He's our choice because he's in jail, and unlike an American who would be out on bail while preparing his defence, Dmitry rots in jail, and will for a year if we don't get him out.
We don't actually want him as a poster child for an anti-DMCA case because the cost to him is too high. We do want him out, and that's why all the people who have never met him and never will are marching for him.
I've been looking for a while for better sources of portable power, and hoping for a project like this. Fuel cells have been around for some time but not sold commercially because they are not commercially viable.
But I've been wondering if there's any way to get convenient power out off the grid that's portable, and can generate the 10-15 watts they are talking about for this project. A fuel cell that could run off typical camp stove fuels would of course do the trick.
But what about a tiny generator? How practical would a 12v generator that ran off camp stove fuel be? You couldn't wear it on your body, probably, but it could still have a lot of other application s for mobile equipment. Anybody heard of one of these?
Fortunately I think this is the typical scattershot cease and desist letter a lot of firms send out just to look like they are pretecting marks and to scare people who don't know better.
I wasn't scared by it, but I did enjoy responding to a legal letter like that, and I wanted to get the message out to people not to be intimidated by such tactics.
But really, the picked the wrong guy. Aside from my history dealing with attempts to censor rec.humor.funny, I've also been a plaintiff in a free speech case before the supreme court, and I am chairman of the board of the leading free speech foundation for cyberspace (EFF). So while they did customize the letter, they didn't do to much research, did they?
As somebody who was working for Personal Software (VisiCorp) when Visicalc was launched, but in no way part of the group writing the licence, let me add my own view on why the licence came to be.
It wasn't just because of the fear of bridges falling down. That was a longstanding fear with tools and programs sold to engineers, and was the source of clauses in many contract waiving "consequential damages." For example, when you use film, they put in a warning that they are only liable for the cost of the film if it fails, not the value of the picture you lost. If not, they would have to charge a lot more for film and developing, since people use 20 cent film to take million dollar pictures.
It was much more than that. The reality, as all programmers know, is that large and complex systems have bugs. They will always have bugs. All the copies sold will all have the same bugs. There will be new versions, which will fix some of the bugs, but not all of them. And the new versions will have new bugs.
This will never go away. And the software vendors know it, but the users at the time might not have known it. The reality was, if you can get sued because you have bugs, you can't release software at all.
This is unlike most manufactured goods. When they have flaws, usually the flaws are limited to a few particular units. When they have design flaws, which force recalls or class action suits, product lines and companies are often ruined. Most products had simpler designs, and design flaws were few because you could test for them.
But you can't test software enough to get out all the design flaws. Or if you can, it's a rare and very expensive skill.
So the only way to realistically sell software, especially $150 software like Visicalc, is to say, "Face it, this thing is going to come with some bugs."
I always figured at some point the world would come to understand what bugs are and we could develop social and legal concepts of what sort of warranties make sense for software. So that people will do QA, but not delay releasing software endlessly. So that the sort of bug that raises legal liability exists but is rare enough that people can run a business.
The point is that the written correspondence of the President is a matter of public record if it's not classified. While we want to use encryption in our private lives, we have decided that the actions of our public officials should be public. As such, we don't let them use encryption unless public trusts like national security would be threatened.
Do you want your public officials using encryption to encrypt up their records of kickbacks and graft? Their secret deals with other officials?
Now all this really means is that people learn to do the stuff they want secret, including the illegal stuff, in ephemeral forms rather than writing. Though Nixon learned that you had better not have tape recorders on.
All these present interesting public issues. How much privacy do public officials get when in their offices? Should we grant special privacy to certain records to avoid people refusing to document them at all?
I'm presuming that if Bush has a computer in his private residence, and uses it to E-mail his friends strictly about non-governmental matters, he can encrypt them. And if they are not about government, people can't FOIA them. They can still subponea them, and even demand he hand over encryption keys, if they are relevant to a case.
This is one of the big issues of E-mail. E-mail ends up being halfway between written records, which are subject to subponea, and spoken ones which are normally not recorded and in many states can't legally be recorded. We haven't figured out a good way to treat it in the law.
Yes, they are hoping you won't send in the rebate. But they're hoping even more than you won't even plan to.
Rebates and coupons are a way that vendors establish differential pricing. All vendors want to charge the rich who value time more than money a higher price than what they charge the poor.
The modern fixed price, advertising based world doesn't easily allow that, thus the coupons and the rebates. They know the rich won't go through the hassles, and only those who care a lot will. They don't mind giving those the lower price, in fact they know they probably won't get more out of you so they are happy to do so.
But they could never sell the product for the rebate price and make money, so they are indeed counting on you not sending it in. The float on the money is a lesser issue, since most people don't send in the rebate at all.
The more hassle they can make the rebate process, the better this works.
The great curse would be a net business that automatically filled out rebate forms for you. That would ruin the rebate biz and get rid of rebates, eliminating the subsidy for the poor. Insisting on original paper helps stop this.
Shopping club cards cost the stores a lot because a lot of people who would never clip coupons use a club card. The store finds value in the data, but I find you can simply trade the cards randomly with people every so often to avoid that. Have a bowl at your parties for people to trade.
Of course, some club cards try to mail things to your address to discourage false addresses and trading.
Alas no. If etoys is a trademark then the toy store had it first. Even though it may not feel right to you, the folks who registered the mark in 1990 do have the right to sell there interests in it, and that includes being well before etoy.
But even so, they didn't have it as a mark for avante garde art projects, and so they would have to prove a conflict to sue etoy.
However, the reverse is true. Etoy would have to prove the same conflict. With etoys having an older mark, etoy would have to show that etoys expanded their business and started confusing the public about etoy. I'm not sure they did this, frankly, other than by suing. I doubt a reasonable person would confuse the two.
Of course if etoys is a generic term for toys, then etoys can't sue anybody over using it for toys, and nobody can sue them over using it for toys.
A generic term can be a TM in another field. Apple is a generic term in the fruit business, but a trademark in the computer business. Apple computer can't sue any apple growers for using the term in the fruit business, nobody can.
The standard the law uses is whether the public might become confused because of two conflicting marks. Ie. If members of the public see "etoy" and might wonder, "Oh, is that related to the online toy vendor?" then there is confusion.
Of course it has to be legitimate confusion. For example, if the public would look and say "Oh, no, this is an art group they don't sell toys" then there is no confusion because they are in different fields. Thus Apple Computer and Apple Auto Glass can and do co-exist. However, if Apple Computer were to try to repair windshields or Apple Auto Glass sell computers, it could be a problem, as it was when Apple Records raised questions about Apple Computers which could be used as musical instruments.
So even though eToys, in purchasing the Etna etoys mark, would have prior claim if the mark had not been invalidated for being generic, it wouldn't matter as the marks are different.
But etoys made a mistake when they sued etoy, for they stated that they felt there was confusion. Now etoy doesn't have to prove confusion nearly so much.
But if etoys is a generic term it means anybody can use it, so they may not have much luck.
I think this is a real opportunity for the open source movement. Develop open source voting software and run it on old, slow PCs that people donate to the cause, with the only cost being a new, small hard drive.
The open source movement would be called upon to make an open source
voting machine system. The source code, widely available, would be
highly scrutinized for fairness and elmination of protential fraud.
This software would then be placed on certified hard disks (which may have
to be bought new) and placed into any suitable PC. It would assume nothing
more than a low-memoried, slow pentium with VGA.
The public would then be asked to donate old PCs, and they would get a
tax deduction for it. I think there would be a flood of donations.
A quick check to assure the donated parts are standard, and you would
be able to get all the voting machines at close to zero cost (mostly just
the $50 new hard drive, since allowing a donated hard drive provides a
slight risk of fraud by very clever people who recode the firmware on the
drive.)
People would get a thrill out of donating their old PC to help an electoral
system in crisis.
The machines would not be internet connected. They would just have a
screen and printer. They would conduct the voter through their ballot
and then both record the ballot and print out a paper ballot which is
both human and machine readable -- with the machine reading what the human
reads, not some bar code or other non human readable info. When the
person confirms their paper ballot is correct, they end the process and
take the paper ballot to a ballot box.
At close of voting, the machines immediately report a tally of the votes
to the returning officers. However, randomly, or in case of a recount,
the paper ballots are counted by hand or with a scanner, as they are the
true record.
An alternative scheme would be to get donated scanners on a 2nd machine.
On the 2nd machine, the voter would take their ballot and insert it into
the sheetfed scanner. The machine would display their vote as read off
the paper ballot, and they would confirm it is correct, then place the
paper ballot in the ballot box. The machine with scanner would retain
the tally, and could rescan the ballots at any time. Again, the machine
would do some form of OCR on a ballot designed to make it reliable, it
would not rely on anything a human can't easily read.
In this system, voters could, in theory, prepare their ballots ahead of
time running the software on their own machines, and just bring them in
and present them to the scanner machine, confirm them and put them in the
box. If the scanner did not confirm what they want, they could go to
a machine at the polling station and re-vote.
Such machines would provide a quick accurate count, with confirmation to
each voter that their vote is recorded as they wish.
They would also allow more "complex" votes, in particular, they would
allow the use of the "australian" or "preference" ballot, where you get
to list the candidates you like, in order, rather than just picking one,
and a mini-runoff is done, eliminating the bottom candidate and transferring
the votes of those who had that candidate as first choice to their next
choice. Such ballots, used in Australia, Ireland and many private
elections in the USA, totally avoide the "nader effect" seen this year,
as Nader voters could vote "Nader, Gore" if they wanted, and once Nader
was eliminated, their votes would switch to Gore.
That's where my question comes in -- I understand the purpose of the unique serial number on the media in CPRM, so that anything you buy to play from that particular device is encoded so you will need the unique serial number in order to decode it.
But what precisely are the large bank of keys also on the disk for? Do they come with protected items you buy? How are they involved in decoding?
The question of "optional" implementation of CPRM is a silly one. The whole SDMI plan is they wish to release music that can only be played by SDMI compliant devices. THe major record labels plan to use their oligopoly power to assure that almost all popular music can only be played by an SDMI compliant device.
So if you don't have a compliant hard drive in your computer, your computer won't be a compliant device, and it won't be able to play such music. You can download the music to your hard drive then copy it into your compliant portable player,
but it will only play in the player which knows how to decrypt it, not on your computer.
So you can "opt out" of having your hard drive have this function, but that doesn't matter to them.
What matters to them is that compatible players become wisespread, so that they feel a critical mass has been reached which will allow them to release content that can only be playd on compliant devices and not be hurting their market.
Or rather that the lost sales from people who don't have a compatible device, or have "turned it off" are, in their opinion, fewer than the lost sales from copyright infringement.
Re:EFF is a political lobbying group, not a charit
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Geek Charities?
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· Score: 1
I'm from the EFF, and let me clarify a couple of things:
1) The terms you use "lobbying group" and "charity" have legal meanings. True lobbying groups can't take tax deductable donations. EFF is a 501(c)3 like any other charitable foundation.
(2) That said, it's true that EFF doesn't focus on helping the financially "needy." There are many charities which do, and many of them deserve your support. One hopes that life has been good enought for you that you can donate to both the financially needy and to change the world.
(3) The EFF's mission is to fight for a free cyberspace. If you think that giving people freedom today results in their being more prosperous tomorrow, then donations along this line do help the needy, just more indirectly, but perhaps even more in the grand scheme of things.
(4) This past year has been one of the most active for EFF. The DVD/DeCSS case was one of the most expensive cases we have undertaken in many years and it's not over, and we are far from our funding goal on it right now.
So please give to some of the other worthy charities listed here, but also to the EFF.
And I've won $500 claims in courts against people using them. Right now I have to get around to getting a company called Independent Mortgage in Dana Point, CA, which uses one.
I think you should get $1500 but I couldn't convince the smaill claims court commissioner, even though I had documentary evidence the other guy was perjuring himself.
Should have a full USENET archive back to when they started Alexa. They kept the library after selling Alexa to Amazon.
Deja was useful and still is, but they seemed to decide supporting USENET was not where the money is. No surprise, USENET is largely abandoned by the software development community and money community now. The top newsreader is from microsoft!
And they show, very roughly, the order as well. There are inconsistencies, but the modification time order is too correlated with the kick-off order not to mean something.
No, this doesn't solve anything and just creates an inefficient mess. People will quickly settle on defining "the right" domain, such as www.TLD, and you will be back to domain battles and have broken the efficiences of DNS.
Or perhaps they will settle on "foo.foo." Or worse, people will just try to "cover all the bases" and register as much as they can, piling up money for Newtwork Solutions and serving nobody else.
While I know one person who has proposed this does not work for Network Solutions/Verisign, if you propose this you might as well work there.
They simply move the problem one level. If you ration them out to special purposes like.GNU, everybody will fight to have one and argue they are more deserving.
If you let everybody have any TLD you will just get the same fights over www.TLD or similar.
If you make specific TLDs for specific functions, you will just get fights the same as for.com, as everybody grasps for "the one right domain" for them. And Network Solutions just rakes in the $7 registration fees. They hope that with extra.com domains, they will rake in millions on people doing a pointless landgrab or registering their domain in every single TLD they can get. The only solution is meaningless TLDs. See my domain page for details.
Doing stuff like this was developed in the early 80s in projects like the Cornel Program Synthesizer.
I myself developed a syntax directed editor in 1985 called ALICE -- see this page to download it for DOS or Linux -- which still 15 years later does more than Intellisense.
There are some MS innovations but this is also 20 year old stuff.
Bit of an unfortunate name for that package. Alice Pascal was a system I developed for teaching back around 1985. It was developed for DOS, and a GUI version for GEM on the Atari ST, as well as some other systems.
It's free. The DOS package is up and can be found via this page which points to the tutorial, manual and FTP archive.
The source code is also availble. It compiles under Linux but has a bit of bit rot. Happy to see people play with it.
Alice was, I am now proud to say, way ahead of its time. It has features that it took other IDEs a decade to introduce, and some good ones they still haven't gotten around to.
It's DOS, but that can be fine for beginners, and runs fine in a DOS box under windows. As a syntax directed editor with 700 context sensative help screens, it was designed to get a student going, and was written with all the Ontario schools as the first customer. Yeah, it should be ported to X and Windows, but I have moved on to other things.
Garbus may be sharp, but let me remind you that he is not working on this case for free. We at the EFF need to send him large checks every month, and that only comes from the donations of our members and supporters.
Have you made a bundle from open source and open standards? Donating appreciated stock gives you a double tax deduction and can even be done when the stock is locked out under certain provisions.
Does your company benefit from the right to reverse engineer? Does it want reverse engineering to be prohibited on copy protection devices? Does your company benefit from open discussion of cryptosystems and their flaws?
If this is true, make the business case to your company as to why these rights need to be defended.
Go to EFF's web site to find out how to join or donate. Sorry about the ad, but this thread wouldn't even exist if not for the donors who have come forward so far. In spite of the generous donations we have raised only a fraction of what this case will take if it goes the supreme court as expected.
If you're serious, this is still the way to go. Digital cameras get better every few months, just like computers. Unlike computers, the argument that "If you keep waiting for the better product, you will never buy anything" doesn't wash here because there is an existing product - film - which is already better in most respects.
The right course is to shoot on film and scan until the digicam comes out that meets your needs. The cost of your film and scanning will possibly be less than the depreciation on your digital camera while you wait for the one with the resolution you want.
A good 35mm frame has as many as 20 million 42 bit pixels. The best digicams have 3 million 8 bit pixels. A $90 Olympus Stylus Epic will shoot pictures far beyond any Digicam. You can get develop and scan for $8.50 a roll of 36 at dalelabs.com, for example.
Of course you don't get the instant feedback. And instant feedback is worth a lot. But is it worth giving up resolution?
Only you can decide. But don't think just because you don't need the resolution today that you don't need it. Never throw away information. If you shoot that one precious photo on digital, you won't be able to go back in time and get it again in high res. You will be able to do that if you shoot on film. Today our monitors are only 1600x200. Tomorrow we will look at that as clunky -- this is always the way. The digicams of just 2 years ago now look clunky to us.
How many rolls will you shoot a year? If it's less than 50, then $500 on 3000x2000 scanning will be about the same as the depreciation on a top of the line digicam today.
Don't get me wrong, I will go to digicams soon, when they get to more than 8 bits/pixel and around 2500 pixels wide. It's not far away. But they are changing to fast to pick them quite yet if you are serious about your pictures.
Serious photogrpahers shoot a lot of shots to get that one great shot. When they get that great shot, they want it in as much resolution as possible. If you can afford it even if you shoot 100 rolls/year, the only way to get that great shot in hi res is on film.
I've always been annoyed at Sun saying this. It was I who suggested that dot be the character to divide the multilevel domains in an arpanet 2-level domain, and Jon Postel who later drafted it. We gotta stop Sun from saying this. And no, I'm not making this up. The record is at this page with archives from the tcp-ip digest of Jannuary, 1982.
These services are way beyond Quicken/Wells Fargo
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I was using Wells Fargo for a while and it worked fine, but these new services are an order of mangitude more than that.
I evaluated Paytrust, Statusfactory and Paymybills and went with Paymybills. They seemed to have things the most together, and on top of it they had a free promotion.
These services receive your paper bills for you, scan them, OCR them and shred them. For me, this is the huge win, not just writing the checks. They can thus automate even variable bills while still giving you manual intervention, soemthing you can't do with EFT bills arranged with the phone or power company.
I got tired of filing all that paper, let alone writing all the checks. paymybills is going to send me a CD with all my bills at year's end for a $25 fee, and that is all I'll file.
Paytrust was seriously lacking in some areas. It doesn't even offer you an archive. Statusfactory wants $50 for the CD.
All of them need to offer instead an ability to download (or have mailed to you) archives of the actual GIFs of your bills. They might go out of business and then you wouldn't get the CD.
It would be nice if they also could handle statements like airline frequent flyer mile statements, health insurance payment notices and other things that clutter my mailbox.
They need to learn how to use encrypted e-mail and just mail me the bill plus ready-to-use URLs.
But this is a huge step forward. Though they plan it to be a temporary one. As more and more people use this, their plan is to get all the billers to just send electronic bills to the bill handlers, and that's fine with me.
One positive feature about the Wells Fargo bill-pay however -- if you use it to send an ordinary check to somebody, they get a check drawn not on your account but on Wells Fargo Bank. That's almost as good as a certified check, and it's free.
Not that ordinary consumers want to run linux (or X) or even know they are running them in the living room.
The reason the living room could be the killer app for linux is the open source development community. None of these home-audio-video computers and web/tv boxes have really been a platform for ordinary programmers to show off their stuff. But what better place to show off your stuff than in a million living rooms.
A box with a processor, linux or other free*nix, multi-use video card like the ATI All-in-wonder 128 or similar with capture, various TV outputs, ethernet & modem, dvd drive and cd-r (ideally together in one drive), and bays for hard disks -- this would make a tremendous platform for the development of various cool home applications.
You've thought of most of them -- digital VCR like Tivo. CD and MP3 and DVD player. CD writer and general great audio mixer/editor. Home video editor with firewire port. Web surf while watching TV. Digital TV and HDTV decoder.
But the point of this is that as an open platform, people would come up with their own apps. All sorts of cool apps. Or better user interfaces for the above apps.
Games are cool but forget games. They eat processor and require expensive video hardware. This box could run on the aging PC the family wants to throw away.
If the video apps themselves were open source, people would improve on them. If not, they would add they own. All the benefits of open source -- if you don't like it, fix it -- would come to something many people use a lot more than their ordinary computer. It's not that the OS is free that matters, it's that you can change it.
One interesting way to beat the other tools is that today they use expensive hard drives that are quiet enough for the living room.
But the open home audio device, in one incarnation, might depend on there being a home ethernet going back to the home PC (and the DSL box or cable modem of course.) If it's 100mbit ethernet in particular, just slot all the cheap hard drives in the home PC. They are donw to $7 a gigabyte now -- that's about $20 for an hour of high quality video.
In fact write a Windows app to act as server for a network bootable computer and the thing doesn't have to even have a hard drive if they are willing to run the cable.
People would write cooler commercial eliminators that could never be beaten by networks since they are updated nightly. Search engines that rely on reading all the closed capton tracks at once. And lots more.
The public would not know or care it was linux, they would care it was an open platform. And this might cause more linux to be run than all the servers and nerd workstations in the world.
I warned when this law was passed that it was a tremendous waste of the efforts of the anti-spam community. The judge is entirely right on this one.
States have no business regulating geography-independent things like E-mail or just about anything else on the internet. While a state might regulate mail *from* people within the state, the idea of a state being able to regulate anything -- spam or otherwise -- on mail to the state is an extremely dangerous precedent.
When I send E-mail, I often don't know where the receipient is. State regulation of E-mail would create a requirement that I must know, and that I must then check the laws of that state to see if I comply, or risk being sued or prosecuted there.
"Who cares if spammers have to check where they are mailing?" Indeed, who does. The problem is that states can and have passed other E-mail regulation rules, other than anti-spam. New Mexico tried a law against "indency." But I wouldn't care if the law simply approved of motherhood. The problem is we don't want to have to worry about what states the people we send E-mail to are in, or the people who hit our web sites. Or, if you like, the states that contain the routers that route our packets.
In our eagerness to fight spam in every way possible, it is a mistake to go over the top and use the wrong tools. In the end we would get 50 different sets of E-mail regulations to worry about, and a need to know where every e-mail address is before we mail to it.
That's why it does violate the commerce clause. It makes people outside Washington mailing people in an unknown place (that's also outside Washington, as it turns out) forced to check that their address is not in Washington. The state is not allowed to do that.
Slashdot Mirror
We don't actually want him as a poster child for an anti-DMCA case because the cost to him is too high. We do want him out, and that's why all the people who have never met him and never will are marching for him.
I've been looking for a while for better sources of portable power, and hoping for a project like this. Fuel cells have been around for some time but not sold commercially because they are not commercially viable.
But I've been wondering if there's any way to get convenient power out off the grid that's portable, and can generate the 10-15 watts they are talking about for this project. A fuel cell that could run off typical camp stove fuels would of course do the trick.
But what about a tiny generator? How practical would a 12v generator that ran off camp stove fuel be? You couldn't wear it on your body, probably, but it could still have a lot of other application s for mobile equipment. Anybody heard of one of these?
Fortunately I think this is the typical scattershot cease and desist letter a lot of firms send out just to look like they are pretecting marks and to scare people who don't know better.
I wasn't scared by it, but I did enjoy responding to a legal letter like that, and I wanted to get the message out to people not to be intimidated by such tactics.
But really, the picked the wrong guy. Aside from my history dealing with attempts to censor rec.humor.funny, I've also been a plaintiff in a free speech case before the supreme court, and I am chairman of the board of the leading free speech foundation for cyberspace (EFF). So while they did customize the letter, they didn't do to much research, did they?
As somebody who was working for Personal Software (VisiCorp) when Visicalc was launched, but in no way part of the group writing the licence, let me add my own view on why the licence came to be.
It wasn't just because of the fear of bridges falling down. That was a longstanding fear with tools and programs sold to engineers, and was the source of clauses in many contract waiving "consequential damages." For example, when you use film, they put in a warning that they are only liable for the cost of the film if it fails, not the value of the picture you lost. If not, they would have to charge a lot more for film and developing, since people use 20 cent film to take million dollar pictures.
It was much more than that. The reality, as all programmers know, is that large and complex systems have bugs. They will always have bugs. All the copies sold will all have the same bugs. There will be new versions, which will fix some of the bugs, but not all of them. And the new versions will have new bugs.
This will never go away. And the software vendors know it, but the users at the time might not have known it. The reality was, if you can get sued because you have bugs, you can't release software at all.
This is unlike most manufactured goods. When they have flaws, usually the flaws are limited to a few particular units. When they have design flaws, which force recalls or class action suits, product lines and companies are often ruined. Most products had simpler designs, and design flaws were few because you could test for them.
But you can't test software enough to get out all the design flaws. Or if you can, it's a rare and very expensive skill.
So the only way to realistically sell software, especially $150 software like Visicalc, is to say, "Face it, this thing is going to come with some bugs."
I always figured at some point the world would come to understand what bugs are and we could develop social and legal concepts of what sort of warranties make sense for software. So that people will do QA, but not delay releasing software endlessly. So that the sort of bug that raises legal liability exists but is rare enough that people can run a business.
We aren't there yet.
The point is that the written correspondence of the President is a matter of public record if it's not classified. While we want to use encryption in our private lives, we have decided that the actions of our public officials should be public. As such, we don't let them use encryption unless public trusts like national security would be threatened.
Do you want your public officials using encryption to encrypt up their records of kickbacks and graft? Their secret deals with other officials?
Now all this really means is that people learn to do the stuff they want secret, including the illegal stuff, in ephemeral forms rather than writing. Though Nixon learned that you had better not have tape recorders on.
All these present interesting public issues. How much privacy do public officials get when in their offices? Should we grant special privacy to certain records to avoid people refusing to document them at all?
I'm presuming that if Bush has a computer in his private residence, and uses it to E-mail his friends strictly about non-governmental matters, he can encrypt them. And if they are not about government, people can't FOIA them. They can still subponea them, and even demand he hand over encryption keys, if they are relevant to a case.
This is one of the big issues of E-mail. E-mail ends up being halfway between written records, which are subject to subponea, and spoken ones which are normally not recorded and in many states can't legally be recorded. We haven't figured out a good way to treat it in the law.
Yes, they are hoping you won't send in the rebate. But they're hoping even more than you won't even plan to.
Rebates and coupons are a way that vendors establish differential pricing. All vendors want to charge the rich who value time more than money a higher price than what they charge the poor.
The modern fixed price, advertising based world doesn't easily allow that, thus the coupons and the rebates. They know the rich won't go through the hassles, and only those who care a lot will. They don't mind giving those the lower price, in fact they know they probably won't get more out of you so they are happy to do so.
But they could never sell the product for the rebate price and make money, so they are indeed counting on you not sending it in. The float on the money is a lesser issue, since most people don't send in the rebate at all.
The more hassle they can make the rebate process, the better this works.
The great curse would be a net business that automatically filled out rebate forms for you. That would ruin the rebate biz and get rid of rebates, eliminating the subsidy for the poor. Insisting on original paper helps stop this.
Shopping club cards cost the stores a lot because a lot of people who would never clip coupons use a club card. The store finds value in the data, but I find you can simply trade the cards randomly with people every so often to avoid that. Have a bowl at your parties for people to trade.
Of course, some club cards try to mail things to your address to discourage false addresses and trading.
Alas no. If etoys is a trademark then the toy store had it first. Even though it may not feel right to you, the folks who registered the mark in 1990 do have the right to sell there interests in it, and that includes being well before etoy.
But even so, they didn't have it as a mark for avante garde art projects, and so they would have to prove a conflict to sue etoy.
However, the reverse is true. Etoy would have to prove the same conflict. With etoys having an older mark, etoy would have to show that etoys expanded their business and started confusing the public about etoy. I'm not sure they did this, frankly, other than by suing. I doubt a reasonable person would confuse the two.
Of course if etoys is a generic term for toys, then etoys can't sue anybody over using it for toys, and nobody can sue them over using it for toys.
A generic term can be a TM in another field. Apple is a generic term in the fruit business, but a trademark in the computer business. Apple computer can't sue any apple growers for using the term in the fruit business, nobody can.
The standard the law uses is whether the public might become confused because of two conflicting marks. Ie. If members of the public see "etoy" and might wonder, "Oh, is that related to the online toy vendor?" then there is confusion.
Of course it has to be legitimate confusion. For example, if the public would look and say "Oh, no, this is an art group they don't sell toys" then there is no confusion because they are in different fields. Thus Apple Computer and Apple Auto Glass can and do co-exist. However, if Apple Computer were to try to repair windshields or Apple Auto Glass sell computers, it could be a problem, as it was when Apple Records raised questions about Apple Computers which could be used as musical instruments.
So even though eToys, in purchasing the Etna etoys mark, would have prior claim if the mark had not been invalidated for being generic, it wouldn't matter as the marks are different.
But etoys made a mistake when they sued etoy, for they stated that they felt there was confusion. Now etoy doesn't have to prove confusion nearly so much.
But if etoys is a generic term it means anybody can use it, so they may not have much luck.
The open source movement would be called upon to make an open source voting machine system. The source code, widely available, would be highly scrutinized for fairness and elmination of protential fraud.
This software would then be placed on certified hard disks (which may have to be bought new) and placed into any suitable PC. It would assume nothing more than a low-memoried, slow pentium with VGA.
The public would then be asked to donate old PCs, and they would get a tax deduction for it. I think there would be a flood of donations. A quick check to assure the donated parts are standard, and you would be able to get all the voting machines at close to zero cost (mostly just the $50 new hard drive, since allowing a donated hard drive provides a slight risk of fraud by very clever people who recode the firmware on the drive.)
People would get a thrill out of donating their old PC to help an electoral system in crisis.
The machines would not be internet connected. They would just have a screen and printer. They would conduct the voter through their ballot and then both record the ballot and print out a paper ballot which is both human and machine readable -- with the machine reading what the human reads, not some bar code or other non human readable info. When the person confirms their paper ballot is correct, they end the process and take the paper ballot to a ballot box.
At close of voting, the machines immediately report a tally of the votes to the returning officers. However, randomly, or in case of a recount, the paper ballots are counted by hand or with a scanner, as they are the true record.
An alternative scheme would be to get donated scanners on a 2nd machine. On the 2nd machine, the voter would take their ballot and insert it into the sheetfed scanner. The machine would display their vote as read off the paper ballot, and they would confirm it is correct, then place the paper ballot in the ballot box. The machine with scanner would retain the tally, and could rescan the ballots at any time. Again, the machine would do some form of OCR on a ballot designed to make it reliable, it would not rely on anything a human can't easily read. In this system, voters could, in theory, prepare their ballots ahead of time running the software on their own machines, and just bring them in and present them to the scanner machine, confirm them and put them in the box. If the scanner did not confirm what they want, they could go to a machine at the polling station and re-vote.
Such machines would provide a quick accurate count, with confirmation to each voter that their vote is recorded as they wish.
They would also allow more "complex" votes, in particular, they would allow the use of the "australian" or "preference" ballot, where you get to list the candidates you like, in order, rather than just picking one, and a mini-runoff is done, eliminating the bottom candidate and transferring the votes of those who had that candidate as first choice to their next choice. Such ballots, used in Australia, Ireland and many private elections in the USA, totally avoide the "nader effect" seen this year, as Nader voters could vote "Nader, Gore" if they wanted, and once Nader was eliminated, their votes would switch to Gore.
That's where my question comes in -- I understand the purpose of the unique serial number on the media in CPRM, so that anything you buy to play from that particular device is encoded so you will need the unique serial number in order to decode it.
But what precisely are the large bank of keys also on the disk for? Do they come with protected items you buy? How are they involved in decoding?
The question of "optional" implementation of CPRM is a silly one. The whole SDMI plan is they wish to release music that can only be played by SDMI compliant devices. THe major record labels plan to use their oligopoly power to assure that almost all popular music can only be played by an SDMI compliant device.
So if you don't have a compliant hard drive in your computer, your computer won't be a compliant device, and it won't be able to play such music. You can download the music to your hard drive then copy it into your compliant portable player,
but it will only play in the player which knows how to decrypt it, not on your computer.
So you can "opt out" of having your hard drive have this function, but that doesn't matter to them.
What matters to them is that compatible players become wisespread, so that they feel a critical mass has been reached which will allow them to release content that can only be playd on compliant devices and not be hurting their market.
Or rather that the lost sales from people who don't have a compatible device, or have "turned it off" are, in their opinion, fewer than the lost sales from copyright infringement.
1) The terms you use "lobbying group" and "charity" have legal meanings. True lobbying groups can't take tax deductable donations. EFF is a 501(c)3 like any other charitable foundation.
(2) That said, it's true that EFF doesn't focus on helping the financially "needy." There are many charities which do, and many of them deserve your support. One hopes that life has been good enought for you that you can donate to both the financially needy and to change the world.
(3) The EFF's mission is to fight for a free cyberspace. If you think that giving people freedom today results in their being more prosperous tomorrow, then donations along this line do help the needy, just more indirectly, but perhaps even more in the grand scheme of things.
(4) This past year has been one of the most active for EFF. The DVD/DeCSS case was one of the most expensive cases we have undertaken in many years and it's not over, and we are far from our funding goal on it right now.
So please give to some of the other worthy charities listed here, but also to the EFF.
And I've won $500 claims in courts against people using them. Right now I have to get around to getting a company called Independent Mortgage in Dana Point, CA, which uses one.
I think you should get $1500 but I couldn't convince the smaill claims court commissioner, even though I had documentary evidence the other guy was perjuring himself.
Should have a full USENET archive back to when they started Alexa. They kept the library after selling Alexa to Amazon.
Deja was useful and still is, but they seemed to decide supporting USENET was not where the money is. No surprise, USENET is largely abandoned by the software development community and money community now. The top newsreader is from microsoft!
It shows the same winner as the "X" error.
The final four are him, Rudy, Jenna and Richard.
Full details at this page
No, this doesn't solve anything and just creates an inefficient mess. People will quickly settle on defining "the right" domain, such as www.TLD,
and you will be back to domain battles and have broken the efficiences of DNS.
Or perhaps they will settle on "foo.foo." Or worse, people will just try to "cover all the bases" and register as much as they can, piling up money for Newtwork Solutions and serving nobody else.
While I know one person who has proposed this does not work for Network Solutions/Verisign, if you propose this you might as well work there.
If you let everybody have any TLD you will just get the same fights over www.TLD or similar.
If you make specific TLDs for specific functions, you will just get fights the same as for .com, as everybody grasps for "the one right domain" for them. And Network Solutions just rakes in the $7 registration fees. They hope that with extra .com domains, they will rake in millions on people doing a pointless landgrab or registering their domain in every single TLD they can get. The only solution is meaningless TLDs. See my domain page for details.
I myself developed a syntax directed editor in 1985 called ALICE -- see this page to download it for DOS or Linux -- which still 15 years later does more than Intellisense.
There are some MS innovations but this is also 20 year old stuff.
It's free. The DOS package is up and can be found via this page which points to the tutorial, manual and FTP archive.
The source code is also availble. It compiles under Linux but has a bit of bit rot. Happy to see people play with it.
Alice was, I am now proud to say, way ahead of its time. It has features that it took other IDEs a decade to introduce, and some good ones they still haven't gotten around to.
It's DOS, but that can be fine for beginners, and runs fine in a DOS box under windows. As a syntax directed editor with 700 context sensative help screens, it was designed to get a student going, and was written with all the Ontario schools as the first customer. Yeah, it should be ported to X and Windows, but I have moved on to other things.
Garbus may be sharp, but let me remind you that he is not working on this case for free. We at the EFF need to send him large checks every month, and that only comes from the donations of our members and supporters.
Have you made a bundle from open source and open standards? Donating appreciated stock gives you a double tax deduction and can even be done when the stock is locked out under certain provisions.
Does your company benefit from the right to reverse engineer? Does it want reverse engineering to be prohibited on copy protection devices? Does your company benefit from open discussion of cryptosystems and their flaws?
If this is true, make the business case to your company as to why these rights need to be defended.
Go to EFF's web site to find out how to join or donate. Sorry about the ad, but this thread wouldn't even exist if not for the donors who have come forward so far. In spite of the generous donations we have raised only a fraction of what this case will take if it goes the supreme court as expected.
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If you're serious, this is still the way to go. Digital cameras get better every few months, just like computers. Unlike computers, the argument that "If you keep waiting for the better product, you will never buy anything" doesn't wash here because there is an existing product - film - which is already better in most respects.
The right course is to shoot on film and scan until the digicam comes out that meets your needs. The cost of your film and scanning will possibly be less than the depreciation on your digital camera while you wait for the one with the resolution you want.
A good 35mm frame has as many as 20 million 42 bit pixels. The best digicams have 3 million 8 bit pixels. A $90 Olympus Stylus Epic will shoot pictures far beyond any Digicam. You can get develop and scan for $8.50 a roll of 36 at dalelabs.com, for example.
Of course you don't get the instant feedback. And instant feedback is worth a lot. But is it worth giving up resolution?
Only you can decide. But don't think just because you don't need the resolution today that you don't need it. Never throw away information. If you shoot that one precious photo on digital, you won't be able to go back in time and get it again in high res. You will be able to do that if you shoot on film. Today our monitors are only 1600x200. Tomorrow we will look at that as clunky -- this is always the way. The digicams of just 2 years ago now look clunky to us.
How many rolls will you shoot a year? If it's less than 50, then $500 on 3000x2000 scanning will be about the same as the depreciation on a top of the line digicam today.
Don't get me wrong, I will go to digicams soon, when they get to more than 8 bits/pixel and around 2500 pixels wide. It's not far away. But they are changing to fast to pick them quite yet if you are serious about your pictures.
Serious photogrpahers shoot a lot of shots to get that one great shot. When they get that great shot, they want it in as much resolution as possible. If you can afford it even if you shoot 100 rolls/year, the only way to get that great shot in hi res is on film.
Removes your links when you preview. The link from the last post was this one
I've always been annoyed at Sun saying this. It was I who suggested that dot be the character to divide the multilevel domains in an arpanet 2-level domain, and Jon Postel who later drafted it. We gotta stop Sun from saying this. And no, I'm not making this up. The record is at this page with archives from the tcp-ip digest of Jannuary, 1982.
I was using Wells Fargo for a while and it worked fine, but these new services are an order of mangitude more than that.
I evaluated Paytrust, Statusfactory and Paymybills and went with Paymybills. They seemed to have things the most together, and on top of it they had a free promotion.
These services receive your paper bills for you, scan them, OCR them and shred them. For me, this is the huge win, not just writing the checks. They can thus automate even variable bills while still giving you manual intervention, soemthing you can't do with EFT bills arranged with the phone or power company.
I got tired of filing all that paper, let alone writing all the checks. paymybills is going to send me a CD with all my bills at year's end for a $25 fee, and that is all I'll file.
Paytrust was seriously lacking in some areas. It doesn't even offer you an archive. Statusfactory wants $50 for the CD.
All of them need to offer instead an ability to download (or have mailed to you) archives of the actual GIFs of your bills. They might go out of business and then you wouldn't get the CD.
It would be nice if they also could handle statements like airline frequent flyer mile statements, health insurance payment notices and other things that clutter my mailbox.
They need to learn how to use encrypted e-mail and just mail me the bill plus ready-to-use URLs.
But this is a huge step forward. Though they plan it to be a temporary one. As more and more people use this, their plan is to get all the billers to just send electronic bills to the bill handlers, and that's fine with me.
One positive feature about the Wells Fargo bill-pay however -- if you use it to send an ordinary check to somebody, they get a check drawn not on your account but on Wells Fargo Bank. That's almost as good as a certified check, and it's free.
Not that ordinary consumers want to run linux (or X) or even know they are running them in the living room.
The reason the living room could be the killer app for linux is the open source development community. None of these home-audio-video computers and web/tv boxes have really been a platform for ordinary programmers to show off their stuff. But what better place to show off your stuff than in a million living rooms.
A box with a processor, linux or other free*nix, multi-use video card like the ATI All-in-wonder 128 or similar with capture, various TV outputs, ethernet & modem, dvd drive and cd-r (ideally together in one drive), and bays for hard disks -- this would make a tremendous platform for the development of various cool home applications.
You've thought of most of them -- digital VCR like Tivo. CD and MP3 and DVD player. CD writer and general great audio mixer/editor. Home video editor with firewire port. Web surf while watching TV. Digital TV and HDTV decoder.
But the point of this is that as an open platform, people would come up with their own apps. All sorts of cool apps. Or better user interfaces for the above apps.
Games are cool but forget games. They eat processor and require expensive video hardware. This box could run on the aging PC the family wants to throw away.
If the video apps themselves were open source, people would improve on them. If not, they would add they own. All the benefits of open source -- if you don't like it, fix it -- would come to something many people use a lot more than their ordinary computer. It's not that the OS is free that matters, it's that you can change it.
One interesting way to beat the other tools is that today they use expensive hard drives that are quiet enough for the living room.
But the open home audio device, in one incarnation, might depend on there being a home ethernet going back to the home PC (and the DSL box or cable modem of course.) If it's 100mbit ethernet in particular, just slot all the cheap hard drives in the home PC. They are donw to $7 a gigabyte now -- that's about $20 for an hour of high quality video.
In fact write a Windows app to act as server for a network bootable computer and the thing doesn't have to even have a hard drive if they are willing to run the cable.
People would write cooler commercial eliminators that could never be beaten by networks since they are updated nightly. Search engines that rely on reading all the closed capton tracks at once. And lots more.
The public would not know or care it was linux, they would care it was an open platform. And this might cause more linux to be run than all the servers and nerd workstations in the world.
I warned when this law was passed that it was a tremendous waste of the efforts of the anti-spam community. The judge is entirely right on this one.
States have no business regulating geography-independent things like E-mail or just about anything else on the internet. While a state might regulate mail *from* people within the state, the idea of a state being able to regulate anything -- spam or otherwise -- on mail to the state is an extremely dangerous precedent.
When I send E-mail, I often don't know where the receipient is. State regulation of E-mail would create a requirement that I must know, and that I must then check the laws of that state to see if I comply, or risk being sued or prosecuted there.
"Who cares if spammers have to check where they are mailing?" Indeed, who does. The problem is that states can and have passed other E-mail regulation rules, other than anti-spam. New Mexico tried a law against "indency." But I wouldn't care if the law simply approved of motherhood. The problem is we don't want to have to worry about what states the people we send E-mail to are in, or the people who hit our web sites. Or, if you like, the states that contain the routers that route our packets.
In our eagerness to fight spam in every way possible, it is a mistake to go over the top and use the wrong tools. In the end we would get 50 different sets of E-mail regulations to worry about, and a need to know where every e-mail address is before we mail to it.
That's why it does violate the commerce clause. It makes people outside Washington mailing people in an unknown place (that's also outside Washington, as it turns out) forced to check that their address is not in Washington. The state is not allowed to do that.