And how many of those media outlets have interlocking "content" deals? Let's see, Washington Post (which owns Newsweek) is in a content partnership with MSNBC/MSN News. CNN is of course AOLTW and is seriously talking about a shared-news partnership with ABC/Disney.
NY Times and NYT-owned papers (e.g. Boston Globe) have similar content partnerships.
And since when do the "three major broadcast stations (sic) here in the US get their stories from the New York Times"? The major Networks (not stations) get their stories in part from their own news staffs - such as NBC (GE-owned, MSFT-partner) News, ABC (Disney-owned, future AOLTW/CNN partner), and CBS News (Viacom/Paramount Pictures/MTV/UPN).
Every one of them has a parent or partner with good reason to put limits on content, bandwidth, and on all us "bandwidth hogs".
Associated Press reports are typically supplements to the news, not the main content of the news (except for tiny low-budget "rip and read" stations), and the "associated" part of it in many cases means stories contributed by stations and papers which are subscribers/members of AP.
No, it's not at all surprising that the mainstream media ignores this issue.
They know it won't stand up. That's why they're going after real small "mom and pop" businesses. Somebody who doesn't have lawyers on retainer, who can't afford the time away from running their business to fight it.
Think they'd try this with walmart.com or Amazon? The article implies they are considering it, but you know that's just bluster.
These sleazeballs aren't stupid enough to pick on sombody who could fight back.
You know, Mastercard, Amex, Visa, and Discover all tell you to sign your card as soon as you receive it. As an example, here's Mastercard's Fraud Info page.
I'm not going to do your research for you but I've seen statement mailers, various web pages, and other consumer info from each of them over the years that all said "See ID" or similar is not valid to put on the card. More importantly, unless that card is signed with your signature rather than some bogus phrase, you technically haven't followed your terms of the contract. Arguably they could claim that because you didn't sign the card, they aren't liable, because you didn't take the reasonable (and required under the contract) action of signing the card.
"See ID" is a nice idea, but it's kind of like that wacky MS EULA-bypass stuff we always see here. People get some idea that by finding a way not to take a specific physical action like clicking a button or signing a card, they've changed the contract. I doubt that would hold up. There may even be unintended consequences like claiming the cardholder didn't take the necessary and reasonable steps to protect the card.
(And in the case of the EULA-bypasser, MS might claim use of a "circumvention device" under the DMCA.)
Access to Netscape's webmail, from within the same Mail application as your popmail.
This may not matter to you, and in fact it doesn't matter to me either. But for someone who chooses to rely on theirname@netscape.net for email, the NS-branded versions of Mozilla give them a much better email client than using Netscape.com's webmail.
Make the case that they've made a totally inaccurate categorization that is blocking software developers from accessing the leading open-source software repository.
I mentioned it's possibly a libelous miscategorization to call it an mp3 site.
Probably best not to be too rabid, but we shouls/. their mailserver with emails.
"Mozilla also fails to use my system colours, this is another clasic 'You fool' usability bug."
No, wrong.
The Modern theme is designed to use its own colors. The Classic theme (kinda like NS4) does pick up system colors.
Moz's XUL-based themes allow you to design themes either way. It would be a bug if a theme that *did* have specific colors was overriden by the system.
There are probably some new themes out there you'll like. Click the "Get New Themes" link in the Themes preference panel.
You can't do any page layout with CSS-defined scrolling in Opera. overflow:scroll and overflow:auto don't work - try it and you'll get text falling out of your css-defined text block instead of the automatic generation of scrollbars from Mozilla. Even IE5 and IE6 do that ok - to my mind it's a major failing in Opera. And I like Opera.
I had to redesign pages that I had wanted to do with pure CSS layout rather than tables and frames in order to get independent sections with their own overflow scrolling. They were absolutely fine in IE and Mozilla.
Let's see, there was one major security hole in Mozilla, and it was fixed in about 2 days. That's worse than MS why? You could have gotten a nightly within a couple of days of Greymagic's posting. And RC2 has it fixed if you want a milestone release.
At least with moz prior to the real 1.0, I know I'm using software that isn't declared "done" yet.
you can right-click inside the message and choose print to print the email.
Heck, you can just select the message headers in the mailbox list (not even preview them), right-click, and print. Just proved it on 0.9.9+ 2002041003 build. What more do you need for printing?
Ironically, Netscape 6.2 does work on MSNBC, including all the cascading menus/DHTML stuff. So it's purely due to MSNBC doing *incorrect* browser sniffing - looking explicitly for Netscape 6.x rather than for any Mozilla/Gecko-based browser.
I emailed them via their feedback form last week. Don't know if it will help, but since they *do* support the arch-competitor TWAOL Netscape-branded browser, maybe it was just a coding bug.
OTOH, I wonder what MS considers more of a threat? Another monopoly-style media/internet conglomerate like AOL Time-Warner, or the Open Source movement? Maybe supporting branded-Netscape but not Open Source Mozilla is deliberate...
That's why moz 0.9.9 or higher is great. There's an option to block *unrequested* windows. If you explicitly click a link, the popup will open. But the page can't open it on it's own via javascript unassociated with you clicking a link.
Just what the world needs, another corporate MS admin who thinks the answer to Window's inherent fragility is to swap out the user's drive (or re-image it) with a "fresh install".
We had MSCE-but-business-sense-free cluefree PC support like that at my company for a while. Their solution to everything wrong with Windows was to re-image. To hell with your data (and they didn't provide enough LAN space to back up local data fully). Blow away anything that wasn't "Corporate standard". Ignore the fact that developers here all had various different tools - a DB2 Connect for NT install here, Sybase or Oracle there, XML Authority over in the next row. Just lay back down the standard MS-Office, locked-down browser, and corporate time-reporting tools and say "job well done."
No clue what people really need to do their work in the real world. Morons.
Windows is inherently unrepairable. Settings are basically not transferable (yes I know about tools which attempt to do this with some slight success). Ultimately it's Service Pack, oops stil no good re-image, oops still not right, upgrade to next version - oh now too slow. Guess you need to order a new machine.
Although I agree that Linux is not quite ready for the mainstream desktop in all cases, it is in some. It clearly is working for Largo. Hell, I even had my sweet-but-technically-challenged girlfriend use Linux to connect to the Net, browse the web and get e-mail with Mozilla, and use StarOffice to work on a paper she's writing, this weekend when we were away and I didn't feel like booting my laptop back over to W2K. KDE and Gnome are not unfathomable to the average user.
And Linux is far more maintainable and recoverable than Windows. Attitudes like "if you fuck things up, all that we will do is swap your hard drive with one with a fresh install on it" prove the point.
Handsring's VisorPhone actually is pretty close to what you described.
It pops into the Springboard slot of a Visor (Palm-compatible PDA) and adds GSM phone capability. It does actually have 2 buttons - a multifunction "Phone" button that does one-touch answer, hangup, swaps between speeddial, call history, and phone keypad modes, depending on context. So if you have it in a belt clip with the headset, you can answer a call without taking the Visor out of the case.
The second button is an SMS button that brings up the VisorPhone SMS application. Oh yeah, there's a 3rd button for phone power, but otherwise it's all controlled from software via the PDA.
Kensington has a (vaporous) minimal keypad display coming out soon that will let the phone be controlled with minimal functionality while out of the PDA. If, for instance, you have the MP3 player, GPS, or digital camera module plugged in instead.
It's definitely v1.0 or maybe 1.2 at best, not a fully polished, slick-looking product. But it's surprisingly workable. Software needs to be enhanced some; your applets to automate vmail retreival aren't there. At the old $299 price it was a cute toy. At the new $49 with service price I just grabbed one.
Decent browser too (Blazer, does HTML, cHTML, HDML and WML) - data connectivity and response seems far better than when I used a CDPD Minstrel wireless module with it, even though 2G GSM data is theoretically not as fast as CDPD.
If you have a Visor, or are considering a PalmOS PDA it's worth a look. GSM-only though, no analog fallback. Though marketed as 1900 MHz GSM only, Handspring now admits it works as "world phone" on 900Mhz GSM as well.
"if you can get them to cooperate" regarding freedom not to use Verisign as a Registrar.
Oh, so a company whose service is so bad that you have to hope "you can get them to cooperate" in order NOT to use them, is worthy of having its monopoly continued in another area?
I'm well aware of the difference between a Registry and Registrar. Bad Acts as a Registrar should absolutely have been considered in any decision to extend its monopoly as a Registry.
That standard is applied in most realms of business and consumer activism - why do you think people boycotted Nestle chocolate when they were protesting unethical distribution of infant formula in 3rd-world countries that couldn't afford to use it safely?
I don't care if Netsol/Verisign is an absolute saint as a Registry. They are absolute slime as a Registrar, and that should disqualify them from a continued monopoly as registry and especially from still being able to be both.
Verisign got where it is by hard work alone? Ridiculous. They got there by having a long-term US government-granted monopoly as the only registrar for years. As Network Solutions, before Verisign bought them, and before the domain registrar function was forcibly opened up to competition.
Remember how www.internic.net got redirected to Network Solutions Commercial registrar service even after competition began? How about the ongoing tales of horrible service, e-mail-loop-hell, and deliberate scarfing up of expired names. It took me months to get Network Solutions to "allow" me to transfer one of my domains to another registrar. They kept finding reasons why they couldn't process my transfer even though I'd filled out all the templates properly.
Verisign as a Registrar is about where AT&T as a phone company was in 1967 - "we're the registrar, we don't have to care". They are doing everything they can to hold on to what's left of their monopoly.
Slashdot Mirror
The Dean wanted to mount the Windows shares without tunneling through a VPN?
Do you work for that Yale admissions office that got hacked by Dartmouth?
And how many of those media outlets have interlocking "content" deals? Let's see, Washington Post (which owns Newsweek) is in a content partnership with MSNBC/MSN News. CNN is of course AOLTW and is seriously talking about a shared-news partnership with ABC/Disney.
NY Times and NYT-owned papers (e.g. Boston Globe) have similar content partnerships.
And since when do the "three major broadcast stations (sic) here in the US get their stories from the New York Times"? The major Networks (not stations) get their stories in part from their own news staffs - such as NBC (GE-owned, MSFT-partner) News, ABC (Disney-owned, future AOLTW/CNN partner), and CBS News (Viacom/Paramount Pictures/MTV/UPN).
Every one of them has a parent or partner with good reason to put limits on content, bandwidth, and on all us "bandwidth hogs".
Associated Press reports are typically supplements to the news, not the main content of the news (except for tiny low-budget "rip and read" stations), and the "associated" part of it in many cases means stories contributed by stations and papers which are subscribers/members of AP.
No, it's not at all surprising that the mainstream media ignores this issue.
They know it won't stand up. That's why they're going after real small "mom and pop" businesses. Somebody who doesn't have lawyers on retainer, who can't afford the time away from running their business to fight it.
Think they'd try this with walmart.com or Amazon? The article implies they are considering it, but you know that's just bluster.
These sleazeballs aren't stupid enough to pick on sombody who could fight back.
Typical abuse of our legal system.
You know, Mastercard, Amex, Visa, and Discover all tell you to sign your card as soon as you receive it. As an example, here's Mastercard's Fraud Info page.
I'm not going to do your research for you but I've seen statement mailers, various web pages, and other consumer info from each of them over the years that all said "See ID" or similar is not valid to put on the card. More importantly, unless that card is signed with your signature rather than some bogus phrase, you technically haven't followed your terms of the contract. Arguably they could claim that because you didn't sign the card, they aren't liable, because you didn't take the reasonable (and required under the contract) action of signing the card.
"See ID" is a nice idea, but it's kind of like that wacky MS EULA-bypass stuff we always see here. People get some idea that by finding a way not to take a specific physical action like clicking a button or signing a card, they've changed the contract. I doubt that would hold up. There may even be unintended consequences like claiming the cardholder didn't take the necessary and reasonable steps to protect the card.
(And in the case of the EULA-bypasser, MS might claim use of a "circumvention device" under the DMCA.)
Access to Netscape's webmail, from within the same Mail application as your popmail.
This may not matter to you, and in fact it doesn't matter to me either. But for someone who chooses to rely on theirname@netscape.net for email, the NS-branded versions of Mozilla give them a much better email client than using Netscape.com's webmail.
sites@smartfilter.com
/. their mailserver with emails.
Make the case that they've made a totally inaccurate categorization that is blocking software developers from accessing the leading open-source software repository.
I mentioned it's possibly a libelous miscategorization to call it an mp3 site.
Probably best not to be too rabid, but we shouls
"Mozilla also fails to use my system colours, this is another clasic 'You fool' usability bug."
No, wrong.
The Modern theme is designed to use its own colors. The Classic theme (kinda like NS4) does pick up system colors.
Moz's XUL-based themes allow you to design themes either way. It would be a bug if a theme that *did* have specific colors was overriden by the system.
There are probably some new themes out there you'll like. Click the "Get New Themes" link in the Themes preference panel.
There were fixes since RC2 but it was RC1 (and earlier) that had the one security issue. RC2 doesn't have it.
You can't do any page layout with CSS-defined scrolling in Opera. overflow:scroll and overflow:auto don't work - try it and you'll get text falling out of your css-defined text block instead of the automatic generation of scrollbars from Mozilla. Even IE5 and IE6 do that ok - to my mind it's a major failing in Opera. And I like Opera.
I had to redesign pages that I had wanted to do with pure CSS layout rather than tables and frames in order to get independent sections with their own overflow scrolling. They were absolutely fine in IE and Mozilla.
Let's see, there was one major security hole in Mozilla, and it was fixed in about 2 days. That's worse than MS why? You could have gotten a nightly within a couple of days of Greymagic's posting. And RC2 has it fixed if you want a milestone release.
At least with moz prior to the real 1.0, I know I'm using software that isn't declared "done" yet.
you can right-click inside the message and choose print to print the email.
Heck, you can just select the message headers in the mailbox list (not even preview them), right-click, and print. Just proved it on 0.9.9+ 2002041003 build. What more do you need for printing?
Ironically, Netscape 6.2 does work on MSNBC, including all the cascading menus/DHTML stuff. So it's purely due to MSNBC doing *incorrect* browser sniffing - looking explicitly for Netscape 6.x rather than for any Mozilla/Gecko-based browser.
I emailed them via their feedback form last week. Don't know if it will help, but since they *do* support the arch-competitor TWAOL Netscape-branded browser, maybe it was just a coding bug.
OTOH, I wonder what MS considers more of a threat? Another monopoly-style media/internet conglomerate like AOL Time-Warner, or the Open Source movement? Maybe supporting branded-Netscape but not Open Source Mozilla is deliberate...
That's why moz 0.9.9 or higher is great. There's an option to block *unrequested* windows. If you explicitly click a link, the popup will open. But the page can't open it on it's own via javascript unassociated with you clicking a link.
We had MSCE-but-business-sense-free cluefree PC support like that at my company for a while. Their solution to everything wrong with Windows was to re-image. To hell with your data (and they didn't provide enough LAN space to back up local data fully). Blow away anything that wasn't "Corporate standard". Ignore the fact that developers here all had various different tools - a DB2 Connect for NT install here, Sybase or Oracle there, XML Authority over in the next row. Just lay back down the standard MS-Office, locked-down browser, and corporate time-reporting tools and say "job well done."
No clue what people really need to do their work in the real world. Morons.
Windows is inherently unrepairable. Settings are basically not transferable (yes I know about tools which attempt to do this with some slight success). Ultimately it's Service Pack, oops stil no good re-image, oops still not right, upgrade to next version - oh now too slow. Guess you need to order a new machine.
Although I agree that Linux is not quite ready for the mainstream desktop in all cases, it is in some. It clearly is working for Largo. Hell, I even had my sweet-but-technically-challenged girlfriend use Linux to connect to the Net, browse the web and get e-mail with Mozilla, and use StarOffice to work on a paper she's writing, this weekend when we were away and I didn't feel like booting my laptop back over to W2K. KDE and Gnome are not unfathomable to the average user.
And Linux is far more maintainable and recoverable than Windows. Attitudes like "if you fuck things up, all that we will do is swap your hard drive with one with a fresh install on it" prove the point.
Handsring's VisorPhone actually is pretty close to what you described.
It pops into the Springboard slot of a Visor (Palm-compatible PDA) and adds GSM phone capability. It does actually have 2 buttons - a multifunction "Phone" button that does one-touch answer, hangup, swaps between speeddial, call history, and phone keypad modes, depending on context. So if you have it in a belt clip with the headset, you can answer a call without taking the Visor out of the case.
The second button is an SMS button that brings up the VisorPhone SMS application. Oh yeah, there's a 3rd button for phone power, but otherwise it's all controlled from software via the PDA.
Kensington has a (vaporous) minimal keypad display coming out soon that will let the phone be controlled with minimal functionality while out of the PDA. If, for instance, you have the MP3 player, GPS, or digital camera module plugged in instead.
It's definitely v1.0 or maybe 1.2 at best, not a fully polished, slick-looking product. But it's surprisingly workable. Software needs to be enhanced some; your applets to automate vmail retreival aren't there. At the old $299 price it was a cute toy. At the new $49 with service price I just grabbed one.
Decent browser too (Blazer, does HTML, cHTML, HDML and WML) - data connectivity and response seems far better than when I used a CDPD Minstrel wireless module with it, even though 2G GSM data is theoretically not as fast as CDPD.
If you have a Visor, or are considering a PalmOS PDA it's worth a look. GSM-only though, no analog fallback. Though marketed as 1900 MHz GSM only, Handspring now admits it works as "world phone" on 900Mhz GSM as well.
an AC popped up from the swamp to say:
"if you can get them to cooperate" regarding freedom not to use Verisign as a Registrar.
Oh, so a company whose service is so bad that you have to hope "you can get them to cooperate" in order NOT to use them, is worthy of having its monopoly continued in another area?
I'm well aware of the difference between a Registry and Registrar. Bad Acts as a Registrar should absolutely have been considered in any decision to extend its monopoly as a Registry.
That standard is applied in most realms of business and consumer activism - why do you think people boycotted Nestle chocolate when they were protesting unethical distribution of infant formula in 3rd-world countries that couldn't afford to use it safely?
I don't care if Netsol/Verisign is an absolute saint as a Registry. They are absolute slime as a Registrar, and that should disqualify them from a continued monopoly as registry and especially from still being able to be both.
Verisign got where it is by hard work alone? Ridiculous. They got there by having a long-term US government-granted monopoly as the only registrar for years. As Network Solutions, before Verisign bought them, and before the domain registrar function was forcibly opened up to competition.
Remember how www.internic.net got redirected to Network Solutions Commercial registrar service even after competition began? How about the ongoing tales of horrible service, e-mail-loop-hell, and deliberate scarfing up of expired names. It took me months to get Network Solutions to "allow" me to transfer one of my domains to another registrar. They kept finding reasons why they couldn't process my transfer even though I'd filled out all the templates properly.
Verisign as a Registrar is about where AT&T as a phone company was in 1967 - "we're the registrar, we don't have to care". They are doing everything they can to hold on to what's left of their monopoly.