Turns out screen resolution and quality are not nearly as important as you would think. Most of the time you will be reading somewhere with decent light, including an airplane. A non-backlit screen has some big advantages -- namely it uses a lot less power, and that's pretty important.
And sure, more screen resolution is great, but it's not a killer, more to the point it's not worth making the thing bigger and heavier to get it. You want to be able to lightly hold it in your hand without burden. And you want the batteries to last a very long time.
Which probably means you don't want one of those PDAs that can run linux. Not that you couldn't have linux on a low-power PDA, but we tend to see it ported more to the higher-power units which don't last as long and need heavier batteries.
So re-sort your priorities:
a) Thin and light and easy to hold b) Extra long battery life c) Decent contrast screen when not lit. (Light as a backup) d) More screen res e) Nice software platform.
I have read many books on the Palm V. There are better units now, but this is just to say be careful about what you really want.
While Key Escrow was a nasty idea in the Clipper Chip debate, with Escrow by the government, it's a good idea if you want some or all of your data to be available to your heirs after you die.
One could use conventional (overseas) escrow agencies to take keys or key fragments with instructions to hand them over to your heirs or executor upon proof of your death.
Another would be the idea I recently blogged which I call Friendscrow.
In this system, your key is distributed among your closest contacts, possibly without them even knowing it's happening. But when you die, you presume your heirs will be able to figure out who your contacts were and reassemble your key.
Of course you thus might want to have at least 2 keys. One for stuff you want your heirs to see, and one for stuff you definitely don't want them to see!
That's the problem. The DoJ says that after you deliver the mail (the user reads it) it's now a database (and now shopping) service, not e-mail delivery any more.
You may not know that you are mailing gmail. For example, I am testing gmail by forwarding some of my mail aliases to my gmail account, you have no idea this is going on.
I indicate in the article that indeed, you can just not use it. The issue in question is that millions of people will use it, if Google is as successful as their track record indicates, and what that means for the privacy of their email, and of mine when I send to them.
Of course we have a right and a duty to explore these issues, and to make people aware of them, and to argue for improvements in the design of systems to make things better for everybody.
As I write at the end, privacy is peculiar among the rights in that you don't worry about it much until after it has been violated. Privacy remains only when some are willing to worry about it beforehand.
To clarify what I talk about wrt Google encrypting the mail. That means several things, but the main thing is a call for them (and other webmail providers) to store the mail, indexes and associated data on their disks encrypted with a key derived from your password.
This would not slow anything down. When you logged in, your password would be used to decrypt the needed keys, and then your mail, and the pre-computed indexes, would be available to the software to provide all services. My understanding is that google already does this, as they use an encrypted filesystem on their servers -- the prime difference is that they would now be using your key instead of theirs.
When you log out, the key would be purged from memory. Nobody, not Google, not the government, could read the email records at that point. This is good for Google because if they show up with a court order to hand over your mail they can say "We don't have it." They can ask for a wiretap order to read your password should you log in again, but that is a much harder judicial process. Vastly harder.
There are other encryptions I suggest they do, but the above is the main one. I suggest they use SMTP over TLS. I suggest they support PGP and S/MIME encryption. In doing so, they would not be giving you something as secure as end to end encryption, but they would be doing more than you get by not using any crypto at all.
The government has no involvement here, except where it might try to ban the export of encryption. Fortunately we at the EFF fought very hard on this issue to make it much easier to do this, which is why you see encryption much more commonly in products. (Anybody remember all the hoops you used to have to go to to get a 128 bit SSL capable browser?)
My point is that in 1986, the government did declare that E-mail had that expectation of privacy, and that a warrant would be needed to get it, just as for phone calls or letters. We have not lost that -- yet. If more people believe as you do we will lose it. That would be a shame.
The issue with enhanced webmail is that the DoJ believes it goes beyond the definitions of an email service that has the expectation of privacy, and could indeed bring about the "email is public" regime you describe.
I've reveled in new technology, built new technology and happily wandered through akihabara. And I also worry when the nature of society and our concepts of privacy will be rewritten by new technology.
So I'm every kind of geek you describe, and I think that's the sort of geek to be.
Internet searching way predates 1994. Archie by Peter Deutsch (the one from Montreal, not the American one) was one of the most popular applications on the internet in the 80s. The http search engines like Webcrawler and Lycos came much, much later on internet time scales.
Some have asked why I respond to them with more humour instead of a more formal response, and whether they have to do this to protect their trademark.
As some of you know, I am with the EFF, and so I don't lack for legal advice on cyberspace free speech issues. That's not the question.
This letter is an example of a new phenomenon I call "spammigation." Automated bulk legal action. I suspect Amex told their lawyers to just threaten everybody using an Amex trademark on a web page without authorization. Or perhaps the lawyers convinced Amex this was a good idea. In worse cases, DirecTV sues everybody who bought a smart card writer, and the RIAA sues hundreds of Kazaa users at once.
They send threats or sue because they know they are the big guy and the little guy will almost always cave in. It's easy and cheap. For a typical web site owner, it's too expensive to even figure out if you are within your rights, certainly too expensive to get a lawyer. So people just take their web sites down.
Every so often they get somebody like me who knows his rights, and I predict they have no desire to fight me once they see who I am and that I can defend my rights. So I'm not in much danger personally. The people in danger are the other people who got this letter and didn't know the truth.
So I make fun of them to ridicule them, to point out what they are doing, and to inform people that they don't have to give in to impressive sounding threats on their parodies. By doing it in an amusing way, people pay more attention to it.
They do need to defend their mark, but parodies are not infringing so they don't need to send C&D letters on those. They do it because they are lazy, or because they want to be very sweeping, or perhaps because the lawyers want to bill the client for more hours, who knows? It's a foolish strategy, but they do it.
And another reason for the publicity is that it teaches them to be more careful, and not to just threaten willy-nilly. I want it to come back and bite them. Last time, Mastercard got people cutting up their mastercards, and the law firm doesn't want the client calling to say "what the hell did you do, customers are cancelling accounts!"
So write Amex if you don't like them bullying. Tell them and the lawyers there is a cost to bullying in the modern age.
(If you don't get/.ed. My pages have been/.ed before and handled it fine but for some reason not today. The server is up and furiously spitting out pages but obviously not fast enough.)
Not the first spam, but a new level of chatter
on
Happy Spamiversary!
·
· Score: 5, Informative
The Canter and Siegel spam was not the first spam, nor the first commercial abuse, nor the first to be called a spam. (The term SPAM had been used to describe flooding on MUDS since the early 90s, and had been applied to USENET floods about a year before.)
The C&S spam had two firsts to it. One, they were the first to not turn tail and run after seeing the anger of the net. Prior spammers had quickly given up. C&S fought back.
That leads to first #2, they caused a lot of conversation and awareness, and that led to the term going mainstream, away from just lesser use in newsgroups and MUDS.
Two of the big anniversaries were about a year ago. The 25th anniversary of the first E-mail spam I found, and the 10th anniversary of the term SPAM being used to describe a USENET flooding.
The first really big USENET spam was january of 94, it was religious. A big commercial spam dates back to the 80s, and jj@cup.portal.com.
The Dramatic Presentation Hugo is the most popular Hugo but by many of the standards that go into the award, the least important. It is one that used to be so bad that "No Award" was a serious contender and always the category where it does best. An award means there should be in every year many fine contenders, from which 5 nominees that are worthy can be chosen, of which one will be deemed excellent. Quite often the DP Hugo has not met this standard.
Of all the Hugos, it was the one least in need of duplicating. It was a popular choice nonetheless (though still controversial) because people just like to give awards, and some people really enjoy their TV SF.
The DP award was also notorious for being the one the recipient often cared nothing for, the nominees coming rarely if at all to get the award. In some years the winner was told in advance they won (in violation of the principles for all the other awards) just to get them to show up.
Again, not what was needed to be duplicated. TV fans tend to be fans of series, and though this is an episode award, you can be sure voters will vote for their favourite series, even if another series had an episode better than the best episode of their series.
The Retros were written in in the 90s and tried in 1996. Participation was low, and voting was clearly based in some cases on the historical reputation of the authors rather than the works, or simply who was alive to receive or who it would be cute to receive in one category. The later worldcons entitled to give retro hugos deemed them a mistake and didn't do them again, but they were not removed from the rules so this con did them. Doesn't alter it.
I also talk about how self-parking might be the big early application. Not the already existing parallel parking, but the ability to do automatic valet parking in special parking lots.
This was a blog entry about how another generic TLD is a bad idea, pointing to essays that explain things in much more detail that people wouldn't read.
Branded TLDs would be for brands in the directory business. It would be silly, of course, to give TLDs to ordinary companies for use for their own business, that would just repeat the.com problems at a higher level.
The example of.yahoo is used because Yahoo is in the directory and naming business already. But it's a poor choice I guess because it confuses people.
To understand things better, imagine that instead of saying that the.com registry will own commerce, and the.edu registry will own education, we had instead invited people to create TLDs with totally made-up names, names with no meaning -- in other words, brands.
We would do this because trademark law has centuries of experience in how to divide up ownership of a namespace, and contains valuable lessons for us.
Anyway, these new branded TLDs, with names not unlike those chosen for.com companies after all the generics got quickly registered in.com) would all be on an even footing. None would be better than another inherently. (This would be the opposite of.edu or.museum, which have a strong inherent value for those in those spaces.)
They would compete. On price, on terms, on policy, on service, on quality. Some would become famous and more desireable. Some would remain small-time. Some would die and their escrowed records managed by the highest bidder.
Each would set their own policies, but there would be no fighting over domain names because no name would be inherently better than another. It's great to get your inhernetly best name but it means somebody else can't get it. We would all love to own generic terms instead of being required to establish non-generic brands, but there's a reason the rules are made that way.
So I name Yahoo as an example of a company that did just that, took a term with no meaning in the naming and dirctory space, and made it a brand.
The confusion is that the.yahoo TLD would not be for Yahoo the company. It would be for Yahoo the brand, for resale to others, with only limited use (or perhaps none at all) for Yahoo the company. Thus it is simpler to think about newly made up names.
Now it turns out I think you can solve the problem of use by Yahoo the company of their TLD brand, but to keep things simple don't think about that.
Interesting idea with lots of potential but poorly executed. The show tried to do way too much. Instead of just doing the basic clone-importing case which they could have made good, they need to throw in a long series of surprises, plans to harvest organs, that the boy is already a clone and so on. It was too much to put in one show, especially with two cases to do.
Can't say I cared much for the overacting or dramatics either.
Yes, this was a grand challenge. But it would be nice if teams could solve part of the problem at first, get some recognition and minor prize money for that, and then move on.
So perhaps step one should have been just doing a long ordinary road course, minimal obstical avoidance, just handling roads, turns, potholes, ramps and even traffic lights (where you are told they are).
That contest would provide useful civilian tech and also useful military tech in terms of a autonomous vehicles to carry cargo in a controlled area with intact roads.
Or you could also imagine autonomous vehicles which handle roads, but then get to a rough patch they can't handle. At the rough patches you station soldiers who drive/remote control the vehicles over the rough patch, but you need far fewer because they stay in one place and only do the rough patch. Let humans do what they can do and computers do the boring long-haul road drive.
Next, hold a contest for a shorter rough course with obstacles.
A do not spam list would just be a big list for spammers to use as a source for who to mail. You can't hide the list with hashes.
Most spams are already illegal, con games, selling prescription drugs etc. They are not scared of a little do not spam list. The do-not-call list stopped businesses that wanted to stay legit.
Instead, sign up for the do not spam list (I have an infinite number of email addresses so it may take me some time to do so) and you will just get more spam, I am pretty sure.
If you download the illustration showing the location of the HUDF in the sky, you get a graphic with the southern sky, the Earth, Hubble rotating around it and rays projecting out from the telescope to the location of the field, at about 28 degrees of south declination from the look of it.
But the picture looks like Hubble is over the pacific, shooting over the North Pole of the earth, not down into the southern celestial hemisphere at all.
These are supposed to be the Nasa Rocket Scientists.
Harlan thinks of some turkey posts his book on USENET, he should then be able to attack all the zillions of people running a USENET server.
In his first round, he didn't do well, but he did have this one technicality -- AOL didn't handle their complaint address properly. And AOL getting dinged for this is fine. What we need to worry about is what the precedent means.
I mean, we've all had email go astray before, had servers go down, had mail drop on the floor. (Happens daily in the world of overactive spam filters.)
This might mean that some sites will decide there is too much legal risk in hosting content or usenet servers.
This part of the DMCA (little relation to the circumvention parts) was meant to make it easier to be an ISP, though at the cost of making them obey every takedown without requiring proof in some cases.
I have always felt the right trick to system management would be to divide up changes and components not just by what they are but who (as in which class of person) provides, installs, maintains and configures them.
Thus you should be able to compartmentalize all of "your" changes, your company's, your distro's into independent units. To upgrade, just replace the parts the distro maintains, keep your part. To move to another environment, move your part.
At least if you found yourself caught with a VC in this elevator, you would finally have time to really pitch your business plan.
On a serious note, they predict it would be hit, if not moved, by a large space object around once a year. They think they can spot these objects and move it as needed. But what about smaller objects. How much damage will they do? How easily can they be detected? How often will they hit?
And worse, what about deliberately launched smaller objects, radar-invisible small objects fired by a nation that doesn't want another nation to own space.
It seems to me that if you could build a scanner able to tell the difference between one tag answering and two tags answering, you could still read tags in spite of the blocker tags.
Those who wanted to plant scanners in the doors to see who comes and goes are not above buying a next generation fancier scanner to see the people carrying the blocker tags.
Umm. But Cory does identify that the brief was written by his co-worker, it's very clear. Slashdot has a duty to tell you when they write about their own company, and Cory has one too. What Slashdot does is link to the actual source, where the connections are clearly laid out. Nothing untoward happened here.
Cory doesn't hide his position, but he's not a leader, he's our online outreach coordinator, a sort of technological evangelist and analyst who studies and writes and slogs around to do hard work representing the EFF in important places.
But he's also one of the most respected web journalists, and if he writes that he really likes a brief, I would wager that he really means it.
Excuse me? We never fight the fight on the side that looks to lose?
My god, I wish that were true. Do you know nothing about the EFF? I guess I should be thrilled that our PR is so good that some people remember only our victories. Obviously we don't like to trumpet our losses, but I am still baffled by this charge. We spent near a million dollars -- an amount equivalent to our annual budget just a few years ago -- losing the 2600 DeCSS case, a very hard case which we took on because it had to be fought, and a case based on the same principles of defending reverse engineering that are deemed unimportant by the above "insightful" posting.
I will have to relay that "we always" win sentiment down to the lawyers in the trenches. It will cheer them up, at least until they stop laughing.
Plus don't get the idea that the EFF has anything remotely close to deep pockets. Quite the reverse. As you may have missed in the note, the donation was put into an ENDOWMENT. This means it will be invested, and the earnings from the investment can be used to fund our battles. The million dollar donation is extremely generous, and I hope that others might remember us in their wills (or even better, beforehand) in this way, but it is an endowment, not operating money to give us deep pockets.
Please, actually learn about the EFF and its history before making ludicrous claims like these.
Slashdot Mirror
Turns out screen resolution and quality are not nearly as important as you would think. Most of the time you will be reading somewhere with decent light, including an airplane. A non-backlit screen has some big advantages -- namely it uses a lot less power, and that's pretty important.
And sure, more screen resolution is great, but it's not a killer, more to the point it's not worth making the thing bigger and heavier to get it. You want to be able to lightly hold it in your hand without burden. And you want the batteries to last a very long time.
Which probably means you don't want one of those PDAs that can run linux. Not that you couldn't have linux on a low-power PDA, but we tend to see it ported more to the higher-power units which don't last as long and need heavier batteries.
So re-sort your priorities:
a) Thin and light and easy to hold
b) Extra long battery life
c) Decent contrast screen when not lit. (Light as a backup)
d) More screen res
e) Nice software platform.
I have read many books on the Palm V. There are better units now, but this is just to say be careful about what you really want.
While Key Escrow was a nasty idea in the Clipper Chip debate, with Escrow by the government, it's a good idea if you want some or all of your data to be available to your heirs after you die.
One could use conventional (overseas) escrow agencies to take keys or key fragments with instructions to hand them over to your heirs or executor upon proof of your death.
Another would be the idea I recently blogged which I call Friendscrow.
In this system, your key is distributed among your closest contacts, possibly without them even knowing it's happening. But when you die, you presume your heirs will be able to figure out who your contacts were and reassemble your key.
Of course you thus might want to have at least 2 keys. One for stuff you want your heirs to see, and one for stuff you definitely don't want them to see!
That's the problem. The DoJ says that after you deliver the mail (the user reads it) it's now a database (and now shopping) service, not e-mail delivery any more.
You may not know that you are mailing gmail. For example, I am testing gmail by forwarding some of my mail aliases to my gmail account, you have no idea this is going on.
I indicate in the article that indeed, you can just not use it. The issue in question is that millions of people will use it, if Google is as successful as their track record indicates, and what that means for the privacy of their email, and of mine when I send to them.
Of course we have a right and a duty to explore these issues, and to make people aware of them, and to argue for improvements in the design of systems to make things better for everybody.
As I write at the end, privacy is peculiar among the rights in that you don't worry about it much until after it has been violated. Privacy remains only when some are willing to worry about it beforehand.
To clarify what I talk about wrt Google encrypting the mail. That means several things, but the main thing is a call for them (and other webmail providers) to store the mail, indexes and associated data on their disks encrypted with a key derived from your password.
This would not slow anything down. When you logged in, your password would be used to decrypt the needed keys, and then your mail, and the pre-computed indexes, would be available to the software to provide all services. My understanding is that google already does this, as they use an encrypted filesystem on their servers -- the prime difference is that they would now be using your key instead of theirs.
When you log out, the key would be purged from memory. Nobody, not Google, not the government, could read the email records at that point. This is good for Google because if they show up with a court order to hand over your mail they can say "We don't have it." They can ask for a wiretap order to read your password should you log in again, but that is a much harder judicial process. Vastly harder.
There are other encryptions I suggest they do, but the above is the main one. I suggest they use SMTP over TLS. I suggest they support PGP and S/MIME encryption. In doing so, they would not be giving you something as secure as end to end encryption, but they would be doing more than you get by not using any crypto at all.
The government has no involvement here, except where it might try to ban the export of encryption. Fortunately we at the EFF fought very hard on this issue to make it much easier to do this, which is why you see encryption much more commonly in products. (Anybody remember all the hoops you used to have to go to to get a 128 bit SSL capable browser?)
My point is that in 1986, the government did declare that E-mail had that expectation of privacy, and that a warrant would be needed to get it, just as for phone calls or letters. We have not lost that -- yet. If more people believe as you do we will lose it. That would be a shame.
The issue with enhanced webmail is that the DoJ believes it goes beyond the definitions of an email service that has the expectation of privacy, and could indeed bring about the "email is public" regime you describe.
I've reveled in new technology, built new technology and happily wandered through akihabara. And I also worry when the nature of society and our concepts of privacy will be rewritten by new technology.
So I'm every kind of geek you describe, and I think that's the sort of geek to be.
Internet searching way predates 1994. Archie by Peter Deutsch (the one from Montreal, not the American one) was one of the most popular applications on the internet in the 80s. The http search engines like Webcrawler and Lycos came much, much later on internet time scales.
Some have asked why I respond to them with more humour instead of a more formal response, and whether they have to do this to protect their trademark.
/.ed. My pages have been /.ed before and handled it fine but for some reason not today. The server is up and furiously spitting out pages but obviously not fast enough.)
As some of you know, I am with the EFF, and so I don't lack for legal advice on cyberspace free speech issues. That's not the question.
This letter is an example of a new phenomenon I call "spammigation." Automated bulk legal action. I suspect Amex told their lawyers to just threaten everybody using an Amex trademark on a web page without authorization. Or perhaps the lawyers convinced Amex this was a good idea. In worse cases, DirecTV sues everybody who bought a smart card writer, and the RIAA sues hundreds of Kazaa users at once.
They send threats or sue because they know they are the big guy and the little guy will almost always cave in. It's easy and cheap. For a typical web site owner, it's too expensive to even figure out if you are within your rights, certainly too expensive to get a lawyer. So people just take their web sites down.
Every so often they get somebody like me who knows his rights, and I predict they have no desire to fight me once they see who I am and that I can defend my rights. So I'm not in much danger personally. The people in danger are the other people who got this letter and didn't know the truth.
So I make fun of them to ridicule them, to point out what they are doing, and to inform people that they don't have to give in to impressive sounding threats on their parodies. By doing it in an amusing way, people pay more attention to it.
They do need to defend their mark, but parodies are not infringing so they don't need to send C&D letters on those. They do it because they are lazy, or because they want to be very sweeping, or perhaps because the lawyers want to bill the client for more hours, who knows? It's a foolish strategy, but they do it.
And another reason for the publicity is that it teaches them to be more careful, and not to just threaten willy-nilly. I want it to come back and bite them. Last time, Mastercard got people cutting up their mastercards, and the law firm doesn't want the client calling to say "what the hell did you do, customers are cancelling accounts!"
So write Amex if you don't like them bullying. Tell them and the lawyers there is a cost to bullying in the modern age.
(If you don't get
The Canter and Siegel spam was not the first spam, nor the first commercial abuse, nor the first to be called a spam. (The term SPAM had been used to describe flooding on MUDS since the early 90s, and had been applied to USENET floods about a year before.)
The C&S spam had two firsts to it. One, they were the first to not turn tail and run after seeing the anger of the net. Prior spammers had quickly given up. C&S fought back.
That leads to first #2, they caused a lot of conversation and awareness, and that led to the term going mainstream, away from just lesser use in newsgroups and MUDS.
A while ago I wrote a history of the term spam and the early spam events. You may find it useful in tracing the history of this and other events.
Two of the big anniversaries were about a year ago. The 25th anniversary of the first E-mail spam I found, and the 10th anniversary of the term SPAM being used to describe a USENET flooding.
The first really big USENET spam was january of 94, it was religious. A big commercial spam dates back to the 80s, and jj@cup.portal.com.
The Dramatic Presentation Hugo is the most popular Hugo but by many of the standards that go into the award, the least important. It is one that used to be so bad that "No Award" was a serious contender and always the category where it does best. An award means there should be in every year many fine contenders, from which 5 nominees that are worthy can be chosen, of which one will be deemed excellent. Quite often the DP Hugo has not met this standard.
Of all the Hugos, it was the one least in need of duplicating. It was a popular choice nonetheless (though still controversial) because people just like to give awards, and some people really enjoy their TV SF.
The DP award was also notorious for being the one the recipient often cared nothing for, the nominees coming rarely if at all to get the award. In some years the winner was told in advance they won (in violation of the principles for all the other awards) just to get them to show up.
Again, not what was needed to be duplicated. TV fans tend to be fans of series, and though this is an episode award, you can be sure voters will vote for their favourite series, even if another series had an episode better than the best episode of their series.
The Retros were written in in the 90s and tried in 1996. Participation was low, and voting was clearly based in some cases on the historical reputation of the authors rather than the works, or simply who was alive to receive or who it would be cute to receive in one category. The later worldcons entitled to give retro hugos deemed them a mistake and didn't do them again, but they were not removed from the rules so this con did them. Doesn't alter it.
I've been interested in this topic for a while. You may wish to check out some articles on the subject in my blog.
For example, I talk about how oil companies should fund automatic car development because it would make people tolerate longer drives and commutes.
I also talk about how self-parking might be the big early application. Not the already existing parallel parking, but the ability to do automatic valet parking in special parking lots.
Alas, I finally realize that the government will try to ban drive-by wire cars because they are a great terrorist's tool if they become common.
This was a blog entry about how another generic TLD is a bad idea, pointing to essays that explain things in much more detail that people wouldn't read.
.com problems at a higher level.
.yahoo is used because Yahoo is in the directory and naming business already. But it's a poor choice I guess because it confuses people.
.com registry will own commerce, and the .edu registry will own education, we had instead invited people to create TLDs with totally made-up names, names with no meaning -- in other words, brands.
.com companies after all the generics got quickly registered in .com) would all be on an even footing. None would be better than another inherently. (This would be the opposite of .edu or .museum, which have a strong inherent value for those in those spaces.)
.yahoo TLD would not be for Yahoo the company. It would be for Yahoo the brand, for resale to others, with only limited use (or perhaps none at all) for Yahoo the company. Thus it is simpler to think about newly made up names.
Branded TLDs would be for brands in the directory business. It would be silly, of course, to give TLDs to ordinary companies for use for their own business, that would just repeat the
The example of
To understand things better, imagine that instead of saying that the
We would do this because trademark law has centuries of experience in how to divide up ownership of a namespace, and contains valuable lessons for us.
Anyway, these new branded TLDs, with names not unlike those chosen for
They would compete. On price, on terms, on policy, on
service, on quality. Some would become famous and more desireable. Some would remain small-time. Some would die and their escrowed records managed by the highest bidder.
Each would set their own policies, but there would be no fighting over domain names because no name would be inherently better than another. It's great to get your inhernetly best name but it means somebody else can't get it. We would all love to own generic terms instead of being required to establish non-generic brands, but there's a reason the rules are made that way.
So I name Yahoo as an example of a company that did just that, took a term with no meaning in the naming and dirctory space, and made it a brand.
The confusion is that the
Now it turns out I think you can solve the problem of use by Yahoo the company of their TLD brand, but to keep things simple don't think about that.
Interesting idea with lots of potential but poorly executed. The show tried to do way too much. Instead of just doing the basic clone-importing case which they could have made good, they need to throw in a long series of surprises, plans to harvest organs, that the boy is already a clone and so on. It was too much to put in one show, especially with two cases to do.
Can't say I cared much for the overacting or dramatics either.
Yes, this was a grand challenge. But it would be nice if teams could solve part of the problem at first, get some recognition and minor prize money for that, and then move on.
So perhaps step one should have been just doing a long ordinary road course, minimal obstical avoidance, just handling roads, turns, potholes, ramps and even traffic lights (where you are told they are).
That contest would provide useful civilian tech and also useful military tech in terms of a autonomous vehicles to carry cargo in a controlled area with intact roads.
Or you could also imagine autonomous vehicles which handle roads, but then get to a rough patch they can't handle. At the rough patches you station soldiers who drive/remote control the vehicles over the rough patch, but you need far fewer because they stay in one place and only do the rough patch. Let humans do what they can do and computers do the boring long-haul road drive.
Next, hold a contest for a shorter rough course with obstacles.
Finally, combine the two.
A do not spam list would just be a big list for spammers to use as a source for who to mail. You can't hide the list with hashes.
Most spams are already illegal, con games, selling prescription drugs etc. They are not scared of a little do not spam list. The do-not-call list stopped businesses that wanted to stay legit.
Instead, sign up for the do not spam list (I have an infinite number of email addresses so it may take me some time to do so) and you will just get more spam, I am pretty sure.
If you download the illustration showing the location of the HUDF in the sky, you get a graphic with the southern sky, the Earth, Hubble rotating around it and rays projecting out from the telescope to the location of the field, at about 28 degrees of south declination from the look of it.
But the picture looks like Hubble is over the pacific, shooting over the North Pole of the earth, not down into the southern celestial hemisphere at all.
These are supposed to be the Nasa Rocket Scientists.
And networks like it.
Harlan thinks of some turkey posts his book on USENET, he should then be able to attack all the zillions of people running a USENET server.
In his first round, he didn't do well, but he did have this one technicality -- AOL didn't handle their complaint address properly. And AOL getting dinged for this is fine. What we need to worry about is what the precedent means.
I mean, we've all had email go astray before, had servers go down, had mail drop on the floor. (Happens daily in the world of overactive spam filters.)
This might mean that some sites will decide there is too much legal risk in hosting content or usenet servers.
This part of the DMCA (little relation to the circumvention parts) was meant to make it easier to be an ISP, though at the cost of making them obey every takedown without requiring proof in some cases.
I have always felt the right trick to system management would be to divide up changes and components not just by what they are but who (as in which class of person) provides, installs, maintains and configures them.
Thus you should be able to compartmentalize all of "your" changes, your company's, your distro's into independent units. To upgrade, just replace the parts the distro maintains, keep your part. To move to another environment, move your part.
More details at this essay
At least if you found yourself caught with a VC in this elevator, you would finally have time to really pitch your business plan.
On a serious note, they predict it would be hit, if not moved, by a large space object around once a year. They think they can spot these objects and move it as needed. But what about smaller objects. How much damage will they do? How easily can they be detected? How often will they hit?
And worse, what about deliberately launched smaller objects, radar-invisible small objects fired by a nation that doesn't want another nation to own space.
It seems to me that if you could build a scanner able to tell the difference between one tag answering and two tags answering, you could still read tags in spite of the blocker tags.
Those who wanted to plant scanners in the doors to see who comes and goes are not above buying a next generation fancier scanner to see the people carrying the blocker tags.
More details in the first article at my blog.
Umm. But Cory does identify that the brief was written by his co-worker, it's very clear. Slashdot has a duty to tell you when they write about their own company, and Cory has one too. What Slashdot does is link to the actual source, where the connections are clearly laid out. Nothing untoward happened here.
Cory doesn't hide his position, but he's not a leader, he's our online outreach coordinator, a sort of technological evangelist and analyst who studies and writes and slogs around to do hard work representing the EFF in important places.
But he's also one of the most respected web journalists, and if he writes that he really likes a brief, I would wager that he really means it.
Excuse me? We never fight the fight on the side that looks to lose?
My god, I wish that were true. Do you know nothing about the EFF? I guess I should be thrilled that our PR is so good that some people remember only our victories. Obviously we don't like to trumpet our losses, but I am still baffled by this charge. We spent near a million dollars -- an amount equivalent to our annual budget just a few years ago -- losing the 2600 DeCSS case, a very hard case which we took on because it had to be fought, and a case based on the same principles of defending reverse engineering that are deemed unimportant by the above "insightful" posting.
I will have to relay that "we always" win sentiment down to the lawyers in the trenches. It will cheer them up, at least until they stop laughing.
Plus don't get the idea that the EFF has anything remotely close to deep pockets. Quite the reverse. As you may have missed in the note, the donation was put into an ENDOWMENT. This means it will be invested, and the earnings from the investment can be used to fund our battles. The million dollar donation is extremely generous, and I hope that others might remember us in their wills (or even better, beforehand) in this way, but it is an endowment, not operating money to give us deep pockets.
Please, actually learn about the EFF and its history before making ludicrous claims like these.