Re:This might stimulate nerds and developers
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MySQL FS
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· Score: 2
Not necessary: I'd assume that when you get to the level below the field level in the dir structure, things would behave like links to items. That is, if I have items '325', '326', etc under Employee_ID, and items 'Smith, A.', 'Anderson, N.', etc, those would point to the same set of unique objects, specifically the data base records. So Mr. HR guy comes along, and if he knows that Smith gets a $100,000 raise, he doesn't have to know he's employee #326, just that he's an Employee, findable under a standard OS find function.
Seriously. The average config file is an heirarchical structure as opposed to a table structure. This makes it ideal to use XML.
I think that making config files usable by XML, one could write custom configuration apps that would work with any program. Example: mythical "gappconf" would simply need the rc file as well as some DTD description of the tags for that program, and it would present the standard tree widget with descriptions of what options you can change, what restrictions you have, etc.
Now, extending your idea above, I would think it's also possible, but beyond my ability, to write a fs that fakes a directory structure based on an XML file, so that you can decend into directories via your favorite shell and change specific options that you want.
The concept about sepearating code and HTML runs along the same lines as the method-view-interface of Java and other languages, or separating content and layout for HTML/CSS. The separation takes time, and usually more resources than pure optimization, but when you get the bonus is if you wanted to run the SAME engine/content but with a different interface. A good example is HTML/CSS -- you can easily specify different stylesheets for layout depending on the viewing situation: if it's on screen, you can use one that might include all your navigation links, if you're printing, you can use another that hides navigation links, and maybe for those with celphones, you can cut it down to just the skinny. It's also much easier to make changes in one aspect (content or presentation), without affecting the other.
Now, sure, with JSP and the like, it does seem that all you'll be serving is web pages, so why not intermix the HTML code with Java code? What if with the change of one line, you could run the JSP as an independant app (no browser required?) -- or in text mode? Or whatever other interface might come along next? It's much easier to do that separation now that if the next big thing comes along, you can easily adapt your program, than to rewrite from scratch.
I've been running a web server with CGI/apache/perl/mysql initally on a 486/66, and now on a 200MHz Pentium. The former case, the pages were definitely not speedy, and with the 200 behind them, it's much better (what I've written could probably stand for some optimization and mod_perl-goodness, of course). While I know that the scripts I have won't be going to JSP at any foreseeable future, I wonder what sort of power you'd need behind it to make sure the pages ran well. Assume that it's a small-size web site, maybe on the order of 10,000hits/day, with standard db backends where needed. Will my 200Mhz/128megs be able to power it?
Certainly not my idea, but one that's been repeated here by many others before: If you are running your own mail server, create email aliases for accounts that are used on the web (see my address above, for example) that all point back to your normal account. Not just for sites that would publish your email, but those that don't, such as NYT. Make sure they are sufficiently different for each one so that you can tell exactly which email address, and therefore what site was used to start the spam. Do note that some sites can't help it --/. is prone to email harvesters for example, but there's no way that a normal email harverster is going to get the email that I use at NYT or Amazon since it's not posted on any content page there at all. However, if *they* sell that email address to others, then you have a way to track that down. If you find that in this latter case this happens, it's easy enough to change the alias to drop everything in/dev/null or some alternative mail folder that you can check and purge periodically as opposed to seeing crap in your main in-box. If you are so inclined, you can simply delete the alias, and the spam will just bounce off your mail server.
IMO, this works much better than munging your email address, as the fake address does work (as opposed to having a legit email sender try to figure out how to demunge your munged address), and it's rather easy to turn off the mail feed for a particularly spammed account.
Making sure to specify exactly what SPAM is
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Norway Bans Spam
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· Score: 2
As one that runs several legit mailing lists, the only thing that concerns me about spam regulations is exactly the definition of spam. If it's simply "unsolicated email", then that can harm more than hurt -- what if someone who I've never talked before send me comments on a web site or a similar feature. I never solicated for those comments, so theorhetically it's spam by the simple definition above. Make things worst: say that one of the people on my legit mailing list decides they don't like me anymore and live in a place that punishes spammers -- they can claim that mailings from my list are spamming them, and I'd be punished with no way to stop it.
Nor can you simply add "unsoliciated email advertizing" , as I've seen spam that is generally a plea for help, though poorly targeted and still going through the classic spam patterns. The content of the message does not guarentee it being spam.
And of course, you can't simply add how headers and recieverships might be hidden or such, because there are spammers that actually follow proper protocols -- they don't stay very long at one ISP, mind you, but they do continue to spam.
I think that any spam punishment provision must include the fact that if the person attempted to out-opt and yet recieved the spam from the same people after a sufficient timeframe passed for the opt-out request to be processed (2 weeks), then if they are spammed again, then the penalties start. This would allow those that run mailing lists, for example, to be free of concerns of ruthless subscribers, as well protecting casual one-time emails, while most spammers, who'd refuse to prune email lists, would be caught pants down.
Heh, add "Neuromancer" to the "When Will It Be Made?" list. I know I've heard stuff ever since the travisity known as Mnemonic, but no hard details save for Gibson having a very strong hand in working with it.
(You could also add the supposed 'hard-core sci-fi' "Doctor Who" movie done by the same guy that did Event Horizon (I wanna say Ripley Scott, but that doesn't jive right), with rumors of it following up to the FOX travesity (which the BBC has said is canon, wah!)
(And following up to some of the followups of this post, there was a 6 part miniseries done in the early 70s by the BBC for HHGTTG, which, given the BBC at that time, was rather decent and kept with the campiness of the book).
When I mean computer aptitude, particularly in the MS case, it's more than knowing how to turn it on and connect to AOL. The jury, for matters of common sense, would have to already know what operating systems are, how DLLs work, how web browsers work, etc etc. In general, programmers and system adminstrators. Which yes, I'd agree that not everyone in that set is going to be a linux bigot, but I would say that more than 50% are going to know exactly *how* MS does business with competitors already.
Ender's Game is an awesome books as well as the sequels (I've not yet read the side-quels about Bean, but that's on my list).
I hope I'm not the only one that feels that a movie on EG would be a BAD idea, however not just because we know exactly how Hollywood would mangle it for things like Ender's thoughts, etc,
and would focus more on action scenes rather than plot and character. My more worrisome concern is that there's a certain mystique about the visuals in the book; beyond certain key descriptions such as how the academy looks and the zero-g room so that the plot works in flawlessly, we don't have much about what Ender's like, what Peter, Valentine, Bean, and other key characters are beyond 'they're kids'. We only have vague descriptions of the looks of the school from the inside, of how the computer systems work, etc. I want to kept that mystique, because Ender's Game works on the premise that you don't need to know this stuff, and knowing it would distract from the key elements of the book.
The other, somewhat important issue, is that you are going to need to find not only about a dozen *talented* child actors of the right ageset, but also about 50 to 100 more that are sufficiently serious to fill the rest of the school and do some of the stunts you'd need to adequetely do the zero-g room. And one thing with child actors that are keyed for certain parts is that they have a limited shelf life before they're too old. The 6th Sense kid, for example, or McCulley Culkin (sp) -- if you tried to film for more than a year, you'd have serious aging problems. It might not matter too much in EG, since you're looking about about a timeframe of 3 to 4 years for the bulk of the book, but it still can proof challenging.
It boggles the mind why this completely obvious point warrants a headline on Slashdot.
Today was the today when the DOJ was required to submit their rebuttal of MS's appeal statement; the case is still going and on time, as the appeal court is expected to rule on this by the middle of the year.
If we go by "jury of peers", who would Microsoft's peers be? If you use the standard jury methods, then most likely 10 out of those 12 will be computer-stupid, and would be deadweight; if you polled for computer aptitude, you'd probably have 10 people already with a bias against MS. If you took what would be considered true peers, then would you have the CEOs of any other high tech company (which wrt to Microsoft, will have absolutely no neutrality?)
From my understanding, as long as the trial is only on civil charges (which is what this case is) and the defendant being a business, the jury by peers is dropped for practical reasons. If this were a criminal case (for example, rumored bits that the CEOs of Ford and Firestone might have been brough in on criminal charges related to knowingly distributing bad tires), then a jury of peers would have been called. IANAL of course.
It's not like "hey, the judge was a bastard", "oh. well in that case you're dismissed Microsoft, go about your newly found illegal business"
That's *exactly* what Microsoft is trying to do -
they think that because Jackson was biased from square one, that they should be granted a new trial with a new judge, prefferrably one assigned by the (business-compassionate) appeal court. What the appeal court has to decide is if Jackson's bias drastically altered the outcome of the case such that if an unbiased judge was in place, the outcome would have been different. And IMO, that answer is no: as long as the judge was familar with how computers work in addition to legal facts, the evidence that was presented at the trial was heavily against MS.
Remember that you also have 19 states persuing action along side the DOJ. The DOJ may back down, but power really hasn't changed in those states and they'll keep up the fight.
If you recall MS's original documents for the appeal, they didn't focus much on the meat of the case (that is, the findings of fact that they *are* a monopoly (not illegal), and abused that monopoly power (illegal)), but instead were trying to erode Jackson's integrity as well as playing games with those technicalities of the court that could be said that they didn't get a fair trial out of. In fact, during the case itself, before it was known how much concempt that Jackson *seemed* to have to MS, MS was already playing the politiking side of things, trying to avoid the issues and instead focus on
character and integrity.
I think the DOJ's rebuttal to MS's appeal arguements is trying to remind the court that facts have been put in place from the lower court proceedings, and that is the heart of the issue: did Jackson misintreprete the evidence to achieve those facts? Doubtful - the evidence was plainly against MS and regardless of how much bias a judge may have, the only intelligent conclusion from the evidence was that there was a monopoly and the abuse of that position involved. Maybe his final verdic was one where he had some bias involved, but it probably was also one where he realized that there would be rounds of appeals including him possibly seeing the case, and that the true final judgement against MS would probably be smaller than any initial penalty he might state. Therefore, he used a rather damaging
penalty as a starting point, expecting that a final penalty will be reduced from that, but still significant.
Question: would search engines be different, presumably because they also confer a benefit on the target by making it findable?)"
The standard search engines, such as google, altavista, etc, know and obey robots.txt, which is the same as Register.com's policy of not allowing spambots search through their site. If, after a robots.txt file is in place and the search engine continues to index it, I would say there's a good legal case there.
Now, more interestingly is tools that 'mirror' web sites; they still are using a resource that you've made publicably available, except doing it over a timeframe that is much shorter than a human can do it, which usually means more resources used up at the server end. These bots tend not to follow robots.txt rules, and are only defeatable by User-Agent blocking. If the above ruling stands, does it apply here?
Take it a step further: Ebay has taken action to stop meta-Ebay sites that index their site and make it easier than ebay's search engines to find things or to search multiple auction websites. Even though the information that is up is publically available from ebay, and IIRC, they still won, mostly because the information is still ebay's property and they didn't like it on other sites.
Which all leads to an interesting question: when you click on a link, does that start a clock in which you have temporary copyright ability to download the information to your local computer, and after some time, that ability 'expires'? If so, sites that index or mirror without further authorization could find themselves in trouble...
First, since the FCC *and* FTC have both given the nod, this is it -- AOL and TW will now merge (if that's not already apparent).
I'm against this deal for sure, but you need to remember that a lot of things went into this: it took more than a year for FCC and FTC to review it, during which both AOL and TW stock tumbled; Initially, most pointed out that AOL was 'buying' TW, but with the value of the companies now, it's more now that TW is 'buying' AOL; both companies had to divest themselves of several smaller aspects (biggest one that I can recall was TW owning part of AT&T, which they were told to give up), so neither is as bohemith as before; both the FTC and FCC have put several restrictions on the merger, most importantly that the merged company must make open access for all that have finiacal means, including a required contract with at least two other ISPs (Earthlink is one, I believe, that they've already gotten a deal down for); and AOL's had to make several concessions on the lucrative instant messaging market.
Which means that for at least 5 years, AOL/TW will be under a government microscope -- if they so much as move to limit *non-premium* content from non AOL/TW users, you'd bet they have the goverment on their backs before you can say 'censorship'. Even with the DOJ on their case, Microsoft is much more free to do things now than AOL/TW is.
I think that the FTC/FCC is looking at this as an experiment with rather high odds for the companies involved. If it is possible for a content provider AND network provider to coexist as the same company while playing fair to all other content and network providers out there, then they might let further mergers go through. If AOL/TW play rotten tricks, they'll take action to prevent this further.
But as I mentioned above, the situation of the AOL/TW merger is drastically different now than the announcement a year ago that the thought of those two companies combined doesn't scare me as much -- it's still worrisome, but not as bad as, say, MS licensing issues.
Part of my Christmas gift exchange/upgrades was to get a DDS reciever -- Circuit City has a good Kenwood one on sale this week at $300 -- two optical inputs in addition to two digital inputs; 3+2+3 sets of Video/A/V inputs for video, audio, and auxialary componets, as well as 5.1 inputs. Also has bank of s-video inputs though these aren't really used by the reciever. So far, the output seems clean -- when on but no signal, narely a buzz from my speakers and trying a number of sources (TV, VCR, DVD, computer) I can't fault it's performance. Basic equalizer functions on the box itself but they can be disabled if the sound is routed to a monitor. Supports full digital copying between audio sources assuming digital connections are used. Remote is rather simple to use to access most of the features. Obviously, standard 5.1 outputs as well.
But as others have told me and are saying here, you basically are going to be plunking the money down for speakers, and not the reciever itself, in order to get good quality sound.
I've yet to see it with Q3A, but I know Half-Life has had it, and probably still does: "Could not validate with WON servers" was a common message when the net connectivity between the WON game network servers and your computer was down, even if the hosted game wasn't associated with WON at all. Then there were rampant issues of CD Key stealing for those that got the game validly.
And I do know that Q3A checks something back to ID's site: when I couldn't access quake3arena.com (I believe) but could access the game server, I couldn't connect. Easy way to check: disable DNS, and connect to a Q3A server with the IP #...
You are NOT going to make money if you distribute your high quality product on the web for free along side a physical product of the same or better quality, you are going to lose money in the end. The internet comic strip is the same way -- there's only a few comics that the authors got lucky to make money off the stuff and it's usually for other endevors (for example, the guy that draws Penny Arcade is an illustrator for much of GameSpy as well).
But, alternatively, you offer a decent but not high quality product on the web and offer a high quality physical product, and you'll make a few bucks - for comics, that ray of hope is through Plan 9 Publishing, a publishing house that does a lot of small (10,000 copies) runs for many many internet comics, include Sluggy, Kevin and Kell, Ozy and Millie, etc etc. There's also merchandise from the various comics that are available, Sluggy t-shirts, coffee mugs, etc etc. And this is generally where if any money is to be made is the sale of these secondary products along side the free distribution of the comics. It's not a LOT of money, from what I've been told, but it is more than enough to offset costs of hosting and make a small profit in return -- but you'd better not plan on making your living off these ventures.
From my understanding, Q3A, Elite Force, and Half-life and others require you to enter a CD key before you play online (so at this point, we've guarenteed that we have net connectivity). The first thing those engines do is send off that CD code to a clearinghouse server to check to see 1) if it's valid, and 2) if it's in use. It's my understanding that unlike the Blizzard/Warcraft/Starcraft problems from 3 years or so ago when the same mechanism ALSO sent your IP and other identifying info back to a server, these CD number checks do NOT do this, it's an anonymous test. If either test fails to pass, then you can't play online. Generally 1 isn't a problem unless the ink on the CD case gets smudged, but 2 is. These CD's are only covering 36^16 combinations (ok so that IS large), but all you need are a few good script kiddies that combine a large database of these, grok what values are important and start to push out tons of valid CD numbers, most which have never been printed, but certainly a good number that have. And if they start playing with that number, which happens to be the one on the back of your legitimate CD case, you are SOL. Which is why nearly every gaming site, manual, and chat room scream "NEVER GIVE AWAY YOUR CD KEY".
Even if the solution is as simple as you've said MS promises, they cannot avoid the few that will try to grok the license number, and abuse it for their own gain. What if you install a legal copy of Whistler, and use it for 6 months, then decide to reinstall on the SAME machine (no change in MAC address), but just days before you install, some script kiddie guesses or obtains your PID, uses it to install Whistler (after calling MS to reactivate it), and then when you the denied message, you call MS and they question why you need to reactivate that PID on a different MAC? This case can be defeated if MS does collect personal information about you such that they can verify that it is you that is doing the reactivation, but then you lose the anonymosity and raise more questions, putting them right back into Blizzard's position.
First, I do think that Ebay has a right to change your user preferences when they feel like it, as long as you still have the option to change them back; it's their server. Yes, it's a stupid little thing only meant to increase their own ad revenue, but legally, they've done nothing wrong.
Unfortunately, the US Gov't in the recent privacy discussions probably feels that Ebay could do this normally. While they are going to come down on sites that don't have good privacy info, or that do not adhead to standards, the gov't seems fine to let the standard "opt-in" for web registrations continue unchecked, despite many computer and rights groups arguing for out-out as default. Mind you, I have found commercial sites that I use where opt-out is the default, and require you to click to sign in, but 90% of the rest of the sites are the reverse. Is it wrong? No. Is it immoral? Hard to say, since I can't opt-out of junk snail mail, though there's no direct cost to me with that. Is it poor customer service? Yes, for sure.
One of the tags that was eager to see in HTML4.0 is the socalled OBJECT tag. The tag is supposed to work as such (OTTOMH, so errors are mine):
OBJECT SOURCE="mypic.mpg" TYPE="video/mpeg">
OBJECT SOURCE="mypic.png" TYPE="image/png">
<OBJECT SOURCE="mypic.gif" TYPE="image/gif">
A picture of myself.
</OBJECT>
</OBJECT>
</OBJECT>
Notice how if the browser has no idea on OBJECT, it just reports the text. If it does know how to handle OBJECT, it looks at the type in the first tag, sees if it can handle it, and if not, continues down the embedded OBJECT list until it does find a type it can handle, or otherwise the 'alternate' text. This was to replace IMG since the alternate text can now be appropriately marked up with HTML.
So for a MathXL situation, I'd have the mathxl in the outer loop, a gif of the equation in the inner one, and possibly something like troff equation output as the alternate text. Those that have browsers that render MathXL would see it with no problem, those without it would see the equation still, and those in text mode would see the troff eq. Of course, this would require a bit more work on the part of the page designer, but certainly I'm sure tools would be made available to convert mathXL to gifs easily.
The problem is, guess how many of {IE|NS} for {PC|MAC|Unix} have adequete support for OBJECT?
I really think that technology in the home media market is moving much too fast and going too far beyond what the average joe wants. There are both biological and technological limits that are there. In the former, humans can only see so much resolution without fuzziness with good eyesight, so going beyond what the current TVs (not necessarily HDTV) can offer is only going to benefit a small fraction of society. From the technological standpoint, as we keep adding more and more features to these devices, people are going to start using less and less of them, because all they want to do is watch Wheel of Fortune and Friends.
I think what we have right now, DVD with digital TV signals from cable sources and 5.1 sound, is about the most complex that we can go in the A/V technology without disinteresting any more consumers. HDTV is a good example of how most consumers are happy with what they have now and don't want to go any further. What the hardward and media content producers should start looking at is paralleling the technology, adding more things like TiVO-like systems, interactivity, or the ability to watch any program at any time. A good portion of consumers have the ability to do this, so why not start exploring how to improve the content distsribution, as opposed to making the consumer buy toys that could easily be antiquated in a few years.
I went to grad school at the Univ. of Michigan -- most of my time was on north campus away from the famous Quad of central campus. Note that at this time there's no 'free-speech zone' or what not at this point.
Whenever I was down on central, in the Quad there was at least one super-religious person(s) arguing why we were all sinners, blah blah blah. Most were respective of those that came through, shouting to be heard but not going any further than that, but a few were the in-your-face times, that would attempt to impede your progress through the Quad or critique you or walk as close to slander as possible without crossing the line. Were they doing anything wrong? Maybe -- you have a right to free speech as long as you don't hurt the rights of others, and detaining you to hear their speech is pushing it. But it was a problem and needs to be fixed. I'm sure there's similar cases in other institutions. I'd rather see universities desigate areas that are not sites of major traffic conjestion to set up soap box areas, but still easily accessible, so that those more 'physical' speakers can still speak their minds without harming others that do NOT want to hear the message.
If anything, aren't these similar to stores that set up "no soliciation" zones in them (and then of course let girl scouts or the sal. army set up shop there?:-/)
IMO, the US government does abide by the initial
concept of this contry wrt to companies, the idea that the gov't should do little to control those companies in order to keep a free market, and for the most part they have (Now, unfortunately, the reverse is not true, with corps controlling the gov't with soft money). Certainly, any business owner is going to B&M over all the various regulations that the US gov't has on operating a business, from OSHA to wage laws to anti-trust legislation, for the most part, as long as the business pays it's taxes, does not screw the consumer, and treats it's employees well, the gov't is not going to care what happens. So most of the time, whenever something that involves the operating of a business is passed, it's generally a gentle push and not strict demands, hoping that the corporate culture will provide the rest of the momentum.
The interaction between the gov't and the net has mostly this way. While we did have problems with CDA and kin, the end picture was that the gov't wanted those sites with inappropriate material for children to take necessary steps to make it harder for children to access them while still allowing easy access by adults. There are certainly a few stragglers of adult content sites that don't care if they push to kids, but most are intelligent enough to plaster warnings up all over their sites.
Privacy is a similar beast; the gov't has been dropping hints that consumer privacy on the net is very important to them, and corps that need privacy policies should start implementing them appropriately. But unlike the child-blocking of sites above, there a numerous examples of late where privacy was not treated highly or ignored; credit card lists thefts, aburpt changes in privacy policies without opt-outs, etc. The gov't is dropping more and more hints, but these big sites do not seem to be picking up on this. And when the gov't cannot succeed with hints, the next step is to pass legislation. Which is going to happen within the next 2 years, IMO. The technology is there to set up a privacy framework, where consumers can easily opt-out any information that they don't want a site to have, and the legislation is going to require that sites do this. And the businesses are going to complain and the like, but I think the gov't with the current political nature is going to put their foot down and tell them to do it or be punished with civil punishments.
Privacy policy WILL happen, the question is, how restrictive is it going to be -- will the net companies try to make amends now or later?
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously. The average config file is an heirarchical structure as opposed to a table structure. This makes it ideal to use XML.
I think that making config files usable by XML, one could write custom configuration apps that would work with any program. Example: mythical "gappconf" would simply need the rc file as well as some DTD description of the tags for that program, and it would present the standard tree widget with descriptions of what options you can change, what restrictions you have, etc.
Now, extending your idea above, I would think it's also possible, but beyond my ability, to write a fs that fakes a directory structure based on an XML file, so that you can decend into directories via your favorite shell and change specific options that you want.
Now, sure, with JSP and the like, it does seem that all you'll be serving is web pages, so why not intermix the HTML code with Java code? What if with the change of one line, you could run the JSP as an independant app (no browser required?) -- or in text mode? Or whatever other interface might come along next? It's much easier to do that separation now that if the next big thing comes along, you can easily adapt your program, than to rewrite from scratch.
I've been running a web server with CGI/apache/perl/mysql initally on a 486/66, and now on a 200MHz Pentium. The former case, the pages were definitely not speedy, and with the 200 behind them, it's much better (what I've written could probably stand for some optimization and mod_perl-goodness, of course). While I know that the scripts I have won't be going to JSP at any foreseeable future, I wonder what sort of power you'd need behind it to make sure the pages ran well. Assume that it's a small-size web site, maybe on the order of 10,000hits/day, with standard db backends where needed. Will my 200Mhz/128megs be able to power it?
IMO, this works much better than munging your email address, as the fake address does work (as opposed to having a legit email sender try to figure out how to demunge your munged address), and it's rather easy to turn off the mail feed for a particularly spammed account.
Nor can you simply add "unsoliciated email advertizing" , as I've seen spam that is generally a plea for help, though poorly targeted and still going through the classic spam patterns. The content of the message does not guarentee it being spam.
And of course, you can't simply add how headers and recieverships might be hidden or such, because there are spammers that actually follow proper protocols -- they don't stay very long at one ISP, mind you, but they do continue to spam.
I think that any spam punishment provision must include the fact that if the person attempted to out-opt and yet recieved the spam from the same people after a sufficient timeframe passed for the opt-out request to be processed (2 weeks), then if they are spammed again, then the penalties start. This would allow those that run mailing lists, for example, to be free of concerns of ruthless subscribers, as well protecting casual one-time emails, while most spammers, who'd refuse to prune email lists, would be caught pants down.
(You could also add the supposed 'hard-core sci-fi' "Doctor Who" movie done by the same guy that did Event Horizon (I wanna say Ripley Scott, but that doesn't jive right), with rumors of it following up to the FOX travesity (which the BBC has said is canon, wah!)
(And following up to some of the followups of this post, there was a 6 part miniseries done in the early 70s by the BBC for HHGTTG, which, given the BBC at that time, was rather decent and kept with the campiness of the book).
I hope I'm not the only one that feels that a movie on EG would be a BAD idea, however not just because we know exactly how Hollywood would mangle it for things like Ender's thoughts, etc, and would focus more on action scenes rather than plot and character. My more worrisome concern is that there's a certain mystique about the visuals in the book; beyond certain key descriptions such as how the academy looks and the zero-g room so that the plot works in flawlessly, we don't have much about what Ender's like, what Peter, Valentine, Bean, and other key characters are beyond 'they're kids'. We only have vague descriptions of the looks of the school from the inside, of how the computer systems work, etc. I want to kept that mystique, because Ender's Game works on the premise that you don't need to know this stuff, and knowing it would distract from the key elements of the book.
The other, somewhat important issue, is that you are going to need to find not only about a dozen *talented* child actors of the right ageset, but also about 50 to 100 more that are sufficiently serious to fill the rest of the school and do some of the stunts you'd need to adequetely do the zero-g room. And one thing with child actors that are keyed for certain parts is that they have a limited shelf life before they're too old. The 6th Sense kid, for example, or McCulley Culkin (sp) -- if you tried to film for more than a year, you'd have serious aging problems. It might not matter too much in EG, since you're looking about about a timeframe of 3 to 4 years for the bulk of the book, but it still can proof challenging.
Today was the today when the DOJ was required to submit their rebuttal of MS's appeal statement; the case is still going and on time, as the appeal court is expected to rule on this by the middle of the year.
From my understanding, as long as the trial is only on civil charges (which is what this case is) and the defendant being a business, the jury by peers is dropped for practical reasons. If this were a criminal case (for example, rumored bits that the CEOs of Ford and Firestone might have been brough in on criminal charges related to knowingly distributing bad tires), then a jury of peers would have been called. IANAL of course.
That's *exactly* what Microsoft is trying to do - they think that because Jackson was biased from square one, that they should be granted a new trial with a new judge, prefferrably one assigned by the (business-compassionate) appeal court. What the appeal court has to decide is if Jackson's bias drastically altered the outcome of the case such that if an unbiased judge was in place, the outcome would have been different. And IMO, that answer is no: as long as the judge was familar with how computers work in addition to legal facts, the evidence that was presented at the trial was heavily against MS.
Remember that you also have 19 states persuing action along side the DOJ. The DOJ may back down, but power really hasn't changed in those states and they'll keep up the fight.
I think the DOJ's rebuttal to MS's appeal arguements is trying to remind the court that facts have been put in place from the lower court proceedings, and that is the heart of the issue: did Jackson misintreprete the evidence to achieve those facts? Doubtful - the evidence was plainly against MS and regardless of how much bias a judge may have, the only intelligent conclusion from the evidence was that there was a monopoly and the abuse of that position involved. Maybe his final verdic was one where he had some bias involved, but it probably was also one where he realized that there would be rounds of appeals including him possibly seeing the case, and that the true final judgement against MS would probably be smaller than any initial penalty he might state. Therefore, he used a rather damaging penalty as a starting point, expecting that a final penalty will be reduced from that, but still significant.
Question: would search engines be different, presumably because they also confer a benefit on the target by making it findable?)"
The standard search engines, such as google, altavista, etc, know and obey robots.txt, which is the same as Register.com's policy of not allowing spambots search through their site. If, after a robots.txt file is in place and the search engine continues to index it, I would say there's a good legal case there.Now, more interestingly is tools that 'mirror' web sites; they still are using a resource that you've made publicably available, except doing it over a timeframe that is much shorter than a human can do it, which usually means more resources used up at the server end. These bots tend not to follow robots.txt rules, and are only defeatable by User-Agent blocking. If the above ruling stands, does it apply here?
Take it a step further: Ebay has taken action to stop meta-Ebay sites that index their site and make it easier than ebay's search engines to find things or to search multiple auction websites. Even though the information that is up is publically available from ebay, and IIRC, they still won, mostly because the information is still ebay's property and they didn't like it on other sites.
Which all leads to an interesting question: when you click on a link, does that start a clock in which you have temporary copyright ability to download the information to your local computer, and after some time, that ability 'expires'? If so, sites that index or mirror without further authorization could find themselves in trouble...
I'm against this deal for sure, but you need to remember that a lot of things went into this: it took more than a year for FCC and FTC to review it, during which both AOL and TW stock tumbled; Initially, most pointed out that AOL was 'buying' TW, but with the value of the companies now, it's more now that TW is 'buying' AOL; both companies had to divest themselves of several smaller aspects (biggest one that I can recall was TW owning part of AT&T, which they were told to give up), so neither is as bohemith as before; both the FTC and FCC have put several restrictions on the merger, most importantly that the merged company must make open access for all that have finiacal means, including a required contract with at least two other ISPs (Earthlink is one, I believe, that they've already gotten a deal down for); and AOL's had to make several concessions on the lucrative instant messaging market.
Which means that for at least 5 years, AOL/TW will be under a government microscope -- if they so much as move to limit *non-premium* content from non AOL/TW users, you'd bet they have the goverment on their backs before you can say 'censorship'. Even with the DOJ on their case, Microsoft is much more free to do things now than AOL/TW is.
I think that the FTC/FCC is looking at this as an experiment with rather high odds for the companies involved. If it is possible for a content provider AND network provider to coexist as the same company while playing fair to all other content and network providers out there, then they might let further mergers go through. If AOL/TW play rotten tricks, they'll take action to prevent this further.
But as I mentioned above, the situation of the AOL/TW merger is drastically different now than the announcement a year ago that the thought of those two companies combined doesn't scare me as much -- it's still worrisome, but not as bad as, say, MS licensing issues.
But as others have told me and are saying here, you basically are going to be plunking the money down for speakers, and not the reciever itself, in order to get good quality sound.
And I do know that Q3A checks something back to ID's site: when I couldn't access quake3arena.com (I believe) but could access the game server, I couldn't connect. Easy way to check: disable DNS, and connect to a Q3A server with the IP #...
But, alternatively, you offer a decent but not high quality product on the web and offer a high quality physical product, and you'll make a few bucks - for comics, that ray of hope is through Plan 9 Publishing, a publishing house that does a lot of small (10,000 copies) runs for many many internet comics, include Sluggy, Kevin and Kell, Ozy and Millie, etc etc. There's also merchandise from the various comics that are available, Sluggy t-shirts, coffee mugs, etc etc. And this is generally where if any money is to be made is the sale of these secondary products along side the free distribution of the comics. It's not a LOT of money, from what I've been told, but it is more than enough to offset costs of hosting and make a small profit in return -- but you'd better not plan on making your living off these ventures.
Even if the solution is as simple as you've said MS promises, they cannot avoid the few that will try to grok the license number, and abuse it for their own gain. What if you install a legal copy of Whistler, and use it for 6 months, then decide to reinstall on the SAME machine (no change in MAC address), but just days before you install, some script kiddie guesses or obtains your PID, uses it to install Whistler (after calling MS to reactivate it), and then when you the denied message, you call MS and they question why you need to reactivate that PID on a different MAC? This case can be defeated if MS does collect personal information about you such that they can verify that it is you that is doing the reactivation, but then you lose the anonymosity and raise more questions, putting them right back into Blizzard's position.
Unfortunately, the US Gov't in the recent privacy discussions probably feels that Ebay could do this normally. While they are going to come down on sites that don't have good privacy info, or that do not adhead to standards, the gov't seems fine to let the standard "opt-in" for web registrations continue unchecked, despite many computer and rights groups arguing for out-out as default. Mind you, I have found commercial sites that I use where opt-out is the default, and require you to click to sign in, but 90% of the rest of the sites are the reverse. Is it wrong? No. Is it immoral? Hard to say, since I can't opt-out of junk snail mail, though there's no direct cost to me with that. Is it poor customer service? Yes, for sure.
OBJECT SOURCE="mypic.mpg" TYPE="video/mpeg"> OBJECT SOURCE="mypic.png" TYPE="image/png"> <OBJECT SOURCE="mypic.gif" TYPE="image/gif"> A picture of myself. </OBJECT> </OBJECT> </OBJECT>
Notice how if the browser has no idea on OBJECT, it just reports the text. If it does know how to handle OBJECT, it looks at the type in the first tag, sees if it can handle it, and if not, continues down the embedded OBJECT list until it does find a type it can handle, or otherwise the 'alternate' text. This was to replace IMG since the alternate text can now be appropriately marked up with HTML.
So for a MathXL situation, I'd have the mathxl in the outer loop, a gif of the equation in the inner one, and possibly something like troff equation output as the alternate text. Those that have browsers that render MathXL would see it with no problem, those without it would see the equation still, and those in text mode would see the troff eq. Of course, this would require a bit more work on the part of the page designer, but certainly I'm sure tools would be made available to convert mathXL to gifs easily.
The problem is, guess how many of {IE|NS} for {PC|MAC|Unix} have adequete support for OBJECT?
I think what we have right now, DVD with digital TV signals from cable sources and 5.1 sound, is about the most complex that we can go in the A/V technology without disinteresting any more consumers. HDTV is a good example of how most consumers are happy with what they have now and don't want to go any further. What the hardward and media content producers should start looking at is paralleling the technology, adding more things like TiVO-like systems, interactivity, or the ability to watch any program at any time. A good portion of consumers have the ability to do this, so why not start exploring how to improve the content distsribution, as opposed to making the consumer buy toys that could easily be antiquated in a few years.
Whenever I was down on central, in the Quad there was at least one super-religious person(s) arguing why we were all sinners, blah blah blah. Most were respective of those that came through, shouting to be heard but not going any further than that, but a few were the in-your-face times, that would attempt to impede your progress through the Quad or critique you or walk as close to slander as possible without crossing the line. Were they doing anything wrong? Maybe -- you have a right to free speech as long as you don't hurt the rights of others, and detaining you to hear their speech is pushing it. But it was a problem and needs to be fixed. I'm sure there's similar cases in other institutions. I'd rather see universities desigate areas that are not sites of major traffic conjestion to set up soap box areas, but still easily accessible, so that those more 'physical' speakers can still speak their minds without harming others that do NOT want to hear the message.
If anything, aren't these similar to stores that set up "no soliciation" zones in them (and then of course let girl scouts or the sal. army set up shop there? :-/)
The interaction between the gov't and the net has mostly this way. While we did have problems with CDA and kin, the end picture was that the gov't wanted those sites with inappropriate material for children to take necessary steps to make it harder for children to access them while still allowing easy access by adults. There are certainly a few stragglers of adult content sites that don't care if they push to kids, but most are intelligent enough to plaster warnings up all over their sites.
Privacy is a similar beast; the gov't has been dropping hints that consumer privacy on the net is very important to them, and corps that need privacy policies should start implementing them appropriately. But unlike the child-blocking of sites above, there a numerous examples of late where privacy was not treated highly or ignored; credit card lists thefts, aburpt changes in privacy policies without opt-outs, etc. The gov't is dropping more and more hints, but these big sites do not seem to be picking up on this. And when the gov't cannot succeed with hints, the next step is to pass legislation. Which is going to happen within the next 2 years, IMO. The technology is there to set up a privacy framework, where consumers can easily opt-out any information that they don't want a site to have, and the legislation is going to require that sites do this. And the businesses are going to complain and the like, but I think the gov't with the current political nature is going to put their foot down and tell them to do it or be punished with civil punishments.
Privacy policy WILL happen, the question is, how restrictive is it going to be -- will the net companies try to make amends now or later?