's superimposed on that and tax (and regulate) it again? Are you going to agree with 'virtual stamps' for emails next? After all, they are doing the same thing as the postal office - right?
The much bigger issue is that just because something is VoIP, does in no way whatsoever mean that it's equivalent to a phone line. If the VoIP company used a wireless connection to your house in a public frequency range to provide a service that is equivalent to a phone line, you may have a point. Short of that, this is over-regulation and double taxation, and will by all means stifle an emerging technology.
IANAL, and have the following question: I assume from how this sounds that it will exploit the autorun 'feature' of windows to go ahead and install a program. This would be pretty pointless if they asked me if I wanted it, so I assume they will just go ahead and do it.
Now, I know that there aren't many laws describing what software can and can't do, but taking an action like installing something (that may even come with a license that is accepted by installing said software), but dang it, I don't think anybody has the right to install anything on my computer without my expressed consent, and inserting a CD to listen to music definitely does not qualify in my mind.
So my question is "Is this legally sound? Can they do that?" I personally could think of various scenarious where an action like that could cause me financial harm at least in the form of lost time. (Imagine my hard drive being nearly full and a program trying to install [for non-windows users, you will see the most freakish behaviour including reboot loops etc when this happens] or even if there was a bug in their program and it crashed my computer.)
Also, once someone installs a program like that, I'd bet it would phone home whenever it felt like it. Worse even, if I manually try to uninstall whatever software they put on my computer (or, for that matter "circumvent" the installation), am I not in a way violating the DMCA?
This is scary stuff and it irritates me to no end that they get away with it. If this is not illegal yet, I really think it should be. What do you think?
Oh I see. Well really that means whatever anti-virus software is sending bounces is broken, because Sobig forges From: addresses. However I've never heard of someone getting blacklisted because of this?
The real solution to this problem is built-in virus filtering (with hourly updates). Every pieve of mail going through our server is spam and virus checked. The result? about 50000 blocked virus-emails since August 16th this year, and not a single problem with our users. And the cost is only a few hundred bucks per year.
Actually, adult females cannot "produce" ovules (ova?). The just release one or more per month (well, or zero if they are on depo or something similar). They pretty much have what they are born with (~300-400) and then start loosing them, and when they run out they go into menopause.
""As a web developer I can tell you that maybe you should read up a little and come out of the 90's. Go check some place like Human Factors, some of the other usability sites, the W3 WAI, Bobby site, Gov. 508 guidlines, or try to find a site with some good information about disabilities in the US and worldwide.""
I do, and I write standard compliant websites. However that alone does not make them accessible to disabled/impared people.
Anyways I don't know why I keep finding myself on the defensive with these posts, so this will be my last one on the issue.
I'm just going to once again point out that I don't disagree with making sites accessible, and that if you have the funding for it, by all means go ahead. But our customers (small to mid size businesses) don't have the money to rewrite their entire sites, giving up the 'hip and cool' features, locking out anybody below the 5.* version browsers (which you apparently don't care about), and then gain NOTHING.
Small businesses can't afford to hire blind developers or even just disabled people, because they are less productive and cost extra money. It's not that any of them don't sympathise, or would be willing to pay maybe 10-20% more. But that is not a realistic amount. The people that spend money online are mostly the people that love flash(y) stuff, visually interesting pages. Sites that I would expect to get used by disabled people like univerisities and government sites, are already required to be accessible to the highest standards (A friend of mine did accessibility work for a local college website. He had constant audits and eventually quit because as he says, "there are things that are impossible to make accessible to all disabled people. it's the most annoyingly frustrating work.").
And I'm not talking out of my ass either. A company I worked for about 2.5 years ago had a blind developer. But believe me, he didn't get anything done. He was basically given work that mostly didn't matter. We all felt bad for the guy, but what are you gonna do? He had the most expensive workstation (hardware AND software) of all of us, and it barely worked. Whenever there was the smallest problem (and as I'm sure you know, windows has lots of those, especially when you have to install all kinds of weird screen readers, and assorted utilities) someone else needed to help. So not only was the guy not particularly productive, someone else needed to help him half the time. Not all problems like this are solved by throwing tons of money at it because you feel bad about it.
And lastly there is a huge distinction between someone with bad eye-sight and blind people. It is relatively easy to design your site such that much larger fonts etc can be used, but accessibility for blind people is a whole different story. Don't throw the two in one pot and treat them the same.
In fact it may make a lot more sense for the government to throw a few million bucks towards developing a well working screen reader and hand it out for free. THAT would actually help, and not burden thousands of businesses with the cost.
Ok since you know what I'm hired to do, and what tools I use to do my job, and all the things I do wrong, maybe you have an example of a website you've designed bigmouth?
Just FYI, websites I write are generally W3C HTML 4.01/Transitional fully compliant (yes I use their validator), i use VIM to write websites, and even though tables are intended for displaying tabular data, NOONE (ie no major website) uses them that way. They are the only consistent cross-browser way to get things displayed the same, and with some control over it. (And that is something the people with the money care about.)
And doing all that still doesn't make a website accessible to blind people. It takes extra work and lots of testing and redoing things (summarys, headers, TONS of hidden arguments etc etc). And as I said, while this works fine for static content, doing this on dynmaic sites is a complete nightmare. (And aside produces no 'visible' results, so the people with the money don't care. I'm not saying that that's right, but that's how it works in the business world.)
CSS is still horible for layout due to the fact that to date there is not a single browser out there that implements it correctly, not even version 1. But then if you knew what you were talking about, you would have known that, and the nightmare of doing spacing and layout that way. It literally looks different in every freakin' browser out there, unless you restrict yourself to some very core attributes, and then you're back to square one, because spacing is not one of those.
And yes I use lynx to check that websites are readable in text only browsers.
Anyway, once again I'd like to point out that in theory I don't disagree with you. When I do work for myself or my pet projects, sure I do what I can to make them compliant and accessible. But when you're on the clock for some corporation, you don't get to make those decisions. That's really all I was saying.
Huh? Have you ever designed a large scale website before? Yes following the standards gets you part of the way there. But following the standards alone is in a way extra work (unless you can come up with a real good reason for an alt tag in a spacer picture for example). And my whole point was not that it's difficult or impossible, it's that companies want to save money. They don't want me to spend the time to make their websites standard compliant or accessible, they just want it to work well for 90%+ of their users. Beyond that they take the cheapest bid.
"""All of your examples of "regular features" are in fact gross abuse of HTML."""
What? Which example would that be? Nested tables? colspans? rowspans? Those are all default HTML. Transparent images for spacing have been used for ages because they are the easiest cross-browser compatible way to force things to space right, and do not violate any HTML standard I'm aware of.
And yes CSS is great, but it doesn't solve all these problems. Aside from that, you seem to be only thinking of static HTML. Most websites I design are highly dynamic, and the accessibility issue becomes much, much more difficult with those. Take/. for example: it's a screen-reader's nightmare. Come to think of it, since you so loudely (and rudely one might add) voice your opinion, have you EVER tried out a screen reader just to check how things work? Doesn't sound like it.
"""Maybe you'll get more business if you stop trying to fuck every user up the ass?"""
Oh ya now I see your point. Funny thing is, I keep getting business because I can under-bid the competition. My time is worth money. And I seem to be doing just fine with my customers. Thanks though, Mr. MBA.
"It's not rocket science for website developers. Most don't even think about website accessibility though since it's only about 8% of the population they stand to alienate. They don't understand that there are other losses associated with not having accessible sites."
Not really true. As a web developer, I can tell you that not only is this concept of accessibility incredibly difficult to explain to corporations buying websites, but they simply are not willing to spend nearly twice the money (yes it does take almost double the time) to make websites accessible to a miniscule minority (8% - ya right. try 0.1%, or are you really trying to suggest that one out of 13 people _using the internet_ is blind or heavily vision impaired?). Additionally to make sites accessible you can't use all kinds of flashy features, and regular features (such as nested tables, rowspans, colspans, transparent spacing images etc.) because the screen reading programs suck so bad (not that it is an easy task to write one, but still they don't work well). I feel sorry for people who are blind, but I think it's unreasonable to expect everyone to spend extra thousands of dollars on the 'possibility' of getting one or two extra customers a year while at the same time seriously reducing the quality of their website.
Don't forget that in a sense it's unfair to the huge majority to spend half your resources on a couple individuals who can't really use the thing to begin with.
Well if you read the article, there are instructions underneath the pictures to the left that specifically mention to use heavy cryo gloves.. just like in the picture they show with it.
I think this is interesting, but a flawed attempt, mainly because of the sheer number of indivuals that may feel the need to 'reply' to a particular publication. Say, for example, CNN writes an article about how a group, say Hamas, should be designated as a terrorist organization (which it is). Now, what if 100000 responses come back? I don't think that's an unreasonable number. Sure when you have business A talking on their website about product B of company C this all could work. But we don't live in that ideal world, and if that was the only intent and purpose of the law it would be pretty useless. For example, what about Microsoft badmouthing Linux? If only one reply need by published, which one, and who gets to decide that? If all replys need be published, then it's obvious that this law is as worthless as it is unfeasable.
It's an interesting idea, but I just can't imagine it working.
Actually, I see this brought up a lot in this discussion, however, MOST and by that i probably mean upwards of 90% of backup needs are such that if the business not only looses it's main facility but also it's nearby backup facility, it simply doesn't matter anymore. The only businesses that can survive that are monsters like WalMart.
Also I think this is a great solution to be used WITH tapes. Because (so far) all the recovery I had to do was on site and involved things like hardware failures, viruses and accidental deletions etc. Catastrophic events are very very very rare. That doesn't mean you shouldn't plan for them and make the once a month offsite backup, but that is really enough for anybody i know. If your facility gets devastated, what the heck do you want with the backups? It will be weeks before you're back online anyway, so a larger cycle works just fine. But for the most common uses of backup, a system like this would be great and seriously reduce the time it takes for recovery. It's definitely interesting and could be a great addition to most backup scenarios.
"You can't invoke trademark law if you don't have a trademark."
In a word, bullshit. You don't have to do anything for something you use to identify your company or a product to be a trademark. Registering it merely indicates that you are going to be fighting for it. Do the research before you spew out untrue crap. Oh and if you had RTFA it made mentions of that same fact in there too.
Additionally you are making a mistake that they were trying to fight. You keep referring to it as "Firebird SQL". That's not its name. It's "Firebird". See why it's lame someone else is starting to use their name?
Slashdot Mirror
They did, and it's called "caldera".
The connection between what is yours and what belongs to others is easily made when you pay for it with your credit card, or use your club card and pay cash. Sure some items like ties and underwear may be presents, but how often do you buy tires for someone else? Or conversely, this enables the interested parties, without effort to establish connections between people. Customer A bougth item I1 that is now being worn by Customer B. And suddenly people you have no relation to whatsoever know who bought you a tie as a present around Valentine's day.
Granted, your boss may not easily get access to this data if you are some small company, but the bigger that company is, the farther they can reach. And if you don't already know - you'd be surprised how willing large companies are to sell access to their customer databases.
The problem is that tracking license plates, cell phones etc, is - as you say - a huge effort that isn't worth it, not even for the government, unless you are a suspected murdere etc.
RFID tags make this much much easier - so much, that tracking the general public as a side effect is technically and financially plausible.
Batteries? Have you ever even read anything about RFID technology? They don't have batteries, which is the only reason for their limited range. They get power directly from the radio waves.
RFID tags in the packaging? They are now weaving them into of clothing, they are inside your tires, and in the handle of your razor.
Disable them? Try microwaving your tire...
The concern is that they don't deactivate themselves. And almost any RFID tag can be read by almost any RFID reader. So your boss can start checking how often you change your underwear, and indirectly can track you around the building by the tags in your clothing. Your car could be tracked at every intersection.
It's not that there is an inherent problem, it's just ripe for abuse, and big step towards slipping into a police state.
Most of us just don't want to get anywhere near there. There is most definitely a need for concern.
For one, there is really not much that supports your argument in that developing 'issues' has anything to do with the sexual preference of the "parents" (in quotes because i'm using it in the wider sense of... rolemodels that spend most of their time and energy with the children - ie not necessarily biological parents). Children in perfectly "normal" families develop issues as well.
And secondly, even if a child develops issues "because of the sexual choices of thier guardians", I bet in most cases it's not directly that, but instead the stigmatized social responses and pre-conceptions they have to deal with day by day.
Lastly, excuse my repetitive use of quotes. Also, I'm not saying you're wrong, I just believe that in and of itself there are no disadvantages to children raised by gay couples (as it seemed to me you implied). I blame those problems more on the extra hurdles that society puts in those people's paths to happyness - and less on their personal choices (which by the way is a great thing to implicitly teach your children).
Um... hello. Go back and re-read the OP. He was being sarcastic.
While I think you're right about the targeting, nukes don't fall ONTO anything per se, that's a common misperception. Nukes explode several hundred and sometimes thousand feet up in the air to maximize the destructive potential.
Well that makes sense. Don't know how I was thinking that the votes were removed after voting...
my bad.
"In fact, when the USCCR held hearings on the Florida elections, they were unable to interview a single person that was incorrectly prevented from voting because of the felon list."
Umm... I thought their votes were removed *after* they voted. And since probably not each voter in Floria has a list of all convicted fellons handy, how would they know (especially in cases where a vote was crossed out because of a *similar* name)? Your point is analogous to "They randomly crossed out 10000 votes after voting, but before counting, but not one of those crossed out complained."
Well duh. What's your point?
Yes, the same lines that are already regulated, and that I'm already paying about 20 different taxes on. Why do you think it makes sense to take a service that's superimposed on that and tax (and regulate) it again? Are you going to agree with 'virtual stamps' for emails next? After all, they are doing the same thing as the postal office - right?
The much bigger issue is that just because something is VoIP, does in no way whatsoever mean that it's equivalent to a phone line. If the VoIP company used a wireless connection to your house in a public frequency range to provide a service that is equivalent to a phone line, you may have a point. Short of that, this is over-regulation and double taxation, and will by all means stifle an emerging technology.
IANAL, and have the following question: I assume from how this sounds that it will exploit the autorun 'feature' of windows to go ahead and install a program. This would be pretty pointless if they asked me if I wanted it, so I assume they will just go ahead and do it.
Now, I know that there aren't many laws describing what software can and can't do, but taking an action like installing something (that may even come with a license that is accepted by installing said software), but dang it, I don't think anybody has the right to install anything on my computer without my expressed consent, and inserting a CD to listen to music definitely does not qualify in my mind.
So my question is "Is this legally sound? Can they do that?" I personally could think of various scenarious where an action like that could cause me financial harm at least in the form of lost time. (Imagine my hard drive being nearly full and a program trying to install [for non-windows users, you will see the most freakish behaviour including reboot loops etc when this happens] or even if there was a bug in their program and it crashed my computer.)
Also, once someone installs a program like that, I'd bet it would phone home whenever it felt like it. Worse even, if I manually try to uninstall whatever software they put on my computer (or, for that matter "circumvent" the installation), am I not in a way violating the DMCA?
This is scary stuff and it irritates me to no end that they get away with it. If this is not illegal yet, I really think it should be. What do you think?
Oh I see. Well really that means whatever anti-virus software is sending bounces is broken, because Sobig forges From: addresses. However I've never heard of someone getting blacklisted because of this?
The real solution to this problem is built-in virus filtering (with hourly updates). Every pieve of mail going through our server is spam and virus checked. The result? about 50000 blocked virus-emails since August 16th this year, and not a single problem with our users. And the cost is only a few hundred bucks per year.
Actually, adult females cannot "produce" ovules (ova?). The just release one or more per month (well, or zero if they are on depo or something similar). They pretty much have what they are born with (~300-400) and then start loosing them, and when they run out they go into menopause.
""As a web developer I can tell you that maybe you should read up a little and come out of the 90's. Go check some place like Human Factors, some of the other usability sites, the W3 WAI, Bobby site, Gov. 508 guidlines, or try to find a site with some good information about disabilities in the US and worldwide.""
I do, and I write standard compliant websites. However that alone does not make them accessible to disabled/impared people.
Anyways I don't know why I keep finding myself on the defensive with these posts, so this will be my last one on the issue.
I'm just going to once again point out that I don't disagree with making sites accessible, and that if you have the funding for it, by all means go ahead. But our customers (small to mid size businesses) don't have the money to rewrite their entire sites, giving up the 'hip and cool' features, locking out anybody below the 5.* version browsers (which you apparently don't care about), and then gain NOTHING.
Small businesses can't afford to hire blind developers or even just disabled people, because they are less productive and cost extra money. It's not that any of them don't sympathise, or would be willing to pay maybe 10-20% more. But that is not a realistic amount. The people that spend money online are mostly the people that love flash(y) stuff, visually interesting pages. Sites that I would expect to get used by disabled people like univerisities and government sites, are already required to be accessible to the highest standards (A friend of mine did accessibility work for a local college website. He had constant audits and eventually quit because as he says, "there are things that are impossible to make accessible to all disabled people. it's the most annoyingly frustrating work.").
And I'm not talking out of my ass either. A company I worked for about 2.5 years ago had a blind developer. But believe me, he didn't get anything done. He was basically given work that mostly didn't matter. We all felt bad for the guy, but what are you gonna do? He had the most expensive workstation (hardware AND software) of all of us, and it barely worked. Whenever there was the smallest problem (and as I'm sure you know, windows has lots of those, especially when you have to install all kinds of weird screen readers, and assorted utilities) someone else needed to help. So not only was the guy not particularly productive, someone else needed to help him half the time. Not all problems like this are solved by throwing tons of money at it because you feel bad about it.
And lastly there is a huge distinction between someone with bad eye-sight and blind people. It is relatively easy to design your site such that much larger fonts etc can be used, but accessibility for blind people is a whole different story. Don't throw the two in one pot and treat them the same.
In fact it may make a lot more sense for the government to throw a few million bucks towards developing a well working screen reader and hand it out for free. THAT would actually help, and not burden thousands of businesses with the cost.
Ok since you know what I'm hired to do, and what tools I use to do my job, and all the things I do wrong, maybe you have an example of a website you've designed bigmouth?
Just FYI, websites I write are generally W3C HTML 4.01/Transitional fully compliant (yes I use their validator), i use VIM to write websites, and even though tables are intended for displaying tabular data, NOONE (ie no major website) uses them that way. They are the only consistent cross-browser way to get things displayed the same, and with some control over it. (And that is something the people with the money care about.)
And doing all that still doesn't make a website accessible to blind people. It takes extra work and lots of testing and redoing things (summarys, headers, TONS of hidden arguments etc etc). And as I said, while this works fine for static content, doing this on dynmaic sites is a complete nightmare. (And aside produces no 'visible' results, so the people with the money don't care. I'm not saying that that's right, but that's how it works in the business world.)
CSS is still horible for layout due to the fact that to date there is not a single browser out there that implements it correctly, not even version 1. But then if you knew what you were talking about, you would have known that, and the nightmare of doing spacing and layout that way. It literally looks different in every freakin' browser out there, unless you restrict yourself to some very core attributes, and then you're back to square one, because spacing is not one of those.
And yes I use lynx to check that websites are readable in text only browsers.
Anyway, once again I'd like to point out that in theory I don't disagree with you. When I do work for myself or my pet projects, sure I do what I can to make them compliant and accessible. But when you're on the clock for some corporation, you don't get to make those decisions. That's really all I was saying.
Huh? Have you ever designed a large scale website before? Yes following the standards gets you part of the way there. But following the standards alone is in a way extra work (unless you can come up with a real good reason for an alt tag in a spacer picture for example). And my whole point was not that it's difficult or impossible, it's that companies want to save money. They don't want me to spend the time to make their websites standard compliant or accessible, they just want it to work well for 90%+ of their users. Beyond that they take the cheapest bid.
/. for example: it's a screen-reader's nightmare. Come to think of it, since you so loudely (and rudely one might add) voice your opinion, have you EVER tried out a screen reader just to check how things work? Doesn't sound like it.
"""All of your examples of "regular features" are in fact gross abuse of HTML."""
What? Which example would that be? Nested tables? colspans? rowspans? Those are all default HTML. Transparent images for spacing have been used for ages because they are the easiest cross-browser compatible way to force things to space right, and do not violate any HTML standard I'm aware of.
And yes CSS is great, but it doesn't solve all these problems. Aside from that, you seem to be only thinking of static HTML. Most websites I design are highly dynamic, and the accessibility issue becomes much, much more difficult with those. Take
"""Maybe you'll get more business if you stop trying to fuck every user up the ass?"""
Oh ya now I see your point. Funny thing is, I keep getting business because I can under-bid the competition. My time is worth money. And I seem to be doing just fine with my customers. Thanks though, Mr. MBA.
"It's not rocket science for website developers. Most don't even think about website accessibility though since it's only about 8% of the population they stand to alienate. They don't understand that there are other losses associated with not having accessible sites."
Not really true. As a web developer, I can tell you that not only is this concept of accessibility incredibly difficult to explain to corporations buying websites, but they simply are not willing to spend nearly twice the money (yes it does take almost double the time) to make websites accessible to a miniscule minority (8% - ya right. try 0.1%, or are you really trying to suggest that one out of 13 people _using the internet_ is blind or heavily vision impaired?). Additionally to make sites accessible you can't use all kinds of flashy features, and regular features (such as nested tables, rowspans, colspans, transparent spacing images etc.) because the screen reading programs suck so bad (not that it is an easy task to write one, but still they don't work well). I feel sorry for people who are blind, but I think it's unreasonable to expect everyone to spend extra thousands of dollars on the 'possibility' of getting one or two extra customers a year while at the same time seriously reducing the quality of their website.
Don't forget that in a sense it's unfair to the huge majority to spend half your resources on a couple individuals who can't really use the thing to begin with.
Well if you read the article, there are instructions underneath the pictures to the left that specifically mention to use heavy cryo gloves.. just like in the picture they show with it.
""If I knew what it was I was doing, it wouldn't be called research, would it?""
-Albert Einstein
I think this is interesting, but a flawed attempt, mainly because of the sheer number of indivuals that may feel the need to 'reply' to a particular publication. Say, for example, CNN writes an article about how a group, say Hamas, should be designated as a terrorist organization (which it is). Now, what if 100000 responses come back? I don't think that's an unreasonable number. Sure when you have business A talking on their website about product B of company C this all could work. But we don't live in that ideal world, and if that was the only intent and purpose of the law it would be pretty useless. For example, what about Microsoft badmouthing Linux? If only one reply need by published, which one, and who gets to decide that? If all replys need be published, then it's obvious that this law is as worthless as it is unfeasable.
It's an interesting idea, but I just can't imagine it working.
2 comments posted and already dead.
The link was to complex to be included here? They look pretty regular to me. You've maybe heard of the A tag? Was it Great Archaeological Sites, Exploring Mars, Earth As Art, or Archimedes' Lab; _OR_ did you just want some traffic to your site? ;)
Actually, I see this brought up a lot in this discussion, however, MOST and by that i probably mean upwards of 90% of backup needs are such that if the business not only looses it's main facility but also it's nearby backup facility, it simply doesn't matter anymore. The only businesses that can survive that are monsters like WalMart.
Also I think this is a great solution to be used WITH tapes. Because (so far) all the recovery I had to do was on site and involved things like hardware failures, viruses and accidental deletions etc. Catastrophic events are very very very rare. That doesn't mean you shouldn't plan for them and make the once a month offsite backup, but that is really enough for anybody i know. If your facility gets devastated, what the heck do you want with the backups? It will be weeks before you're back online anyway, so a larger cycle works just fine. But for the most common uses of backup, a system like this would be great and seriously reduce the time it takes for recovery. It's definitely interesting and could be a great addition to most backup scenarios.
This was already covered.
"You can't invoke trademark law if you don't have a trademark."
In a word, bullshit. You don't have to do anything for something you use to identify your company or a product to be a trademark. Registering it merely indicates that you are going to be fighting for it. Do the research before you spew out untrue crap. Oh and if you had RTFA it made mentions of that same fact in there too.
Additionally you are making a mistake that they were trying to fight. You keep referring to it as "Firebird SQL". That's not its name. It's "Firebird". See why it's lame someone else is starting to use their name?