1) Buses tend to have really amazing turning radii and a whole lot of intimidation power; i.e. they manage to get around things pretty efficiently. Their speed deficit compared to car travel is primarily due to time spent at stops and slow acceleration/deceleration. Innovations in "Bus Rapid Transit" are reducing this deficit really nicely.
2) Dedicated bus lanes are becoming more and more prevalent, thanks to massive successes in places like Curitiba, Brazil. We can only hope...
There is NO way to get energy on a large scale without adversely effecting something.
Excellent point (though do birds really fly into windmills? And if so, doesn't that help the evolutionary process?). But since the original poster was pointing out that an EV powered by what is commonly considered the dirtiest source available is still half as polluting as a fairly fuel-efficient internal combustion engine, you still have a net decrease in ecological footprint. Which is especially important given your argument.
Don't think you meant to say this, but I wouldn't want some idiot to think your post meant "Oh, well, can't totally fix it, so I might as well just keep my SUV that gets 5 gallons to the mile and hasn't passed a smog check in 10 years!"
Most areas across the USA are fairly rural. I know I had a 50+mile commpute to work at one point
Are those two statements connected? Because, no matter how rural much of the US is, I don't know of very many places you can work that don't have any residential opportunities within 50 miles. Makes it very hard to get employees, so businesses usually avoid such location decisions.
Sure, there may not be anywhere you want to live within 50 miles, but if you choose your job and your home based on criteria that have nothing to do with where they are, you're still choosing to have that 50+ mile commute. And believe me, those long commutes are not dependent on rurality... I had a 50-mile commute (for a whopping two weeks) from West Los Angeles to Covina, which is a continuous metropolitan landscape the whole way. Granted, I quit that job just as soon as I could... but I know people who have been making similar crazy-length urban commutes for years.
It's still a choice they made, however. Even if it's more or less a negative choice, in that they didn't consider commute distance a factor, it's still something they have the ability to consider.
The truth is, although many alternative fuel vehicles may be cleaner while you drive them, their energy efficiency tends to be about the same if you make them as fast as a normal car.
True, but, seems that's just a battery capacity issue. After all, even though you may be getting the same number of miles per unit of stored energy, you can get the energy from sources that aren't dependent on an exhaustible supply of dead dinosaurs.
In Los Angeles, the Department of Water and Power offers the option of getting "Green Power," where you pay a couple bucks extra per month but they are buying power from renewable resources on your behalf. (Obviously they can't ensure that EXACTLY the same watts they purchased from a particular source end up in your socket, but it changes the balance of consumption a little at a time.) So, if I drove an electric car (which I don't, because basically I don't drive), and if I still lived in City of Los Angeles (instead of the Island of West Hollywood which unfortunately is powered, or not as the case is at least a few seconds out of every week, by Southern California Edison), I could ensure that every mile I drove came from renewable resources. Which isn't an efficiency argument per sé, but has a certain ecological elegance to it.
If people they're intended for aren't using them, how "good" can [bike paths and sidewalks] be?
Not sure about that. But, I do know what the laws are... and having to practically step into the street to avoid getting run over by a cyclist, who, according to the Vehicle Code, is supposed to yield to pedestrians on the sidewalk, really annoys me. Not to mention cyclists who go sailing through the crosswalk, often against traffic, completely oblivious to vehicle code requirements that require them to actually walk the bike in the crosswalk.
On the other hand, no matter how much it personally frustrates me, I will always do my best to give a cyclist who is legally riding in the street a safe cushion. I even use my signal when I go around them [pause for applause]. (Then when they cut across traffic without signaling, I sometimes regret it.)
I spend a lot of time as a pedestrian these days, which gives me a little better chance to see what's going on around me. Considering the enormous numbers of regulations that cars are required to follow, and the very few that bikes are, I seem to see bikes observing a much, much smaller percentage of their rules routinely. That may be what led to the parent post's frustration with bikes and pedestrians.
BTW, what's the problem with a posted speed limit of 10-12 mph? Streets often have speed limits of 25-35 mph, though cars comfortably cruise at 45-55 mph. It's just not considered safe to do so when there's other traffic... like bikes and pedestrians.
Statistically it is enough tho, as long as the 70 were picked fairly (randomly).
I think most statisticians would want at least 100 to consider the results statistically significant, and you need at least 3,000 respondents to guarantee a 3-percentage-point margin of error.
With all the different kinds of sites out on the internet, with extremely different dev cycles, content, and audience, 70 websites picked completely randomly still could turn out to be 50 pr0n sites and 20 Geocities N'Sync fansites. At the very least, you'd have to stratify your sample... and there's probably too many categories to take into account to get a representative sample with only 70 cases.
What's really weird in all of this is, FirebirdSQL isn't calling Mozilla on the carpet over a registered trademark. They have never tried to register their trademark, they simply "own" (no, sorry, to properly quote them, it's "OWN") the name because they have been using it. This is entirely possible; IANAL. However, the rub is, if they had not previously noted that it was a trademark, and hadn't registered it, how on earth was anyone to know that it *was* a trademark before using the name?
When I'm at home, and don't have WebSense telling me that the Wayback Machine falls under the forbidden category of "proxy evasion," I'll see what firebirdsql.org has previously said about their "trademark." If they never called it a trademark until AOL/Time Warner did, I cry foul. If they did, though, then a Google search should have told the AOL lawyers this was a bad idea.
"firebird database project": about 135. Search took 0.34 seconds
firebird +sql: about 22,800. Search took 0.14 seconds
firebird +database: about 32,500. Search took 0.07 seconds
firebird +browser: about 17,700. Search took 0.17 seconds.
firebird +mozilla: about 11,500. Search took 0.12 seconds (2,000 more since your search!)
firebird +trademark: about 12,000. Search took 0.19 seconds
firebird +trademark +database: about 779. Search took 0.30 seconds
firebird +trademark +sql: about 210. Search took 0.22 seconds
firebird +trademark +browser: 456. Search took 0.63 seconds
firebird +trademark +mozilla: about 202. Search took 0.36 seconds
-------control searches (with semi-common words that don't have any particular relationship to "firebird")-------
firebird +kleenex: about 1,030. Search took 0.05 seconds
firebird +textbook: about 947. Search took 0.15 seconds
firebird +spreadsheet: about 950. Search took 0.15 seconds
When you compare like to like, i.e. "firebird +sql" with "firebird +mozilla" and "firebird +database" with "firebird +browser", the differences are much smaller and getting smaller still. If you look at the control searches, it's reasonable to expect around 1,000 hits when you combine "firebird" with any other semi-common term, so subtract that many hits from each two-term search. You're left with:
Firebird +... More restrictive: > sql: 21,800 > mozilla: 10,500 > difference: 11,300 or Mozilla has 48% as many hits
Less restrictive: > database: 31,500 > browser: 16,700 > difference: 14,800 or Mozilla has 53% as many hits
What we don't have is some normalizing data to account for time passed; i.e. what is the average rate of hit rise for a new word combo? Then we can normalize these numbers based on the huge difference in time that these two concepts have been kicking around.
Wait, you're telling me there's also something called "FirebirdSQL" now? As well as the database package Firebird and Mozilla's unfortunately named Firebird?
As far as I can tell from the (extremely convoluted) info in the links, the "Firebird Database Project" and "FirebirdSQL" are the same thing.
Did they actually use the abbreviation "IP" specifically with respect to TCP/IP address bocks? I wonder if by "IP" they meant "Intellectual Property"?
Here's the quote:
39. Defendants, S. LINFORD, J. LINFORD, MURPHY, WILSON, GUNN, SOBOL, SHARP, TIETJENS, BROWER, JARED, SPAMHAUS and SPEWS converted said Internet Protocol addresses and servers to their own use and for their own financial gain.
It would be great if it could be proved that some of the product distributors who benefit from this advertising could be shown to have actively participated as well. Cut off the funding for spam.
Ah, yes... there is legal precedent for this. A lawyer named Julie Su successfully sued major clothing retailers for using sweatshop labor, when it was actually their subcontractors who were guilty. This case established a precedent of responsibility on the part of companies for the illegal actions of their contractors. (Sorry I don't have a proper citation; our professor just told us the lawyer's name... he was very impressed because Ms. Su was only a year out of law school when she did this.)
Of course, it's not quite as compelling a case, since the breast and penis enlargement companies and those folks with a million boxes of Norton Antivirus to sell are not as high-profile as The Gap and Jessica McClintock. Still, I wouldn't mind seeing them put out of business.
And yes, by saying that Linford "has an excellent countersuit" I did mean that if he chose to countersue, there is plenty of law to back him up. And I do kind of hope he does, though it may be more trouble than it's worth to him.
Almost makes me want to apply to law school... (IANAL, but they make us take a law class in the Urban Planning Master's program.)
Yes, that article is the source of the quote. It was written by Ben Shiller for the April 18, 2003 edition of Entertainment Weekly. Thanks for pulling a web reference for me;-)
Sorry, that is not the same. Getting email about enlarging your none-existent dick is not the same as forced sex.
Nor is unsolicited commercial bulk email the same as a certain "meat" product made by Hormel. However, being forced to sort out graphic, unwanted emails from the real stuff is to having to cope with some man trying to force himself on me, as unsolicited commercial email is to Hormel's answer to the hungry American. Therefore, the use of the word "digital" to preface the phrase. (Also, date-rape as opposed to stranger-rape, as it is as much about people's f'ed up sense of what rights a person has over their own experience than about violence.)
You should be allowed to sue for anything. Who should judge what is worthy? A judge of course, nobody else should be allowed to make the decision if the case should proceed.
I don't see a better solution.
An excellent point, really. The problem is, it depends on a certain threshold amount of personal ethics and judgement, which we seem to have slowly sloughed off here in the US. You should be *able* to sue for anything, but you should not automatically come up with a lawsuit every time the world inconveniences you or takes away your favorite toy. Unfortunately, our legal system runs on dollars, not sense. It's not corrupt, really; it's just big and complicated (like a Hummer?), and the people who can give it enough fuel to get mileage out of it are those with lots of cash (yeah, like a Hummer). Meanwhile, there's thousands of "reasonable" lawsuits every day that never get as far as a filing, because people don't have the time and/or money to deal with it.
There's a lawyer in Downtown Los Angeles named Nancy Mintie, who has been practicing for 24 years. She has never lost a case. Seems amazing on the face of it... but on a closer look, she does nothing but pro bono legal services for homeless and poor people. There are so many people down there who are being horribly exploited and abused, so there's tons of very solid cases to work with. You walk into a court room and tell them that a landlord has to do something about kids getting chewed on by rats in their sleep, you don't have much trouble at all. It's the big bucks lawsuits that are touch-and-go, because they often don't have a solid foundation to rest on.
I've been trying to come up with a better solution, but really, how could you feasibly socialize the legal system? Universal Health Care is a cinch in comparison. After all, if the guy across the street has a better doctor than me, it doesn't mean he can take years away from my life. But if he's got a better lawyer, he can sue me for all I'm worth, and it may not matter if he has a better case than I do... as long as he has better representation.
In the US, you can file a suit for anything. You risk countersuit and charges for frivolous lawsuits for filing blatantly false and harrassing lawsuits, which is what happened in this case.
EMarketersAmerica.org claims in their suit, among other things, that:
- Spamhaus and SPEWS are run by the same people. - Steve Linford's brother, who lives in Italy and knows nothing about Spamhaus, is one of those people running both sites. - Spamhaus has an office in the US. - Spamhaus sells products. - Spamhaus' products "destroy" and "intercept" legitimate email transmissions. - Spamhaus has *appropriated* IPs belonging to EMarketersAmerica member organizations for their own use and profit. (Tell me, how on Earth do you do that? I want to steal MS's block...)
They make many other false statements, but those are the doozies.
These are people who make their living by digitally date-raping whoever they can find. (And, yes, I use that word... please, I get emails about enlarging my member on a daily basis, and I'm a WOMAN, for crying out loud. At least send me breast enlargement ads instead.) They have no compunction about breaking more laws by filing a frivolous and false lawsuit in hopes that it will scare someone off.
The good news is, Steve Linford, if he has the time and money to do so, now has an excellent countersuit, which could make a lot of those spammer's documents public record. Big ifs, but stranger things have happened.
Wiretaps are (or, at least, until very recently were) far less common than they were in the 1960's, when the McCarthy bug was going around. That's because we started requiring the FBI to get court orders to do wiretapping. Since then, it's become much easier to do a wiretap, and we've had 9/11, which has opened the floodgates on funding to "counter terrorism."
They don't have the means or the funds to monitor everyone, or even most people. But they do have the means to at least somewhat monitor the million or so they consider the most dangerous. But, since you're willing to patronize the conspiracy theorists, that will probably bump you far enough down the list that *you're* safe. And after all, that's what really matters, isn't it?
Oops, I think I just moved myself up to 999,999...
I would point out that we're still barely talking about double digit numbers of wiretaps here. ("16", "18")
Those of you with nightmares about everybody in the US being tapped can move along, because there's very little to see. From the article:
the number of wiretap applications granted for which encryption was encountered
So, we see that:
- The number of wiretaps applied for (i.e. that they had a legal justification for doing) which were actually encrypted was barely double-digits. This gives us no info about the total number of wiretaps applied for, and does not rule out un-applied for wiretaps.
- The Patriot Act rescinds the restrictions on FBI wiretapping that require them to have a good reason. The numbers for 2003, which will probably not be released without the ACLU suing under the Freedom of Information Act, will probably be a lot higher.
Those restrictions were put in place originally because the FBI was running rampant during the McCarthy era, tapping every phone line of everyone that wore maroon two days running. They're perfectly capable of tapping far more than they have been in the last couple decades, and almost certainly will step it up in the current political climate.
AC writes:
PGP doesn't help you one whit when the feds slip into your house at night and plant a keysniffer to get your private key/pass phrase...
Surak writes: Heh. Right. Maybe on your Windoze box where you don't know what processes are running, etc., but that's much more difficult to do on Linux box, especially when the Linux box is owned by a Unix sysadmin with more than 10 years of experience...
Finni writes: How does 10 years of experience translate into knowing about the hardware bug they slipped into your keyboard?
Xanadu writes: It doesn't. That was his/her/it's freakin' point. Esentially, the post was about "hidden" processes running on various OS's out there. *MUCH* easier to detect on *NIX. THAT was the point. I suggest you actually read articles and posts before posting in the future.
You're right that the AC's point was that software intrusion is easier to detect on *nix. That post, however, entirely missed the point of the parent, which is that if the feds want to know what you're typing, they will install *hardware* detection.
Reading threads before posting is a good idea... you're right about that too.
(Apologies for the redundancy of this post go out to all those who read this stuff the first time around.)
"We believe that just like in television, the creative you build is what gets shown, the technology should not get in the way..."
- In television, we pay $26 + change per month for basic cable, so that we can have clear reception on the two channels we ever watch. We pay $64.95 per month for "Enhanced DSL" so that all our computers have their own IP addresses.
- In television, I usually have a pretty solid 10-15 minutes of show viewing between commercial breaks. Interstitial ads will be entirely subject to reading and interpretation speed... faster is worse.
- In television, I am almost always watching for entertainment. I use the web to get news, learn, shop, and a variety of other things I find a bit more important than Buffy the Vampire Slayer (as important as Buffy can be).
- In television, content is scheduled and periodic, and the commercials are built into that. On the web, I have no idea how long it's going to take me to read this story or catch up on the day's events, so adding in 15 seconds hits harder.
- In television, commercial breaks are usually around 2-5 minutes. That's enough time to go to the restroom, grab a snack, tell an amusing anecdote. 15 seconds is not enough time to do something else, and too much time to stare at the screen.
- I sit farther away from my television than my computer screen.
So it's not just like television. Any chance they'll figure that out someday?
Funny you should mention the motion picture industry, yet another cartel. Yet Hollywood looks honest next to spammers and phone hucksters. There's nothing sincere about this effort but the desire to make money by obnoxing all of us.
It's all about making money. Duh. That's the entire point to *commercial* speech. But it's entirely possible that they're trying to bring the obnoxiousness down to a tolerable level, for the purpose of making more money. Let them give it a shot.
Shemes to add intelligence to the internet are all designed to make it imposible for any but a select few to send the adverts. They seek legitmacy and government protection for their abuse of a public network. That's not something I'm willing to give up my ability to run a mail server for. Nor do I wish for my ISP to be forced to pay fees for the new service which will garantee spam forever.
I don't think we read the same article. The one I read was very vague about implementation, and described a system which would actually NOT be abuse of a (privately-owned, publicly populated) network. Nor did it say anything about giving up your mail server or charging ISPs... I don't think it even implied that.
There are good ways and bad ways to implement a system such as the one described in the article. To take it as fact that they will choose the worst possible way of implementing it is jumping to a conclusion. Sure, it's likely. But it's far from in evidence.
The answer is to simply outlaw these obnoxious practices. Unsolicited comercial calls are abuses of public networks and should not be tollerated. People who would abuse their neighbors this way should be fined and put in jail.
Unsolicited commercial calls and faxes *are* in many cases illegal. It helps so much. Automated calling, automated answering machine messages, continuing to call after being requested not to... all illegal, all practiced. How do you propose to *enforce* such laws?
The issue of spam is not now, and never has been, about CONTENT. It has always been about CONSENT.
I dunno... I'd have a lot less hostility toward spam if it wasn't always telling me I should enlarge my (non-existent) penis (yay XX chromosome). In general, there would probably be less hostility toward spam if it was not saturated with products that most people don't even *want* to want. It's the stuff that has the hardest time selling... so they sell it the hardest way possible.
Consent is a big issue, too. If they actually set up this system as they say they will, then consent will be part of it. You'll at least be able to tell the emails you consented to from the ones you didn't. That's a big if, but it's conceivable.
Consider the movie ratings system. It's not in any way government regulated; it's run entirely by the Motion Picture Association of America. Whatever disputes I have with their policies and practices, you have to admit, the industry has been fairly successful at eliminating the need for government regulation through self-regulation.
It sounds more like these spammers are getting together to find a way to continue sending requested marketing email. Spam has gotten so bad that the baby is being thrown out with the bathwater at the ISP level, before the consumer even implements their own filters. They're afraid of losing the ability to market via e-mail *period*, so they've come up with a way to screen it.
If it actually works as they claim (in terms of unsubscribe rules, identifiability, and so forth) it might be a way ISPs could filter out commercial email that *doesn't* conform to this protocol, while still allowing commercial email to happen.
I'm not saying I think it will (or won't) work, but I think this is probably a sincere attempt to regulate commercial email in a manner that will be acceptable to consumers.
Slashdot Mirror
And then the bus gets stuck behind one?
1) Buses tend to have really amazing turning radii and a whole lot of intimidation power; i.e. they manage to get around things pretty efficiently. Their speed deficit compared to car travel is primarily due to time spent at stops and slow acceleration/deceleration. Innovations in "Bus Rapid Transit" are reducing this deficit really nicely.
2) Dedicated bus lanes are becoming more and more prevalent, thanks to massive successes in places like Curitiba, Brazil. We can only hope...
There is NO way to get energy on a large scale without adversely effecting something.
Excellent point (though do birds really fly into windmills? And if so, doesn't that help the evolutionary process?). But since the original poster was pointing out that an EV powered by what is commonly considered the dirtiest source available is still half as polluting as a fairly fuel-efficient internal combustion engine, you still have a net decrease in ecological footprint. Which is especially important given your argument.
Don't think you meant to say this, but I wouldn't want some idiot to think your post meant "Oh, well, can't totally fix it, so I might as well just keep my SUV that gets 5 gallons to the mile and hasn't passed a smog check in 10 years!"
Most areas across the USA are fairly rural. I know I had a 50+mile commpute to work at one point
Are those two statements connected? Because, no matter how rural much of the US is, I don't know of very many places you can work that don't have any residential opportunities within 50 miles. Makes it very hard to get employees, so businesses usually avoid such location decisions.
Sure, there may not be anywhere you want to live within 50 miles, but if you choose your job and your home based on criteria that have nothing to do with where they are, you're still choosing to have that 50+ mile commute. And believe me, those long commutes are not dependent on rurality... I had a 50-mile commute (for a whopping two weeks) from West Los Angeles to Covina, which is a continuous metropolitan landscape the whole way. Granted, I quit that job just as soon as I could... but I know people who have been making similar crazy-length urban commutes for years.
It's still a choice they made, however. Even if it's more or less a negative choice, in that they didn't consider commute distance a factor, it's still something they have the ability to consider.
The truth is, although many alternative fuel vehicles may be cleaner while you drive them, their energy efficiency tends to be about the same if you make them as fast as a normal car.
True, but, seems that's just a battery capacity issue. After all, even though you may be getting the same number of miles per unit of stored energy, you can get the energy from sources that aren't dependent on an exhaustible supply of dead dinosaurs.
In Los Angeles, the Department of Water and Power offers the option of getting "Green Power," where you pay a couple bucks extra per month but they are buying power from renewable resources on your behalf. (Obviously they can't ensure that EXACTLY the same watts they purchased from a particular source end up in your socket, but it changes the balance of consumption a little at a time.) So, if I drove an electric car (which I don't, because basically I don't drive), and if I still lived in City of Los Angeles (instead of the Island of West Hollywood which unfortunately is powered, or not as the case is at least a few seconds out of every week, by Southern California Edison), I could ensure that every mile I drove came from renewable resources. Which isn't an efficiency argument per sé, but has a certain ecological elegance to it.
If people they're intended for aren't using them, how "good" can [bike paths and sidewalks] be?
Not sure about that. But, I do know what the laws are... and having to practically step into the street to avoid getting run over by a cyclist, who, according to the Vehicle Code, is supposed to yield to pedestrians on the sidewalk, really annoys me. Not to mention cyclists who go sailing through the crosswalk, often against traffic, completely oblivious to vehicle code requirements that require them to actually walk the bike in the crosswalk.
On the other hand, no matter how much it personally frustrates me, I will always do my best to give a cyclist who is legally riding in the street a safe cushion. I even use my signal when I go around them [pause for applause]. (Then when they cut across traffic without signaling, I sometimes regret it.)
I spend a lot of time as a pedestrian these days, which gives me a little better chance to see what's going on around me. Considering the enormous numbers of regulations that cars are required to follow, and the very few that bikes are, I seem to see bikes observing a much, much smaller percentage of their rules routinely. That may be what led to the parent post's frustration with bikes and pedestrians.
BTW, what's the problem with a posted speed limit of 10-12 mph? Streets often have speed limits of 25-35 mph, though cars comfortably cruise at 45-55 mph. It's just not considered safe to do so when there's other traffic... like bikes and pedestrians.
Statistically it is enough tho, as long as the 70 were picked fairly (randomly).
I think most statisticians would want at least 100 to consider the results statistically significant, and you need at least 3,000 respondents to guarantee a 3-percentage-point margin of error.
With all the different kinds of sites out on the internet, with extremely different dev cycles, content, and audience, 70 websites picked completely randomly still could turn out to be 50 pr0n sites and 20 Geocities N'Sync fansites. At the very least, you'd have to stratify your sample... and there's probably too many categories to take into account to get a representative sample with only 70 cases.
What's really weird in all of this is, FirebirdSQL isn't calling Mozilla on the carpet over a registered trademark. They have never tried to register their trademark, they simply "own" (no, sorry, to properly quote them, it's "OWN") the name because they have been using it. This is entirely possible; IANAL. However, the rub is, if they had not previously noted that it was a trademark, and hadn't registered it, how on earth was anyone to know that it *was* a trademark before using the name?
When I'm at home, and don't have WebSense telling me that the Wayback Machine falls under the forbidden category of "proxy evasion," I'll see what firebirdsql.org has previously said about their "trademark." If they never called it a trademark until AOL/Time Warner did, I cry foul. If they did, though, then a Google search should have told the AOL lawyers this was a bad idea.
I think they should just let google decide:
Yes, but let's get a little more data...
firbirdsql: about 1,240. Search took 0.22 seconds
"firebird database project": about 135. Search took 0.34 seconds
firebird +sql: about 22,800. Search took 0.14 seconds
firebird +database: about 32,500. Search took 0.07 seconds
firebird +browser: about 17,700. Search took 0.17 seconds.
firebird +mozilla: about 11,500. Search took 0.12 seconds (2,000 more since your search!)
firebird +trademark: about 12,000. Search took 0.19 seconds
firebird +trademark +database: about 779. Search took 0.30 seconds
firebird +trademark +sql: about 210. Search took 0.22 seconds
firebird +trademark +browser: 456. Search took 0.63 seconds
firebird +trademark +mozilla: about 202. Search took 0.36 seconds
-------control searches (with semi-common words that don't have any particular relationship to "firebird")-------
firebird +kleenex: about 1,030. Search took 0.05 seconds
firebird +textbook: about 947. Search took 0.15 seconds
firebird +spreadsheet: about 950. Search took 0.15 seconds
When you compare like to like, i.e. "firebird +sql" with "firebird +mozilla" and "firebird +database" with "firebird +browser", the differences are much smaller and getting smaller still. If you look at the control searches, it's reasonable to expect around 1,000 hits when you combine "firebird" with any other semi-common term, so subtract that many hits from each two-term search. You're left with:
Firebird +...
More restrictive:
> sql: 21,800
> mozilla: 10,500
> difference: 11,300 or Mozilla has 48% as many hits
Less restrictive:
> database: 31,500
> browser: 16,700
> difference: 14,800 or Mozilla has 53% as many hits
What we don't have is some normalizing data to account for time passed; i.e. what is the average rate of hit rise for a new word combo? Then we can normalize these numbers based on the huge difference in time that these two concepts have been kicking around.
I think a press release where Satan issued a cease-and-decist for defamation of character would have been funnier.
You think you're joking... but the Vin Diesel movie "A Man Apart" was entitled "Diablo" until Blizzard threatened legal action.
Wait, you're telling me there's also something called "FirebirdSQL" now? As well as the database package Firebird and Mozilla's unfortunately named Firebird?
As far as I can tell from the (extremely convoluted) info in the links, the "Firebird Database Project" and "FirebirdSQL" are the same thing.
Here's the quote:
"Stupid" is an understatement.
It would be great if it could be proved that some of the product distributors who benefit from this advertising could be shown to have actively participated as well. Cut off the funding for spam.
Ah, yes... there is legal precedent for this. A lawyer named Julie Su successfully sued major clothing retailers for using sweatshop labor, when it was actually their subcontractors who were guilty. This case established a precedent of responsibility on the part of companies for the illegal actions of their contractors. (Sorry I don't have a proper citation; our professor just told us the lawyer's name... he was very impressed because Ms. Su was only a year out of law school when she did this.)
Of course, it's not quite as compelling a case, since the breast and penis enlargement companies and those folks with a million boxes of Norton Antivirus to sell are not as high-profile as The Gap and Jessica McClintock. Still, I wouldn't mind seeing them put out of business.
And yes, by saying that Linford "has an excellent countersuit" I did mean that if he chose to countersue, there is plenty of law to back him up. And I do kind of hope he does, though it may be more trouble than it's worth to him.
Almost makes me want to apply to law school... (IANAL, but they make us take a law class in the Urban Planning Master's program.)
Oops... by Joel Stein, entitled "Ben Shiller". Think, then type. That's the best solution.
Yes, that article is the source of the quote. It was written by Ben Shiller for the April 18, 2003 edition of Entertainment Weekly. Thanks for pulling a web reference for me ;-)
Sorry, that is not the same. Getting email about enlarging your none-existent dick is not the same as forced sex.
Nor is unsolicited commercial bulk email the same as a certain "meat" product made by Hormel. However, being forced to sort out graphic, unwanted emails from the real stuff is to having to cope with some man trying to force himself on me, as unsolicited commercial email is to Hormel's answer to the hungry American. Therefore, the use of the word "digital" to preface the phrase. (Also, date-rape as opposed to stranger-rape, as it is as much about people's f'ed up sense of what rights a person has over their own experience than about violence.)
Sorry to have confused you. Hope this helps.
You can sue for anything, really you can.
You should be allowed to sue for anything.
Who should judge what is worthy? A judge of course, nobody else should be allowed to make the decision if the case should proceed.
I don't see a better solution.
An excellent point, really. The problem is, it depends on a certain threshold amount of personal ethics and judgement, which we seem to have slowly sloughed off here in the US. You should be *able* to sue for anything, but you should not automatically come up with a lawsuit every time the world inconveniences you or takes away your favorite toy. Unfortunately, our legal system runs on dollars, not sense. It's not corrupt, really; it's just big and complicated (like a Hummer?), and the people who can give it enough fuel to get mileage out of it are those with lots of cash (yeah, like a Hummer). Meanwhile, there's thousands of "reasonable" lawsuits every day that never get as far as a filing, because people don't have the time and/or money to deal with it.
There's a lawyer in Downtown Los Angeles named Nancy Mintie, who has been practicing for 24 years. She has never lost a case. Seems amazing on the face of it... but on a closer look, she does nothing but pro bono legal services for homeless and poor people. There are so many people down there who are being horribly exploited and abused, so there's tons of very solid cases to work with. You walk into a court room and tell them that a landlord has to do something about kids getting chewed on by rats in their sleep, you don't have much trouble at all. It's the big bucks lawsuits that are touch-and-go, because they often don't have a solid foundation to rest on.
I've been trying to come up with a better solution, but really, how could you feasibly socialize the legal system? Universal Health Care is a cinch in comparison. After all, if the guy across the street has a better doctor than me, it doesn't mean he can take years away from my life. But if he's got a better lawyer, he can sue me for all I'm worth, and it may not matter if he has a better case than I do... as long as he has better representation.
How can spammers sue anti-spam list maintainers?
In the US, you can file a suit for anything. You risk countersuit and charges for frivolous lawsuits for filing blatantly false and harrassing lawsuits, which is what happened in this case.
EMarketersAmerica.org claims in their suit, among other things, that:
- Spamhaus and SPEWS are run by the same people.
- Steve Linford's brother, who lives in Italy and knows nothing about Spamhaus, is one of those people running both sites.
- Spamhaus has an office in the US.
- Spamhaus sells products.
- Spamhaus' products "destroy" and "intercept" legitimate email transmissions.
- Spamhaus has *appropriated* IPs belonging to EMarketersAmerica member organizations for their own use and profit. (Tell me, how on Earth do you do that? I want to steal MS's block...)
They make many other false statements, but those are the doozies.
These are people who make their living by digitally date-raping whoever they can find. (And, yes, I use that word... please, I get emails about enlarging my member on a daily basis, and I'm a WOMAN, for crying out loud. At least send me breast enlargement ads instead.) They have no compunction about breaking more laws by filing a frivolous and false lawsuit in hopes that it will scare someone off.
The good news is, Steve Linford, if he has the time and money to do so, now has an excellent countersuit, which could make a lot of those spammer's documents public record. Big ifs, but stranger things have happened.
Wiretaps are (or, at least, until very recently were) far less common than they were in the 1960's, when the McCarthy bug was going around. That's because we started requiring the FBI to get court orders to do wiretapping. Since then, it's become much easier to do a wiretap, and we've had 9/11, which has opened the floodgates on funding to "counter terrorism."
They don't have the means or the funds to monitor everyone, or even most people. But they do have the means to at least somewhat monitor the million or so they consider the most dangerous. But, since you're willing to patronize the conspiracy theorists, that will probably bump you far enough down the list that *you're* safe. And after all, that's what really matters, isn't it?
Oops, I think I just moved myself up to 999,999...
Those of you with nightmares about everybody in the US being tapped can move along, because there's very little to see.
From the article:
So, we see that:
- The number of wiretaps applied for (i.e. that they had a legal justification for doing) which were actually encrypted was barely double-digits. This gives us no info about the total number of wiretaps applied for, and does not rule out un-applied for wiretaps.
- The Patriot Act rescinds the restrictions on FBI wiretapping that require them to have a good reason. The numbers for 2003, which will probably not be released without the ACLU suing under the Freedom of Information Act, will probably be a lot higher.
Those restrictions were put in place originally because the FBI was running rampant during the McCarthy era, tapping every phone line of everyone that wore maroon two days running. They're perfectly capable of tapping far more than they have been in the last couple decades, and almost certainly will step it up in the current political climate.
You're right that the AC's point was that software intrusion is easier to detect on *nix. That post, however, entirely missed the point of the parent, which is that if the feds want to know what you're typing, they will install *hardware* detection.
Reading threads before posting is a good idea... you're right about that too.
(Apologies for the redundancy of this post go out to all those who read this stuff the first time around.)
"We believe that just like in television, the creative you build is what gets shown, the technology should not get in the way..."
- In television, we pay $26 + change per month for basic cable, so that we can have clear reception on the two channels we ever watch. We pay $64.95 per month for "Enhanced DSL" so that all our computers have their own IP addresses.
- In television, I usually have a pretty solid 10-15 minutes of show viewing between commercial breaks. Interstitial ads will be entirely subject to reading and interpretation speed... faster is worse.
- In television, I am almost always watching for entertainment. I use the web to get news, learn, shop, and a variety of other things I find a bit more important than Buffy the Vampire Slayer (as important as Buffy can be).
- In television, content is scheduled and periodic, and the commercials are built into that. On the web, I have no idea how long it's going to take me to read this story or catch up on the day's events, so adding in 15 seconds hits harder.
- In television, commercial breaks are usually around 2-5 minutes. That's enough time to go to the restroom, grab a snack, tell an amusing anecdote. 15 seconds is not enough time to do something else, and too much time to stare at the screen.
- I sit farther away from my television than my computer screen.
So it's not just like television. Any chance they'll figure that out someday?
Surely these adverts can be killed on Windows by pressing ALT F4 or CTRL ALT DEL then kill the window.
Except that, since these ads take over the main window, you'll kill whatever you were trying to look at too.
Not that this is a bad idea, mind you...
Funny you should mention the motion picture industry, yet another cartel. Yet Hollywood looks honest next to spammers and phone hucksters. There's nothing sincere about this effort but the desire to make money by obnoxing all of us.
It's all about making money. Duh. That's the entire point to *commercial* speech. But it's entirely possible that they're trying to bring the obnoxiousness down to a tolerable level, for the purpose of making more money. Let them give it a shot.
Shemes to add intelligence to the internet are all designed to make it imposible for any but a select few to send the adverts. They seek legitmacy and government protection for their abuse of a public network. That's not something I'm willing to give up my ability to run a mail server for. Nor do I wish for my ISP to be forced to pay fees for the new service which will garantee spam forever.
I don't think we read the same article. The one I read was very vague about implementation, and described a system which would actually NOT be abuse of a (privately-owned, publicly populated) network. Nor did it say anything about giving up your mail server or charging ISPs... I don't think it even implied that.
There are good ways and bad ways to implement a system such as the one described in the article. To take it as fact that they will choose the worst possible way of implementing it is jumping to a conclusion. Sure, it's likely. But it's far from in evidence.
The answer is to simply outlaw these obnoxious practices. Unsolicited comercial calls are abuses of public networks and should not be tollerated. People who would abuse their neighbors this way should be fined and put in jail.
Unsolicited commercial calls and faxes *are* in many cases illegal. It helps so much. Automated calling, automated answering machine messages, continuing to call after being requested not to... all illegal, all practiced. How do you propose to *enforce* such laws?
The issue of spam is not now, and never has been, about CONTENT. It has always been about CONSENT.
I dunno... I'd have a lot less hostility toward spam if it wasn't always telling me I should enlarge my (non-existent) penis (yay XX chromosome). In general, there would probably be less hostility toward spam if it was not saturated with products that most people don't even *want* to want. It's the stuff that has the hardest time selling... so they sell it the hardest way possible.
Consent is a big issue, too. If they actually set up this system as they say they will, then consent will be part of it. You'll at least be able to tell the emails you consented to from the ones you didn't. That's a big if, but it's conceivable.
Consider the movie ratings system. It's not in any way government regulated; it's run entirely by the Motion Picture Association of America. Whatever disputes I have with their policies and practices, you have to admit, the industry has been fairly successful at eliminating the need for government regulation through self-regulation.
It sounds more like these spammers are getting together to find a way to continue sending requested marketing email. Spam has gotten so bad that the baby is being thrown out with the bathwater at the ISP level, before the consumer even implements their own filters. They're afraid of losing the ability to market via e-mail *period*, so they've come up with a way to screen it.
If it actually works as they claim (in terms of unsubscribe rules, identifiability, and so forth) it might be a way ISPs could filter out commercial email that *doesn't* conform to this protocol, while still allowing commercial email to happen.
I'm not saying I think it will (or won't) work, but I think this is probably a sincere attempt to regulate commercial email in a manner that will be acceptable to consumers.