jmp100 wrote: >I read a news article a long time ago about pictures of Brooke Shields. Her mother >signed a contract with a photographer, who then took pictures of her before and during a >bath. Rather gross if you ask me, but then I don't understand lots of what people call "art."
That would be the film Pretty Baby, written and directed by the late Louis Malle. In the context of portraying Keith Carradine's character's sexual interest in young girls, the character played by the young Brooke Shields is portrayed fully nude. It was intended to be shocking. While such a film might not be made today, it was completely legal under the pornography laws in place in 1978 (and probably still is, except in Kansas...).
Here is the Jacobsen vs United States case involving the man targeted in a child porn sting. Even though he was convicted and every appeal along the way affirmed the government's case, the Supreme Court agreed that the investigation as conducted was entrapment.
kidzero asks: >Is he a child molestor if he didn't actually commit a crime?
A reasonable question. He's not charged with child molestation, but with "crossing state lines to have sex with a minor" -- and it's been recognized for some time that the target can be an adult law enforcement officer, but because of the defendant's predisposition to the crime, he is guilty. (Lack of predisposition is the crux of any successful entrapment defense -- such as the one you cited. That individual had to go all the way to the Supreme Court to be cleared, though.) This is one relevant Supreme Court case.
It's a smaller crime than actually molesting someone, but part of the purpose of these stings is media attention -- that is, ruined careers, friendships, etc. The idea is that they do enough of these high-profile arrests and fewer people will have the balls to go through with the real crime with real kids. In a word, deterrence.
Aside from the solicitation, though, Naughton was caught with a bunch of child pornography on his computer. Even if he gets a light sentence for the solicitation (which is likely), he'll still face imprisonment for the porn.
I don't believe the creators (researchers at IBM's T.J. Watson Institute) consider this to be true Artificial Intelligence.
But it is probably a pretty big deal. Now that the dreams of true Turing-esque AI are largely fallen by the wayside, researchers are focusing on smaller areas of interest and practical applications, e.g. expert systemsm, neural networks, or language processing. One important area is "human computer interaction", meaning not just one person sitting at their PC, but true communication between a person and a computer, either by typing or speaking. Thus, a computer that can "understand" the rudiments of grammar and "respond" in kind is a realistic proposition, even if you can say it's just an ELIZA program with a huge language database.
Just as expert systems have begun to replace, say, bank loan officers, companies are also looking to automate (for consistency as much as anything) portions of customer service. Imagine a system that can deal with the public, deciding whether the vendor has taken too many returned widgets this month and has to hold the line and suggest an exchange for a whatsis instead, that sort of thing. This would be a boon for small businesses trying to make it online.
A guy I knew a couple years ago was working on a project to have a computer read and interpret complaint letters, then recommend a course of action. This likely falls into the same category, except it's more like pure research.
Racter, alas, wasn't the breakthrough it was claimed to be. The sentences and word choices were done by computer, but the database that produced the sentence structure and word database (with heavily preselected word connections for "strangeness") was built by a man with a highly idiosyncratic style to begin with, and as in the Brutus.1 case, there was more useless output thrown away than we'll ever know. The public software probably wasn't capable of generating the stories in the book.
AtariDatacenter said: >Can't wait until fifty years from now when there's a colony on the moon or something. Heck, I'd trademark Linux, Pepsi-Cola, >the letter "X", and the number "3aF". No prior use on the moon would be great.
Well, under the 1979 UN Moon Treaty (applying to all bodies outside the Earth), individual nations retain sovereignty and legal jurisdiction over their vehicles and bases. Thus, an American colony would be governed by US law. At this point, a sovereign moon colony is not permitted.
nfgaida wrote: >> We could be the fluke of the universe >How likely is that? out of the 300 billion stars or so, (give or take a few billion) that our planet would be the only one?
We don't know how likely it is. It could be as common as grass; or we may be unique. We have no information either way to make a sound judgement.
>Come on... i'm not blaming you for this view, cause many people have it.. our society has it. >It goes back to my point about religious arrogance.
Well, it is a matter of faith. I happen to agree with you, though maybe not for the same reasons. I simply believe that the evolutionary process is effective enough that once life begins on a planet, reaching intelligent life is almost a given. Now, Earth had a couple of shots; the dinosaurs were around for millions of years, but they never built a space shuttle. We've only been around a few hundred thousand years, and have accomplished a great deal in a flicker of time.
I think that is a great argument for the near-inevitability of intelligent life. On the other hand, as Larry Niven points out, there's no guarantee that we'll be intelligent at the same time as another planet's intelligent inhabitants. And that we both develop space programs, or at the very least, effective SETI. We could be a single star system away from a planet that was inhabited by intelligent life... millenia ago.
Again, though, the bottom line is that we have no data, so an intelligent determination is impossible. All we have are assumptions, and guesses, and extrapolations.
Until we found out that Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune all have their own faint ring systems, we believed that Saturn was unique. Numerous sf stories were written where our solar system was "famous" as the one with the planet with the beautiful rings. Now, we have to assume that they're everyday things. But this, of course, is what makes astronomy exciting. We like not knowing, because that means there's more stuff to find out.
Actually, the article stated that it's located "near the center of our galaxy". That puts it somewhere around 20,000 light years from Earth (taking our distance from the center as being around 25,000, though it does get jiggered around as new observations are made).
Since the fastest space probe we can build now would take around 60-80,000 years to reach the nearest star system, Alpha Centauri, we can infer that the quickest we could reach this newly discovered planet is around 1,200,000,000 years. By then our own sun will likely be cooling and expanding, making Earth uninhabitable. Better hurry!
Even if we assume the capability to speed up a craft near light speed, say a solar sail or a reaction drive using interstellar hydrogen as fuel, we're still looking at twice the length of written human history to reach this star.
Now, assuming a warp drive, all bets are off. But that's a bit much to assume.
As for your last question, about how Earth-like it may be, we'll probably never know. That determination would require detailed spectral analysis, and the amount of light received in these observations just couldn't have been sufficient. Whether it has an atmosphere, water, a reasonable distance from its sun... although, given the proximity to the center of the galaxy, background radiation may well be too high for life as we know it to survive.
No, trademark law is certainly NOT international, although it's important to note that what happens in one country can affect what happens in another.
Trademark ownership in the USA does not imply trademark ownership in Germany. But it will be important to the case of the trademarking firm to demonstrate the use of their trademark in Germany (and in the USA). They can do neither, so unless the German trademark application process is extremely liberal, this can be easily opposed.
You may be thinking of copyright. Copyright is internationalized by the Berne Convention, a treaty which nearly all countries have signed. (The USA was one of the last holdouts, before anybody gets on a high horse.)
The movie encountered protests on release because of the extreme depiction of violence, and ran only in one London theater (but it ran there for a year). Thinking the fuss had abated, Warner Bros released it generally, but the British tabloid press laid into the film and Kubrick personally. Kubrick and his family did receive threats, though I've never heard "a brown bag with a ticking orange"! Eventually Kubrick asked WB to withdraw the film from the UK, and they did so quietly (as if it had simply ended its run). It wasn't until years later, when the movie was not released for a Kubrick film festival, that the ban became public knowledge -- which probably accounts for the rumors surrounding it.
Kubrick never changed his mind, and WB -- though within their full legal rights to do so -- respected his wishes.
According to his widow this year, "the film was withdrawn because we got so many threats that the police said we must do something and he withdrew it. [He was] both artistically hurt and also scared. He didn't want to be misunderstood and misinterpreted and you don't like to get death threats for your family."
This ban was never in effect in any other country (although it may have been banned for other reasons).
If you're too lazy to vote, well, you just voted. If you don't know enough about the candidates, stay the heck away from the voting booth.
I'm a dyed-in-the-wool populist, but I don't believe in the idea that "more people would vote if it were easier".
The reforms I do support:
move all election days to either Saturday or Sunday
standardized voting hours for Presidential elections (e.g. 8am EST to 8pm PST, *everywhere*)
*voluntary* voting registration at the DMV (i.e. make it easy, but not automatic)
Wisconsin-style open primaries with voting-day registration
a reformed primary/caucus schedule that rotates them so that all states get an equal chance to be a bellwether (like NH and IA always get to be) or an also-ran (like CA ended up being) [the states attorneys general have a plan, but it takes the legislatures to agree and cooperate]
secondary benefit of the above: a shortened presidential campaign, to prevent voter burnout
Well, I'm reminded of Winston Churchill's comment, something along the lines of "Democracy is the worst political system possible, except for all the rest."
I've come to respect the two-party winner-take-all voting system in the US. When I was younger, I preferred a parliamentary system, but I came to realize that most of them tend to give splinter parties too much leverage (especially the systems in place in Israel and Italy). The workings of our democracy may be ponderous and slow, but the founders thought that was a good thing!
The principle of one-man-one-vote is extremely important to American democratic ideals (although it isn't enshrined in law quite the way people think it is). The electoral college is a bit of a tinker-toy mechanism in between the popular vote and the presidential selection, but it nearly always validates that popular vote (there were a couple of 19th century exceptions) -- and what people forget is that it reinforces the idea that we are a Federal Republic that represents the interests of 50 quasi-independent states. Heaven forfend things should ever require it, but the electoral college provides a means for the states to prevent a fraudulent election.
Actually, no. My point was that the Sears catalog -- for a whole century prior to the net -- was something akin to online shopping. My overall point was that Prodigy/Sears offered this depot delivery service, solely because Sears had been doing it already for decades, which is a helpful link mostly missing from the current online shopping experience.
I've made points before (here and elsewhere) about how so many net businesses are essentially re-creating things that we've long had in other forms. Like before we had modern grocery stores, there were grocery delivery trucks that would drop off fresh goods at your back door. Now we have people investing US$billions in companies that... deliver fresh goods to your back door. Hmmm.
Your post probably got reposted, say to rec.humor.best-of-usenet. Or somebody quoted it in a sig. And before you know it you have a GEN-you-wine Ann Landers Craig Shergold immortal bit of netlore...
I doubt Wired (even today's craven Wired) would have printed your letter with the full knowledge that it was attributable to someone specifically. They're a company. They have lawyers. And whatever you think of them then (techno-weenies) or now (netbiz-weenies), they're magazine people, and magazines are actually a whole lot more cognizant of these kinds of issues than netfolk.
I mean, if they were printing it as "interesting found humor" I doubt they would have chosen to do so as a *letter*. That's pointless.
Prodigy's best feature, and the one that made it unique among early services (like QuantumLink/QLink [AOL], Compuserve, GEnie] was the online Sears catalog. The Sears catalog was, of course, the original "online shopping" experience -- the first time most people bought something without holding it in their hands first. And to service the catalog biz, Sears stores -- which used to be ubiquitous -- would have catalog depots where they would deliver your order. Going online via Prodigy, you could select what you needed, pay for it by credit card, and it would be in the depot practically the next day.
Now, most today would consider that a step backward -- home delivery via FedEx/UPS is the norm -- but some people (like me) are never home to receive packages. There's actually a new trend toward local businesses like convenience stores acting as delivery depots.
Prodigy always was the Avis of online services -- trying harder, never #1. The stuff they were always flamed for -- like the ads -- is commonplace enough today. (The only difference is that with the web, we have freedom of choice.)
Linux is a tiny market right now compared to Wintel. The gaming industry is (like other sectors) taking baby steps into the pond of Linux to test the waters, and what they're going to choose are products that have proven appeal. [In fact, that's the motto of Loki Software: bringing best-selling games to Linux.]
Railroad Tycoon is probably a good choice. Its appeal isn't just to the flash-in-the-pan crowd who buy every game the moment it hits the shelves, but also to a large class of non-hardcore gamers. Yes, the former will sniff at the "old" games (six months old!), but the scenario you envision...
ain't gonna happen.
Your proposal to "petition companies like Looking Glass, Westwood et all to release the quality games simultaneously" reflects a fan-boy activist mentality. Instead of using "petitions", why not use that old, tried-and-true method of influencing businesses: sales?
Loki's probably lucky to get the rights to port what it has so far (RRT2, MythII, some solitaire) and that's the way it's going to stay... until Linux is a proven gaming market. Just like the Macintosh, there are going to be few games with simultaneous releases on both platforms.
maybe my expectations were too high, but the one thing I always wanted from RRTycoon was an interface to a spreadsheet program, so I could export engine age data, route profit trends, and the like to something I could actually SEARCH and MANIPULATE. The more lines you put in, the more tedious the management became. I did a lot of pencil-and-paper recordkeeping to maximize my returns.
The other thing that really bugged me was the inability to do anything other than macro city-to-city line-building with other railroads you controlled. Shouldn't you get the same level of detail with them? Ah well.
You do realize that there's not much difference between an electronic transaction including/excluding sales tax, and an electric register (or manual) transaction including/exclusing sales tax?
The states that levy sales taxes also have enforcement divisions, and from time to time you do find a business that has been cheating. (Since generally businesses reimburse the government in lump sum payments representing the tax for many, many transactions, it is always tempting for a tenuous business to hold back some of that cash for itself -- something like adjusting withholding. You end up owing the same amount of tax; it's just a matter of whether you've paid it or not.)
Right now, the government DOES have the right to come in and examine your books, if they suspect tax cheating. So this really has little "internet" relevance.
miyax writes: If they can do this to Hotmail that means, just as easily, they can do this to any web-based e-mail service.
Uh, actually, no. That should read "to any badly-programmed web-mail service". See, they didn't invent some gosh-darn super-duper smart-agent neural-net jacked-into-the-matrix hack; they found out that Hotmail hadn't locked all the doors, that's all.
(Sadly, that's pretty much the case with ANY system cracking.)
Enoch Root (root@eruditorum.org) wrote: The story at CNN Interactive is interesting, because they're taking credit where credit arguably goes to Slashdot. [snip]
Shortly after CNN Interactive posted the story, one of the sites, based in Stockholm, Sweden, was changed to a simple message, "Microsoft rules."
Funny. The story was posted on CNN after it was reported here, and Hotmail went down at around 11:45 AM EDT, following the assault of/.ers. Besides, they don't mention the URL; how the hell could the CNN readers find it?
You're reading too much into that sentence, Enoch. They were simply editing the article; I read the first version, where they implied that the Swedish site was still up, but when it was blanked, they changed that sentence and almost nothing else. I don't think it was an attempt to take credit.
WHat bugs me about all the mainstream articles I've read so far -- CNN, even News.com -- seem to believe that the crack was only possible with the CGI script. The Hotmail PR line is "advanced programming techniques" -- which news.com swallowed whole hog. Fortunately ZDNet is reporting that "a simple HTML script" (long way to say "URL") could also thread the security needle.
Key details not found there (unless you poke around some) are that the court case involved anonymous e-mail sent by a critic of the Church of Scientology, a lawsuit brought by Scientologists in Finland against Julf, and the subpoena served on Julf by reluctant Finnish police. Julf had simply hoped this day would never arrive; when it did, somewhat more quickly than he had expected, he was caught off-guard. Since he realized that he did not have the resources to protect the users of the service, he closed it.
which did do the job of servicing users anonymously well. The machine which did the work wasn't even physically connected to the internet except by UUCP connections over a phone line several times a day. Latency was large, but it did provide security.
Julf did a great job with anon.penet.fi, but let's not oversell it. The anon.penet.fi did nothing more spectacular than remail your text with its headers. There were instances of the service being spoofed, accidentally revealing addresses, and being abused by someone with prior (social) knowledge of the real e-mail address associated with an anon.penet.fi address. And in the end, it all boiled down to Julf: did you trust him? He was honorable, but that wasn't guaranteed.
Nevertheless, many thousands used the service mainly because it was the easiest anonymizer to use. And yes, as many security geeks pointed out endlessly, the ease of use made it more vulnerable than other systems.
I recently saw something that made a similar confusion -- alleging that historically, "art" was made by men, and women made only "crafts". The difference, allegedly, between painting and weaving.
I didn't buy it then, and I don't buy it here. The historic status of craftsmen was high. The respect given a blacksmith or a stonemason was in proportion to the quality of their work. (Try to get a decent tuckpointing job these days... but that's a different story.)
The difference, then, was between art being something luxurious and unnecessary, and yet an expected part of life, and craft being the art, as it were, of making necessary things unexpectedly well. To me, programming falls into the latter camp. And that is a mark of respect.
A good coder is a good craftsman. The code does something necessary (the end result) but the virtue of being good code is not necessary to that end result -- it is simply doing the necessary well.
Open Source may help this process along, encourage it, even make it practically mandatory in certain circles. Of course, Open Source isn't the only way to get there. Good craft comes from within, from the personal pride of the craftsman, from the knowledge that his skill is something special.
Slashdot Mirror
jmp100 wrote:
...).
>I read a news article a long time ago about pictures of Brooke Shields. Her mother
>signed a contract with a photographer, who then took pictures of her before and during a
>bath. Rather gross if you ask me, but then I don't understand lots of what people call "art."
That would be the film Pretty Baby, written and directed by the late Louis Malle. In the context of portraying Keith Carradine's character's sexual interest in young girls, the character played by the young Brooke Shields is portrayed fully nude. It was intended to be shocking. While such a film might not be made today, it was completely legal under the pornography laws in place in 1978 (and probably still is, except in Kansas
Here is the Jacobsen vs United States case involving the man targeted in a child porn sting. Even though he was convicted and every appeal along the way affirmed the government's case, the Supreme Court agreed that the investigation as conducted was entrapment.
kidzero asks:
>Is he a child molestor if he didn't actually commit a crime?
A reasonable question. He's not charged with child molestation, but with "crossing state lines to have sex with a minor" -- and it's been recognized for some time that the target can be an adult law enforcement officer, but because of the defendant's predisposition to the crime, he is guilty. (Lack of predisposition is the crux of any successful entrapment defense -- such as the one you cited. That individual had to go all the way to the Supreme Court to be cleared, though.) This is one relevant Supreme Court case.
It's a smaller crime than actually molesting someone, but part of the purpose of these stings is media attention -- that is, ruined careers, friendships, etc. The idea is that they do enough of these high-profile arrests and fewer people will have the balls to go through with the real crime with real kids. In a word, deterrence.
Aside from the solicitation, though, Naughton was caught with a bunch of child pornography on his computer. Even if he gets a light sentence for the solicitation (which is likely), he'll still face imprisonment for the porn.
I don't believe the creators (researchers at IBM's T.J. Watson Institute) consider this to be true Artificial Intelligence.
But it is probably a pretty big deal. Now that the dreams of true Turing-esque AI are largely fallen by the wayside, researchers are focusing on smaller areas of interest and practical applications, e.g. expert systemsm, neural networks, or language processing. One important area is "human computer interaction", meaning not just one person sitting at their PC, but true communication between a person and a computer, either by typing or speaking. Thus, a computer that can "understand" the rudiments of grammar and "respond" in kind is a realistic proposition, even if you can say it's just an ELIZA program with a huge language database.
Just as expert systems have begun to replace, say, bank loan officers, companies are also looking to automate (for consistency as much as anything) portions of customer service. Imagine a system that can deal with the public, deciding whether the vendor has taken too many returned widgets this month and has to hold the line and suggest an exchange for a whatsis instead, that sort of thing. This would be a boon for small businesses trying to make it online.
A guy I knew a couple years ago was working on a project to have a computer read and interpret complaint letters, then recommend a course of action. This likely falls into the same category, except it's more like pure research.
Racter, alas, wasn't the breakthrough it was claimed to be. The sentences and word choices were done by computer, but the database that produced the sentence structure and word database (with heavily preselected word connections for "strangeness") was built by a man with a highly idiosyncratic style to begin with, and as in the Brutus.1 case, there was more useless output thrown away than we'll ever know. The public software probably wasn't capable of generating the stories in the book.
Read Jorn Barger's Racter FAQ.
It's probably going too far to call it a hoax, but there certainly was more hype than substance here.
AtariDatacenter said:
>Can't wait until fifty years from now when there's a colony on the moon or something. Heck, I'd trademark Linux, Pepsi-Cola,
>the letter "X", and the number "3aF". No prior use on the moon would be great.
Well, under the 1979 UN Moon Treaty (applying to all bodies outside the Earth), individual nations retain sovereignty and legal jurisdiction over their vehicles and bases. Thus, an American colony would be governed by US law. At this point, a sovereign moon colony is not permitted.
nfgaida wrote:
... millenia ago.
>> We could be the fluke of the universe
>How likely is that? out of the 300 billion stars or so, (give or take a few billion) that our planet would be the only one?
We don't know how likely it is. It could be as common as grass; or we may be unique. We have no information either way to make a sound judgement.
>Come on... i'm not blaming you for this view, cause many people have it.. our society has it.
>It goes back to my point about religious arrogance.
Well, it is a matter of faith. I happen to agree with you, though maybe not for the same reasons. I simply believe that the evolutionary process is effective enough that once life begins on a planet, reaching intelligent life is almost a given. Now, Earth had a couple of shots; the dinosaurs were around for millions of years, but they never built a space shuttle. We've only been around a few hundred thousand years, and have accomplished a great deal in a flicker of time.
I think that is a great argument for the near-inevitability of intelligent life. On the other hand, as Larry Niven points out, there's no guarantee that we'll be intelligent at the same time as another planet's intelligent inhabitants. And that we both develop space programs, or at the very least, effective SETI. We could be a single star system away from a planet that was inhabited by intelligent life
Again, though, the bottom line is that we have no data, so an intelligent determination is impossible. All we have are assumptions, and guesses, and extrapolations.
Until we found out that Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune all have their own faint ring systems, we believed that Saturn was unique. Numerous sf stories were written where our solar system was "famous" as the one with the planet with the beautiful rings. Now, we have to assume that they're everyday things. But this, of course, is what makes astronomy exciting. We like not knowing, because that means there's more stuff to find out.
Actually, the article stated that it's located "near the center of our galaxy". That puts it somewhere around 20,000 light years from Earth (taking our distance from the center as being around 25,000, though it does get jiggered around as new observations are made).
... although, given the proximity to the center of the galaxy, background radiation may well be too high for life as we know it to survive.
Since the fastest space probe we can build now would take around 60-80,000 years to reach the nearest star system, Alpha Centauri, we can infer that the quickest we could reach this newly discovered planet is around 1,200,000,000 years. By then our own sun will likely be cooling and expanding, making Earth uninhabitable. Better hurry!
Even if we assume the capability to speed up a craft near light speed, say a solar sail or a reaction drive using interstellar hydrogen as fuel, we're still looking at twice the length of written human history to reach this star.
Now, assuming a warp drive, all bets are off. But that's a bit much to assume.
As for your last question, about how Earth-like it may be, we'll probably never know. That determination would require detailed spectral analysis, and the amount of light received in these observations just couldn't have been sufficient. Whether it has an atmosphere, water, a reasonable distance from its sun
No, trademark law is certainly NOT international, although it's important to note that what happens in one country can affect what happens in another.
Trademark ownership in the USA does not imply trademark ownership in Germany. But it will be important to the case of the trademarking firm to demonstrate the use of their trademark in Germany (and in the USA). They can do neither, so unless the German trademark application process is extremely liberal, this can be easily opposed.
You may be thinking of copyright. Copyright is internationalized by the Berne Convention, a treaty which nearly all countries have signed. (The USA was one of the last holdouts, before anybody gets on a high horse.)
The movie encountered protests on release because of the extreme depiction of violence, and ran only in one London theater (but it ran there for a year). Thinking the fuss had abated, Warner Bros released it generally, but the British tabloid press laid into the film and Kubrick personally. Kubrick and his family did receive threats, though I've never heard "a brown bag with a ticking orange"! Eventually Kubrick asked WB to withdraw the film from the UK, and they did so quietly (as if it had simply ended its run). It wasn't until years later, when the movie was not released for a Kubrick film festival, that the ban became public knowledge -- which probably accounts for the rumors surrounding it.
Kubrick never changed his mind, and WB -- though within their full legal rights to do so -- respected his wishes.
According to his widow this year, "the film was withdrawn because we got so many threats that the police said we must do something and he withdrew it. [He was] both artistically hurt and also scared. He didn't want to be misunderstood and misinterpreted and you don't like to get death threats for your family."
This ban was never in effect in any other country (although it may have been banned for other reasons).
I'm a dyed-in-the-wool populist, but I don't believe in the idea that "more people would vote if it were easier".
The reforms I do support:
Well, I'm reminded of Winston Churchill's comment, something along the lines of "Democracy is the worst political system possible, except for all the rest."
I've come to respect the two-party winner-take-all voting system in the US. When I was younger, I preferred a parliamentary system, but I came to realize that most of them tend to give splinter parties too much leverage (especially the systems in place in Israel and Italy). The workings of our democracy may be ponderous and slow, but the founders thought that was a good thing!
The principle of one-man-one-vote is extremely important to American democratic ideals (although it isn't enshrined in law quite the way people think it is). The electoral college is a bit of a tinker-toy mechanism in between the popular vote and the presidential selection, but it nearly always validates that popular vote (there were a couple of 19th century exceptions) -- and what people forget is that it reinforces the idea that we are a Federal Republic that represents the interests of 50 quasi-independent states. Heaven forfend things should ever require it, but the electoral college provides a means for the states to prevent a fraudulent election.
Actually, no. My point was that the Sears catalog -- for a whole century prior to the net -- was something akin to online shopping. My overall point was that Prodigy/Sears offered this depot delivery service, solely because Sears had been doing it already for decades, which is a helpful link mostly missing from the current online shopping experience.
... deliver fresh goods to your back door. Hmmm.
I've made points before (here and elsewhere) about how so many net businesses are essentially re-creating things that we've long had in other forms. Like before we had modern grocery stores, there were grocery delivery trucks that would drop off fresh goods at your back door. Now we have people investing US$billions in companies that
I said,
'the Sears catalog was, of course, the original "online shopping" experience'
which the astute reader will recognize as a bit of irony, there having been no such thing as the internet in the nineteenth century.
Your post probably got reposted, say to rec.humor.best-of-usenet. Or somebody quoted it in a sig. And before you know it you have a GEN-you-wine Ann Landers Craig Shergold immortal bit of netlore ...
I doubt Wired (even today's craven Wired) would have printed your letter with the full knowledge that it was attributable to someone specifically. They're a company. They have lawyers. And whatever you think of them then (techno-weenies) or now (netbiz-weenies), they're magazine people, and magazines are actually a whole lot more cognizant of these kinds of issues than netfolk.
I mean, if they were printing it as "interesting found humor" I doubt they would have chosen to do so as a *letter*. That's pointless.
Hardly. Maybe to YOU, but who the hell are you to say what every computer should do?
iMacs are the right computer for a whole lot of people. That's why Apple's selling a ton of them.
If you don't think computers should be easy to use, you're part of the problem.
Prodigy's best feature, and the one that made it unique among early services (like QuantumLink/QLink [AOL], Compuserve, GEnie] was the online Sears catalog. The Sears catalog was, of course, the original "online shopping" experience -- the first time most people bought something without holding it in their hands first. And to service the catalog biz, Sears stores -- which used to be ubiquitous -- would have catalog depots where they would deliver your order. Going online via Prodigy, you could select what you needed, pay for it by credit card, and it would be in the depot practically the next day.
Now, most today would consider that a step backward -- home delivery via FedEx/UPS is the norm -- but some people (like me) are never home to receive packages. There's actually a new trend toward local businesses like convenience stores acting as delivery depots.
Prodigy always was the Avis of online services -- trying harder, never #1. The stuff they were always flamed for -- like the ads -- is commonplace enough today. (The only difference is that with the web, we have freedom of choice.)
Uh, you want to take a business class or two?
...
... until Linux is a proven gaming market. Just like the Macintosh, there are going to be few games with simultaneous releases on both platforms.
Linux is a tiny market right now compared to Wintel. The gaming industry is (like other sectors) taking baby steps into the pond of Linux to test the waters, and what they're going to choose are products that have proven appeal. [In fact, that's the motto of Loki Software: bringing best-selling games to Linux.]
Railroad Tycoon is probably a good choice. Its appeal isn't just to the flash-in-the-pan crowd who buy every game the moment it hits the shelves, but also to a large class of non-hardcore gamers. Yes, the former will sniff at the "old" games (six months old!), but the scenario you envision
ain't gonna happen.
Your proposal to "petition companies like Looking Glass, Westwood et all to release the quality games simultaneously" reflects a fan-boy activist mentality. Instead of using "petitions", why not use that old, tried-and-true method of influencing businesses: sales?
Loki's probably lucky to get the rights to port what it has so far (RRT2, MythII, some solitaire) and that's the way it's going to stay
maybe my expectations were too high, but the one thing I always wanted from RRTycoon was an interface to a spreadsheet program, so I could export engine age data, route profit trends, and the like to something I could actually SEARCH and MANIPULATE. The more lines you put in, the more tedious the management became. I did a lot of pencil-and-paper recordkeeping to maximize my returns.
The other thing that really bugged me was the inability to do anything other than macro city-to-city line-building with other railroads you controlled. Shouldn't you get the same level of detail with them? Ah well.
You do realize that there's not much difference between an electronic transaction including/excluding sales tax, and an electric register (or manual) transaction including/exclusing sales tax?
The states that levy sales taxes also have enforcement divisions, and from time to time you do find a business that has been cheating. (Since generally businesses reimburse the government in lump sum payments representing the tax for many, many transactions, it is always tempting for a tenuous business to hold back some of that cash for itself -- something like adjusting withholding. You end up owing the same amount of tax; it's just a matter of whether you've paid it or not.)
Right now, the government DOES have the right to come in and examine your books, if they suspect tax cheating. So this really has little "internet" relevance.
miyax writes:
If they can do this to Hotmail that means, just as easily, they can do this to any web-based e-mail service.
Uh, actually, no. That should read "to any badly-programmed web-mail service". See, they didn't invent some gosh-darn super-duper smart-agent neural-net jacked-into-the-matrix hack; they found out that Hotmail hadn't locked all the doors, that's all.
(Sadly, that's pretty much the case with ANY system cracking.)
The story at CNN Interactive is interesting, because they're taking credit where credit arguably goes to Slashdot. [snip]
Shortly after CNN Interactive posted the story, one of the sites, based in Stockholm, Sweden, was changed to a simple message, "Microsoft rules."
Funny. The story was posted on CNN after it was reported here, and Hotmail went down at around 11:45 AM EDT, following the assault of
You're reading too much into that sentence, Enoch. They were simply editing the article; I read the first version, where they implied that the Swedish site was still up, but when it was blanked, they changed that sentence and almost nothing else. I don't think it was an attempt to take credit.
WHat bugs me about all the mainstream articles I've read so far -- CNN, even News.com -- seem to believe that the crack was only possible with the CGI script. The Hotmail PR line is "advanced programming techniques" -- which news.com swallowed whole hog. Fortunately ZDNet is reporting that "a simple HTML script" (long way to say "URL") could also thread the security needle.
substrate wrote:
A few years ago there was a true anonymous mail service based in (I think) Finland. It was something like penet.fi (its been awhile)
anon.penet.fi, yes. Read the story of its demise.
Key details not found there (unless you poke around some) are that the court case involved anonymous e-mail sent by a critic of the Church of Scientology, a lawsuit brought by Scientologists in Finland against Julf, and the subpoena served on Julf by reluctant Finnish police. Julf had simply hoped this day would never arrive; when it did, somewhat more quickly than he had expected, he was caught off-guard. Since he realized that he did not have the resources to protect the users of the service, he closed it.
which did do the job of servicing users anonymously well. The machine which did the work wasn't even physically connected to the internet except by UUCP connections over a phone line several times a day. Latency was large, but it did provide security.
Julf did a great job with anon.penet.fi, but let's not oversell it. The anon.penet.fi did nothing more spectacular than remail your text with its headers. There were instances of the service being spoofed, accidentally revealing addresses, and being abused by someone with prior (social) knowledge of the real e-mail address associated with an anon.penet.fi address. And in the end, it all boiled down to Julf: did you trust him? He was honorable, but that wasn't guaranteed.
Nevertheless, many thousands used the service mainly because it was the easiest anonymizer to use. And yes, as many security geeks pointed out endlessly, the ease of use made it more vulnerable than other systems.
Here's a link to the e-mail record of the defense of the Linux® trademark in the US.
I recently saw something that made a similar confusion -- alleging that historically, "art" was made by men, and women made only "crafts". The difference, allegedly, between painting and weaving.
... but that's a different story.)
I didn't buy it then, and I don't buy it here. The historic status of craftsmen was high. The respect given a blacksmith or a stonemason was in proportion to the quality of their work. (Try to get a decent tuckpointing job these days
The difference, then, was between art being something luxurious and unnecessary, and yet an expected part of life, and craft being the art, as it were, of making necessary things unexpectedly well. To me, programming falls into the latter camp. And that is a mark of respect.
A good coder is a good craftsman. The code does something necessary (the end result) but the virtue of being good code is not necessary to that end result -- it is simply doing the necessary well.
Open Source may help this process along, encourage it, even make it practically mandatory in certain circles. Of course, Open Source isn't the only way to get there. Good craft comes from within, from the personal pride of the craftsman, from the knowledge that his skill is something special.