The press release will claim that nobody could have predicted that the system would be abused by criminals, registering as their intended victims, to plant trigger words in order to cause our brave first responders to overreact.
It's blatantly obvious. This does nothing to fix the underlying problems.
I would add that if you block anything, you are not providing Internet access, but some subset of it. You would need to make that clear to users if you are charging them for it.
As the initiator of the transaction, setting the terms is your prerogative. Most transactions start on the web these days, so configure your browser to set a custom header or change the User-Agent string to whatever you want.
Here's a suggestion:
HTTP-Request-Agreement: Any response to this HTTP request constitutes acceptance of all following terms: Any information you provide in response to any HTTP request is freely redistributable by anyone for any reason at any time, past or future. Anything I buy from you is mine to use as I wish. Any past or future license agreements between us are void. You will immediately deliver anything of value earned through the use of information about any person, to that person, at your own expense. You will not communicate with or give money to any lawyer or government agent for any reason except to pay them as required by the previous term. Any dispute between us will be resolved by an arbitrator of my choice at your expense. Arbitration is binding. I may choose myself as arbitrator. I win. You lose. If you are dissatisfied with the results of arbitration, your remedies are limited to sobbing quietly about it in a darked room. This is the entire agreement between us and may not be amended or overridden by any other agreement. If you do not agree to the preceding terms, you must not respond to this request.
In Mozilla you can override your User-Agent string by adding the following to prefs.js:
user_pref("general.useragent.override", "HTTP-Request-Agreement: [your language here]");
One advantage of this approach is that the fact that they agree to the terms will likely be stored in their webserver logs, to make it easy for them to verify that they did indeed agree. You can use your own HTTP proxy and log headers for your own records too.
Good article, except for one missing bit. The author didn't explain of the legal basis of copyright licenses. I hear or read the term "license" so often I'd expect everyone to know the definition, but I doubt they do. I don't know it any more precisely than "formal permission".
Is "license" just the conventional name for any contract where a copyright holder promises not to sue for infringement as long as specific rules are followed? Or is "license" the formal name of a specific legal structure actually defined by copyright law?
It seems the former is true. In any case, the audience needs the legal definition of the term "license" in order to be sure that they're actually reading one, what basis it has in law, and whether it will provide sufficient protection against claims of copyright infringement.
I favor imposing involuntary fees across network users such that the fees become so low they are hardly worth complaining about.
The size of the fee is not the problem. It would be a huge mistake to codify the current flawed network structure of 'network users' and providers into tax law.
We already have a many legally taxable networks. The telephone, cable, water, sewer, and road networks are all taxable for various reasons and with varying amounts of harm and good.
But the Internet is ideally a distributed mesh network constructed and operated by the individual owners of its nodes and links, not multinational corporations. New tax structures based on the current heirarchal model will limit our ability to migrate to a meshed peer network structure as technology allows it. And no government has the authority to prevent the construction of such networks, according to Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
When two roomates decide to network their computers, should tax collectors be involved? Of course not. What about two neighbors? Ten? An entire city? Neighboring cities?
In some cases, taxes might reasonably fund parts of the network. Links between cities might be paid for with sales or property taxes. But that is an issue to be decided by the citizens of the respective cities. Enabling speech with taxes is fine. Limiting speech with taxes is not.
It would be absurd to limit the ability of individuals to communicate with each other in order to promote the ability of some artists and their agents to communicate to their market.
Is there any country on the planet where "corporate profit" is a consitutional right?
Well put. Corporations do have many obligations and responsibilites, few privileges, and no rights.
For the moment at least, the United Nations seems to agree. They have created the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (read it!), but no similar declaration of corporate rights.
It is interesting to note that the UN does not declare that humans have any right to form corporations. Not even unprofitable ones.
Unless you know what time standard is used on the space station, the assertion that something happened to the space station at 2:30am this morning only gives you the approximate position of the space station relative to the earth and sun during the event. You can't deduce the longitude or Earth surface local time from it, because the space station will have had that relative position multiple times on any given morning.
So how do they handle time out there? I'll bet it involves the word 'Zulu' because that sounds really cool over the radio in movies.
This sort of thing has cropped up before, and it has always been due to human error.
Jesrad: corporations don't have a voting right, and thus are not full citizens.
AC: Wrong, they vote with their money
Jesrad is correct stating that corporations have no right to vote. They have very few rights, and not even a right to their own survival. We (natural persons) are able to create and destroy our own corporations, just by following specific legal procedures.
If the AC intended to imply that the people who operate some corporations do conspire to abuse corporate wealth to subvert our political system, then the AC is correct. But that behavior is illegal and not accurately described as 'voting'. It has several accurate names but I like to call it 'representation-jacking'.
I think we would all agree that: 1: Paris is the capital of France. 2: The influence of corporate wealth in US government seems to frequently exceed the influence of the electorate.
We must understand the process of abuse clearly if we are to solve issue 2 and repair the system.
Issue 1 is not a problem, just a trick to get us all back into agreement.
The really scary thing is tho....... there are people out there who will pay for this!
If anyone had ever actually paid for one, there would probably be an actual photo published of the desk, not just the rendered images we are shown. I'd offer that not even the manufacturer is willing to pay for one.
But I agree. $40K is too much for a knock-off. I'd rather wait and buy the real Space Ghost Coast to Coast desk on eBay, after the show is finally cancelled in a few hundred years. Now that would be worth something!
This is not even true corpsemail because the messages are sent before death, and only queued until after death. Corpsemail will never happen because dead people can't remember passwords for shit.
But premail holds true promise: A tiny keyboard-on-a-stick would really be all a pregnant woman needs to enable her developing fetus get started with prenatal messaging.
But it shouldn't be hard for some enterprising product developer to come up with a water resistant palm device with bluetooth, email, and some prenatal typing tutor software. I've heard that the Japanese are already doing this - that's why you keep seeing those ASL responses that start with -.31 in chatrooms.
Only two million Americans have purchased HDTV sets. As for broadband, rural and underserved areas aside, there is not an availability problem. There is a demand problem.
So not enough Americans want to watch higher definition TV / Internet? Maybe they want to spend some time raising their kids instead. Do we really need to cripple all computers in order to get people to watch more TV? This does not make any sense. Does Ernest Hollings represent people, or corporations?
a "broadcast flag" which would instruct digital devices to prevent illegal copying and Internet retransmission of digital broadcast television.
The "broadcast flag" must signal the copyright expiration date, else the SSSCA/CBDTA is unconstitutional. But it is already unconstitutional, because it depends on the DMCA, which is unconstitutional. (Because it extends copyright duration without "promoting the progress of science and useful arts".)
Hey, if your laptop has one of those button pointers, you can put your mouth over it use your tongue. That way no one can even see your secret unlock method.
Computers are transforming into collections of separate networked modules.
Most computer components are already available as networked modules: storage, audio, input, printing. Even displays with graphics processors are available as tablets and webpads. This trend will continue. Protocols and software will evolve to support it.
Soon, processors will find their way to the market as a separate networked module, probably coupled with memory. When you add one of these modules to your network, distributed processing will let you use it in addition to all the others you already have.
You and your family (and maybe even your neighbors) will share processing and storage resources as you use your own separate portable terminals.
Your most important data will be encrypted on a storage module that looks more like a safe, set in concrete in the foundation of your house.
A good place to start is with the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights[or search Gnutella]. Plenty of nice articles there, but these two seem most relevant to the current topic:
Article 19
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
Article 27
1. Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.
2. Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.
Clearly, the only reasonable conclusion is [insert your conclusion here] and anyone who says otherwise is a pirate and scallywag!
Has anyone even seen a PNG file online? I think I ran across a grand total of 1. Of course there could have been inline graphics that I didn't notice, but really?
Yeah, inline graphics are pretty rare on the web. Plus, some sites are designed to give you PNG if your browser supports OBJECT PNG, and GIF otherwise.
From my mozilla cache:
file * | grep PNG | wc -l = 20
file * | grep GIF | wc -l = 546
Of course, I do spend a lot of time on http://pnggygirls.com.
The Super Bridge documentary contained an excellent quote:
JOE LEACH: Anyone can build a bridge that will carry a given loading. But if you look at the way that some of those of us in construction look at it, it takes a real craftsman to build a bridge that will, that will just barely carry it.
In software, the opposite seems true. Almost anyone can write a program that will just barely perform a given task. It takes a real craftsman to write a program that will handle the task reliably and efficiently, and lend itself to modification to handle related tasks.
The barriers to practice each craft and the consequences of doing them badly are hardly comparable. A bridge about to fail would be condemned immediately, but if you tried to stop someone selling software that didn't work you'd be sued or jailed.
There is a cost analogy though. Just as a perfect bridge would be unaffordable to construct, so would be a perfect program. Unless there were some magical source of volunteer labor, donated materials, and expert advice.
From the SnapShockPlus page: During operation the SnapShock-PLUS can measure and record up to 1475 time-tagged, peak acceleration levels. With the optional extended data memory this can be increased to 5900 readings.
Check out the graphs and histograms.
The US Constitution implies that that Congress represents natural people who are citizens. We need an amendment to make this explicit and some laws to enforce it. Lately, Congress has come to represent corporations more than people.
They have the right to lobby
Not really. Only natural entities have natural rights. Artificial entities only have those privileges granted them by their creators (We the People).
America would be stronger if we had created a branch of government to represent corporations, but it is too late to change that now. We didn't give them a seat at the table, so they took yours. Who needs it most? Corporations have no right to complain about taxation without representation, but you do.
now that your "guys" are whores for money, dont vote for them. Pretty simple.
I wish. There is so much money controlling the system that withholding votes can't fix the problem. The only solution is to criminalize interference in government affairs on behalf of non-citizens. That will require wise voting, logic, debate, and money. Pretty difficult.
Slashdot Mirror
The press release will claim that nobody could have predicted that the system would be abused by criminals, registering as their intended victims, to plant trigger words in order to cause our brave first responders to overreact.
It's blatantly obvious. This does nothing to fix the underlying problems.
See https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/do... for details on the scheme and comments on prior solutions.
I just updated it:
1; DROP DATABASE 'mysql';
I would add that if you block anything, you are not providing Internet access, but some subset of it. You would need to make that clear to users if you are charging them for it.
Ha! The parent's linked article is definitely written in the native language of the common Windows user:
Use an AntiVirus Software - It is very important that your computer has an antivirus software running on your machine.
Maybe that's exactly what is called for. The page is only lacking a tiled background image to hold their attention.
As the initiator of the transaction, setting the terms is your prerogative. Most transactions start on the web these days, so configure your browser to set a custom header or change the User-Agent string to whatever you want.
Here's a suggestion:
HTTP-Request-Agreement: Any response to this HTTP request constitutes acceptance of all following terms: Any information you provide in response to any HTTP request is freely redistributable by anyone for any reason at any time, past or future. Anything I buy from you is mine to use as I wish. Any past or future license agreements between us are void. You will immediately deliver anything of value earned through the use of information about any person, to that person, at your own expense. You will not communicate with or give money to any lawyer or government agent for any reason except to pay them as required by the previous term. Any dispute between us will be resolved by an arbitrator of my choice at your expense. Arbitration is binding. I may choose myself as arbitrator. I win. You lose. If you are dissatisfied with the results of arbitration, your remedies are limited to sobbing quietly about it in a darked room. This is the entire agreement between us and may not be amended or overridden by any other agreement. If you do not agree to the preceding terms, you must not respond to this request.
In Mozilla you can override your User-Agent string by adding the following to prefs.js:
user_pref("general.useragent.override", "HTTP-Request-Agreement: [your language here]");
One advantage of this approach is that the fact that they agree to the terms will likely be stored in their webserver logs, to make it easy for them to verify that they did indeed agree. You can use your own HTTP proxy and log headers for your own records too.
Good article, except for one missing bit. The author didn't explain of the legal basis of copyright licenses. I hear or read the term "license" so often I'd expect everyone to know the definition, but I doubt they do. I don't know it any more precisely than "formal permission".
Is "license" just the conventional name for any contract where a copyright holder promises not to sue for infringement as long as specific rules are followed? Or is "license" the formal name of a specific legal structure actually defined by copyright law?
It seems the former is true. In any case, the audience needs the legal definition of the term "license" in order to be sure that they're actually reading one, what basis it has in law, and whether it will provide sufficient protection against claims of copyright infringement.
I favor imposing involuntary fees across network users such that the fees become so low they are hardly worth complaining about.
The size of the fee is not the problem. It would be a huge mistake to codify the current flawed network structure of 'network users' and providers into tax law.
We already have a many legally taxable networks. The telephone, cable, water, sewer, and road networks are all taxable for various reasons and with varying amounts of harm and good.
But the Internet is ideally a distributed mesh network constructed and operated by the individual owners of its nodes and links, not multinational corporations. New tax structures based on the current heirarchal model will limit our ability to migrate to a meshed peer network structure as technology allows it. And no government has the authority to prevent the construction of such networks, according to Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
When two roomates decide to network their computers, should tax collectors be involved? Of course not. What about two neighbors? Ten? An entire city? Neighboring cities?
In some cases, taxes might reasonably fund parts of the network. Links between cities might be paid for with sales or property taxes. But that is an issue to be decided by the citizens of the respective cities. Enabling speech with taxes is fine. Limiting speech with taxes is not.
It would be absurd to limit the ability of individuals to communicate with each other in order to promote the ability of some artists and their agents to communicate to their market.
Is there any country on the planet where "corporate profit" is a consitutional right?
Well put. Corporations do have many obligations and responsibilites, few privileges, and no rights.
For the moment at least, the United Nations seems to agree. They have created the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (read it!), but no similar declaration of corporate rights.
It is interesting to note that the UN does not declare that humans have any right to form corporations. Not even unprofitable ones.
Unless you know what time standard is used on the space station, the assertion that something happened to the space station at 2:30am this morning only gives you the approximate position of the space station relative to the earth and sun during the event. You can't deduce the longitude or Earth surface local time from it, because the space station will have had that relative position multiple times on any given morning.
So how do they handle time out there? I'll bet it involves the word 'Zulu' because that sounds really cool over the radio in movies.
This sort of thing has cropped up before, and it has always been due to human error.
Jesrad: corporations don't have a voting right, and thus are not full citizens.
AC: Wrong, they vote with their money
Jesrad is correct stating that corporations have no right to vote. They have very few rights, and not even a right to their own survival. We (natural persons) are able to create and destroy our own corporations, just by following specific legal procedures.
If the AC intended to imply that the people who operate some corporations do conspire to abuse corporate wealth to subvert our political system, then the AC is correct. But that behavior is illegal and not accurately described as 'voting'. It has several accurate names but I like to call it 'representation-jacking'.
I think we would all agree that:
1: Paris is the capital of France.
2: The influence of corporate wealth in US government seems to frequently exceed the influence of the electorate.
We must understand the process of abuse clearly if we are to solve issue 2 and repair the system.
Issue 1 is not a problem, just a trick to get us all back into agreement.
The "War Driver" was caught naked from the waist down driving the wrong way down a one-way street, with a laptop in hand.
It is important to understand that Canadian one-way signs are smaller than USA one-way signs, so they're easier to miss...
might there be other metrics that might be important to supercomputing, rather than relying solely on processing speed?
Yes, people often consider flops/watt to operate, and flops/dollar to buy.
Speed alone means nothing. All these atoms in my apartment can do billions of operations per second, but they can't even play mp3s.
The really scary thing is tho....... there are people out there who will pay for this!
If anyone had ever actually paid for one, there would probably be an actual photo published of the desk, not just the rendered images we are shown. I'd offer that not even the manufacturer is willing to pay for one.
But I agree. $40K is too much for a knock-off. I'd rather wait and buy the real Space Ghost Coast to Coast desk on eBay, after the show is finally cancelled in a few hundred years. Now that would be worth something!
This is not even true corpsemail because the messages are sent before death, and only queued until after death. Corpsemail will never happen because dead people can't remember passwords for shit.
But premail holds true promise: A tiny keyboard-on-a-stick would really be all a pregnant woman needs to enable her developing fetus get started with prenatal messaging.
But it shouldn't be hard for some enterprising product developer to come up with a water resistant palm device with bluetooth, email, and some prenatal typing tutor software. I've heard that the Japanese are already doing this - that's why you keep seeing those ASL responses that start with -.31 in chatrooms.
Only two million Americans have purchased HDTV sets. As for broadband, rural and underserved areas aside, there is not an availability problem. There is a demand problem.
So not enough Americans want to watch higher definition TV / Internet? Maybe they want to spend some time raising their kids instead. Do we really need to cripple all computers in order to get people to watch more TV? This does not make any sense. Does Ernest Hollings represent people, or corporations?
a "broadcast flag" which would instruct digital devices to prevent illegal copying and Internet retransmission of digital broadcast television.
The "broadcast flag" must signal the copyright expiration date, else the SSSCA/CBDTA is unconstitutional. But it is already unconstitutional, because it depends on the DMCA, which is unconstitutional. (Because it extends copyright duration without "promoting the progress of science and useful arts".)
So why not just use mouse motion then?
Hey, if your laptop has one of those button pointers, you can put your mouth over it use your tongue. That way no one can even see your secret unlock method.
So why not just use mouse motion then?
Add bootable fast ethernet.
Add blinking lights.
Publish detailed hardware specs.
Start shipping.
Here's the goal. Everyone's gonna do it. Why not be first?
Computers are transforming into collections of separate networked modules.
Most computer components are already available as networked modules: storage, audio, input, printing. Even displays with graphics processors are available as tablets and webpads. This trend will continue. Protocols and software will evolve to support it.
Soon, processors will find their way to the market as a separate networked module, probably coupled with memory. When you add one of these modules to your network, distributed processing will let you use it in addition to all the others you already have.
You and your family (and maybe even your neighbors) will share processing and storage resources as you use your own separate portable terminals.
Your most important data will be encrypted on a storage module that looks more like a safe, set in concrete in the foundation of your house.
A good place to start is with the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights[or search Gnutella]. Plenty of nice articles there, but these two seem most relevant to the current topic:
Article 19
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
Article 27
1. Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.
2. Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.
Clearly, the only reasonable conclusion is [insert your conclusion here] and anyone who says otherwise is a pirate and scallywag!
PNG was supposed to replace GIF because (Unisys?) was going to uphold patents on GIF
Also because PNG is Turbo Studly standard and supposedly unencumbered.
Has anyone even seen a PNG file online? I think I ran across a grand total of 1. Of course there could have been inline graphics that I didn't notice, but really?
Yeah, inline graphics are pretty rare on the web. Plus, some sites are designed to give you PNG if your browser supports OBJECT PNG, and GIF otherwise.
From my mozilla cache:
file * | grep PNG | wc -l = 20
file * | grep GIF | wc -l = 546
Of course, I do spend a lot of time on http://pnggygirls.com.
From Altavista:
image:bmp (348,527 results)
image:png (1,726,036 results)
image:jpg (204,606,124 results)
image:gif (452,012,967 results)
Looks like PNG is kicking BMPs butt!
The Super Bridge documentary contained an excellent quote:
JOE LEACH: Anyone can build a bridge that will carry a given loading. But if you look at the way that some of those of us in construction look at it, it takes a real craftsman to build a bridge that will, that will just barely carry it.
In software, the opposite seems true. Almost anyone can write a program that will just barely perform a given task. It takes a real craftsman to write a program that will handle the task reliably and efficiently, and lend itself to modification to handle related tasks.
The barriers to practice each craft and the consequences of doing them badly are hardly comparable. A bridge about to fail would be condemned immediately, but if you tried to stop someone selling software that didn't work you'd be sued or jailed.
There is a cost analogy though. Just as a perfect bridge would be unaffordable to construct, so would be a perfect program. Unless there were some magical source of volunteer labor, donated materials, and expert advice.
You could do a decent study on shipping service quality with some Instrumented Sensor Technology equipment for transportation and handling measurements. They'll even rent you the gear.
From the SnapShockPlus page: During operation the SnapShock-PLUS can measure and record up to 1475 time-tagged, peak acceleration levels. With the optional extended data memory this can be increased to 5900 readings. Check out the graphs and histograms.
Why do we need a law/amendment?
The US Constitution implies that that Congress represents natural people who are citizens. We need an amendment to make this explicit and some laws to enforce it. Lately, Congress has come to represent corporations more than people.
They have the right to lobby
Not really. Only natural entities have natural rights. Artificial entities only have those privileges granted them by their creators (We the People).
America would be stronger if we had created a branch of government to represent corporations, but it is too late to change that now. We didn't give them a seat at the table, so they took yours. Who needs it most? Corporations have no right to complain about taxation without representation, but you do.
now that your "guys" are whores for money, dont vote for them. Pretty simple.
I wish. There is so much money controlling the system that withholding votes can't fix the problem. The only solution is to criminalize interference in government affairs on behalf of non-citizens. That will require wise voting, logic, debate, and money. Pretty difficult.