LEGO is STILL frickin' cool -- it's great to know that they are supportive of the hacking community and seem encouraged by that. This issue with trademarks makes completely seem particularly since none of their trademarked words are common english (And considering how long Lego have been on the market to prevent common dilution of the word, that's no surprise).
I wouldn't have thought that MS would be broken up in millions of years. It makes good sense for speeding up the trial in terms of determining penalties (Remember, they *are* guilty of abusing their monopoly position).
What annoys me, and probably our friends in NY and CA, and is being heavily downplayed by the press, is that the DOJ is also dropping persuing the tying of IE into WinXX. IMO, this is the most important information here, and it drastically would affect XP as well given that an IM and media player is also built into the system. While I know the appeals court said that the case as given wasn't strong enough for this particular charge to carry through, it certainly didn't say that it wasn't false either. Fortunately, it looks like NY and CA see it this was as well, as well as the EU commission.
Roller Coaster Tycoon and expansions. Only violence bits are those that would vandalize the park, which is given negative implications since it lowers the park rating and you can hire security guards to help protect it.
Caesar III, Pharaoh/Cleopatra and Zeus. All are simcity-like, but with historical bents. There are some elements to building an army as necessary to defend your city at times, but you simply tell people to defend or attack, and do little else in terms of battle. Zeus and C III have a bit more of this than Pharaoh.
If you take a look at the last few lines of the linked article, and most the suit, in fact, it talks about how this is all falling under deceptive practices for not labelling the CD package as containing a non-standard CD format or having a privacy notice on the CD.
I'm worried that all the recording companies will do is add in the fine print at the bottom of the back side cover that says something like "This CD is protected by the use of the FairUseSucks System and may not play on computers without entering personal information. Please visit www.weownj00.com for our privacy policy; opening of this package indicates your agreement to this policy". Bingo, they have just gotten out of a lawsuit.
At this point, one would then need to envoke the infamous time-shifting case to fight back for fair use.
"Lego" is considered to be the plural by the company. That is, you "play with Lego", not "play with Legos". The singular form is "Lego brick".
This has been another Useless fact.
Re:This really means little...
on
eBay Beats DMCA
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· Score: 1
Unfortunately, at all the news sites that have this story, they use the same language. It is unclear to me whether the judge ruled in favor of ebay and closed the case, or if the case was dropped, based on that 'dismissed' claim.
In either case, this is still a non-issue case, and simply tells ISPs that they do have a safe harbour clause to hide behind, but it's still yet a strong protection from the judical side.
This really means little...
on
eBay Beats DMCA
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
First, this should be a "duh"; Ebay as an 'ISP' should have such protection, and already had a good way to help remove copyrighted material if so claimed. This is just an extention of already-existing safe harbour laws.
However, more importantly is that the judge threw out this case. There is no precident set by it, no question of the constitutionality raised, and only means that other judges can use it for deciding similar cases but cannot outright use this decision to finalize those cases.
There's already a mechanism in place that, while informal, is supposed to prevent any content on your site from being indexed by a search engine spider, and that's the oft-forgotten robots.txt. Not only should it be able to work to block whole directory from search engines, but for specific file types as well. This ought to be a non-issue.
However, while I would suspect that Google does the Right Thing with this, I know several newer search engines that completely ignore robots.txt and grab everything without even checking for this file. In addition, those new to the website game don't know about this mechanism, and thus don't know how to take steps to 'protect' their work.
IMO, the robots.txt thing ought to be a standard in place by both search engine software and publically offered site-mirroring software. Particularly in the latter case, most of these clients ignore robots.txt completely and grab all content including dynamic pages.
Whenever I hear the word lobbyist, I think of someone carrying a bag of money to a Congressman, and expecting to get legislation passed; the image is most likely a result of hundreds of political cartoons and editorals.
Obviously, this image isn't 100% true, but from what we as citizens hear on daily events in Washington, this doesn't seem like an overexaggration.
Can you describe what a typical day is for you - for example, do you see Congressmen, how do you influence their voting (finiacal or otherwise), and what do you do when you are NOT on Capitol Hill?
I don't argue that there is a large migration of volume moving from USENET to the web, after you ignore anything from binaries. A good amount of this is due to the fact that most newer computer users will find the USENET interface clunky regardless of which program they use (console or GUI based). Another possible reason, but not as strong, is the lack of archival methods for USENET until as of late, in that deja now google sitll only goes back 5 or so years, even though it once spanned more than that; web boards are easy as pie to archive.
However, this is only more good news for those of us that used USENET before 1995; I know I'm not alone in that following discussions is much easier via the USENET interface than the typical web-board interface. A good case in point is that I can go through my daily USENET feed without touching the mouse and excessive tab'ing; while even Slashdot requires you manuever around to follow discussions.
I don't see USENET ever disappearing, neither by outright blockage at the ISP level or by intervention of other groups to block it from copyright concerns. I do see the end of free-ranging alt.* (or any other big 7 heirarchy) groups without charter or fully-reconginzed acceptance of existence. (Yes, at one point, you were supposed to follow procedure to get new groups, but lax ISP NNTP admins allows addgroups to go through without check). But again, this would only remove much of the crap from USENET and revert it to a form that has increased S/N ratios and improved performace for those that prefer that medium over others.
But if anything, if your typical USENET dies, there's always USENET 2 (http://www.usenet2.org/), which explicity disallows binaries groups, and other mistakes that have been introduced into the original USENET structure. It's only that the number of USENET2 servers is quite small compared to USENET at this time.
I wish more ISPs did it this way as well. USENET is not a file-transferring medium; it's meant for discussion in plain/text and nothing else. My current ISP doesn't filter anything, and when the newsgroup goes flakely, a good number of subscribers b&m about poor speeds and lack of multiple connections at high speeds, missing parts, poor retention, and groups not subscribed to. Of course, supporting what these users want is way more than I would expect any reasonable ISP to offer.
I would love to see the lameness ratio of USENET decrease due to lack of users that were using it primarily for binary transfer, and back to the state it was before the Endless September, and wish more ISPs took this route.
I still don't like the fact that this case exists. However, I'm glad that this was limited to where the identity and location of the subscriber or purchaser must be verified; this at least allows any publisher in such a situtation to take steps to block access to material if necessary (for example, blocking subscribed users from.fr from seeing certain auctions on ebay). It's a much saner approach to 'incoming net filtering' than what France has already done with Yahoo.
However, one thing that concerns me, similar to when the COPA (Child Online Protection Act) came to pass, was that there is technology there that can determine age/location with sufficiently decent verification for gov't work, that it might be required that *anyone* that runs a website would have to install such tools in order to make sure that content that is not suitable for specific users can be blocked. And these credit card verification services are not cheap, thus possibly imposing a new barrier to entry to web publishing. Furthermore, as per a somewhat recent/. story on the ability to determine geographical location by the numerical IP address, this would require everyone to install patented property, allowing one group to create an effective barrier on those that can't pay the price for the tool.
These types of things worry me more; the ability of either corporations or businesses to effectively prevent anyone without a good-sized wallet from participating in publishing on the Internet, as one story indicated yesterday. The Internet today is mostly where it is in terms of content due to the fact that anyone can publish their ideas without a large barrier to entry, and if that was removed.. well, see what even Cable TV is like for example where only limited groups are allowed to publish.
The thing that is different about the web from the other traditional forms of media is the cost of entry; with radio and TV, you must get an expensive license from the gov't, while newspapers of a significant distribution need expensive equipment.
With the web, all you need is a $1000 computer, $20/month and a free-hosting site to publish.
I really don't care all that much that a significant fraction of the web is controlled by a tiny fraction of aggolmerations, as long as (1) the cost to publish remains as low as it is and (2) there are no barriers to prevent one from obtaining any outside of the agglomerates. (1) is pretty much going to remain as it is, but (2) may be questionable, with the suggestion that AOL-TW could effectively wall their garden in both directions, possibly allowing their members to only see sites they control, or prevent non-members to see their sites.
As long as the infomation is unwalled, people will visit a off-beat site if they believe the information is good. There are, for example, game review sites that have no corporate backing and are only in it for the fun, not the advertizing dollars, and their reviews are much less biased than one can read on the corporate review sites. Heck, USENET to some extent serves this same purpose.
So while agglomeration of content owners is somewhat distrubing, it's not a concern until they wall off their garden, at which point the barrier to web publishing goes up, and the death of the web would then be imminent.
Moreso, the format that was required by the Copyright Office was PDF only, I believe, and this is typically not an easily print-to format for the casual user.
The first comment of that thread was someone offering to PDF-replies for people, so at least someone extended the hand.
The other thing: look at the time/date posted: late night on saturday. By the time the mass-monday rush comes around, that story's already off the front page.
No, according to the article, the model number is not going to be the same as the mhz rating. That is, a model 1600 will be a 1.4ghz chip; I certainly expect that AMD will make sure that the model 2000 will have a compariable speed rating as a Pentium 2 gHz chip, but it will still be a 1.x ghz chip.
I recall about 2 or 3 years ago when the overclocking chips started to roll out that several questionable vendors had sold chips that they claimed were, say "500mhz", but was really an overclocked 300mhz chip. Some organization (FCC?) stepped in and said that there must be truth in advertizing and that if you are selling an overclocked 300mhz chip, you must advertize it as an overclocked 300mhz chip that can obtain 500mhz, but not as a 500mhz chip.
Wouldn't this strategy defeat the purpose of this ruling? Those same questionable vendors can come out of the wordwork, and say that they just sold you a 1.4ghz AMD chip, when in relality, you've just got a 1.2ghz overclocked to 1.4ghz? Without the ability to see both the chip model # *and* the chip speed in the bios, it will be very hard to proof that you get what you ordered.
I agree that stupid consumers are infactuated with high clock speeds that lead to this problem, but AMD chips, from my experience, seem to stand on their own in terms of quality and performance compared to Intel, and need not hide behind this strategy to effectively compete. Besides, if anything, they have to woe the OEMs and not the ones buying speciality-built computers, and last I checked, many of the OEMs are still Intel-based.
...and it reminded me of the Thrid Class suite that you had in Douglas Adam's Starship Titantic game. How everything seems to fold up and away into the walls, with a some-what infinite flexiblity.
Mind you, in the Newsweek blurb, they mention that you (paraphrasing) "might be rewarded from the boss with the aquarium add-on". Great - the ability to personalize one's cubicle is now a reward rather than a norm?
Re: point and click slumlords - gui for autoconf?
on
KOffice 1.1 Rolls Out
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· Score: 2
I agree; you don't want a solely gui installer; in unix-land there are too many that live by the CLI that going completely gui would harm them.
But a well written package manager with appropriate options at the command line can be easily adapted to fit into something as simple as a Tk GUI, with the Tk code simply making system calls to the package manager CLI version.
I don't expect either rpm or dpkg to head in that direction, so this may be a non-concern.
If we are continuing to try to advocate linux to the standard user, we do need point-n-click installers. Sure, having things that can be done at the command line is nice, but a typical user doesn't want to type much, and trying to remember all the arcane commands can be a problem.
And how many of you want to help your mother run through the rpm/deb process?
But besides the p-n-c installer, we also need some way to allow non-root users to install packages in their home dirs without the need for root to get involved. Obviously, there are some packages that would need root, and so the package manager should be smart enough to have a 'root-only' flag and tell the user that they must tell their sysadmin to install this, so that a system doesn't have 20 copies of apache running around on it. You also need to have a way for the package manager to see if the package is already installed on the system, and let the user know that installation is not needed unless absolutely necessary (say, downgrading or upgrading). Of course, there also has to be quota-watches (don't want someone installing the gimp into a 5meg quota area).
Double-clicking a package icon in whatever file mangaer you are using simply then starts this package manager up. This part is trivial for the current batch of linux fm's.
Of course, the way most packages are packaged, or how a few programs expect access at given locations, this is not a universal solution. But I do believe that such a user-installation tool is going to be another key step in getting linux to joe sixpack.
Assuming the details in the brief story are correct, this is pretty much a straightforward win for Oxford; the guy did this once before, and didn't even defend himself in the suit. So 'cybersquatting' sounds perfectly legit.
But, why in the world would a state-supposored (*) educational institution need a.com for?? I know that the 3 big TLD's have lost their intent, but there's still some rhyme or reason to them! And certainly there are private-sector educational systems (devry, for example), that certainly have a right to a.com. If a states-side public school in my voting area was to pull a similar tactic, using my tax dollars to fund a domain name battle to get at a.com name, I'd be writting certain government officials and demanding to know why my tax dollars are used in such a manner.
(*) I believe that in the UK, Oxford is government funded, but I may be wrong.
I think the best part of this article is the summary of the problem: it's chicken & egg in that IPv6 won't be implemented by the backbone people until customers want it, while customers don't want it until the services are there. It reminds me very much of the current problem with HDTV, in that viewers don't want to buy HDTV systems since there's little programming that takes advantage of it, while the stations don't want to go to HDTV since no audience people have HDTVs. Of course, in this case, (We hope) government regulation will make the transition required. The switch to IPv6 is yet still only an informal agreement via the standards body and has no force of law yet to make it occur.
In this week's US News and World Report, one of the journalists has an editoral with regards to the use of cameras to catch red-light breakers and how Dick Amery (congressman) responded negatively to them. The journalist felt that Amery's fears were in the wrong place, in that with large numbers of accidents already happening from red lights, adding more cops actually at the scene, runnign red lights to catch those that break the law, would lead to more accidents. In other words, he felt there's a point where security and safety outweight privacy rights.
While I'm sure we here on/. all agree that once you give up privacy for security, you start down a path where all privacy is given up, I think that the journalist's comments are a good representation of how the average American feels that their privacy rights should come after the safety of the nation. Sure, people stealing books from Borders aren't going to be hurting anyone, but there is little differnce between looking at everyone's face in a store and looking at everyone going through a light. And the question of who watches the watchers is raised, but the journalist appears to write this under the table, since the governments completely infallible (uh-huh).
The same issue came up in the recent article on rolling-your-own DSL. Nearly every major provide prevents residental reselling of the connection, and even if this is a 'free' use, I'm sure that if someone sharing their line was discovered, they'd have their connection pulled.
Mind you, the idea is very cool, and if I were running an ISP with sufficient resources, I'd be making sure that I had a end-of-line tap with a wiretransmitter in a sufficient grid within a city such that one can simply tell people "As long as you are in downtown, you can access the internet from anywhere." I'd even pay (ie, reduce the rates) of customers already in the city to offer such a service from their homes if possible. The average consumer of broadband these days is no where near fullying using their speed, and this would be an easy buck on both sides to make.
Slashdot Mirror
What annoys me, and probably our friends in NY and CA, and is being heavily downplayed by the press, is that the DOJ is also dropping persuing the tying of IE into WinXX. IMO, this is the most important information here, and it drastically would affect XP as well given that an IM and media player is also built into the system. While I know the appeals court said that the case as given wasn't strong enough for this particular charge to carry through, it certainly didn't say that it wasn't false either. Fortunately, it looks like NY and CA see it this was as well, as well as the EU commission.
Caesar III, Pharaoh/Cleopatra and Zeus. All are simcity-like, but with historical bents. There are some elements to building an army as necessary to defend your city at times, but you simply tell people to defend or attack, and do little else in terms of battle. Zeus and C III have a bit more of this than Pharaoh.
I'm worried that all the recording companies will do is add in the fine print at the bottom of the back side cover that says something like "This CD is protected by the use of the FairUseSucks System and may not play on computers without entering personal information. Please visit www.weownj00.com for our privacy policy; opening of this package indicates your agreement to this policy". Bingo, they have just gotten out of a lawsuit.
At this point, one would then need to envoke the infamous time-shifting case to fight back for fair use.
This has been another Useless fact.
In either case, this is still a non-issue case, and simply tells ISPs that they do have a safe harbour clause to hide behind, but it's still yet a strong protection from the judical side.
However, more importantly is that the judge threw out this case. There is no precident set by it, no question of the constitutionality raised, and only means that other judges can use it for deciding similar cases but cannot outright use this decision to finalize those cases.
However, while I would suspect that Google does the Right Thing with this, I know several newer search engines that completely ignore robots.txt and grab everything without even checking for this file. In addition, those new to the website game don't know about this mechanism, and thus don't know how to take steps to 'protect' their work.
IMO, the robots.txt thing ought to be a standard in place by both search engine software and publically offered site-mirroring software. Particularly in the latter case, most of these clients ignore robots.txt completely and grab all content including dynamic pages.
Can you describe what a typical day is for you - for example, do you see Congressmen, how do you influence their voting (finiacal or otherwise), and what do you do when you are NOT on Capitol Hill?
However, this is only more good news for those of us that used USENET before 1995; I know I'm not alone in that following discussions is much easier via the USENET interface than the typical web-board interface. A good case in point is that I can go through my daily USENET feed without touching the mouse and excessive tab'ing; while even Slashdot requires you manuever around to follow discussions.
I don't see USENET ever disappearing, neither by outright blockage at the ISP level or by intervention of other groups to block it from copyright concerns. I do see the end of free-ranging alt.* (or any other big 7 heirarchy) groups without charter or fully-reconginzed acceptance of existence. (Yes, at one point, you were supposed to follow procedure to get new groups, but lax ISP NNTP admins allows addgroups to go through without check). But again, this would only remove much of the crap from USENET and revert it to a form that has increased S/N ratios and improved performace for those that prefer that medium over others.
But if anything, if your typical USENET dies, there's always USENET 2 (http://www.usenet2.org/), which explicity disallows binaries groups, and other mistakes that have been introduced into the original USENET structure. It's only that the number of USENET2 servers is quite small compared to USENET at this time.
I would love to see the lameness ratio of USENET decrease due to lack of users that were using it primarily for binary transfer, and back to the state it was before the Endless September, and wish more ISPs took this route.
However, one thing that concerns me, similar to when the COPA (Child Online Protection Act) came to pass, was that there is technology there that can determine age/location with sufficiently decent verification for gov't work, that it might be required that *anyone* that runs a website would have to install such tools in order to make sure that content that is not suitable for specific users can be blocked. And these credit card verification services are not cheap, thus possibly imposing a new barrier to entry to web publishing. Furthermore, as per a somewhat recent /. story on the ability to determine geographical location by the numerical IP address, this would require everyone to install patented property, allowing one group to create an effective barrier on those that can't pay the price for the tool.
These types of things worry me more; the ability of either corporations or businesses to effectively prevent anyone without a good-sized wallet from participating in publishing on the Internet, as one story indicated yesterday. The Internet today is mostly where it is in terms of content due to the fact that anyone can publish their ideas without a large barrier to entry, and if that was removed.. well, see what even Cable TV is like for example where only limited groups are allowed to publish.
With the web, all you need is a $1000 computer, $20/month and a free-hosting site to publish.
I really don't care all that much that a significant fraction of the web is controlled by a tiny fraction of aggolmerations, as long as (1) the cost to publish remains as low as it is and (2) there are no barriers to prevent one from obtaining any outside of the agglomerates. (1) is pretty much going to remain as it is, but (2) may be questionable, with the suggestion that AOL-TW could effectively wall their garden in both directions, possibly allowing their members to only see sites they control, or prevent non-members to see their sites.
As long as the infomation is unwalled, people will visit a off-beat site if they believe the information is good. There are, for example, game review sites that have no corporate backing and are only in it for the fun, not the advertizing dollars, and their reviews are much less biased than one can read on the corporate review sites. Heck, USENET to some extent serves this same purpose.
So while agglomeration of content owners is somewhat distrubing, it's not a concern until they wall off their garden, at which point the barrier to web publishing goes up, and the death of the web would then be imminent.
Moreso, the format that was required by the Copyright Office was PDF only, I believe, and this is typically not an easily print-to format for the casual user.
The first comment of that thread was someone offering to PDF-replies for people, so at least someone extended the hand.
The other thing: look at the time/date posted: late night on saturday. By the time the mass-monday rush comes around, that story's already off the front page.
Today is Aug 30.
Two months is Oct 30.
XP ships Oct 27.
Just a tad late to help any injunction case against the company.
No, according to the article, the model number is not going to be the same as the mhz rating. That is, a model 1600 will be a 1.4ghz chip; I certainly expect that AMD will make sure that the model 2000 will have a compariable speed rating as a Pentium 2 gHz chip, but it will still be a 1.x ghz chip.
Wouldn't this strategy defeat the purpose of this ruling? Those same questionable vendors can come out of the wordwork, and say that they just sold you a 1.4ghz AMD chip, when in relality, you've just got a 1.2ghz overclocked to 1.4ghz? Without the ability to see both the chip model # *and* the chip speed in the bios, it will be very hard to proof that you get what you ordered.
I agree that stupid consumers are infactuated with high clock speeds that lead to this problem, but AMD chips, from my experience, seem to stand on their own in terms of quality and performance compared to Intel, and need not hide behind this strategy to effectively compete. Besides, if anything, they have to woe the OEMs and not the ones buying speciality-built computers, and last I checked, many of the OEMs are still Intel-based.
Mind you, in the Newsweek blurb, they mention that you (paraphrasing) "might be rewarded from the boss with the aquarium add-on". Great - the ability to personalize one's cubicle is now a reward rather than a norm?
But a well written package manager with appropriate options at the command line can be easily adapted to fit into something as simple as a Tk GUI, with the Tk code simply making system calls to the package manager CLI version.
I don't expect either rpm or dpkg to head in that direction, so this may be a non-concern.
If we are continuing to try to advocate linux to the standard user, we do need point-n-click installers. Sure, having things that can be done at the command line is nice, but a typical user doesn't want to type much, and trying to remember all the arcane commands can be a problem.
And how many of you want to help your mother run through the rpm/deb process?
But besides the p-n-c installer, we also need some way to allow non-root users to install packages in their home dirs without the need for root to get involved. Obviously, there are some packages that would need root, and so the package manager should be smart enough to have a 'root-only' flag and tell the user that they must tell their sysadmin to install this, so that a system doesn't have 20 copies of apache running around on it. You also need to have a way for the package manager to see if the package is already installed on the system, and let the user know that installation is not needed unless absolutely necessary (say, downgrading or upgrading). Of course, there also has to be quota-watches (don't want someone installing the gimp into a 5meg quota area).
Double-clicking a package icon in whatever file mangaer you are using simply then starts this package manager up. This part is trivial for the current batch of linux fm's.
Of course, the way most packages are packaged, or how a few programs expect access at given locations, this is not a universal solution. But I do believe that such a user-installation tool is going to be another key step in getting linux to joe sixpack.
But, why in the world would a state-supposored (*) educational institution need a
(*) I believe that in the UK, Oxford is government funded, but I may be wrong.
While I'm sure we here on
Mind you, the idea is very cool, and if I were running an ISP with sufficient resources, I'd be making sure that I had a end-of-line tap with a wiretransmitter in a sufficient grid within a city such that one can simply tell people "As long as you are in downtown, you can access the internet from anywhere." I'd even pay (ie, reduce the rates) of customers already in the city to offer such a service from their homes if possible. The average consumer of broadband these days is no where near fullying using their speed, and this would be an easy buck on both sides to make.