From what I've read, the producers had built an amphibious robot to be Rover for the Prisoner; it performed excellently in all the land tests. So they took it to the water... where it promptly sank and ruined it.
Rumor has it that as the robot sank, they looked up in desparation, saw a weather balloon, and inspiration hit.
Buying 'mcdonalds.com' knowing well-in-full of the existence of McDonald's is certainly something questionable.
But the real-estate question is more akin to something along the lines of this: Say you buy the name "bigturkey.com", and squat it. Sometime later, McDonald's introduces the Big Turkey sandwich into their menu, and because they want to get web site traffic, they try to register 'bigturkey.com', and find it taken.
Presuming that you had no inside knowledge of the direction that McDonald's was taking, who's got the right to the name? By real-estate standards, it's you, but WIPO would most likely rule in McD's favor. This leads to retroactive trademarks, which IMO can open up a whole host of new lawsuits.
To the best of my knowlegde, there's yet to be a case as this: nearly all the domain name squabbles involve the fact that there was pre-existing trademarks before the domain was registered. But this case would be the type that would definitely tell us how imbalanced that the WIPO is (Beyond what we know already, of course.)
...except that in a school situation, I wouldn't want kids browsing, I'd want them researching. And from this aspect, most of the important sites (such as Google, online dictionaries and encyclopedias, and current news sites) come up fine. So they can't see Gamespy.com, PlanetQuake or Slashdot at school, awww, too bad.
And, to what extent I've used it, Opera's tech releases for Linux have been looking pretty sharp and lacking little of the rendering functionality of the Windows version, meaning that unless the site uses not-available-for-linux plugins, it will look just right.
Another factor to add in is how UCITA (and to some effect, DMCA) will affect the reporting of bugs. Of the key provisions in that legislation is that a company could make it against the law via the click-through license to 'critique' the software package without permission or to try to reverse-engineering protocols. Since many security bugs are typically found in either of these two activities, it may be illegal to simply access the security of a piece of software, or at least to access and release those results to the world. Which is another reason to make sure that if your state is considering UCITA to emphasis that it will hurt the security sector and could prove harmful in the long run.
...It seems more on the part of 'catching up' rather than trying to lead the pack in terms of news reporting. I subscribe to NW , and I know that they are very good at providing a good comprehensive review of news stories that happened during the last week (unlike tv news, which tend to get the facts that they can in a short amount of time and present those, despite them possibly being one-sided).
However, it's been 3 weeks since the guy's release from jail, and nearly a month and a half since his initial arrest. I can understand waiting until a point where Adobe, the EFF, and the FBI & DOJ have made their comments, but that was still weeks ago and this is the first mention of the case at all in the magazine.
Furthermore, if you note how this story is presented, it's on the second-to-last leaf page (or 4 pages back) from the back cover, right before their typical op-ed piece. In a typical NW magazine, there's usually "You and Your Health" type of news rigth before this; "Entertainment" and "Science and Technology" are usually in the front part of the second half of the magazine. In addition, it's presented as a full-page (larger font, not necessarily more text) 'piece' instead of the normal format used for news stories.
So, IMO, this is just one of the Newsweek's editors' op-ed piece on the situation and not necessarily reporting facts. (Note that there's very little discussion of 'the other side' - RIAA, MPAA, BSA, etc). I'm glad to see such an article that hopefully will make the common man realize something's amiss, but this is a not a good news article, and if it were to be one, it comes very late after things have happened.
IMO, it feels like the NW saw that papers like the NYTimes and others were sitting up and taking notice of this story shortly after the bail (possibilty waiting for an interview with the guy), and someone on the editing staff felt they had to address it. It's certainly not too little, too late, but for an article that seems to strongly believe something is seriously fscked with the DMCA, it's very late and poorly placed to be effective.
Name and author long forgotten, but the story talked about how scientists had found the gravitation constant and others to be bouncing around (within 0.01% that is) in both directions, with increasing frequency for about a year, and they realized that a 'wavefront' between the old universal constants and the new ones was about to hit the earth. The story specifically focuses on a couple that retreat to an isolated island as rioters and 'end-of-the-universe' fanatics rampaged through citiss right before the wavefront hit. The wavefront does occur, but the world doens't end; the couple emerge from their location with the sky looking slightly redder, feeling a bit lighter, but no worse for wear.
Of course, the other thing this reminds me of is a TNG episode where the temporarily mortal Q is in engineering as the crew try to figure out how to deflect an asteroid landing on a planet, and Q blurts out "Why not just change the gravitational constant of the universe?"
Since most of the problems come from the fact that that baby bells own the last mile and get their advantages from this, the solution is rather obvious:
Make it such that the companies that own the COs and the last mile, and parents/subsideraries thereof, cannot offer the consumer any services and are only there to lease the use of their lines to phone, data, or other potental companies. I'd further extend it to cable lines where that is appropriate.
This would require the bells to split off a company to manage those last miles, and they would never be able to merge it back in the future. But this would also prevent a company like Covad (if they had the cash) to buy the last mile out and reverse the tables in order to screw the telcos. Including the cable lines and any future 'electronic transfer lines' that may come about in the future would also possibly open the door for more competition in the cable industry.
Of course, this isn't an overnight thing, and there must be some initial regulation as such that the cost of the 'extra' company beyond the telcos does not impact the fees that consumers already pay. I'm sure the baby bells would whine as well, since that last mile is their current money maker. But this would force a level playing field in that anyone wanting to offer consumer services would not have to worry about ownership of the last mile.
What we need is less in terms of labels, and more in terms of the true word of publishing houses.
That is, if you have a book, CD, movie, etc that you want published, you can go to a so-called publishing house, pay the necessary fee plus a small profit to them to make X copies of your work in whatever form. You retain all copyrights, they retain nothing beyond that fee.
You could then sell these on the net on your own, or you could ask this publishing house to distribute them for you (for an added fee).
I look at how Plan 9 works (the ones that are currently helping many online comics sell their
anthologies in archive form), and think that a similar model would work in many other areas.
Was that it emphasized the fact that the DMCA harms the common man moreso than the one that is technologically adapt. A good case was the guy that had a virus incident that caused his ebooks to become unregistered (he probably had to reinstall his OS). He was left only with the options of either registering the second 'installation' of the e-books on that computer, or save it for a different computer like his laptop. He wasn't technologically adapt enough to figure out how to bypass the measures himself, and thus was harmed by the control measures in the fact that he 'lost' one use of the e-book.
Once similar cases start growing in number in which the non-computer-geek common man finds their rights limited by copy protection, the case against DMCA will grow as well.
I see nothing wrong with having a consistent set of drug-testing rules applies to all contestants in the Olympics, regardless of the competition. This only promotes both fairness and sportsmanship in the Games.
And as others have pointed out, there's more than just steroids that can be used to improve performance. Imagine a drug that can be used to simply keep the mind more alert for a longer period of time (the side effect being the need to sleep for several days afterwards to make up for it). I would surmise that a chess player that has taken such a drug would fair better than one that hasn't considering the length of some chess matches.
I think a key aspect is that when the comic is a episodic read, requiring the user to visit day after day, overly-long plot lines (as opposed to long-term character development) will bog down a user as they would have to remember more and more day after day. In addition, some readers will not like every character or twist that was given that character, and focusing for too long on the same character can cause of lost of readership.
Which is the problem that Sluggy is having now. The Bug/Witch/Robot plot, while good, lasted for 2 months, and the current Microuniverse story is at least 2 months and still going with no sign of resolution, and as it continues, it's getting weaker as Pete's used up most of the pop culture references that he can. Take a look back at the first year or so of Sluggy and you'll see plots that lasted two or three weeks at most, or for extended plots, there were breaks that looked back at the other characters to see what they were up to.
It's not that Sluggy's terrible, but I can vouch that others that had read it regularly prior to 2001 have stopped reading it because of these super long plot lines. I'm still getting the odd laugh from the current line, and I know that at some point we'll have hit the 'reset' button to get Torg and Riff back.
Check out Max Payne, a recently released game for Windows; it's a John Woo/Matrix inspired modern-day cop story in a 3rd person (over the shoulder cam) environment. Gameplay is excellent, but what relates it to this/. story is that the plot is carried by a strong graphic-novel display. That is, instead of the cutscene cliche, you're taken to a display of panels from a graphic novel, the panels fully voiced and sound fx'ed when appropriate, along with music in the BG. The bottom of the screen during these points gives access to a VCR-like control set so that you can go back and forth through those scenes that you saw.
If that aspect of the game was removed and used as a foundation for eComicBooks, along with the ability to get good voice actors to help with voicing, they could really take off, knowing full well that they will be expensive too.
Don't read too much into a patent title. The key points in any patent are what the claims are; everything else is definitions or supplimentary material.
As others have pointed out, the process that McAfee is patenting is rather descriptive (eg, requires that the user initiate the connection, requires a browser to initiate that, and requires authenication by the user), which pretty much limits the possible use of prior art to only a few questionable cases.
You don't need to log in to use Windows Update, the patent specifically mentions requiring to log on (as to therefore track customer usage, most likely), which probably is why Windows Update wasn't considered as prior art.
Unless otherwise changed, you will not be able to go to a store and buy XP until October (27th?). However, OEMs like Dell and Compaq need to determine how work with XP for new installs, including using what they can of MS's slight laxing of the initial desktop requirements. Those OEMs will have access to the necesssary files to do this in mid-August so that by October (and more importantly to their bottom lines, before Christmas), they can ship XP-enabled machines.
While the various parties could still seek an injunction after these files/CDs have been shipped to OEMs, the injunction would most likely only limit the direct sale of the software from that point and would not affect what the OEMs try to do (unless, then, the companies go for the gusto and get an injunction on every OEM that's committed to go XP).
There is as of yet no injunction for XP's release. Both the DOJ, the remaining 18 states, and EPIC are trying to get one placed before mid-late August, at which point MS is due to ship the XP master disks off to the OEMs for inclusions on new machines. No word yet on if any of these injunctions have been granted or denied yet.
I definitely agree; it's not the specific tool that's important, but knowing that there are tools and some experience in using them are the important aspects, as well as knowing where to find more information about them if necessary.
This applies to any technical field, not just sysadmining.
One of the features of HL is that the voice that you hear over the PA system throughout the game is actually several different samples; it's possible to program the scripting engine to say any combination of words that have been generated as sound files; many mod authors used this to give a bit more unique feel to their maps.
Yes, there was no intonation, but for a loudspeaker voice, this worked well.
Anything from Matt's Script Archive is about as secure as a wet paper bag.
It's not that the concepts behind the code is bad, but numerous perl experts have pointed out weaknesses and lack of checks in those codes that could easily break a system. Sure, others have improved the security of those codes as well, but most people take blind faith that because they're at Matt's Script Archive, the code is 'secure'.
And saying that thousands of sites use formmail.pl is like saying that thousands of sites use an unpatched IIS.
Then you should be arguing for shorter copyright terms as opposed to freely sharing everything under the sun. The fact that copyright allows corporations to hold on to works for 95 years *and* at the same time allow them to completely stop distribution of said work through retail markets is a major problem.
The current law is that if you are an ISP, you are not liable for content that is offered by your users unless you are told about infringing content and do nothing about it. IMO, this is a perfectly reasonable way for ISPs to behave, as they don't have to have to continue to battle legal defenses for stuff they don't control.
I wish RIAA or other such companies thought this way.
I've proposed way back when Napster first started that the record companies ought to release music tracks as MP3 but recorded at some very low bit rate, like 56k or the like. Enough that you aren't missing the music, but it's not good enough quality to sit around and listen to all day. Then release them into the 'wild'.
Those that would have never bought the music track will still mooch these, but they're not getting a good quality track, and thus will have no incitive to share again.
Those that never heard of that CD have a way to try out the music and see if they like; if they like, they buy the CD. If not, no other money is lost. Again, the quality of the free track makes it worthless from a 'sharing' standpoint.
Those that probably would have bought the CD (for example, one that follows a specific band) have a way to listen to try before they buy, and that includes all the an album, not just the one or two songs that are radio-featured or at those listening kiosks in the record store. (Eg, I know a lot of people would have avoided DMB's "In These Crowded Streets", knowing the other 8 or so tracks outside of the two for radio play).
Additionally, the music companies could then combine this with an online music program such that one can buy those tracks at a reasonable cost (.25 to.50 a track) at a very high bitrate (196k).
Unfortunately for us, the record companies first played ostrich, then denial, then litigation, in regards to online music. Very much like a Mr. Gates regarding the internet in his book "The Road Ahead".
As others have pointed out, individual rates for from between $50 to $500. But this assumes that you only use the journal, etc.
Instituational licenses typically can start at $2000, and go as high as $10,000 per year; this may or may not include access to the online version as well.
Also, going up to the root of this thread, most journal that charge you for all this send you several (25, typically) final proofs of your article, as it would have been printed, which you may 'freely' distribute as you wish. Any more, and you have to ask the publisher for more permission.
Slashdot Mirror
Rumor has it that as the robot sank, they looked up in desparation, saw a weather balloon, and inspiration hit.
But the real-estate question is more akin to something along the lines of this: Say you buy the name "bigturkey.com", and squat it. Sometime later, McDonald's introduces the Big Turkey sandwich into their menu, and because they want to get web site traffic, they try to register 'bigturkey.com', and find it taken.
Presuming that you had no inside knowledge of the direction that McDonald's was taking, who's got the right to the name? By real-estate standards, it's you, but WIPO would most likely rule in McD's favor. This leads to retroactive trademarks, which IMO can open up a whole host of new lawsuits.
To the best of my knowlegde, there's yet to be a case as this: nearly all the domain name squabbles involve the fact that there was pre-existing trademarks before the domain was registered. But this case would be the type that would definitely tell us how imbalanced that the WIPO is (Beyond what we know already, of course.)
And, to what extent I've used it, Opera's tech releases for Linux have been looking pretty sharp and lacking little of the rendering functionality of the Windows version, meaning that unless the site uses not-available-for-linux plugins, it will look just right.
However, it's been 3 weeks since the guy's release from jail, and nearly a month and a half since his initial arrest. I can understand waiting until a point where Adobe, the EFF, and the FBI & DOJ have made their comments, but that was still weeks ago and this is the first mention of the case at all in the magazine.
Furthermore, if you note how this story is presented, it's on the second-to-last leaf page (or 4 pages back) from the back cover, right before their typical op-ed piece. In a typical NW magazine, there's usually "You and Your Health" type of news rigth before this; "Entertainment" and "Science and Technology" are usually in the front part of the second half of the magazine. In addition, it's presented as a full-page (larger font, not necessarily more text) 'piece' instead of the normal format used for news stories.
So, IMO, this is just one of the Newsweek's editors' op-ed piece on the situation and not necessarily reporting facts. (Note that there's very little discussion of 'the other side' - RIAA, MPAA, BSA, etc). I'm glad to see such an article that hopefully will make the common man realize something's amiss, but this is a not a good news article, and if it were to be one, it comes very late after things have happened.
IMO, it feels like the NW saw that papers like the NYTimes and others were sitting up and taking notice of this story shortly after the bail (possibilty waiting for an interview with the guy), and someone on the editing staff felt they had to address it. It's certainly not too little, too late, but for an article that seems to strongly believe something is seriously fscked with the DMCA, it's very late and poorly placed to be effective.
Of course, the other thing this reminds me of is a TNG episode where the temporarily mortal Q is in engineering as the crew try to figure out how to deflect an asteroid landing on a planet, and Q blurts out "Why not just change the gravitational constant of the universe?"
Make it such that the companies that own the COs and the last mile, and parents/subsideraries thereof, cannot offer the consumer any services and are only there to lease the use of their lines to phone, data, or other potental companies. I'd further extend it to cable lines where that is appropriate.
This would require the bells to split off a company to manage those last miles, and they would never be able to merge it back in the future. But this would also prevent a company like Covad (if they had the cash) to buy the last mile out and reverse the tables in order to screw the telcos. Including the cable lines and any future 'electronic transfer lines' that may come about in the future would also possibly open the door for more competition in the cable industry.
Of course, this isn't an overnight thing, and there must be some initial regulation as such that the cost of the 'extra' company beyond the telcos does not impact the fees that consumers already pay. I'm sure the baby bells would whine as well, since that last mile is their current money maker. But this would force a level playing field in that anyone wanting to offer consumer services would not have to worry about ownership of the last mile.
That is, if you have a book, CD, movie, etc that you want published, you can go to a so-called publishing house, pay the necessary fee plus a small profit to them to make X copies of your work in whatever form. You retain all copyrights, they retain nothing beyond that fee.
You could then sell these on the net on your own, or you could ask this publishing house to distribute them for you (for an added fee).
I look at how Plan 9 works (the ones that are currently helping many online comics sell their anthologies in archive form), and think that a similar model would work in many other areas.
Once similar cases start growing in number in which the non-computer-geek common man finds their rights limited by copy protection, the case against DMCA will grow as well.
And as others have pointed out, there's more than just steroids that can be used to improve performance. Imagine a drug that can be used to simply keep the mind more alert for a longer period of time (the side effect being the need to sleep for several days afterwards to make up for it). I would surmise that a chess player that has taken such a drug would fair better than one that hasn't considering the length of some chess matches.
Which is the problem that Sluggy is having now. The Bug/Witch/Robot plot, while good, lasted for 2 months, and the current Microuniverse story is at least 2 months and still going with no sign of resolution, and as it continues, it's getting weaker as Pete's used up most of the pop culture references that he can. Take a look back at the first year or so of Sluggy and you'll see plots that lasted two or three weeks at most, or for extended plots, there were breaks that looked back at the other characters to see what they were up to.
It's not that Sluggy's terrible, but I can vouch that others that had read it regularly prior to 2001 have stopped reading it because of these super long plot lines. I'm still getting the odd laugh from the current line, and I know that at some point we'll have hit the 'reset' button to get Torg and Riff back.
If that aspect of the game was removed and used as a foundation for eComicBooks, along with the ability to get good voice actors to help with voicing, they could really take off, knowing full well that they will be expensive too.
As others have pointed out, the process that McAfee is patenting is rather descriptive (eg, requires that the user initiate the connection, requires a browser to initiate that, and requires authenication by the user), which pretty much limits the possible use of prior art to only a few questionable cases.
While the various parties could still seek an injunction after these files/CDs have been shipped to OEMs, the injunction would most likely only limit the direct sale of the software from that point and would not affect what the OEMs try to do (unless, then, the companies go for the gusto and get an injunction on every OEM that's committed to go XP).
This applies to any technical field, not just sysadmining.
It's not that the concepts behind the code is bad, but numerous perl experts have pointed out weaknesses and lack of checks in those codes that could easily break a system. Sure, others have improved the security of those codes as well, but most people take blind faith that because they're at Matt's Script Archive, the code is 'secure'.
And saying that thousands of sites use formmail.pl is like saying that thousands of sites use an unpatched IIS.
USENET is not a binary file forum. It is for text/plain messages, and works best as such.
I've proposed way back when Napster first started that the record companies ought to release music tracks as MP3 but recorded at some very low bit rate, like 56k or the like. Enough that you aren't missing the music, but it's not good enough quality to sit around and listen to all day. Then release them into the 'wild'.
Those that would have never bought the music track will still mooch these, but they're not getting a good quality track, and thus will have no incitive to share again.
Those that never heard of that CD have a way to try out the music and see if they like; if they like, they buy the CD. If not, no other money is lost. Again, the quality of the free track makes it worthless from a 'sharing' standpoint.
Those that probably would have bought the CD (for example, one that follows a specific band) have a way to listen to try before they buy, and that includes all the an album, not just the one or two songs that are radio-featured or at those listening kiosks in the record store. (Eg, I know a lot of people would have avoided DMB's "In These Crowded Streets", knowing the other 8 or so tracks outside of the two for radio play).
Additionally, the music companies could then combine this with an online music program such that one can buy those tracks at a reasonable cost (.25 to .50 a track) at a very high bitrate (196k).
Unfortunately for us, the record companies first played ostrich, then denial, then litigation, in regards to online music. Very much like a Mr. Gates regarding the internet in his book "The Road Ahead".
Instituational licenses typically can start at $2000, and go as high as $10,000 per year; this may or may not include access to the online version as well.
Also, going up to the root of this thread, most journal that charge you for all this send you several (25, typically) final proofs of your article, as it would have been printed, which you may 'freely' distribute as you wish. Any more, and you have to ask the publisher for more permission.