I don't think any WYSIWYG attempt would necessary devolve into Word. The problem with Word to write any large/scientific document (thesis for example), is that you have poor control of image placement and anchoring, because Word, even up to 2000, is still a hack on a continuous stream of text. Framemaker, and supposedly other typesetting WYSIWYG tools, are based more on the fact that every page is blank until you put down a 'frame', whether that frame is text, graphics, or whatever, and then for text frames that are continuous, you simply need to 'link' them to let text flow. Sure, you can set up linked text boxes in Word, but for anything more than a few pages, it's a pain, and I didn't play around with it enough to check the stability. Word really doesn't like full pages of only text boxes with no text.
A WYSIWYG typesetting program, as long as the programmers and users understand that you place frames on a page as opposed to inserting things into a text stream, will do a world of wonders for Linux.
The PDF format is not bad for what it does in today's day and age: it's a standard (though not open) that allows for portable document generation across platforms when pixel-perfect placement is required. (If you don't need this, then HTML is the way to go). And the rendering engine behind it is sufficiently powerful, combining both vector, object, and pixel-based graphics. That's why Apple's running a PDF-based engine at the heart of OSX. If Adobe had not pushed PDF back in the early days of the web, something else (read Word files) would have taken it's place, and it might have not been as platform-independant as we would like.
And as for appearence problems, such as fonts and grainy images, that's all a problem with whomever put the PDF together. PDF's are capable of print-resolution images, but if the company simply scans in the page in typcial 'bulk workload' mode at 150dpi, then you get little benefit. And the lack of inclusion of the right fonts is the Adobe document creator, not the PDF engine itself, though there should be a default mechanism if fonts don't exist to use a default font style.
Given the number of DNS articles in the last few weeks, anyone here on/. should know of the existance of a few alternative name servers and may already be using them. The tentative hold that ICANN has over the DNS is weak, in the fact that most computers by default will point to a DNS server run by computer-literate people, and default installs of DNS software point only to the ICANN root servers. Anyone with enough knowledge can easily use additional root servers or the like. But that basically leaves 95% of everyone else, who runs Win98 happily and could care less as long as they can get to amazon.com.
So this implies that all ICANN is doing now is making sure computer-illiterate people can surf the net.
Now, there is more to this. Look at the EM spectrum; as to prevent pollution of one signal into another, the band has been divided into several segments and 'rented' out appropriately. Sure, there are a few times where ham radio people can get into teh wrong band that's typically used for air traffic control, but for the most part this works. The internet domain space is the same way, when you consider that there is only a good number of limited 3-or-more letter words that can work as a TLD. Pollution from one 'domain' into another is very easy to happen here, as the.biz case is demonstrating. So does there need to be an organization that divides these domain air waves appropriately, which is what ICANN can do. But if you continue the analogy further, two things show up:
- The TLD spectrum is practically infinite, bounded only by length at n^26 possible domains. While some are more desirable than others (as it's generally easier to broadcast over certain ranges compared to others in regards to power consumption and signal quality), all are effectively possible.
- ICANN is maintaining an artifical sarcity on TLDs. Because the spectrum is infinite, and we've only scratched a tiny fraction of the spectrum, ICANN's role should be evaluating proposals for any new domains at *any* time, not just when they feel like it. As long as the domain register is faithful and trustworthy and there isn't conflict with a previous domain, then ICANN should grant the new TLD. The only thing that should be restricted here is that any new TLDs should have some charter that all sites within it should abide by (ie, regulated domains), and if too many abuses of this are reported to ICANN, the register will lose that TLD to a default register (NSI most likely) or another register if appropriate. This will prevent the need for trademark owners to spend thousands to 'complete the set' because there's more than enough domains to effectively protect the trademark in them all, and in some, trademark protection may not even be possible.
But as ICANN stands right now, they are merely a grinning government appointed panel making sure that Joe Q Public can read his stock quotes every morning and his porn every night.
Poor example, given that the copyright office has stated that bypassing copyright protections to route around malfunctioning devices is entirely legal (one of the two exceptions they alloted for). Thus, you would be able to extract the file, decrypt and remove any watermarks, all because the device was malfunctioning. Though yes, there are more tricky issues here...getting the file and then decrypting the file might be two separate instances of the DMCA, and while getting the file to get around the broken computer interface is reasonable, stripping the watermarking may not be.
Note that I'm following here, because as a whole, my original post was triggering the lameness filter, oy!
Copy protection on CDs: Ok, this is a necessary evil to have to reduce piracy. However, as copy protection schemes move beyond current CD technology, people are finding that some older devices cannot read the disc due to the copy protection, and therefore can't use the media as purchased. In addition, it's been legal to make a backup copy of software for private use, but these copy protection schemes generally prevent the disc from being copied in it's entirity; if the disc is damaged, you can 'repurchase' a new one. However, there are sites out there that describe how to circumvent the copy protection to make such fair uses of the material, or small programs that do this, but by the DMCA, these are illegal. (Yes, these programs can enable further piracy as well, but that's not their only intent). The only solution for the fair use here is to spend more money to the media people, which is certainly not fair use anymore.
SDMI: needless to say, the ability of the music company to control how you can listen to your music, as well as forcing you to obtain a 'new' copy for a different device that you might want to play on, goes against fair use. Having a program that removes the protection but allows the music to be heard on any device you own will be illegal, though the final use is fair use.
HDTV: Broadcasters have been fighting to get into the HDTV standard a bit of data that prevents the ability for digital devices to record a show, even for purposes of time-shifting. Fair use in time-shifting has been upheld by the SC, but having a device that 'unintentionally' ignores this bit would be illegal.
I mean, we did just vote in 5 new people onto the ICANN board, selected by internet users, so one cannot certainly say that these new people will continue ICANN's status quo.
However, the problem is two-fold here: those 5 people are to replace the original, gov't selected ICANN officials, but these officals have yet to step down. In addition, the ICANN board just happened to change it's bylaws after the internet election but before the new domains were selected as to basically prevent the new members from having a say on the new domains.
In other words, until the new members are in place and replacing the other 5, it's still mostly a gov't organized system, which is definitely not democratic in this case (at least, no representation methods). I'm sure that the change over will happen *now* but now is too late as the new TLDs are rather poor choices.
One of the major issues that has been discussed in various state and federal courts is the issue of interstate commerce, and specifically, the fact that states cannot pass laws that attempt to supercede federal interstate laws. A good recent example: a NY court voided new legislation that banned the sale of cigarettes through mail order or internet sales; the law was passed to 'protect the children' in the general sense. The courts rules that NY state cannot deam what can go in or out of it's borders being a state.
All we need is for a similar challenge to UCITA in Virgina or other states to prove that it challenges federal interstate commerce -- the way I've heard the proponents of UCITA talking was to get it passed by a majority of states prior for such a suit to take hold as to show that a majority of the states want that, as opposed to a single state passing the law. If it can be defeated in a court of law now, while only a couple states have passed it, then the only chance for it to become law is via federal law, and the FTC would be watching the passing of that very very carefully, since they are already critical of the software industry.
The concept reminds me a lot of the Java Bug Parade; bugs are submitted, then users can vote (repeatedly, mind you) for bugs that they feel are most important. Unfortunately, you then see a lot of biasing of which bugs are more important that others, sometimes the bugs aren't really bugs at all. A good example was the 'bug' for the lack of Java support on Linux. Tons of votes, and eventually we got something, but it took them about 6 months to deal with that. But usually what happens is that bugs that are going to be more apparent at the client end of a program (visual UI, calculations, performance) will be voted more highly than more severe bugs relating to security, privacy, and robustness, which are generally the last thing clients of java programs care about.
Having seen a lot of software projects, there definitely does need to be a heirarhcy of leadership, such that the person(s) at the top have a focused goal and thus can reject ideas that general users may supply that are impractical to the project (like a breakout game in a office suite, for example). Maybe if, prior to allowing the voting of new suggestions, those suggestions are weeded out of things that are just not needed, so that only ideas that are closely related to the project goals are voted for. Those that do the weeding, of course, would have to be selected somehow as well.
But I know it's been said here before : most OSS projects live or die by how it's managed. I can't see a purely democratic management style producing something as fine-tuned as classic OSS projects.
Save for.museum (and even that's pushing it), none of these are great names. ".biz" is the worst, as we might as well just let every.com grab the associated.biz address, and get nothing new in terms of name polution. ".info" may be useful, but.web would have been better. ".name" promises plenty of abuses and suits. (Does Madonna get "madonna.name"?). ".museum" might work, but then why not register museum.com, and do a yahoo directory from there, and use subdomains for each specific musuem (and of course, not all museums are commercial entities.)
Nothing has been solved, pretty much. Name crowding will still happen. Hopefully the 5 new board members, NOW that they have power, might push for a faster review of newer TLDs before the next scheduled time. We'll still have squatters and RDNH occuring as there's nothing desirable in these.
While both the Usenet death penalty and MAPS, ORBs and other blacklists are attempting the same goal (the securing and improving news or mail services), the two different approaches seem to have quite different results. A UDP rarely has gone unmet by the ISP in question, while the MAPS lists continue to grow larger. One might say that UDPs succeed because it takes a diverse group of people to actually initiate the UDP, so if a UDP is placed, that means multiple people that are in the know have seen something wrong. On the other hand, getting on MAPS seems to require a lot less; a user anywhere needs to complain, and there needs to be verification by the MAPS organization -- this would not be a diverse group, so one may consider MAPS to be biased and ignore being on that list.
Of course, you have to consider how news and mail protocols differ; it's tons easier to get a UDP in full effect with only needed a small number of servers to send cancel messages, while you'd have to get every mail server in the world to use MAPS to achieve the same thing. Also, many ISPs tend to see news as extra, email being essectial, so if the news server is UDP'd, no big loss, but they will fight to make sure they aren't put on MAPS.
If MAPS was more like a small body of mail server operators from various organizations, including larger ISPs, then I think such events as being put on MAPS would be taken more seriously. I suspect that MSN will ingore this, thinking only the tiny fraction of linux users out there will even remotely be interested in MAPS.
I don't think the movie was that bad up to the point where Paul and his mother have to flee the palace. Then we get to the laughable sandworms and it drops fast. (then when Alia hits the scene, ooooh yea, ripe b-grade movie stuff here!:) Basically, the first hour (sans the 6hr long versions' voiceover) is pretty good and does a decent job of capturing the politics and the class distinctions and just the SIZE of things, literally. What it doesn't capture, but that's emphasized strongly in the books, is that Dune is a planet that is completely devoid of any natural water source, even moreso than the deserts of Earth, and thus is completely hostile to humanity, yet the most valuable substance in the universe can only be found on this planet, and thus humanity's survival depends on the planet. Sure, they talked about it in the movie, and there's some imagery of it, but it's just a plot device as opposed to a constant theme. Compare this with Blade Runner: sure, the movie was dark and wet, but it reflected the human condition; throughout the movie, we have many different scenes and places, but not once did we see anyone enjoying themselved -- the future is a dark cold place.
Also, who really gives a rat's ass? Dune is a messiah story. Writing prequels would be like writing prequels to the Bible. Who cares how Joseph and Mary met? Who their parents were?
Actually, a prequel to the Bible is a rather deep thought, isn't it?:D
But seriously, prequels all depend on the series, the authors, etc, particularly if they are a messiah series. Take Foundation; Asimov wrote about a future of humanity that basically seems to follow all standard sci-fi genre; massive colonization, faster-than-light drives, a robot holocaust, etc. Because his Foundation world is so 'predictable' up to the point of "Foundation", he doesn't go into much about how we got there, what the technology actually is, etc, nor was there a need to. Instead, we launch into the first with the introduction of pyschomathematics and the vision of one man that sees the falling of this empire and the need to preserve knowledge. The 4 sequels that Asimov wrote take that long term planning and show how it works out, including and not limited to flaws in the plan (The Mule) and the fact that there was multiple redudancy in it to take care of those problems. Given all this, the prequel which was about this one man and the developement of this long-range science was a pretty good work , and worked well for basically the backstory of a messiah. Would the Foundation series have worked so well if Prelude to F was the first book published? Probably not, as Prelude was a bit more focused on the one man rather than the long-term fate of the Empire.
Dune's a bit different; the universe that Hubbard arranged is somewhat more unique: we still have vast empires, interstellar travel, but the government's now controlled by powerful houses, and what we normally think of as the limits of human ability are above and beyond what we can imagine today. However, Dune does start with the introduction and 'awakening' of our messiah, so any prequels are going to have to set the stage for that universe: how did the bene gessert come about? how are Mentats trained? how did the guild come about? Sure, these are answered indirectly in the existing books, but a more thorough history might be most interesting to read. However, based on comments here and this review, it sounds like more that all they are trying to do here is go back one generation and set up the players for the actions in Dune. Now, true, Dune was probably written with more of a focus on politics than science fiction, so the setting the stage idea does work here, but we aren't really gaining anything new about Paul, so these books start to lose the focus of the original series.
Patents now expire 20 years after the initial filing process has begun; it used to be that patents expired 17 years after the patent awardee acknolwedged the acceptence of the patent, however, with the way the system worked, the awardee could 'forget' to send in their acknowledgement of the patent, and the USPTO would charge them a small (
Now, with 20 years from the initial application, it takes about 1 to 2 years to complete and finalize a patent application, so companies gain a year or so over 17, but they have no oppurtunity to extend the patent lifetime.
First, any TLD where there is limitations on who can use it is a good thing, as it would help to clear up much of the namespace problems we have now along with appropriate public education on how the domain name system works.
This particular move, not only limiting the.health domain to health-related info, but to also have the information scrutenized by WHO, has several benefits; users know that the information there should be factual or otherwise they have a way to point out disputed information to some organization in order to have that information fixed or removed. What will probably happen is that sites that do go to.health will be generally more high-quality sites with better standards for information and will make sure to self-regulate themselves to keep them that way, and any site that is not doing so will be challenged by the WHO for why it should keep the.health domain.
I dunno how much it will catch on as with.com, however; webmd.com, for example, is well established and I doubt they want to give up their name (though I bet they'd grab a webmd.health domain).
True, the distribution would be far away from 50/50 if there was a good basis of well estiblished cases such that the only conflicts that were brought to abriation were those that had studied said cases and already made a decision that they have a strong case. Then 80/20 would be quite reasonable.
But this process, whether the arbitration is over cybersquatting or the reverse domain name hijacking, is just about a year old; there is only a small number (600+) of cases to base previous suits on. As the acticle describes, there is no consistancy on these decisions across the board, so the case history is poor and/or selectively used. In addition, there is still the muddy line between trademark abuse and free speech. This is where knowing the history of the case beyond what the articles report become important.
There are obvious cases of cybersquatting which should not be considered in a modified tally. Ignoring those, all other cases run the gambit of free speech vs trademarks. Because we don't have a line where one ends, and the second begins, all of these preliminary cases should be defining where that line is, and with that, I would argue that in a unbias arbitration system that line is going to be closer to 50/50 than 80/20. But that line is not there, but instead closer to 80/20, indicating bias towards trademark owners. I look through some of the WIPO decisions (not just those listed in this article), and look at both wins for the complainent and for the respondent, and there's an obvious divide in those decisions. I could argue only a little with some of the respondent victories: more are clear-cut cases of freedom of speech over corporate interests. Yet, on the complainent side, there are some true cases of trademark ownership taking priority, but more than enough where it's very questionable, (any somethingsucks.com case, for example). The bias is clearly there. I'd like to take a similar look through eResolutions and see if similar biasing exists.
But getting back to my point, companies know there is a bias and seem to be taking advantage of it. If I register CompanyXsucks.com, and run a legitamit site off it that has consumer complaints on Company X's products, I should not expect Company X to try to bully me over it as it's FoSpeech. But knowing that using arbitaration may give them the edge, particularly if they use WIPO and NAF, they will persue action. They don't have a strong guarentee that they'll win, but for a measly $1500, they have a better than 50/50 shot. And if they do win, this can influence more companies in similar situations to try to do RDNH in a slippery slope fashion. This is why any unbalanced arbiration system is a bad thing, and consistancy regarding trademarks vs FoSpeech is important to qualify now and not a year from now.
That was good reading, and I'm impressed on the collection of statistics. I think that the main conclusion is obvious (the balance between free speech and trademark protection), but with strong evidence showing that current resolution methods tend to favor the latter.
I didn't realize that there were multiple resolution boards, and it was interesting to see that WIPO and NAF were close to 80/20 in "complainant wins" to "respondent wins" cases, whereas eResolutions was closer to 50/50, which, IMO, is a more realistic expectation of a fair system. I also like the idea suggested that the specific board that is used should be decided by the domain name registering company, as opposed to the initiator of the complaint. Yes, that might mean that WIPO and NAF would have no more cases and one or two registrars would be loaded big time, but it shows that there is a problem in consistancy across the current system.
One stat that I wish was cataloged was exactly the types of complaints vs wins and losses. For example, differing "typographical differences" from "trademark words" from "trademark variations" (e.g., "guines.com" vs "guiness.com" vs "guiness-sucks.com"). In addition, a breakdown of how the contested site was being used would be good too, if it was empty or activitely used or otherwise. I would figure the fairness issue would be highlighted strongly here.
I heard this bit on the radio when it was broadcast, and got too infuriated over it (thank goodness I was in a parking lot at the time). At one point, one of the lawyers for the enterment industry mentioned that they were all for making sure fair use rights were acknowledged, but when "they drafted the bill" (they as in the lawyers, NOT Congress), they thought it would be better to protect everything then come back later and fix it if things needed fixing with additional legislation in Congress. I would think that in a logical system based on our Bill of Rights, it would be better to pass minimal regulation, then as new situations and cases arose, to challenge them in the court of law or to pass additional regulations that are not sufficiently covered by the original. In other words, minimize how much the government is interacting or interfering with the consumers and corporates. But nooooo, the entertainment industry had nearly carte blanc with the DMCA, and while I'm sure they know they ultimately can't win with regards to fair use, they are trying their darnest to scare people into thinking they don't have this right.
I don't think that this input system would work well with Q3a and nearly every other game as we have now, as the direction that your virtual counterpart's head is move is the same direction that your body is moving, an you are otherwise limited to the 8 directions that {forward|backward|strafe left|strafe right} can generate from that head position. Sure, you can move NNE while facing north with a combination of these moves, but it's not a direct line.
(Interesting note, I believe that Marathon did it the reverse way, instead of strafe, you turned your head left or right while your body kept forward. You still were limited to 8 directions from this point, of course.)
Anyone remember Robotron? In this game, your head facing was different than your body facing (you had two joysticks). I think that this head joystick would be applicable to games like this, only limiting your head movements to approx 135 deg in both left/right and up/down axis. Your mouse and keyboard now control your body's movements save for up/down looking, while your headpiece now controls the direction your head (and therefore your weapon) is facing. Yes, that would cause a bit of relearning, but it increases the freedom of movement of the character (you can now move, while facing north, NNE directly). As for whiplash, instead of turning your head around fast, you'd have to turn your body around fast, which is limited to the keyboard/mouse (since you can't get your head 180 degrees by itself!)
Reduced use in PTO (personal time off). You can have a Dr. appointment early in the morning or late in the afternoon & not use that time off
If your core hours are 9-3, there's still no time for most doctor appointments: from what I've seen, most don't start until 9, and stop taking appointments at 3, if only to be able to handle the backlog of the day. You still need to get out half-days for these things, but the option is there that employees can make up the 4 hrs in other days if they stay a bit longer or come in earlier.
However, this does allow those that need conduct various errands during the normal bankers hours to be able to make those without waiting for a weekend or missing work time. It's also a big boon for employees with children at school, as they can be home for them when they come home if they opt for early hours and leaving by 3.
No matter which way you cast your votes, whether by pencil, stylus, or computer, and how they are counted, by hand or by machine, the 'winner-take-all' system that we use throughout the states will always be broken, because in any voting process, there's going to be error, the error increasing with population size and numbers of people running the election. There's no way around that, and this election is showing just how much error there can be.
Now, most of the time we can deal with that error because the winner in the election usually wins by a few percentage points or more. This election, however, goes against that, where the two candidates differ by around 0.2% nationally, and less than 0.03% in FL. If there is any error (and there *is*), that error could easily be higher than those differences, thus causing inappropriate results.
Sure, I'd argue that the EC is broken, but as others have pointed out, there's a snowball's chance in heck that will be fixed before 2004. But there are things that can be added that can improve it. I'd personally like to see the splitting of all states electoral votes based on regional results, but I don't think that will happen either as each state would have to do something about it. Instead, what I suggest is to add in at the national level a rules that states if the difference between the top 2 candidates for President is split less than some X percentage, then the states' electors are split equally to both candidates. X here is some percentage that should reflect what the error can be in voting methods, somewhere around 0.1% or 0.2%, the true value calculated by some imparital committee after research of election results in the last 50 years. This would make most of the complaints in FL null and void, and a few other states (NM) would probably be split as well.
What just seems odd to me right now about the current system is that there is a definite cry in FL that there is no strong majority of either candidate, but this fence sitting is worth nearly 10% of the votes needed for Presidency, and by our current system, it's winner takes all. This IMO does not adequetely reflect the will of the people, and these types of problems need to be fixed now.
in response to 1) we need voter registration as we have no national system of valid IDs (and SSNs are NOT supposed to be used as ID, so if it were used, it would be fought in court). Thus, what sort of block do you put on someone that votes from voting again if you lack registration? There needs to be registration available at the polls (which require some significant ID) while when you are actually there to vote, you should only need to present a photo ID and some encoded registration card (paper, not plastic) which is taken from you when you vote; the encoding would be based on individual so that only you could match that card. This reduces the chance for fraud and voting mulitple times, and you can still leave registration open on voting day.
On 3), there is serious talk in all the election reform to move the vote to a weekend. The second Tues after the first Monday in Nov is a holdover when people had to travel to reach the polls.
Stuff like this, and the earlier/. stories on geographically mapping the web and such, make me upset. We have that cybercrime treaty that's pending that would probably make all these things illegal, yet if Hacker X were to do what this article talks about they'd get jail time, while if Corporation Y does it, they get praised.
The other problem is, will they adhere to robots.txt files? If they do, then bypassing the mp3 'sniffer' is a joke; if not, then they should be considered to be violating the explicit denial of a site to allow 'hacking tools' such as a search bot and are still in the wrong. In other words, this will either be uneffictive, or treading illegal water territories (and not necessarily in the vein of copyright infringement).
The problem with eLections
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I remember something from NPR the other day before the election on the number of different systems out there. They brought up the idea of internet voting for future elections, but experts are trying to nix this idea, for good reason.
Most people know about the distance rule, that it is illegal to campaign within (100 yrds?) of a voting center. This helps to protect the secret ballot, in addition to other obvious problems. Certainly, someone standing far enough away could hand you $5 and say to vote for Candidate X; you can take the $5, but you are not bound to vote for X, as your ballot is your ballot and the results of the individual ballot are secret.
Switch now to internet voting. Now, you have someone giving you $5 to do the same as above, but now, since there's no "no politicing zone" around your computer, they can stand over your shoulder and watch how you vote. The secret ballot is no longer secret.
The same problems can occur with mail-in ballots, like OR tried to use this year. However, I believe the arguement that the experts were in favor of these for was that unlike an eLection, which would be held on a specific day (and thus campaigners would be able to target that day), mail ins have much longer period in which the votes can be cast, and it would take too much effort for campaigners to cover all ground during that timeframe.
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A WYSIWYG typesetting program, as long as the programmers and users understand that you place frames on a page as opposed to inserting things into a text stream, will do a world of wonders for Linux.
And as for appearence problems, such as fonts and grainy images, that's all a problem with whomever put the PDF together. PDF's are capable of print-resolution images, but if the company simply scans in the page in typcial 'bulk workload' mode at 150dpi, then you get little benefit. And the lack of inclusion of the right fonts is the Adobe document creator, not the PDF engine itself, though there should be a default mechanism if fonts don't exist to use a default font style.
So this implies that all ICANN is doing now is making sure computer-illiterate people can surf the net.
Now, there is more to this. Look at the EM spectrum; as to prevent pollution of one signal into another, the band has been divided into several segments and 'rented' out appropriately. Sure, there are a few times where ham radio people can get into teh wrong band that's typically used for air traffic control, but for the most part this works. The internet domain space is the same way, when you consider that there is only a good number of limited 3-or-more letter words that can work as a TLD. Pollution from one 'domain' into another is very easy to happen here, as the .biz case is demonstrating. So does there need to be an organization that divides these domain air waves appropriately, which is what ICANN can do. But if you continue the analogy further, two things show up:
- The TLD spectrum is practically infinite, bounded only by length at n^26 possible domains. While some are more desirable than others (as it's generally easier to broadcast over certain ranges compared to others in regards to power consumption and signal quality), all are effectively possible.
- ICANN is maintaining an artifical sarcity on TLDs. Because the spectrum is infinite, and we've only scratched a tiny fraction of the spectrum, ICANN's role should be evaluating proposals for any new domains at *any* time, not just when they feel like it. As long as the domain register is faithful and trustworthy and there isn't conflict with a previous domain, then ICANN should grant the new TLD. The only thing that should be restricted here is that any new TLDs should have some charter that all sites within it should abide by (ie, regulated domains), and if too many abuses of this are reported to ICANN, the register will lose that TLD to a default register (NSI most likely) or another register if appropriate. This will prevent the need for trademark owners to spend thousands to 'complete the set' because there's more than enough domains to effectively protect the trademark in them all, and in some, trademark protection may not even be possible.
But as ICANN stands right now, they are merely a grinning government appointed panel making sure that Joe Q Public can read his stock quotes every morning and his porn every night.
Note that I'm following here, because as a whole, my original post was triggering the lameness filter, oy!
Copy protection on CDs: Ok, this is a necessary evil to have to reduce piracy. However, as copy protection schemes move beyond current CD technology, people are finding that some older devices cannot read the disc due to the copy protection, and therefore can't use the media as purchased. In addition, it's been legal to make a backup copy of software for private use, but these copy protection schemes generally prevent the disc from being copied in it's entirity; if the disc is damaged, you can 'repurchase' a new one. However, there are sites out there that describe how to circumvent the copy protection to make such fair uses of the material, or small programs that do this, but by the DMCA, these are illegal. (Yes, these programs can enable further piracy as well, but that's not their only intent). The only solution for the fair use here is to spend more money to the media people, which is certainly not fair use anymore.
SDMI: needless to say, the ability of the music company to control how you can listen to your music, as well as forcing you to obtain a 'new' copy for a different device that you might want to play on, goes against fair use. Having a program that removes the protection but allows the music to be heard on any device you own will be illegal, though the final use is fair use.
HDTV: Broadcasters have been fighting to get into the HDTV standard a bit of data that prevents the ability for digital devices to record a show, even for purposes of time-shifting. Fair use in time-shifting has been upheld by the SC, but having a device that 'unintentionally' ignores this bit would be illegal.
However, the problem is two-fold here: those 5 people are to replace the original, gov't selected ICANN officials, but these officals have yet to step down. In addition, the ICANN board just happened to change it's bylaws after the internet election but before the new domains were selected as to basically prevent the new members from having a say on the new domains.
In other words, until the new members are in place and replacing the other 5, it's still mostly a gov't organized system, which is definitely not democratic in this case (at least, no representation methods). I'm sure that the change over will happen *now* but now is too late as the new TLDs are rather poor choices.
All we need is for a similar challenge to UCITA in Virgina or other states to prove that it challenges federal interstate commerce -- the way I've heard the proponents of UCITA talking was to get it passed by a majority of states prior for such a suit to take hold as to show that a majority of the states want that, as opposed to a single state passing the law. If it can be defeated in a court of law now, while only a couple states have passed it, then the only chance for it to become law is via federal law, and the FTC would be watching the passing of that very very carefully, since they are already critical of the software industry.
Having seen a lot of software projects, there definitely does need to be a heirarhcy of leadership, such that the person(s) at the top have a focused goal and thus can reject ideas that general users may supply that are impractical to the project (like a breakout game in a office suite, for example). Maybe if, prior to allowing the voting of new suggestions, those suggestions are weeded out of things that are just not needed, so that only ideas that are closely related to the project goals are voted for. Those that do the weeding, of course, would have to be selected somehow as well.
But I know it's been said here before : most OSS projects live or die by how it's managed. I can't see a purely democratic management style producing something as fine-tuned as classic OSS projects.
(Now there's a thought. Get a burger chain to give away free Deb CDs in their kids meals... :D)
Nothing has been solved, pretty much. Name crowding will still happen. Hopefully the 5 new board members, NOW that they have power, might push for a faster review of newer TLDs before the next scheduled time. We'll still have squatters and RDNH occuring as there's nothing desirable in these.
Of course, you have to consider how news and mail protocols differ; it's tons easier to get a UDP in full effect with only needed a small number of servers to send cancel messages, while you'd have to get every mail server in the world to use MAPS to achieve the same thing. Also, many ISPs tend to see news as extra, email being essectial, so if the news server is UDP'd, no big loss, but they will fight to make sure they aren't put on MAPS.
If MAPS was more like a small body of mail server operators from various organizations, including larger ISPs, then I think such events as being put on MAPS would be taken more seriously. I suspect that MSN will ingore this, thinking only the tiny fraction of linux users out there will even remotely be interested in MAPS.
Actually, a prequel to the Bible is a rather deep thought, isn't it? :D
But seriously, prequels all depend on the series, the authors, etc, particularly if they are a messiah series. Take Foundation; Asimov wrote about a future of humanity that basically seems to follow all standard sci-fi genre; massive colonization, faster-than-light drives, a robot holocaust, etc. Because his Foundation world is so 'predictable' up to the point of "Foundation", he doesn't go into much about how we got there, what the technology actually is, etc, nor was there a need to. Instead, we launch into the first with the introduction of pyschomathematics and the vision of one man that sees the falling of this empire and the need to preserve knowledge. The 4 sequels that Asimov wrote take that long term planning and show how it works out, including and not limited to flaws in the plan (The Mule) and the fact that there was multiple redudancy in it to take care of those problems. Given all this, the prequel which was about this one man and the developement of this long-range science was a pretty good work , and worked well for basically the backstory of a messiah. Would the Foundation series have worked so well if Prelude to F was the first book published? Probably not, as Prelude was a bit more focused on the one man rather than the long-term fate of the Empire.
Dune's a bit different; the universe that Hubbard arranged is somewhat more unique: we still have vast empires, interstellar travel, but the government's now controlled by powerful houses, and what we normally think of as the limits of human ability are above and beyond what we can imagine today. However, Dune does start with the introduction and 'awakening' of our messiah, so any prequels are going to have to set the stage for that universe: how did the bene gessert come about? how are Mentats trained? how did the guild come about? Sure, these are answered indirectly in the existing books, but a more thorough history might be most interesting to read. However, based on comments here and this review, it sounds like more that all they are trying to do here is go back one generation and set up the players for the actions in Dune. Now, true, Dune was probably written with more of a focus on politics than science fiction, so the setting the stage idea does work here, but we aren't really gaining anything new about Paul, so these books start to lose the focus of the original series.
This particular move, not only limiting the .health domain to health-related info, but to also have the information scrutenized by WHO, has several benefits; users know that the information there should be factual or otherwise they have a way to point out disputed information to some organization in order to have that information fixed or removed. What will probably happen is that sites that do go to .health will be generally more high-quality sites with better standards for information and will make sure to self-regulate themselves to keep them that way, and any site that is not doing so will be challenged by the WHO for why it should keep the .health domain.
I dunno how much it will catch on as with .com, however; webmd.com, for example, is well established and I doubt they want to give up their name (though I bet they'd grab a webmd.health domain).
But this process, whether the arbitration is over cybersquatting or the reverse domain name hijacking, is just about a year old; there is only a small number (600+) of cases to base previous suits on. As the acticle describes, there is no consistancy on these decisions across the board, so the case history is poor and/or selectively used. In addition, there is still the muddy line between trademark abuse and free speech. This is where knowing the history of the case beyond what the articles report become important.
There are obvious cases of cybersquatting which should not be considered in a modified tally. Ignoring those, all other cases run the gambit of free speech vs trademarks. Because we don't have a line where one ends, and the second begins, all of these preliminary cases should be defining where that line is, and with that, I would argue that in a unbias arbitration system that line is going to be closer to 50/50 than 80/20. But that line is not there, but instead closer to 80/20, indicating bias towards trademark owners. I look through some of the WIPO decisions (not just those listed in this article), and look at both wins for the complainent and for the respondent, and there's an obvious divide in those decisions. I could argue only a little with some of the respondent victories: more are clear-cut cases of freedom of speech over corporate interests. Yet, on the complainent side, there are some true cases of trademark ownership taking priority, but more than enough where it's very questionable, (any somethingsucks.com case, for example). The bias is clearly there. I'd like to take a similar look through eResolutions and see if similar biasing exists.
But getting back to my point, companies know there is a bias and seem to be taking advantage of it. If I register CompanyXsucks.com, and run a legitamit site off it that has consumer complaints on Company X's products, I should not expect Company X to try to bully me over it as it's FoSpeech. But knowing that using arbitaration may give them the edge, particularly if they use WIPO and NAF, they will persue action. They don't have a strong guarentee that they'll win, but for a measly $1500, they have a better than 50/50 shot. And if they do win, this can influence more companies in similar situations to try to do RDNH in a slippery slope fashion. This is why any unbalanced arbiration system is a bad thing, and consistancy regarding trademarks vs FoSpeech is important to qualify now and not a year from now.
I didn't realize that there were multiple resolution boards, and it was interesting to see that WIPO and NAF were close to 80/20 in "complainant wins" to "respondent wins" cases, whereas eResolutions was closer to 50/50, which, IMO, is a more realistic expectation of a fair system. I also like the idea suggested that the specific board that is used should be decided by the domain name registering company, as opposed to the initiator of the complaint. Yes, that might mean that WIPO and NAF would have no more cases and one or two registrars would be loaded big time, but it shows that there is a problem in consistancy across the current system.
One stat that I wish was cataloged was exactly the types of complaints vs wins and losses. For example, differing "typographical differences" from "trademark words" from "trademark variations" (e.g., "guines.com" vs "guiness.com" vs "guiness-sucks.com"). In addition, a breakdown of how the contested site was being used would be good too, if it was empty or activitely used or otherwise. I would figure the fairness issue would be highlighted strongly here.
(Interesting note, I believe that Marathon did it the reverse way, instead of strafe, you turned your head left or right while your body kept forward. You still were limited to 8 directions from this point, of course.)
Anyone remember Robotron? In this game, your head facing was different than your body facing (you had two joysticks). I think that this head joystick would be applicable to games like this, only limiting your head movements to approx 135 deg in both left/right and up/down axis. Your mouse and keyboard now control your body's movements save for up/down looking, while your headpiece now controls the direction your head (and therefore your weapon) is facing. Yes, that would cause a bit of relearning, but it increases the freedom of movement of the character (you can now move, while facing north, NNE directly). As for whiplash, instead of turning your head around fast, you'd have to turn your body around fast, which is limited to the keyboard/mouse (since you can't get your head 180 degrees by itself!)
Reduced use in PTO (personal time off). You can have a Dr. appointment early in the morning or late in the afternoon & not use that time off
If your core hours are 9-3, there's still no time for most doctor appointments: from what I've seen, most don't start until 9, and stop taking appointments at 3, if only to be able to handle the backlog of the day. You still need to get out half-days for these things, but the option is there that employees can make up the 4 hrs in other days if they stay a bit longer or come in earlier.However, this does allow those that need conduct various errands during the normal bankers hours to be able to make those without waiting for a weekend or missing work time. It's also a big boon for employees with children at school, as they can be home for them when they come home if they opt for early hours and leaving by 3.
Now, most of the time we can deal with that error because the winner in the election usually wins by a few percentage points or more. This election, however, goes against that, where the two candidates differ by around 0.2% nationally, and less than 0.03% in FL. If there is any error (and there *is*), that error could easily be higher than those differences, thus causing inappropriate results.
Sure, I'd argue that the EC is broken, but as others have pointed out, there's a snowball's chance in heck that will be fixed before 2004. But there are things that can be added that can improve it. I'd personally like to see the splitting of all states electoral votes based on regional results, but I don't think that will happen either as each state would have to do something about it. Instead, what I suggest is to add in at the national level a rules that states if the difference between the top 2 candidates for President is split less than some X percentage, then the states' electors are split equally to both candidates. X here is some percentage that should reflect what the error can be in voting methods, somewhere around 0.1% or 0.2%, the true value calculated by some imparital committee after research of election results in the last 50 years. This would make most of the complaints in FL null and void, and a few other states (NM) would probably be split as well.
What just seems odd to me right now about the current system is that there is a definite cry in FL that there is no strong majority of either candidate, but this fence sitting is worth nearly 10% of the votes needed for Presidency, and by our current system, it's winner takes all. This IMO does not adequetely reflect the will of the people, and these types of problems need to be fixed now.
in response to 1) we need voter registration as we have no national system of valid IDs (and SSNs are NOT supposed to be used as ID, so if it were used, it would be fought in court). Thus, what sort of block do you put on someone that votes from voting again if you lack registration? There needs to be registration available at the polls (which require some significant ID) while when you are actually there to vote, you should only need to present a photo ID and some encoded registration card (paper, not plastic) which is taken from you when you vote; the encoding would be based on individual so that only you could match that card. This reduces the chance for fraud and voting mulitple times, and you can still leave registration open on voting day.
On 3), there is serious talk in all the election reform to move the vote to a weekend. The second Tues after the first Monday in Nov is a holdover when people had to travel to reach the polls.
The other problem is, will they adhere to robots.txt files? If they do, then bypassing the mp3 'sniffer' is a joke; if not, then they should be considered to be violating the explicit denial of a site to allow 'hacking tools' such as a search bot and are still in the wrong. In other words, this will either be uneffictive, or treading illegal water territories (and not necessarily in the vein of copyright infringement).
Most people know about the distance rule, that it is illegal to campaign within (100 yrds?) of a voting center. This helps to protect the secret ballot, in addition to other obvious problems. Certainly, someone standing far enough away could hand you $5 and say to vote for Candidate X; you can take the $5, but you are not bound to vote for X, as your ballot is your ballot and the results of the individual ballot are secret.
Switch now to internet voting. Now, you have someone giving you $5 to do the same as above, but now, since there's no "no politicing zone" around your computer, they can stand over your shoulder and watch how you vote. The secret ballot is no longer secret.
The same problems can occur with mail-in ballots, like OR tried to use this year. However, I believe the arguement that the experts were in favor of these for was that unlike an eLection, which would be held on a specific day (and thus campaigners would be able to target that day), mail ins have much longer period in which the votes can be cast, and it would take too much effort for campaigners to cover all ground during that timeframe.