As another posted gave a URL to the various cases under ICANN's wing, I read through some of them, and am pleased with a lot of the decisions. See specifically "SIXNET.COM" and "TELAXIS.COM", both which were registered either before the name was trademarked, or there were international boundaries involved. In both cases, ICANN ruled in favor of the current holder instead of transferring ownership.
The owner of the name "musicweb.com" was not using it in the interest of "music on the web", and thus is basically cybersquatting. Makes sense.
KEy thing is that cases like this need to be treated on a case-by-case basis. There are many things that going into the name of a domain that are not necessarily readily apparent. Let's say I took the name "coffeehaus.com" as a site for amateur poetry distribution. Given that many coffee houses in the area here are cultural centers, this name is reasonable. If, afterwards, a company that calls itself "Coffeehaus Coffees", which sells coffee, and tries to take the domain name from the poetry site, there's no justification for it, because the poetry site is using the name "coffeehaus" in good faith. As long as ICANN makes decisions like this, they should work out.
That said, given how big business want ICANN to open up more TLDs only if they have the opportunity to get trademarked names first, I would argue that registering a domain name automatically gives you the copyright on that name assuming that there is no copyright in existance for your service. In the example above "coffeehaus" would automatically become a copyright for the owners of that domain, such that if Coffeehaus coffees wanted to try to dispute it, it comes down to when coffeehaus.com was registered vs when "Coffeehaus Coffees" was trademarks. Of course, I see some problems with this, and given the stance of big businesses this will never go through, but it should be a goal.
And I still stand by my belief that the DNS system is totally messed up and needs a total overhaul that includes limitations on what TLD you can register in among other things. Also, I would argue that a single entity (person, business, whatever), can only register up to 3 domains without question. After the 3rd, additional domains are registered based on a case-by-case business. Reasons for getting 4 or more domain names should NOT include trying to cover all the TLDs with your name, or blocking spelling mistakes, or whatnot. There are legit reasons, but implementing limits on the number of TLDs will help purge the overly expanded namespace, force businesses to use the 3rd (or 4th) component of the site's address (the machine name) to subdivide their web presence instead of spreading thin, and to educate users on what the various parts of a domain name are and represent, as to use it to their advantage when surfing. This would also kill cybersquatters dead and make cases like the above unnecessary.
While I strongly believe that censorware is bad, at least as most packages currently implement, I would argue that these latest actions by cracking the program and making available the means to crack it are doing just as much damage to the cause, compared to what other means can achieve.
What these groups are doing is very similar to the fellow that cracked the ecommerce sites, obtained the lists of credit cards numbers, and posted samples of those on a web site. Sure, the fellow was trying to point out that security on the web is nearly non-existant at many places, but the means to demonstrate this is poor.
I think that if a group of hackers was interested in fighting for the cause, they would approach the commercial companies, and offer to aid in their services, either to ensure the security of the blocked site list, or to maybe aid in improving the criterion that the blockers use. Assuming that the creditals of such a group are good, along with the offer to sign NDAs, I don't see why a company would not want to accept this offer (OTP: while the movie sucked, the concept of the team in 'Sneakers' is exactly what I'm thinking of). The only huddle to this is to get companies to respect these various hacker groups; initially, only small projects would be worked on, but as the involvement of a hacker team outside of the company is used to achieve successful results, more and more companies will want to participate. Certainly most companies do have their own security team, but adding a third party will always improve the quality of the final product.
Of course, I also still believe that for censoring the web, self-regulation is the real only answer. The only problem is to get 1) a standard and 2) some body to maintain that standard and implement an informal protocol to handle it. Sure, RSCI is almost there, but it's not widely implemented. What such a team can do is to first get a small subset with a good cross-section of the web and set the various ratings on it, so that a baseline for what a "violence: 3 (out of 5)" represents, for example. This will help those that want to self-censor their page to understand what the levels are. In addition, there should be a way for the causal user to send feedback to the standards body, to let them know of a site that might not have the ratings on them, or the ratings are inappropriate, such that the standards body (as opposed to the user) can contact that page's owner and ask them to adjust the rating. There's nothing forced about it, and no legal penalty can be brough against the offending site, but I would figure that getting such emails repeatedly will eventually force them to update their page.
If such a system was in place, then it's rather easy for parents to set the censor levels to what they think is appropriate for Junior, with password protection to keep those settings out. Sure, the script kiddie will probably find a way to crack the password and get to the sites, but for the most part, this would achieve the censoring without forcing issues with commercial products.
"Dune" the original book, is one of the top sci-fi books of all time. Yes, there's a heck of a lot of detail in the first 100 pages, but the universe that Dune exists in is completely different than that of ours that without this detail, we may miss key points later in the book. The ideas present a odd feulism-like society, where a tiny tiny tiny fraction of the population control the power, even less that the European feudlism, and how the various Houses scheme and plan to get a head of each other, not caring for the life that are placed in danger of their plans. And then it all falls down to one thing; longevity as controlled by the spice.
If you haven't tried reading Dune, or tried and failed several years ago, definitely try again. Sure, it's not an easy read, but the impressions that Frank has written into it are deep.
Stating that, avoid any of the other Dune books. Like most sci-fi novels, one book is planned, but the author is pressured to write more, and this definitely shows in the latter books. The style is less harse, and is actually an easier read-- which IMO is a failing (compare Neuromancer to Mona Lisa Overdrive, as another example).
And, as everyone else here as put, the Movie sucked, at least the 2 hrs that were put to the theater. Even the directors cut is lakcing something that the book itself had.
But then you have to add back in the color and shape, and that's the bulk of Apple's suit. The lop-sided trianglar prism shape, with colored translucent panels, all which was a unique design. Apple was protecting itself along the lines off "If you see a machine like this, it's a iMac made by Apple".
Comparing a beige Mac and an iMac is like comparing a Pinto to a Jaguar - both machines have the same functionality under the hood, but their outward appearence is the unique factor (give or take a few horsepower:D).
A lot of people are attacking apple because they feel that Apple didn't design the all-in-one computer case. Certainly, that's not the point here. Apple is trying to defend the fact that they have spent time and money to develop an unique design to computer systems, and the pc clones were obvious copies of that. No machine before the iMac had any design similar to it, so it needs to protect something that it did create. I would suspect that a suit like this will allow other computer makers with unique designs to follow up to it (for example, that Compaq business machine model that's really thin, etc). Of course, there's lots of prior outside of the iMac look for most other computer cases, so it has to be a revolutionary design.
However, with that said, this could set a dangerous precident going back to the GUI look and feel. Sure, it's too late for Microsoft or Apple or Xerox to stop GUI operating systems with the typical functionality, but let's take the Aqua theme that Apple developed for it's OS. A while back, Apple asked various theme sites to remove the Aqua clones, but based on the specific targets of the removal, these themes used the Apple or MacOS logo in the theme, which could be considered a trademark violation; Apple apparently didn't have problems with people copying the theme, just the trademarks logos.
Now sure, this case was a out-of-court settlement, no precident has been set, but this could get Apple or Microsoft or some other OS design a bit braver and take more drastic action against copy-cat clones of the OS system beyond just the standard C sure, we still have the result of the Apple/MS Look-and-Feel lawsuit that set a precident, but those can be overturned as times change.
Even beyond just the OS, what about application software? Can Netscape sue MS over look-and-feel of IE compared to NS? Can WinZip sue the countless zip clones? What about a unique feature of an application program that is then extended by others to be a common control in later application programs?
I think the key thing comes down to with something like this is that is there a difference between the design of a physical object and the design of a virtual object. As said in one of the DCMA article discussions yesterday, if someone takes a physical object, a new physical object has to be created to replace it, while one can easily take a copy of a virtual object, and still leave that virtual object for others. Because physical objects move much slower than virtual ones, is it more important to protect the designs of physical objects over virtual ones? I believe so, but there needs to be some precident to distinquish the two cases. We only have a few such precidents in place, and unless a law is passed soon regarding this, the solution will be decided by frivolous lawsuits.
When I suggested my ideas before, one comment was that a non-profit organization as defined by the US gov't is not the same as one defined by the UK or France or German or Japan or.. etc.. Thus, if you didn't use country codes but still tried to enforce restrictions on who can get an.org, whose definition of a NPO do you use? Same with.com and.net. And the same question with regards to trademarks - what if I registered "naff.com" in the states (where naff means nothing), but in the UK, that's a common insult ala "sucks". Without country codes, there are barriers to this.
Note that my proposed outline however handled default country codes, ones that you can program into the browser, so that if you type in "foobar.com", it would try each "foobar.com" in each country code you've defined to find the site of interest; if it doesn't find it after that type of search (assuming the DNS system worked right), you probably would have had to use Yahoo to find the site in the first place.
Yes, the internet can transend boundaries, but those that pretend they run it (ecommerce) are forcing us to make sure that the boundaries are still visible.
We need restrictions on what TLD you can register.
on
Master Of Your Domain
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· Score: 5
I've said it before, and I'll continue to say it. We need to say that given the entity that you represent when registering a domain, you are only limited to certain TLDs. Network providers must use.net, anything with strong commercial interest is.com, non-profit organizations are.org, etc. Of those 3, an entity can only qualify into one of them, so there is no overlap.
Of course, one asks how do internation rules come into play. For that, we need to force the use of country codes, then have each country decide the usage of the TLD within that country code. If you are looking for megacorp.com, the browser should be smart enough to start at www.megacorp.com.us if you are in the States, or www.megacorp.co.uk if in britian or so on. Thus, the *true* TLDs are the country codes, then each country can set it's own restrictions, so that the definition of a US non-profit organization does not play into how the UK might decide who gets org.uk domains.
But it all falls down to teaching the public and businesses that those TLDs *are* important in distiquishing between commercial and non-commercial interests. Commercial companies should have absolutely no reason to grab an.org name, and should be prevented from doing so. Thus, trademark dilution due to domain names in a unappropriate TLD become null and void; the TLD indicates that the word is not associated with the commercial business. (Mind you, if the content on the page is libel, that's something different).
Alas, the days when URLs were meant to be invisible to the non-proficent user are long gone.
While I am all against censorship, (and I admit not having a chance to see SP:BLU yet, but I certainly plan to!), I think that ABC does have a right here. And it has to do with the push nature of television.
With SP the show or the movie, you are well informed of the upcoming profanity in the show. If you are a parent, you should be changing the channel at that point if you don't want your kids to watch it. You don't have to take them to the movie, and everything else. Again, there are plenty of disclaimers and they make sense here.
Take the Oscars broadcast; the average person does not know anything beyond the top 5 or 6 awards (movie, actors, supporting actors, etc), so they will NOT know that a song with profanity will be in the works. In addition, the Oscar broadcast has generally been PG, at work; making the entire 2+ hr broadcast a TV-M first means that it can't be aired until after 10pm, and second, they will lose viewers. They (ABC) have no choice to do *something* about Blame Canada.
That said, I would think that a better way for ABC to handle it is to drop the musical numbers for all songs, such that they don't have to worry about playing it, but not play any of the others, as to be fair. Rewriting the song to avoid censoring is IMO a bad choice, as that can ruin the effect of the song in the first place.
While I agree that OpenSource will hit Windows next, there is a LARGE obsticle there, and it's surprisingly not due to Microsoft.
With almost all unix systems, you have "cc" or some varient, and "make" and some varient. Additionally tools, such as automake, etc, help with system dependances, but in general, all you need to do to build an OS program is untar,./configure, and make all.
On the Windows side, however, there is no preferred developer enviroment. Yes, you can get Cygwin tools with come with gcc and make and all other unix tools, but I would suspect that less than 1% of Windows programmers know about these. Most are used to visual environments where the concept of a makefile is not well know. Thus, if I was to do an OS Windows project, I'd need to supply a project file for all the major IDEs (a task in and of itself). Then I have to worry about all the slight differences in how the compilers work; something may compile out of the box fine on Borland C++, but fails miserably under Microsoft Visual C++. The solution in most of these cases is not quite as simple as having #ifdef _UNIX_ in the source; there are probably major revamps to the code to make sure it works. And I haven't even mentioned propriatary extentions to the languages yet by each vendor.
With that said, if you do approach an OS project, make sure that you stick to ANSI and Win32 APIs calls as close as possible, and avoid using compiler features. Try to follow how UNIX code is set up; maybe, just maybe, someone might want to port your app from Win32 to Unix, so keep GUI and engine functionality separate. Try to know the various differences between the IDEs avaiable. I believe you can also compile Win32 code using the Cygwin gcc compilers, so this might be a good test of how portable your final code is for open source distribution.
Actually, with the recent press covereage of the Doubleclick fiacso, I know that junkbusters.org has been printed in Newsweek, US News & WR, and an AP article in my local paper, as well as on CNN Headline News. Sure, it's not fixed common knowledge, but the word is out.
However, I do believe that we as citizens concerned about privacy need to get a few well placed TV ads to make the message strong or stronger.
First, I did try to access the link in the article, but the berkeley server appears to be down or slow.
That said, the concept seems iffy. Based on the above, the fact that it works in all existing browsers, suggests to me that the form of the URL is the following:
Namely, that anchors that use this URL will be sent to this server (apparently fixed in place), then redirected either to the working page, or to the appropriate search engine results. This means that the robust server will be running scripts. While I don't believe that the indent as described here would be to catalog all matches, all you need is one unscrupulous company that uses this and can now trace where you are and where you are going to quite easily with a bit of modification. I really don't like this potental, and personally I'll take a 404 anyday over potental privacy problems.
On the other hand, it migth be that the method uses Javascript, but at which point this nulls and voids any statement on "working on all existing browsers".
I fully believe that one does need to tax goods bought on the net, as others have pointed out, using the Walmart as an excellent example. Buying stuff online is good and all, but it will never replace the physical stores. And *when* the ecommerce bubble bursts (not if), a lot of these solely ecommerce businesses will disappear overnight, and thus we can't come to depend on them for everything.
That said, no one has yet to offer a tax code that any consumer will be treated fairly with. The two biggest questions are "How do you validate whom you are taxing?" and "Who gets the taxes?".
The first is difficult from a technical viewpoint. I've yet to see any specification or protocol or method to 100% positively ID who is buying the goods. Credits cards are close to 100%, but not perfect. There's too much at risk to assume that the current methods will accurately tell me who is buying something on my website, where they live and thus how much to charge them. And what about oversees people?
The second is very political. As others have pointed out, Oregon has no sales tax. Michigan, on the other hand, has a ~6% sales tax, plus they want to collect "use tax" for out-of-state purchases. So if I bought something from an OR based company, what tax do I get charged? IMO, you should pay the sales tax to the state that you bought it from, but other states will cry foul as industry will relocate to states with no sales tax, dragging away people and money from other states.
At least to this end, the fairest solution as I see it is to have the nat'l gov't determine a nat'l sales tax on internet sales, the rate set as being the population-normalized averages of every state. This will probably be between 5 to 6%. All domestic internet sales will have this tax, collected by the national gov't. The money is returned to the states based on the population and sales tax of the state. Thus, in the above scheme, OR will get no returns from this, while I'd expect CA and NY to get rather significant chunks.
In line with that, two other things have to be done: first, all mail order and otherwise all transactions not done in person need to be taxes via this method, instead of the usual method for mail order. There is no difference from ordering from the internet as there is from ordering from Eddie Bauer over the phone or via mail. Second, all states must abolish any "use tax" clauses; they already tax purchased items twice and should not be legal assuming the above was put into place.
I know this isn't the best solution, but it is probably the most practical and easiest to implement while still being fair to the states (and cities too for those that have city sales tax as well).
Get TeraTerm Pro (FREE) from any tucows.com site, then go to the TeraTerm homepage, and follow links for a FREE SSH addon for TeraTerm. I've been using it for several years and have not been disappointed.
Re:coming next week...
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Muppets Sold
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· Score: 2
I'm hemos, aka Jeff Bates.. I help run this site, along with Rob Malda. I handle books, and generally posting stories.
I believe it's due to two factors: First, the IT field is made up by a lot of young ( Second, most of these workers are probably single. Life outside of work, they're not expected to have by management.
I also think that there is no union as far as I know within tech workers.
I wouldn't go as far as suggesting a union, but something needs to be done; the workers need to stand up and REFUSE to work unpaid overtime, or have a time where the beeper will not go off, or anything else like that. The fact that 'spineless' IT workers has been the norm means that we need to fight against that. If you are going to be working 60 hrs/wk (and you might enjoy that), make sure you get paid for 60hrs and not 30. Demand vacation time, make sure they know you have interests outside of work, and that you don't necessarily live and breath their work ethic.
But as with everyone else employed, I'd know I'd be afraid to approach my bosses with such requests. That's why there needs to be some collective effort, maybe lead by those IT workers already engrained in the system so that *they* can fight for better pay and offtime for workers.
"Intranet" is still a necessary and non-made up word that we need to use. As one in catalysis, there's a big distinction between diffusion that is "intraparticle" (within the same particle) and "interparticle" (between particles). The magnitude of their rates is vastly different.
An 'intranet' is a network between computers within the same organization, internet a network between organizations. The way you can manage and publish for the two are vastly different.
Don't deny their facts; they appear to be correct. For example "Windows runs 25 percent of Web sites worldwide; Sun runs 19 percent. (Source: Netcraft 12/99)". That sounds about right. That missing 54% must be linux/apache:D.
Also, they offer cases for Myth #2 where Sun appears to be unrealible. The big problem here is that they don't compare to WinNT at all (the one case they do is a really poor choice). They need to be pointed out to hotmail flaws. (Isn't Ebay also Windows based?)
It's just more FUD. Surprising that they quote the Gardner group findings considering that Gardner is not recommending Win2000 for the time being.
While you are correct that a court will most likely flame down the UTICA law quickly on it's first try in court, that still meant the law has passed and that for a short period of time, it will be in effect.
Our government has switched from pro-active (only passing laws that need to be passed after considerable review) to retro-active (passing all laws and letting another part of the gov't deal with the implementation and legality). Sure, you can say that's part of checks and balances, but as the courts get more and more overloaded with what can best be described as frilious cases, the quality of rulings might start to decline; What if the judge that was reviewing the first case under the UTICA was so busy that he assumed that a passed law was passed with good reason, and let the law stand?
We also need educated lawmakers at all levels of the govt'. Remember the UTICA is at a state level (which makes little sense, this is an issue of interstate commerce, the realm of the federal government). We've got a difficult enough time trying to work with all of the US Senators and Representatives, but it's a hard battle. If the lawmakers were informed and learned not just to listen to the easy money, UTICA would be laughed at, as well as things like DMCA and CDA.
If you don't have a testbed server to play with 6.2, I suggest waiting a month until the product is officially released, then grab and install this; by this time, the major security bugs will have been found and errata'ed, and you'll know of any possible quirks in the install if you follow the right discussion boards.
One of the things that I appriciate from Apple was that they insisted (not forced, but strongly urged) you to follow the Human Interface Guidelines when developing apps; what ordering for menus, where to put certain buttons, etc. Given how the Mac interface needs to be built (basically using ResEdit or it's kin to precise position elements), this helped a lot. Of course, they appear to be deviating drastically from that with the Quicktime player and other aspects of MacOSX as previously discussed...
With Java, as you lose (or will generally not use) the precise positioning, and allow layout managers to take over to place elements, you're still left with a lot of questions -- I know that when I was trying to design a Java interface recently that I noticed no key trends here. Because of the WORA aspect of Java, much of the GUI interface for programs inherited from whatever OS it was developed on (various WinXX-isms, or motif-isms for example). Having a guide such as this will help make Java apps look and feel the same across platforms, which can be very good, but for some reason, it's somewhat bothersome that the java app might not be consistant with the native apps on the computer.
A good example is how dialogs are done - WinXX tend to have the OK to the leftmost, MacOS to the rightmost. There's a few other similar examples.
What might be the next necessary step in the next java release (jdk 1.3) is to add another platform dependant part to the system so that when there are differences in the platform for placement of visual elements, the sandbox can set them up to act more like the native system.
It's not an official holiday, but it's a longstanding custom in the states that on Feb 2, approximately halfway through the winter season, groundhogs would come out of their holes in the morning; if they saw their shadow, they'd race back inside, predicting another 6 weeks of winter, or if they didn't see it, it would be nearly spring. Obviously a tradition started with farmers worried about when to plant their crops, it's mostly now just a curious aside.
(You could have also answered "A really wacky movie starring Bill Murray" for credit as well:D )
* HackerD00D has entered #warez4free -HackerD00D- any1 have all 5 gigs of quake 4? will trade for entire backstreet boys mp3 collection -ElizaBot- What do you feel about backstreet boys mp3 collection? -HackerD00D- oh man, their the gr8est! there 40th reunion tour was the bomb. -ElizaBot- So, you have feelings towards the bomb? -HackerD00D- what, me? no way d00d! Get off my case! * EschlonBot has entered #warez4free * EschlonBot rudely grabs HackerD00D and locks him away. * HackerD00D has left IRC (BUSTED!) -EschlonBot- Thank you for your cooperation * EschelonBot has left IRC (Obey the prime directives) -ElizaBot- Tell me about your feels on obey the prime directives.
While the reasons for failure are nice and sound, your reason still supposes that at some point, UTICA will be in effect -- the corporations that are at the recieving end of this problem won't know about UTICA until it's passed (assuming nothing happens by anyone). And while the UTICA might be overturned, during that brief period of time, it will be lawsuit haven, or the oppotunity for companys to get retroactive licenses out, or whatnot. That is BAD. VERY VERY BAD.
Too much of the US govt and corporate America has let the courts decide much of the policy making -- they should be more pro-active rather than retro-active, though the former is not easily done as it requires being up to date and effort. In this case, at least slashdot helps us with the research side of things.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, the slashdot comment submission box is too small to post the whole proof. I shall leave the proof to the reader.
Hopefully they will keep it up.
KEy thing is that cases like this need to be treated on a case-by-case basis. There are many things that going into the name of a domain that are not necessarily readily apparent. Let's say I took the name "coffeehaus.com" as a site for amateur poetry distribution. Given that many coffee houses in the area here are cultural centers, this name is reasonable. If, afterwards, a company that calls itself "Coffeehaus Coffees", which sells coffee, and tries to take the domain name from the poetry site, there's no justification for it, because the poetry site is using the name "coffeehaus" in good faith. As long as ICANN makes decisions like this, they should work out.
That said, given how big business want ICANN to open up more TLDs only if they have the opportunity to get trademarked names first, I would argue that registering a domain name automatically gives you the copyright on that name assuming that there is no copyright in existance for your service. In the example above "coffeehaus" would automatically become a copyright for the owners of that domain, such that if Coffeehaus coffees wanted to try to dispute it, it comes down to when coffeehaus.com was registered vs when "Coffeehaus Coffees" was trademarks. Of course, I see some problems with this, and given the stance of big businesses this will never go through, but it should be a goal.
And I still stand by my belief that the DNS system is totally messed up and needs a total overhaul that includes limitations on what TLD you can register in among other things. Also, I would argue that a single entity (person, business, whatever), can only register up to 3 domains without question. After the 3rd, additional domains are registered based on a case-by-case business. Reasons for getting 4 or more domain names should NOT include trying to cover all the TLDs with your name, or blocking spelling mistakes, or whatnot. There are legit reasons, but implementing limits on the number of TLDs will help purge the overly expanded namespace, force businesses to use the 3rd (or 4th) component of the site's address (the machine name) to subdivide their web presence instead of spreading thin, and to educate users on what the various parts of a domain name are and represent, as to use it to their advantage when surfing. This would also kill cybersquatters dead and make cases like the above unnecessary.
end rant :-P
What these groups are doing is very similar to the fellow that cracked the ecommerce sites, obtained the lists of credit cards numbers, and posted samples of those on a web site. Sure, the fellow was trying to point out that security on the web is nearly non-existant at many places, but the means to demonstrate this is poor.
I think that if a group of hackers was interested in fighting for the cause, they would approach the commercial companies, and offer to aid in their services, either to ensure the security of the blocked site list, or to maybe aid in improving the criterion that the blockers use. Assuming that the creditals of such a group are good, along with the offer to sign NDAs, I don't see why a company would not want to accept this offer (OTP: while the movie sucked, the concept of the team in 'Sneakers' is exactly what I'm thinking of). The only huddle to this is to get companies to respect these various hacker groups; initially, only small projects would be worked on, but as the involvement of a hacker team outside of the company is used to achieve successful results, more and more companies will want to participate. Certainly most companies do have their own security team, but adding a third party will always improve the quality of the final product.
Of course, I also still believe that for censoring the web, self-regulation is the real only answer. The only problem is to get 1) a standard and 2) some body to maintain that standard and implement an informal protocol to handle it. Sure, RSCI is almost there, but it's not widely implemented. What such a team can do is to first get a small subset with a good cross-section of the web and set the various ratings on it, so that a baseline for what a "violence: 3 (out of 5)" represents, for example. This will help those that want to self-censor their page to understand what the levels are. In addition, there should be a way for the causal user to send feedback to the standards body, to let them know of a site that might not have the ratings on them, or the ratings are inappropriate, such that the standards body (as opposed to the user) can contact that page's owner and ask them to adjust the rating. There's nothing forced about it, and no legal penalty can be brough against the offending site, but I would figure that getting such emails repeatedly will eventually force them to update their page.
If such a system was in place, then it's rather easy for parents to set the censor levels to what they think is appropriate for Junior, with password protection to keep those settings out. Sure, the script kiddie will probably find a way to crack the password and get to the sites, but for the most part, this would achieve the censoring without forcing issues with commercial products.
If you haven't tried reading Dune, or tried and failed several years ago, definitely try again. Sure, it's not an easy read, but the impressions that Frank has written into it are deep.
Stating that, avoid any of the other Dune books. Like most sci-fi novels, one book is planned, but the author is pressured to write more, and this definitely shows in the latter books. The style is less harse, and is actually an easier read-- which IMO is a failing (compare Neuromancer to Mona Lisa Overdrive, as another example).
And, as everyone else here as put, the Movie sucked, at least the 2 hrs that were put to the theater. Even the directors cut is lakcing something that the book itself had.
Comparing a beige Mac and an iMac is like comparing a Pinto to a Jaguar - both machines have the same functionality under the hood, but their outward appearence is the unique factor (give or take a few horsepower :D).
However, with that said, this could set a dangerous precident going back to the GUI look and feel. Sure, it's too late for Microsoft or Apple or Xerox to stop GUI operating systems with the typical functionality, but let's take the Aqua theme that Apple developed for it's OS. A while back, Apple asked various theme sites to remove the Aqua clones, but based on the specific targets of the removal, these themes used the Apple or MacOS logo in the theme, which could be considered a trademark violation; Apple apparently didn't have problems with people copying the theme, just the trademarks logos.
Now sure, this case was a out-of-court settlement, no precident has been set, but this could get Apple or Microsoft or some other OS design a bit braver and take more drastic action against copy-cat clones of the OS system beyond just the standard C sure, we still have the result of the Apple/MS Look-and-Feel lawsuit that set a precident, but those can be overturned as times change.
Even beyond just the OS, what about application software? Can Netscape sue MS over look-and-feel of IE compared to NS? Can WinZip sue the countless zip clones? What about a unique feature of an application program that is then extended by others to be a common control in later application programs?
I think the key thing comes down to with something like this is that is there a difference between the design of a physical object and the design of a virtual object. As said in one of the DCMA article discussions yesterday, if someone takes a physical object, a new physical object has to be created to replace it, while one can easily take a copy of a virtual object, and still leave that virtual object for others. Because physical objects move much slower than virtual ones, is it more important to protect the designs of physical objects over virtual ones? I believe so, but there needs to be some precident to distinquish the two cases. We only have a few such precidents in place, and unless a law is passed soon regarding this, the solution will be decided by frivolous lawsuits.
Note that my proposed outline however handled default country codes, ones that you can program into the browser, so that if you type in "foobar.com", it would try each "foobar.com" in each country code you've defined to find the site of interest; if it doesn't find it after that type of search (assuming the DNS system worked right), you probably would have had to use Yahoo to find the site in the first place.
Yes, the internet can transend boundaries, but those that pretend they run it (ecommerce) are forcing us to make sure that the boundaries are still visible.
Of course, one asks how do internation rules come into play. For that, we need to force the use of country codes, then have each country decide the usage of the TLD within that country code. If you are looking for megacorp.com, the browser should be smart enough to start at www.megacorp.com.us if you are in the States, or www.megacorp.co.uk if in britian or so on. Thus, the *true* TLDs are the country codes, then each country can set it's own restrictions, so that the definition of a US non-profit organization does not play into how the UK might decide who gets org.uk domains.
But it all falls down to teaching the public and businesses that those TLDs *are* important in distiquishing between commercial and non-commercial interests. Commercial companies should have absolutely no reason to grab an .org name, and should be prevented from doing so. Thus, trademark dilution due to domain names in a unappropriate TLD become null and void; the TLD indicates that the word is not associated with the commercial business. (Mind you, if the content on the page is libel, that's something different).
Alas, the days when URLs were meant to be invisible to the non-proficent user are long gone.
With SP the show or the movie, you are well informed of the upcoming profanity in the show. If you are a parent, you should be changing the channel at that point if you don't want your kids to watch it. You don't have to take them to the movie, and everything else. Again, there are plenty of disclaimers and they make sense here.
Take the Oscars broadcast; the average person does not know anything beyond the top 5 or 6 awards (movie, actors, supporting actors, etc), so they will NOT know that a song with profanity will be in the works. In addition, the Oscar broadcast has generally been PG, at work; making the entire 2+ hr broadcast a TV-M first means that it can't be aired until after 10pm, and second, they will lose viewers. They (ABC) have no choice to do *something* about Blame Canada.
That said, I would think that a better way for ABC to handle it is to drop the musical numbers for all songs, such that they don't have to worry about playing it, but not play any of the others, as to be fair. Rewriting the song to avoid censoring is IMO a bad choice, as that can ruin the effect of the song in the first place.
With almost all unix systems, you have "cc" or some varient, and "make" and some varient. Additionally tools, such as automake, etc, help with system dependances, but in general, all you need to do to build an OS program is untar, ./configure, and make all.
On the Windows side, however, there is no preferred developer enviroment. Yes, you can get Cygwin tools with come with gcc and make and all other unix tools, but I would suspect that less than 1% of Windows programmers know about these. Most are used to visual environments where the concept of a makefile is not well know. Thus, if I was to do an OS Windows project, I'd need to supply a project file for all the major IDEs (a task in and of itself). Then I have to worry about all the slight differences in how the compilers work; something may compile out of the box fine on Borland C++, but fails miserably under Microsoft Visual C++. The solution in most of these cases is not quite as simple as having #ifdef _UNIX_ in the source; there are probably major revamps to the code to make sure it works. And I haven't even mentioned propriatary extentions to the languages yet by each vendor.
With that said, if you do approach an OS project, make sure that you stick to ANSI and Win32 APIs calls as close as possible, and avoid using compiler features. Try to follow how UNIX code is set up; maybe, just maybe, someone might want to port your app from Win32 to Unix, so keep GUI and engine functionality separate. Try to know the various differences between the IDEs avaiable. I believe you can also compile Win32 code using the Cygwin gcc compilers, so this might be a good test of how portable your final code is for open source distribution.
However, I do believe that we as citizens concerned about privacy need to get a few well placed TV ads to make the message strong or stronger.
That said, the concept seems iffy. Based on the above, the fact that it works in all existing browsers, suggests to me that the form of the URL is the following:
>a href="http://robusturl.server.com?http://my.outdat edsite.com&keyword1="whatever"<
Namely, that anchors that use this URL will be sent to this server (apparently fixed in place), then redirected either to the working page, or to the appropriate search engine results. This means that the robust server will be running scripts. While I don't believe that the indent as described here would be to catalog all matches, all you need is one unscrupulous company that uses this and can now trace where you are and where you are going to quite easily with a bit of modification. I really don't like this potental, and personally I'll take a 404 anyday over potental privacy problems.
On the other hand, it migth be that the method uses Javascript, but at which point this nulls and voids any statement on "working on all existing browsers".
That said, no one has yet to offer a tax code that any consumer will be treated fairly with. The two biggest questions are "How do you validate whom you are taxing?" and "Who gets the taxes?".
The first is difficult from a technical viewpoint. I've yet to see any specification or protocol or method to 100% positively ID who is buying the goods. Credits cards are close to 100%, but not perfect. There's too much at risk to assume that the current methods will accurately tell me who is buying something on my website, where they live and thus how much to charge them. And what about oversees people?
The second is very political. As others have pointed out, Oregon has no sales tax. Michigan, on the other hand, has a ~6% sales tax, plus they want to collect "use tax" for out-of-state purchases. So if I bought something from an OR based company, what tax do I get charged? IMO, you should pay the sales tax to the state that you bought it from, but other states will cry foul as industry will relocate to states with no sales tax, dragging away people and money from other states.
At least to this end, the fairest solution as I see it is to have the nat'l gov't determine a nat'l sales tax on internet sales, the rate set as being the population-normalized averages of every state. This will probably be between 5 to 6%. All domestic internet sales will have this tax, collected by the national gov't. The money is returned to the states based on the population and sales tax of the state. Thus, in the above scheme, OR will get no returns from this, while I'd expect CA and NY to get rather significant chunks.
In line with that, two other things have to be done: first, all mail order and otherwise all transactions not done in person need to be taxes via this method, instead of the usual method for mail order. There is no difference from ordering from the internet as there is from ordering from Eddie Bauer over the phone or via mail. Second, all states must abolish any "use tax" clauses; they already tax purchased items twice and should not be legal assuming the above was put into place.
I know this isn't the best solution, but it is probably the most practical and easiest to implement while still being fair to the states (and cities too for those that have city sales tax as well).
Get TeraTerm Pro (FREE) from any tucows.com site, then go to the TeraTerm homepage, and follow links for a FREE SSH addon for TeraTerm. I've been using it for several years and have not been disappointed.
I wAtCH tHe PlACe WhILe tHe MaSteR iS aWAy.
I also think that there is no union as far as I know within tech workers.
I wouldn't go as far as suggesting a union, but something needs to be done; the workers need to stand up and REFUSE to work unpaid overtime, or have a time where the beeper will not go off, or anything else like that. The fact that 'spineless' IT workers has been the norm means that we need to fight against that. If you are going to be working 60 hrs/wk (and you might enjoy that), make sure you get paid for 60hrs and not 30. Demand vacation time, make sure they know you have interests outside of work, and that you don't necessarily live and breath their work ethic.
But as with everyone else employed, I'd know I'd be afraid to approach my bosses with such requests. That's why there needs to be some collective effort, maybe lead by those IT workers already engrained in the system so that *they* can fight for better pay and offtime for workers.
An 'intranet' is a network between computers within the same organization, internet a network between organizations. The way you can manage and publish for the two are vastly different.
Also, they offer cases for Myth #2 where Sun appears to be unrealible. The big problem here is that they don't compare to WinNT at all (the one case they do is a really poor choice). They need to be pointed out to hotmail flaws. (Isn't Ebay also Windows based?)
It's just more FUD. Surprising that they quote the Gardner group findings considering that Gardner is not recommending Win2000 for the time being.
While you are correct that a court will most likely flame down the UTICA law quickly on it's first try in court, that still meant the law has passed and that for a short period of time, it will be in effect.
Our government has switched from pro-active (only passing laws that need to be passed after considerable review) to retro-active (passing all laws and letting another part of the gov't deal with the implementation and legality). Sure, you can say that's part of checks and balances, but as the courts get more and more overloaded with what can best be described as frilious cases, the quality of rulings might start to decline; What if the judge that was reviewing the first case under the UTICA was so busy that he assumed that a passed law was passed with good reason, and let the law stand?
We also need educated lawmakers at all levels of the govt'. Remember the UTICA is at a state level (which makes little sense, this is an issue of interstate commerce, the realm of the federal government). We've got a difficult enough time trying to work with all of the US Senators and Representatives, but it's a hard battle. If the lawmakers were informed and learned not just to listen to the easy money, UTICA would be laughed at, as well as things like DMCA and CDA.
If you don't have a testbed server to play with 6.2, I suggest waiting a month until the product is officially released, then grab and install this; by this time, the major security bugs will have been found and errata'ed, and you'll know of any possible quirks in the install if you follow the right discussion boards.
With Java, as you lose (or will generally not use) the precise positioning, and allow layout managers to take over to place elements, you're still left with a lot of questions -- I know that when I was trying to design a Java interface recently that I noticed no key trends here. Because of the WORA aspect of Java, much of the GUI interface for programs inherited from whatever OS it was developed on (various WinXX-isms, or motif-isms for example). Having a guide such as this will help make Java apps look and feel the same across platforms, which can be very good, but for some reason, it's somewhat bothersome that the java app might not be consistant with the native apps on the computer.
A good example is how dialogs are done - WinXX tend to have the OK to the leftmost, MacOS to the rightmost. There's a few other similar examples.
What might be the next necessary step in the next java release (jdk 1.3) is to add another platform dependant part to the system so that when there are differences in the platform for placement of visual elements, the sandbox can set them up to act more like the native system.
(You could have also answered "A really wacky movie starring Bill Murray" for credit as well :D )
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-HackerD00D- oh man, their the gr8est! there 40th reunion tour was the bomb.
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-HackerD00D- what, me? no way d00d! Get off my case!
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Too much of the US govt and corporate America has let the courts decide much of the policy making -- they should be more pro-active rather than retro-active, though the former is not easily done as it requires being up to date and effort. In this case, at least slashdot helps us with the research side of things.