I did submit this as "The Internet/Article". It's not even a good YRO, IMO, as we're talking something that does not have a direct effect on our rights.
They don't lose access -- they lose *unchecked* access. If your health insurence co. wants your health records, they need you to sign a consent form which they have to keep on record for several years. This allows you to know that you data is being transferred. In the case of health insurence, I would figure they do need this data, so I'd allow it.
And if you don't already believe that health insurence co's based their rates on your age already, in addition to other medical conditions, then you've been living in the wrong world.
It's not that Java itself it closed source, but most of the beans that are released for it are 'binary' only, and generally put through a babelizer-like program to prevent debuggers from helping to discover the code of the program. All you get is a simple.jar file.
While I still think it's too agressive of WB here, I do think the Register is missing the point, since a domain name should not be the end-all of a web site. They say nothing about naming the site, just the domain name (which current legalities place well into trademark areas) while there's plenty of ways to find anything you want on the web. Remember, domain names were never meant to be a way to locate sites and the original intent was for domain names to be transparent to average users when the web was introduced.
But yes, WB needs to learn to negotiate, particularly when the person they're threatening is their target audience.
One problem with/. is that there is no secondary setting on posts when you are a moderator. My non-moderated browsing is at +1, threaded, highest first, which is in no way good for moderation, which for me would be +0, nested, newest first. I'd love to have this secondary setting engaged when I have moderator points, and while it's certainly not that big a thing to change it once for one story, it gets time consuming for every other story. Simplying adding a moderation reading setting for users preferences may help here.
But remember, moderation is not only moving posts up when they are deemed worthy of consideration, but to also move posts down that get undesired points. A good example is the +1 karma bonus; I try to avoid posting with that if the post is a throwaway gag or something or doesn't contribute to the thread. But some bonus-holers don't do this and post things that shouldn't have a +2 moderation to start with. Other cases include first posts that might have some information but as the story develops , it's discovered to be wrong -- the story needs to move down...
As for the whack-a-toss-away account, the only way to do this is to basically make getting a new account a 'lengthy' process (namely, your user password needs to be sent to an email address). Sure, it's five minutes, but it might be enough that one who continually spams/. will give up.
I browse at +1 as well. Sure, the noise is not visible, but the telling number at the time of this posting is: 77 of 110 fall within your threshold. That's 30% *noise*. Why is there this noise? A few are playing silly games with/. moderation (see another post at the same level as yours, trying for -100 Karma), but others are truly trying to disrupt the system and possibly get others into trouble (aka g.cx). Even at +1, I know they exist, and we need some way to discourage this attempt to disrupt/. community.
It's between the lines here, and there's a better story at CNN on this, but basically, some company registered about 120 variations of Harry Potter domain, nearly all dated shortly after WB announced the HP movie in March. WB took them to WIPO; the opponent never responded or showed up, so WB took control pretty much by default, as the move was most likely for cybersquatting.
Probably at a time before this action, they tried to contact that person, in addition to every other site that had Harry Potter-isms domain names, with the same form letter: posible violation of WB's trademark name. As the ZDnet article states, WB can't tell at the time if the person is a true fan or a cybersquatter and they have to defend their trademark or lose it.
I know people that have dealt with WB before in fan sites verses copyright and generally WB is pretty good. I think, however, in those cases the amount of money that was involved was pittence to Harry Potter. I expect it to rack up money in the BILLIONS, and WB has a strong financial interest to make sure that squatters aren't ripping them off. I do see that WB is trying to make some concessions, particularly if they harm too many fan sites they are going to disenfrantize their primary audience.
But overall, I think this is a problem of slash-and-burn trademark/domain arbitration. With one major cybersquatter apparently ruining it for the rest. ().
Yes, there is the one case of copyright infringement, but this is actually not surprising; I'd think that if you had a signficiant number of images from books, you'd be looking at a C&D. Typical with other studios as well, but these are things that studios should be able to work out with fans.
The advantage of XML is very subtle, but well suited to any system where your have random-length data fields, with the possibility of some data fields not present in the data file, or the parser not understanding those fields, so that it could skip to the next 'valid' entry.
Before XML was buzzworded, I had developed a XML-like structure for saving data in a program I was writing (no, I'm not going to apply for a patent on it:-P). The program used plug-ins, and as the final version would have allowed user-created plug-ins, I needed to be able to account for versioning of the plug-ins. But I also needed to recognize what to do when a plug-in couldn't be found, if it didn't critically affect the program.
The XML structure allowed me to do this easily:
the data was in a tree, with keywords that started and ended each 'branch'. Certain keywords were guarenteed to work (ie not part of the plugin part), and data for a plugin identified itself as a string. If that string couldn't be matched with a plugin, the file was 'forwarded' until the end of the plugin data was id'ed. Same thing with versioning in plugins... if data from a newer plugin was not understood by the older one, then the plugin could fastforward into the file to get past that extraneous data.
It's like the napster debate. There are times where AC is an absolute necessity, but x% (x approaching 100) of the time, it's used for Natalie Portman and Grits and various evil links. All because posting as AC lacks any accountability - (presumably) no one can trace back who posted what AC message, and if you have a high karma on your account, and post AC, you can't be hurt by it.
The idea solution would be to remove AC posting unless you've logged in, so that any abuses of AC posting can be dealt with. But then there would have to be legal notice that/. would not be responsible for AC posts, and what policy they might use if they were subpeoned for AC identities. (There was a recent case which I did try to submit but was nixed where an anonymous libelous comment to Yahoo was traced down to it's owner after Yahoo was forced to give up the user records, and the owner fined several thousand dollars for that). Now, IMO, I think the importance of avoiding the latter situation overrides the S/N ratio we're getting right now, so I'd rather keep the AC.
The only other option is to give a small percentage of registered users (like 1%) unlimited moderation points that can only be used to pull down ratings; to keep these users in check, if after so many meta-mods revealed that these users were abusing their privaledge, it would be taken away. The 5 moderation points that you get infrequently are too valuable most of the time to be wasting on trolls and the like, and this might make them more worthwhile. Who'd be chosen? Probably those users with high karmas, frequent postings and story submissions, people that are probably likely to see/. continue. But again, there's some simplicity in the current system, and this would require a lot of programming by Rob and co., plus it has it's own faults.
Sure, it's similar to COM and ActiveX. We already had CORBA and ORB, and.. well dozens of other attempts to recreate a COM-like nature.
However, this is all beneficial. When you can reuse components, the programming cycle can speed up tremendously. In the case of the Java the biggest push is for Enterprise Beans, the Java equivalent of ActiveX controls. Take a few activeX/beans, and a visual editor, and you can get the fundament UI/engine intergration completed in minimal time, leaving more time to work on the mechanics of using that data in the program. The only problem with the Java and MS solutions is that a majority of the components were closed source, so how could you be sure that a simply text box did not report back to some site on the net?
With an open-sourced based system, at least you now have a better chance of obtaining open-source components, and thus you can evaluate those components for security problems. In addition, you have the ability to modify behaviors slightly if you don't like how the default component works without drastically affecting the rest of the code since the component is really just a drop-in.
And now the fact that KDE and Gnome, which use different component models, might be able to share components means more components and options are available to developers which could enhance the user experience more.
I don't know anything specific about that xsane/gimp problem, but the first question to ask is: What distros do you have in your/etc/apt/sources.list?
The conflict between these two packages sounds like something you'd find in an unstable branch, maybe as one program requires certain gtk libs, and the other requires newer ones. In most cases it's possible to work around that (the ultimate example being that libc5 and glibc2 libraries can exist on the same system with simply apt-getting. Only if you want to develop for both do you need to take the road less travelled), but maybe the person developing the gimp packages (and therefore the one probably on the gtk packages as well), hasn't had the opportunity to work out the fixes yet. In any case, all that would fall into an unstable branch.
By default the/etc/apt/sources.list only has the version that you installed set up for apt-getting eg, you can only get potato updates with a potato install unless you modify sources.list. And that branch will be 'stable', so you'd never see the above problem. Maybe in that version xsane and gimp can live happily together. Now, knowing how much the average user generally chances preferrences from the default, the chances that they will add anything new to sources.list is low, so they will not see that problem. Anyone that does add it probably is in a position that they know how to deal the above apt-get problem.
I really think that the above is a non-problem for considering the ability of average users to use debian. They *aren't* going to be adding packages alot and will probably be happy with what they install initially. If they do start adding packages, it would be expected that by that point they'll have some familiarity with the system to be able to handle the slight problems as the above post suggests.
This might be a bit outdated, but the numbers can only go the other way: the American Tax Reform site states that in 1999 75% of the cost of cigarettes are collected as taxes. While the taxes are generally considered to be sin taxes, the money is tagged to go back to medical purposes.
Remember what Germany did with MS...
on
Nazis on Napster
·
· Score: 2
Because the defrag program in Microsoft NT/2000 was written by a business whose CEO was a Scientologist, and as Germany considers Scientology to be a terrorist group, the German government forbid the sale of NT/2000 in Germany unless the defrag program was removed.
But between this and the Yahoo/France thing, we've got several cases that are testing how well national boundaries can extend into the internet (we all know they can't, but that's besides the point).
Here's a better idea: All text of laws passed must fit onto 2 pages of standard 8.5"x 11" paper with fixed typesetting. Any supporting information (which is not part of the law but may be used to explain it) can be additional pages, but a legal body only needs to read 2 pages to understand how to implement it. If a bill requires more space, then it must be broken into multiple parts and each treated as a separate bill. Sure, this would make the number of bills that go through Congress skyrocket, but it should also reduce the debate, allow for more varied voting, and easily kills this riders.
Sure, it's been there, done that, but this is another increase in the taxes on the blank media. As the cost of aquiring media like CD-Rs drops easily below a US$1, the tax is becoming a significant cost of the media for Canada. It's similar to cigarettes in the states - usually more than 50% of the cost of a pack of cigarettes is in taxes that go back to pay for medical care and lung cancer research. Especially as the *average* consumer will start using CD-R's more and more for porting their digital music around, this tax will become more noticable.
Basically, it's a 1-dim left-right side scroller -- you could travel either left or right off a board. Each 'screen' had a ground level and a subterrian level with ladders interspersed on the various screens. The ground level had obstacles such as pits that would open and close, lakes with gators, stationary and rolling logs, and vines to cross the pits or lakes when needed. The underground level had scorpians, but also had several deads. There were treasures that were spread out through the game that you had to collect.
This is not 'censoring', though it is a slipperly slope away from that.
Censoring means that the material that may be considered harmful is removed prior to public disemination. I can censor a TV show by bleeping the words in the audio track before it is broadcast. Censoring is ALWAYS done by the distribution end.
Filtering means that the material that may be considered harmful is removed or altered at the recieving end. I can filter a TV show that is coming down live from the network satelite during that 15 second delay before further sending the signal out along cable lines. Filtering is ALWAYS done by the recieving end.
This bill is NOT about censorware, but filterware.
Now, some might argue that this will effectively censor some sites out there. But this is not correct. Take the physical example of 'banned books' such as To Kill a Mockingbird. Sure, the book may be banned from school and public libraries, but there are other means to get the book: from a store, from a friend, possibly by online text. The book is in no way censored since the material is still readily available in some form. Same with online information, say that Slashdot is blocked by these filters. Certainly there are other was to access it, from private internet connections or net-cafes. No one is denying you any access to that site whatsoever, just that the public institution feels that they need to filter it for the public good.
Thus, this bill does not threaten anyone's 1st amendment rights in any way. You still have your freedom of speech and expression, and you still have ways to hear others if you so choose, just that in public institutions, what *you* may want to hear is not in the best of public interest, and thus needs to be filtered.
Now, mind you, this bill sucks. Yes, it does leave it up to the community to decide what to filter, but it should leave more to the communities than just that. In addition, filtering software is inefficient, and can filter legitamite sites as well as As some other articles on the net state, communities have already passed regulations that they will not implement filters due to any easy way to set a community standard and the lack of good software.
So while I expect the ACLU to challenge it, I'd rather see states challenge it as it violates several distinctions of federal and state powers. I'd also like to see groups like Peacefire tackle the problem and raise the issue that no filtering program is sufficiently good at this point in time to be setting national standards for them. Until such a time where we can dynamically determine if the content on such a page (including images) are not up to the standards of the given community, any national filtering solution will fail (and since I doubt we'll get to such a point in 10 years, this bill is waaaay before it's time).
I'd rather see a better approach in the sence of voluntary ratings for sites, and mandating that public institution must enable such features on a browser to conform with that ratings system. Then make it a civil offense to misrate your site after being notified that the site is improperly rated (or some other such action to avoid the quick-fire lawsuit type persons). Certainly 90% of the sites out there probably won't need to rate themselves, and those that do could be making sure that their site flies under the filtering radar (such as a breast cancer site making sure they indicate that they are a health-related site). Yes, it's not a perfect solution, but it's a better direction than filtering software.
But again, filtering != censoring, but a few slipperly slope arguments get you there. "Well, if X is blocked at public schools, why shouldn't it be blocked from the web overall?" doesn't follow logic, but a sympathic judge might eat it up. Any filtering law must state that it's for the purpose of maintaining community standards in public places and does not attempt to interfere with free speech rights granted in private places of home or business.
The thing is, coming completely fresh into the puzzle, you don't know certain things exist, but if you've done the puzzle before, you already have a clue, so that's not the same. As an example, until the robot comes out of the panel, you are not told the panel is there. Sure, you could "look panel" since you know the panel is there, but the description of the room doesn't mention it. So you 'waste' a death as you get everything set up to the point, press the button, and then the panel is introduced; you don't have enough time in turns to get everything in place again before you are shot.
I'm not critical of this, just that this is a distinctive Infocom style compared to LucasArts or most other modern adventure games.
Something else that was on that bill but hasn't been posted to/. yet (I submitted it, but was rejected...no idea why), is that schools and libraries must install mandatory filters on internet connections if they want to continue to recieve money from the federal gov't for that internet connection. Exactly what filtering program and what settings to run it at are up to local communities, but it has to be on and running at all times to get the money.
And yes, this was tacked onto the spending bill, initiated by McCain. Lovely.
It's the equivalent of a burglar checking your doors and windows looking for one that's not locked.
Trying to play with analogies is bad, but this one needs to be cleared up.
Port scanning can only tell you what ports are open. You need more tools to 'abuse' those open ports to gain access to the system, and further tools to actually damange the system.
The analogy should be that port scanning is simply looking at a home and counting the doors and windows. "Hmm, they don't have a door in the back of the house" is equivalent to saying "they're don't have port 23 open". Attempting to connect to that port to see what exploits might be possible is comparable to checking a door on a house to see if it's unlocked. The final step, abusing that exploit, is then compariable to the 'breaking and entering' crime.
Port Scanning should certianly not be a crime based on this analogy, but again, analogies are bad things to start with.:-)
I'm not trying to compare the companies here, but more of their approaches to the adventure type games. With Infocom games, you learn how to solve the puzzles when you fail to do certain tasks within certain "times" resulting in the death of your player (eg, you could NOT, without dying at least once, *learn* what you had to do and setup the babel fish puzzle before the gaurds came and took you away. as long as you knew to put the robe on the hook, etc, and did everything else without missing a turn, you had two extra turns before the guards retrieved you.). In most LucasArts adventure games (Monkey Island series, The Dig), you can't die, and you can't do certain things to get you in a dead end; instead there are countless numbers of visual and dialog hints. For myself, I always got frustrated at Infocom's puzzles, some of them rather vague, and many rather tedious (the maze in Leather Goddess, for example), though the enjoyment for succeeding in these puzzles was satisfactory. For many of the LucasArts games, you usually can figure out the puzzles and solutions, and while the reward of solving them might be short, the fun is usually in the red herrings or the side conversions (for example, in the recently released Escape from MI, about 75% of the dialoge from characters is completely unhelpful to solving the puzzles, but it's a continuation of the stories of characters from the other 3 installments of the MI series).
I'm in the situation where getting DVD is not necessary, but it's going to be unavoidable looking at how slowly shelves at places like BestBuy move from VHS to DVD (last I checked the two local stores were about 50/50 in the mix). VHS may not be dead, but I would suspect in two years, most new releases will be DVD only. I'd like to be ready for that if possible.
One part of this thread mentioned that combo systems suck, and I pretty much agree -- when on a tight budget they can do the trick but since I can spend a little bit more, I'd take quality & DVD features over additional functionality. However, I don't have a good component system yet - standard analog TV, moderately ok speakers, etc; that I'll build up slowly in the next few years. So the DVD player that I'd get would work with my current setup (and understandably not give me the best quality yet), but should work down the road.
While I don't expect that I'll buy any non US region DVDs, I'd rather not be excluded from viewing them if possible.
Are there any good suggestions with these criteria?
Micropayments can work both ways. "Site pays User" models are sorta dying out. The reverse " User pays Site" are not really in use yet, but those that are trying to back digital music/movie/book distrubtion with a fair payment going to the artist are pushing micropayments such that every time you played a song via streaming from a site, for example, you'd pay 2 or 3 cents for that (put on a tab of course). This really hasn't taken hold yet either.
Slashdot Mirror
And if you don't already believe that health insurence co's based their rates on your age already, in addition to other medical conditions, then you've been living in the wrong world.
It's not that Java itself it closed source, but most of the beans that are released for it are 'binary' only, and generally put through a babelizer-like program to prevent debuggers from helping to discover the code of the program. All you get is a simple .jar file.
But yes, WB needs to learn to negotiate, particularly when the person they're threatening is their target audience.
But remember, moderation is not only moving posts up when they are deemed worthy of consideration, but to also move posts down that get undesired points. A good example is the +1 karma bonus; I try to avoid posting with that if the post is a throwaway gag or something or doesn't contribute to the thread. But some bonus-holers don't do this and post things that shouldn't have a +2 moderation to start with. Other cases include first posts that might have some information but as the story develops , it's discovered to be wrong -- the story needs to move down...
As for the whack-a-toss-away account, the only way to do this is to basically make getting a new account a 'lengthy' process (namely, your user password needs to be sent to an email address). Sure, it's five minutes, but it might be enough that one who continually spams /. will give up.
Probably at a time before this action, they tried to contact that person, in addition to every other site that had Harry Potter-isms domain names, with the same form letter: posible violation of WB's trademark name. As the ZDnet article states, WB can't tell at the time if the person is a true fan or a cybersquatter and they have to defend their trademark or lose it.
I know people that have dealt with WB before in fan sites verses copyright and generally WB is pretty good. I think, however, in those cases the amount of money that was involved was pittence to Harry Potter. I expect it to rack up money in the BILLIONS, and WB has a strong financial interest to make sure that squatters aren't ripping them off. I do see that WB is trying to make some concessions, particularly if they harm too many fan sites they are going to disenfrantize their primary audience.
But overall, I think this is a problem of slash-and-burn trademark/domain arbitration. With one major cybersquatter apparently ruining it for the rest. ().
Yes, there is the one case of copyright infringement, but this is actually not surprising; I'd think that if you had a signficiant number of images from books, you'd be looking at a C&D. Typical with other studios as well, but these are things that studios should be able to work out with fans.
Before XML was buzzworded, I had developed a XML-like structure for saving data in a program I was writing (no, I'm not going to apply for a patent on it :-P). The program used plug-ins, and as the final version would have allowed user-created plug-ins, I needed to be able to account for versioning of the plug-ins. But I also needed to recognize what to do when a plug-in couldn't be found, if it didn't critically affect the program.
The XML structure allowed me to do this easily:
the data was in a tree, with keywords that started and ended each 'branch'. Certain keywords were guarenteed to work (ie not part of the plugin part), and data for a plugin identified itself as a string. If that string couldn't be matched with a plugin, the file was 'forwarded' until the end of the plugin data was id'ed. Same thing with versioning in plugins... if data from a newer plugin was not understood by the older one, then the plugin could fastforward into the file to get past that extraneous data.
It's like the napster debate. There are times where AC is an absolute necessity, but x% (x approaching 100) of the time, it's used for Natalie Portman and Grits and various evil links. All because posting as AC lacks any accountability - (presumably) no one can trace back who posted what AC message, and if you have a high karma on your account, and post AC, you can't be hurt by it.
The idea solution would be to remove AC posting unless you've logged in, so that any abuses of AC posting can be dealt with. But then there would have to be legal notice that /. would not be responsible for AC posts, and what policy they might use if they were subpeoned for AC identities. (There was a recent case which I did try to submit but was nixed where an anonymous libelous comment to Yahoo was traced down to it's owner after Yahoo was forced to give up the user records, and the owner fined several thousand dollars for that). Now, IMO, I think the importance of avoiding the latter situation overrides the S/N ratio we're getting right now, so I'd rather keep the AC.
The only other option is to give a small percentage of registered users (like 1%) unlimited moderation points that can only be used to pull down ratings; to keep these users in check, if after so many meta-mods revealed that these users were abusing their privaledge, it would be taken away. The 5 moderation points that you get infrequently are too valuable most of the time to be wasting on trolls and the like, and this might make them more worthwhile. Who'd be chosen? Probably those users with high karmas, frequent postings and story submissions, people that are probably likely to see /. continue. But again, there's some simplicity in the current system, and this would require a lot of programming by Rob and co., plus it has it's own faults.
However, this is all beneficial. When you can reuse components, the programming cycle can speed up tremendously. In the case of the Java the biggest push is for Enterprise Beans, the Java equivalent of ActiveX controls. Take a few activeX/beans, and a visual editor, and you can get the fundament UI/engine intergration completed in minimal time, leaving more time to work on the mechanics of using that data in the program. The only problem with the Java and MS solutions is that a majority of the components were closed source, so how could you be sure that a simply text box did not report back to some site on the net?
With an open-sourced based system, at least you now have a better chance of obtaining open-source components, and thus you can evaluate those components for security problems. In addition, you have the ability to modify behaviors slightly if you don't like how the default component works without drastically affecting the rest of the code since the component is really just a drop-in.
And now the fact that KDE and Gnome, which use different component models, might be able to share components means more components and options are available to developers which could enhance the user experience more.
The conflict between these two packages sounds like something you'd find in an unstable branch, maybe as one program requires certain gtk libs, and the other requires newer ones. In most cases it's possible to work around that (the ultimate example being that libc5 and glibc2 libraries can exist on the same system with simply apt-getting. Only if you want to develop for both do you need to take the road less travelled), but maybe the person developing the gimp packages (and therefore the one probably on the gtk packages as well), hasn't had the opportunity to work out the fixes yet. In any case, all that would fall into an unstable branch.
By default the /etc/apt/sources.list only has the version that you installed set up for apt-getting eg, you can only get potato updates with a potato install unless you modify sources.list. And that branch will be 'stable', so you'd never see the above problem. Maybe in that version xsane and gimp can live happily together. Now, knowing how much the average user generally chances preferrences from the default, the chances that they will add anything new to sources.list is low, so they will not see that problem. Anyone that does add it probably is in a position that they know how to deal the above apt-get problem.
I really think that the above is a non-problem for considering the ability of average users to use debian. They *aren't* going to be adding packages alot and will probably be happy with what they install initially. If they do start adding packages, it would be expected that by that point they'll have some familiarity with the system to be able to handle the slight problems as the above post suggests.
This might be a bit outdated, but the numbers can only go the other way: the American Tax Reform site states that in 1999 75% of the cost of cigarettes are collected as taxes. While the taxes are generally considered to be sin taxes, the money is tagged to go back to medical purposes.
But between this and the Yahoo/France thing, we've got several cases that are testing how well national boundaries can extend into the internet (we all know they can't, but that's besides the point).
Censoring means that the material that may be considered harmful is removed prior to public disemination. I can censor a TV show by bleeping the words in the audio track before it is broadcast. Censoring is ALWAYS done by the distribution end.
Filtering means that the material that may be considered harmful is removed or altered at the recieving end. I can filter a TV show that is coming down live from the network satelite during that 15 second delay before further sending the signal out along cable lines. Filtering is ALWAYS done by the recieving end.
This bill is NOT about censorware, but filterware.
Now, some might argue that this will effectively censor some sites out there. But this is not correct. Take the physical example of 'banned books' such as To Kill a Mockingbird. Sure, the book may be banned from school and public libraries, but there are other means to get the book: from a store, from a friend, possibly by online text. The book is in no way censored since the material is still readily available in some form. Same with online information, say that Slashdot is blocked by these filters. Certainly there are other was to access it, from private internet connections or net-cafes. No one is denying you any access to that site whatsoever, just that the public institution feels that they need to filter it for the public good.
Thus, this bill does not threaten anyone's 1st amendment rights in any way. You still have your freedom of speech and expression, and you still have ways to hear others if you so choose, just that in public institutions, what *you* may want to hear is not in the best of public interest, and thus needs to be filtered.
Now, mind you, this bill sucks. Yes, it does leave it up to the community to decide what to filter, but it should leave more to the communities than just that. In addition, filtering software is inefficient, and can filter legitamite sites as well as As some other articles on the net state, communities have already passed regulations that they will not implement filters due to any easy way to set a community standard and the lack of good software.
So while I expect the ACLU to challenge it, I'd rather see states challenge it as it violates several distinctions of federal and state powers. I'd also like to see groups like Peacefire tackle the problem and raise the issue that no filtering program is sufficiently good at this point in time to be setting national standards for them. Until such a time where we can dynamically determine if the content on such a page (including images) are not up to the standards of the given community, any national filtering solution will fail (and since I doubt we'll get to such a point in 10 years, this bill is waaaay before it's time).
I'd rather see a better approach in the sence of voluntary ratings for sites, and mandating that public institution must enable such features on a browser to conform with that ratings system. Then make it a civil offense to misrate your site after being notified that the site is improperly rated (or some other such action to avoid the quick-fire lawsuit type persons). Certainly 90% of the sites out there probably won't need to rate themselves, and those that do could be making sure that their site flies under the filtering radar (such as a breast cancer site making sure they indicate that they are a health-related site). Yes, it's not a perfect solution, but it's a better direction than filtering software.
But again, filtering != censoring, but a few slipperly slope arguments get you there. "Well, if X is blocked at public schools, why shouldn't it be blocked from the web overall?" doesn't follow logic, but a sympathic judge might eat it up. Any filtering law must state that it's for the purpose of maintaining community standards in public places and does not attempt to interfere with free speech rights granted in private places of home or business.
I'm not critical of this, just that this is a distinctive Infocom style compared to LucasArts or most other modern adventure games.
And yes, this was tacked onto the spending bill, initiated by McCain. Lovely.
Trying to play with analogies is bad, but this one needs to be cleared up.
Port scanning can only tell you what ports are open. You need more tools to 'abuse' those open ports to gain access to the system, and further tools to actually damange the system.
The analogy should be that port scanning is simply looking at a home and counting the doors and windows. "Hmm, they don't have a door in the back of the house" is equivalent to saying "they're don't have port 23 open". Attempting to connect to that port to see what exploits might be possible is comparable to checking a door on a house to see if it's unlocked. The final step, abusing that exploit, is then compariable to the 'breaking and entering' crime.
Port Scanning should certianly not be a crime based on this analogy, but again, analogies are bad things to start with. :-)
One part of this thread mentioned that combo systems suck, and I pretty much agree -- when on a tight budget they can do the trick but since I can spend a little bit more, I'd take quality & DVD features over additional functionality. However, I don't have a good component system yet - standard analog TV, moderately ok speakers, etc; that I'll build up slowly in the next few years. So the DVD player that I'd get would work with my current setup (and understandably not give me the best quality yet), but should work down the road.
While I don't expect that I'll buy any non US region DVDs, I'd rather not be excluded from viewing them if possible.
Are there any good suggestions with these criteria?
Micropayments can work both ways. "Site pays User" models are sorta dying out. The reverse " User pays Site" are not really in use yet, but those that are trying to back digital music/movie/book distrubtion with a fair payment going to the artist are pushing micropayments such that every time you played a song via streaming from a site, for example, you'd pay 2 or 3 cents for that (put on a tab of course). This really hasn't taken hold yet either.