Competition is not a factor in trademark dilution.
He 'used shell.de as the homepage for a translation and publicity business.'
Using the mark for business purposes does.
This just shows just how much more influence big companies have over governments than the rest of us - no matter what government.
Only if you use the mark for commercial purposes. I don't agree with trademark dilution law, but it is within the government's right to regulate commerce.
Osama bin Laden WAS TRAINED AND SUPPLIED BY THE U.S. Figure that one out, genius.
Being trained and supplied by the U.S. means nothing. He wasn't trained to commit terrorism.
And it's quite another thing entirely to call him a 'useful ally' when he's your puppet, and a 'murderer' when you stop supporting him and he turns on you. He's doing THE SAME THING he did when he was an American ally.
How is helping defend a country (Afghanistan) against invasion from another country (the Soviet Union) THE SAME THING as intentionally killing thousands of innocent civilians? Show me evidence that the U.S. was aware of bin Laden intentionally killing innocent civilians and continuing to support him. Even if you do show that it only means the U.S. should admit that mistake and move on, it doesn't mean they should allow others to repeat those mistakes.
However it gets more complicated when you have to consider the expansion of the universe - two distant observers can each be locally "at rest" yet they will have a relative velocity.
Hmm, now that's very interesting, I'd never thought about that. It would definately make the calculations a lot more difficult, but I suspect the errors would be so insignificant as to be immeasurable in any current experiments. In fact, as far as I know, the motion of the earth through the CMBR is small enough with respect to the speed of light that there have been no time dilation experiments with enough accuracy to prove that that is not in fact the universal frame of reference of the universe. In other words, Lorentz contraction (and a slow down of certain other physical processes, perhaps due to subatomic Lorentz contraction) with respect to motion through the CMBR may in fact be the full answer to the question of why light appears to travel at the same speed in every direction (why there is no measurable etheral wind).
The idea is that mozilla would be chrooted to/usr/local/mozilla. Assuming a single user machine, you could simply have/usr/local/mozilla/etc/passwd point the home directory to/usr/local/mozilla/prefs, for instance. Assuming a multi-user machine, you'd have to have subdirectories, maybe/usr/local/mozilla/prefs/username. In the rare case of preferences which need to be shared between programs, you can hard link them into/usr/local/mozilla/prefs/username,/usr/local/netscape/prefs/username, and/home/username, for instance. The users directory would be essentially empty, and documents could be put in a separate partition (NFS mounted? There must be a cleaner way to do it...)
The only real problem I see is that it forces you to put basically everything in a single partition, but I'm sure if it ever caught on that could be worked around.
I'd rather have all the dates and configuration files in the chrooted user's home directory. Again, makes for easier cleanup. Any files which want to be explicitly shared can be hard linked just like the libraries.
Take a look at the list of publically traded software companies, ordered by market cap. What do you see? Microsoft's market cap is almost equal to the market caps of all the other software companies combined. Oracle is way behind with over 1/10 of the software market. Most of the top of the list is B2B.
The moral of the story is that consumer software (other than maybe games) does not make money. It doesn't matter if your product is open, closed, shareware, freeware, whatever, because copyright law is pretty much universally ignored for consumer software.
At least explicitly making the source open gives you some good PR, and forces management to come up with a workable business model which doesn't presume consumers paying for software, which just isn't going to happen.
I'd go one step further. Chroot the programs and hard link the required libraries into the chroot directory. Then you don't have to worry about annoying upgrade problems when one package insists on one set of libraries and another package insists on another. Also, when the hard link count goes down to 1 (the one in the master/lib directory), you can delete the file.
While we applaud Microsoft for raising the idea of helping poorer schools as part of the penalty phase of their conviction for monopolistic practices, we do not think that the remedy should be a mechanism by which Microsoft can further extend its monopoly.
Instead, we believe the remedy should be a mechanism by which Red Hat can create its own monpoly, on Linux Operating Systems.
I'm one of those kids who learned on APPLE and then got out into the real world, found no Apples at any companies, and adapted quite nicely, thank you.
I don't know a single person who knows how to use linux and doesn't know how to use windows... Do you? (And yes, I know a lot of people who know linux).
The main purpose of the computers in the schools isn't to teach operating systems anyway, it's to teach good old reading, writing, and arithmetic.
If I was in charge of IT at the school, I would certainly push to take the computers and immediately reformat the drive and install Linux. I wonder if Microsoft would allow that?
Bush administration is considering the creation of a secure new government communications network separate from the Internet that would be less vulnerable to attack and efforts to disrupt critical federal activities.
That's funny, I've always wanted the creation of an insecure anonymous non-government communications network separate (or on top of) the Internet that would be less vulnerable to efforts to regulate non-critical non-federal activities.
Umm, so does the Washington law. That's why it has been considered Constitutional
I guess we are arguing two different points. You seem to be saying that spam is sometimes illegal, I am saying spam is not always illegal. My initial comment, for instance was essentially "Spam is not illegal". I meant that in the same way as the true statement "Email is not illegal." Sending people unsolicited commercial email is not in and of itself illegal in any state of the US, as far as I know.
As for the fact that you say almost all of the spam that you're being sent is illegal, I guess that alone says that we don't need any more laws or regulations regarding spam, just enforcement of the current laws.
The spammers force third party ISPs to host their advertising by means of disk storage.
And you're forcing slashdot to host your nonsense by means of disk storage, but I'm not accusing you of theft.
Often spammers hijack third party mailservers to send their spew -- theft of service.
You have no argument from me on that one.
Sending junk e-mail to a domain that has specifically stated that it is not desired is trespass to chattel.
If the sender knows of your request. That is not the case most of the time.
By setting up a mail server and allowing random email addresses the ability to send to it, you are implicitly granting anyone the right to send you a limited amount of email. It's as though you have an open house and then try to sue certain people who arrive for trespassing.
Spam is illegal. Spammers should be tortured and killed, their heads should be placed on pikes that should line Silicon Valley.
Breaching a contract is illegal. It's not criminal behaviour in most cases, but you know, contracts are legal documents and have the force of law.
Fine. But by that rationale, it's also illegal to threaten to sue someone, at least under Erols AUP (part 1i, banning threats and intimidation). It seems clear to me that there's a huge distinction between criminal law and contract law.
BTW, entering into a contract with the intent to violate it is usually considered fraud, which is a criminal offense.
Seems like something extremely hard to prosecute, and besides it still requires the help of the ISP. I just don't see how making threats to the spammer which you can't follow through on can possibly help. If you really care that much, contact the ISP. In 99% of the cases someone else has already done this anyway, though.
In any case, fine, maybe 50% of spam is illegal. I still think it's stupid to compare spamming to trespassing and theft. But hey, the anti-spam freaks are going to try to convince people that spamming is trespassing and theft, anyway.
There is a very simple mechanism by which lawyers will likely put an end to that: if you are part of a software "crowd" and someone in that crowd does something, you will be held at least in part responsible.
Only if you have reason to believe that something illegal is being done, and you do nothing about it.
On the other hand, you're participating in a barter system, and therefore have to obtain the identies of the others in the "crowd", so you can send them 1099-Bs to report their barter income.
Use of dial-ups as mail servers and web servers, usually against ISP TOS
Breaking an ISP TOS is not at all illegal. It may be a breach of contract, but in most cases the spammer is not going to get in any more trouble than having his/her account deleted. Besides, if the spammer is breaking the ISP TOS, it makes little sense to make legal threats when you can just contact the ISP.
If you want to charge for spam, force people to agree to pay before you let them email you. It isn't that difficult to send an autoreply with a simple contract and a one time reply address for them to reply if they agree. That'll eliminate 99.9999999% of your spam, still allow people to contact you, and give you a shot in court of actually collecting money on the spam you do receive, especially if you ban IP addresses outside your own country.
A few people in the office suggested I reported them for threatening behaviour, but I never got around to it - after all, there's only so many hours in the day...
There's [sic] only so many hours in the day, yet you had the time to call the spammers and tie up their lines, and fax them? Admit it, the real reason you didn't report them is because you got scared once your fun little passive-aggressive games entered the real world, not some fantasy safe world of fax machines, phone calls, and internet access.
To my surprise, the following week I had a cheque in the mail from them, for $53.50. The payment stub that came with it said, payment enclosed for asshole fee, $50 plus sales tax.
I was amazed. On the other hand, I hotfooted it right to the bank and deposited the cheque, too!
Did you send the sales tax to your state government?
But seriously, the civil charges alone for such theft would run much higher than $50, not to mention the lawyer fees for the criminal case (and the possible jail time). Considering that you had their fax number and were potentially interested in persuing it, getting away with $53.50 was a pretty good deal.
Spammers, on the other hand, aren't doing anything illegal.
My second reaction, upon seeing it is opt-in, is who's stupid enough to sign up for this?
The yellow pages is opt-in advertising, but people still use it every day to find out the locations of certain types of stores. All they have to do is get a large enough number of stores to participate so that I can say "Onstar, where is the nearest pizza place. Place an order for a large pepperoni pie.", and there will be plent of people signing up for it. Hell, I'd probably consider signing up for it, if it was free like the yellow pages.
Marking your box fragile means something to the pick up guy/gal and the end delivery guy/gal at the very most. UPS is not there to ship fragile items which are not properly packed. They are there primarily to send properly packed items from mail order/internet stores to end users. As such they don't need your business, don't want your business, and have zero incentive to treat you in a way which is going to have you return your business.
Besides this, I know several people who are not coders, but still can tweak a program to make a minor modification. And even for those with zero programming knowledge, if the program is open source you know you could find someone to fix it if there's a relatively simple problem and the original author is out of business or otherwise not interested.
FreeBSD has serial console support. You don't get the BIOS, but you pretty much get everything other than that. If you're colocating two (or any even number of) machines, just hook up serial 1 of one machine to serial 2 of the other. Then you can log on even if the machine is in single-user mode, for OS upgrades and when a sudden reboot leaves you at the manual fsck prompt.
Slashdot Mirror
This guy wasn't trying to sell oil or gasoline.
Competition is not a factor in trademark dilution.
He 'used shell.de as the homepage for a translation and publicity business.'
Using the mark for business purposes does.
This just shows just how much more influence big companies have over governments than the rest of us - no matter what government.
Only if you use the mark for commercial purposes. I don't agree with trademark dilution law, but it is within the government's right to regulate commerce.
Osama bin Laden WAS TRAINED AND SUPPLIED BY THE U.S. Figure that one out, genius.
Being trained and supplied by the U.S. means nothing. He wasn't trained to commit terrorism.
And it's quite another thing entirely to call him a 'useful ally' when he's your puppet, and a 'murderer' when you stop supporting him and he turns on you. He's doing THE SAME THING he did when he was an American ally.
How is helping defend a country (Afghanistan) against invasion from another country (the Soviet Union) THE SAME THING as intentionally killing thousands of innocent civilians? Show me evidence that the U.S. was aware of bin Laden intentionally killing innocent civilians and continuing to support him. Even if you do show that it only means the U.S. should admit that mistake and move on, it doesn't mean they should allow others to repeat those mistakes.
A little evidence would be nice before one goes and cuts off a whole country from the 'net.
What evidence do you have that there was no evidence? The title of a slashdot article?
However it gets more complicated when you have to consider the expansion of the universe - two distant observers can each be locally "at rest" yet they will have a relative velocity.
Hmm, now that's very interesting, I'd never thought about that. It would definately make the calculations a lot more difficult, but I suspect the errors would be so insignificant as to be immeasurable in any current experiments. In fact, as far as I know, the motion of the earth through the CMBR is small enough with respect to the speed of light that there have been no time dilation experiments with enough accuracy to prove that that is not in fact the universal frame of reference of the universe. In other words, Lorentz contraction (and a slow down of certain other physical processes, perhaps due to subatomic Lorentz contraction) with respect to motion through the CMBR may in fact be the full answer to the question of why light appears to travel at the same speed in every direction (why there is no measurable etheral wind).
There is NO UNIVERSAL FRAME OF REFERENCE.
The frame of reference in which the microwave background radiation of the universe is stationary.
The idea is that mozilla would be chrooted to /usr/local/mozilla. Assuming a single user machine, you could simply have /usr/local/mozilla/etc/passwd point the home directory to /usr/local/mozilla/prefs, for instance. Assuming a multi-user machine, you'd have to have subdirectories, maybe /usr/local/mozilla/prefs/username. In the rare case of preferences which need to be shared between programs, you can hard link them into /usr/local/mozilla/prefs/username, /usr/local/netscape/prefs/username, and /home/username, for instance. The users directory would be essentially empty, and documents could be put in a separate partition (NFS mounted? There must be a cleaner way to do it...)
The only real problem I see is that it forces you to put basically everything in a single partition, but I'm sure if it ever caught on that could be worked around.
I'd rather have all the dates and configuration files in the chrooted user's home directory. Again, makes for easier cleanup. Any files which want to be explicitly shared can be hard linked just like the libraries.
Take a look at the list of publically traded software companies, ordered by market cap. What do you see? Microsoft's market cap is almost equal to the market caps of all the other software companies combined. Oracle is way behind with over 1/10 of the software market. Most of the top of the list is B2B.
The moral of the story is that consumer software (other than maybe games) does not make money. It doesn't matter if your product is open, closed, shareware, freeware, whatever, because copyright law is pretty much universally ignored for consumer software.
At least explicitly making the source open gives you some good PR, and forces management to come up with a workable business model which doesn't presume consumers paying for software, which just isn't going to happen.
I'd go one step further. Chroot the programs and hard link the required libraries into the chroot directory. Then you don't have to worry about annoying upgrade problems when one package insists on one set of libraries and another package insists on another. Also, when the hard link count goes down to 1 (the one in the master /lib directory), you can delete the file.
While we applaud Microsoft for raising the idea of helping poorer schools as part of the penalty phase of their conviction for monopolistic practices, we do not think that the remedy should be a mechanism by which Microsoft can further extend its monopoly.
Instead, we believe the remedy should be a mechanism by which Red Hat can create its own monpoly, on Linux Operating Systems.
I'm one of those kids who learned on APPLE and then got out into the real world, found no Apples at any companies, and adapted quite nicely, thank you.
I don't know a single person who knows how to use linux and doesn't know how to use windows... Do you? (And yes, I know a lot of people who know linux).
The main purpose of the computers in the schools isn't to teach operating systems anyway, it's to teach good old reading, writing, and arithmetic.
If I was in charge of IT at the school, I would certainly push to take the computers and immediately reformat the drive and install Linux. I wonder if Microsoft would allow that?
Bush administration is considering the creation of a secure new government communications network separate from the Internet that would be less vulnerable to attack and efforts to disrupt critical federal activities.
That's funny, I've always wanted the creation of an insecure anonymous non-government communications network separate (or on top of) the Internet that would be less vulnerable to efforts to regulate non-critical non-federal activities.
Umm, so does the Washington law. That's why it has been considered Constitutional
I guess we are arguing two different points. You seem to be saying that spam is sometimes illegal, I am saying spam is not always illegal. My initial comment, for instance was essentially "Spam is not illegal". I meant that in the same way as the true statement "Email is not illegal." Sending people unsolicited commercial email is not in and of itself illegal in any state of the US, as far as I know.
As for the fact that you say almost all of the spam that you're being sent is illegal, I guess that alone says that we don't need any more laws or regulations regarding spam, just enforcement of the current laws.
The spammers force third party ISPs to host their advertising by means of disk storage.
And you're forcing slashdot to host your nonsense by means of disk storage, but I'm not accusing you of theft.
Often spammers hijack third party mailservers to send their spew -- theft of service.
You have no argument from me on that one.
Sending junk e-mail to a domain that has specifically stated that it is not desired is trespass to chattel.
If the sender knows of your request. That is not the case most of the time.
By setting up a mail server and allowing random email addresses the ability to send to it, you are implicitly granting anyone the right to send you a limited amount of email. It's as though you have an open house and then try to sue certain people who arrive for trespassing.
Spam is illegal. Spammers should be tortured and killed, their heads should be placed on pikes that should line Silicon Valley.
IHBT. IHL. HAND?
California
Ruled unconstitutional. See Ferguson vs. Friendfinder.
Illinois
Only covers spam with false headers.
You break a contract, you're breaking law, unless the term itself is breaking the law.
Fine.
Breaching a contract is illegal. It's not criminal behaviour in most cases, but you know, contracts are legal documents and have the force of law.
Fine. But by that rationale, it's also illegal to threaten to sue someone, at least under Erols AUP (part 1i, banning threats and intimidation). It seems clear to me that there's a huge distinction between criminal law and contract law.
BTW, entering into a contract with the intent to violate it is usually considered fraud, which is a criminal offense.
Seems like something extremely hard to prosecute, and besides it still requires the help of the ISP. I just don't see how making threats to the spammer which you can't follow through on can possibly help. If you really care that much, contact the ISP. In 99% of the cases someone else has already done this anyway, though.
In any case, fine, maybe 50% of spam is illegal. I still think it's stupid to compare spamming to trespassing and theft. But hey, the anti-spam freaks are going to try to convince people that spamming is trespassing and theft, anyway.
There is a very simple mechanism by which lawyers will likely put an end to that: if you are part of a software "crowd" and someone in that crowd does something, you will be held at least in part responsible.
Only if you have reason to believe that something illegal is being done, and you do nothing about it.
On the other hand, you're participating in a barter system, and therefore have to obtain the identies of the others in the "crowd", so you can send them 1099-Bs to report their barter income.
In some states, the spam itself is illegal.
Name one. I'll give you a hint, not Washington.
Fraudulent contact information in WHOIS
What law is there against that?
Use of open relays
Most spam does not use open relays.
Use of dial-ups as mail servers and web servers, usually against ISP TOS
Breaking an ISP TOS is not at all illegal. It may be a breach of contract, but in most cases the spammer is not going to get in any more trouble than having his/her account deleted. Besides, if the spammer is breaking the ISP TOS, it makes little sense to make legal threats when you can just contact the ISP.
If you want to charge for spam, force people to agree to pay before you let them email you. It isn't that difficult to send an autoreply with a simple contract and a one time reply address for them to reply if they agree. That'll eliminate 99.9999999% of your spam, still allow people to contact you, and give you a shot in court of actually collecting money on the spam you do receive, especially if you ban IP addresses outside your own country.
A few people in the office suggested I reported them for threatening behaviour, but I never got around to it - after all, there's only so many hours in the day...
There's [sic] only so many hours in the day, yet you had the time to call the spammers and tie up their lines, and fax them? Admit it, the real reason you didn't report them is because you got scared once your fun little passive-aggressive games entered the real world, not some fantasy safe world of fax machines, phone calls, and internet access.
To my surprise, the following week I had a cheque in the mail from them, for $53.50. The payment stub that came with it said, payment enclosed for asshole fee, $50 plus sales tax.
I was amazed. On the other hand, I hotfooted it right to the bank and deposited the cheque, too!
Did you send the sales tax to your state government?
But seriously, the civil charges alone for such theft would run much higher than $50, not to mention the lawyer fees for the criminal case (and the possible jail time). Considering that you had their fax number and were potentially interested in persuing it, getting away with $53.50 was a pretty good deal.
Spammers, on the other hand, aren't doing anything illegal.
My second reaction, upon seeing it is opt-in, is who's stupid enough to sign up for this?
The yellow pages is opt-in advertising, but people still use it every day to find out the locations of certain types of stores. All they have to do is get a large enough number of stores to participate so that I can say "Onstar, where is the nearest pizza place. Place an order for a large pepperoni pie.", and there will be plent of people signing up for it. Hell, I'd probably consider signing up for it, if it was free like the yellow pages.
Marking your box fragile means something to the pick up guy/gal and the end delivery guy/gal at the very most. UPS is not there to ship fragile items which are not properly packed. They are there primarily to send properly packed items from mail order/internet stores to end users. As such they don't need your business, don't want your business, and have zero incentive to treat you in a way which is going to have you return your business.
Besides this, I know several people who are not coders, but still can tweak a program to make a minor modification. And even for those with zero programming knowledge, if the program is open source you know you could find someone to fix it if there's a relatively simple problem and the original author is out of business or otherwise not interested.
FreeBSD has serial console support. You don't get the BIOS, but you pretty much get everything other than that. If you're colocating two (or any even number of) machines, just hook up serial 1 of one machine to serial 2 of the other. Then you can log on even if the machine is in single-user mode, for OS upgrades and when a sudden reboot leaves you at the manual fsck prompt.