"This one really took me by surprise as a web developer."
Not much of a web developer are you?:-)
I knew someone would have that reaction.
let me clarify: I build web sites. I design pages, write HTML and do wonderful things like that. I don't build databases, enact security measures, or enable filtering or processing of form input. I'm not at all involved in developing the format of URLs or the formats in which we accept data. I build web sites, not networks or security protocols.
That said, as a "web developer", I'm perfectly aware of what CERT says:
When client-to-client communications are mediated by a server, site developers explicitly recognize that data input is untrustworthy when it is presented to other users. Most discussion group servers either will not accept such input or will encode/filter it before sending anything to other readers.
And I doubt, as they do, that many people do no processing whatsoever on public data. the issue at hand is what happens to private data, which CERT seems to think (and I tend to agree with them) not so many developers get concerned about.
I can certainly think of situations (like, say, a free web hosting service or web-based email) where having HTML more complex than bold, italic, etc would be desired as input.
This one really took me by surprise as a web developer. I have to admit that it had never occurred to me not to trust the client in this manner (although there's nothing on any of my sites that would be capable of being abused in this way).
But considering the number of dynamic sites that are being thrown up on a regular basis, especially with folks adding messageboards as quickly as possible in hopes of building a "community", i suspect this failure is present on a lot of large sites.
For those who aren't reading the advisory, it essentially says that sending a malicious link (a link that puts code in the input strings) to someone could cause a server to return that malicious code, assuming that the client sent it knowingly.
Needless to say, a lot of folks who don't pay attention to status bars and address bars could fall prey to all sorts of exploits based on this that don't require "running" anything on the client machine that a typical security app could catch. The only way we can reliably fix this hole is for all of us running servers to remove trust of clients -- we can't depend on clients to disable scripting or cookies.
Their is no law against selling competing products from the same vending machine No law, but the contracts prohibit it. Who pays for the vending machines? they don't spring out of the ground. Coke and Pepsi (their local distributer, really) provide the machines and prohibit you from placing other vendors' products in them. That's not to say you couldn't have a coke machine next to a pepsi machine, but having them both in the same machine will cost a lot more money because you'll ahve to pay for the machine yourself...
72202,142 myself -- been the same since 1979 (pretty good considering I was born in '75!).
Former Sysop/AssistOp -- Adobe; Comics; Artists
Unfortunately folks jumped ship to save a few dollars a month so we could spend hours longer searching for the same information. Now I'm on email lists that have 10 times as much noise, no threading and half the information of the old fora. But I guess that's progress!...
There were no cookies, spam, or ads. The information was accurate, up-to-date and well-moderated. The conversations were ALL on-topic and intelligent. It was called compuserve. The web underbid it.
The post office is the only entity legally allowed to convey a one-ounce letter over the course of 3 or 4 days
I can send a one ounce letter 3-day fedex any time, so what the heck are you talking about? I believe it's called "economy 3 day" delivery or such.
Of course, because of that, they're evil bad private companies who can't do half the job of the shining government monopoly
You're the only one saying they're evil. All I said was that they'd like to have their cake (profits from easy deliveries) and eat it to (not have to deliver to or from less profitable areas). Show me a plan that fedex has to deliver the mail even if they go bankrupt and I'll support letting them do first-class mail. Show me the commitment fedex has to do daily pickup and delivery in nowhere, arkansas, and I'll support them. Until such time I suppose they'll have to be happy making gobs of money the way they are now...
Wow, the US is expanding its borders... "anywhere in the 50 US states"... those retrograde louts at the USPS still recognize Canada (and, depending on your view of what constitutes "North" America, Mexico) as international destinations and charges higher postage accordingly =)
Really! I thought they did include Mexico/Canada as non-international destinations. Now I'm bummed...
Duh! Fedex would love to be able to take a letter from you for $0.25 and deliver it the next day. But they can't, because that would be illegal. Read up on the history of the Post Office sometime, and how they got the government to ban cheaper competition.
Perhaps you should do the same -- the problem is that the USPS is required by law to deliver mail, from anywhere to anywhere. Fedex and UPS (and other, earlier competitors) don't want to HAVE to deliver mail. They want to deliver mail where it's profitable and not deliver it where it isn't profitable for them. Good deal for the stockholders, bad deal for citizens of the country who are left without mail service.
And then you could explain just why postage *should* be the same regardless of distance? Why shouldn't I pay less for a letter which is only going ten miles to a letter which is going a thousand miles?
I never even addressed variable rates in my first response -- simply stated that fedex charges 30 times what the post office does. The fact that fedex will charge you a hundred times that rate for a delivery further away simply proves what a good job the USPS does.
However, I believe that -- like flat-rate calling plans and unlimited internet access -- it's simply easier to deal with a single price for all domestic mail (keeping in mind you can pay less for 2nd or third class mail, or for postcards, or pay more for international, so it isn't quite as "flat rate" as it seems). For the volume of mail the USPS handles it's just a headache they don't need to have to deal with calculating rates on a case-by-case basis (keeping in mind they were handling fedex's volume of mail manually in the 1800s and currently process an order of magnitude more than fedex or UPS does).
I'm personally quite glad I can just buy a roll of stamps and know that my letter will get there without having to write my credit-card number on the letter (ala fedex/ups) or wait in line for a person to tell me what it'll cost. Stick on a stamp, drop it in the mailbox.
What exactly is the relationship between the USPS and the United States government? Not to start some sort of conspiracy theory or anything, but this raises some serious privacy issues
The USPS is a private-public corporation, mandated by the government to deliver the mail. They're supposed to turn a profit (and do) but if they can't they still have to deliver the mail (unlike fedex and UPS who are allowed to say "screw you", burn all your packages, and declare bankruptcy).
As a government agency, they have all governmental restrictions on them that any other agency does -- meaning its probably less likely your privacy will be violated by the USPS (which has to declare damn near everything publicly and ask your permission) than by a private company that is entitled to do whatever they want with your information behind closed doors.
For 33 cents, you can put a letter in a box out in front of your house. A person will drive to your house, pick up the letter, take it to the airport, fly it to anywhere in north america, and drive it to the recipients house. For 33 cents.
Fedex and UPS will charge you at least 30 times that amount (about $10 for a letter), and they won't pick it up unless you are a business. If there's no UPS or Fedex near you, you're SOL.
Of all the monopolies in the world to complain about the USPS is about the last that deserves it. For as insanely inexpensive as the service is, the fact that 99.99999% of mail gets to its destination on time, and that it is available even in the most remote parts of the country, is an amazing accomplishment.
As the first poster pointed out, it's one of the only government agencies (and indeed one of the first companies ON EARTH) to completely embrace technology and automation to save time, money, and reduce costs. The USPS has been using automated systems to sort mail since before Bill gates was arrested and Fedex was a gleam in a venture capitalist's eye.
Or this university pays less for access because they have more to offer than a community college in terms of infrastructure. if they provide half of the bandwidth available for their region, they'll get significant discounts on the charge for bandwidth outside their region, in excange for those outside the region getting access to their local bandwidth.
It's like a news feed -- UUnet doesn't have to pay anyone for their news feeds because they are the biggest provider themselves. Everyone wants to peer with them to get the content and banwidth they offer. It's the small guy who has to pay cash for the bandwidth -- the larger ones provide the cable...
you have to vote for someone. Your only option if you don't like any of the candidates is to stay at home
Or you can write-in a vote. It's less convenient than punching out the little holes with the pin, but then a few minutes out of your life for the sake of democracy isn't such a big deal...
They have to believe that corruption is beatable. Right now, even I have a hard time believing that.
rent "All the President's Men". Ironically, the reason so many people are distrustful of government, while also being the single greatest example of how -- no matter how powerful you think you are -- your dirty laundry will eventually be aired.
"Who is Janet Reno to decide what a private and voluntary association of owners, employees, customers, and other contractually bound participants can do with their time and effort?"
They can do whatever they like in a closed room. Once the door opens and they start impacting other people's lives, the communal agreements we refer to as "laws" are the best solutions we have to settling the inevitable disagreements over boundaries.
Janet Reno is, last time I checked, the duly appointed head of the section of government in charge of enforcing those laws. Disagree with the law, but don't try to make it out like Janet reno has no business doing her job.
But they can sell MEMBERSHIPS to an organization which will distribute only the binaries!
Where in the GPL does it say that clubs/organizations can distribute internally without source?
There is a big difference between a club member and an corporate employee, and those differences is why this "club" idea has no basis in legal reality at all (keeping in mind the GPL is a legal contract)...
"Organizations" don't have any speacial status that prevents them from being held to the GNU license for distribution. Corporations would, as they are legally the liscensing entity, so if Bob in IS gives Mary in accounting an update of the internal version of a GNU app, it's the same as Bob copying his customized version from one home computer to another -- totally kosher, as we're talking about a legal individual. You seem to be saying that any "organization" could use this to their advantage, but being an "organization" doesn't make one a Corporation (a legal individual entity). Your church group is not a legal entity (although the church is), so if the group sets fire to a warehouse or distibutes GNU software without source, the individual members will be legally accountable. Being an "organization" is nothing different than being in the same room as other people -- it gives no special legal privleges or responsibilities. Being a Corporation has many responsibilities (corporate taxes for one!). If someone wants to make a "club" that involves incorporating and hiring as employees every person they want to distribute GPL software to without source, then I guess you're right -- that corporation will be the biggest company in history just to avoid doing something that doesn't cost them any money in the first place. Seriously, OVERREACTION ALERT!!!...
Then subrscribe to a news service -- you seem to be under the impression that having an ISP account gives your rightful access to anything you want. it doesn't. if you want a good quality newsfeed without restrictions and wihtout this kind of idiocy, you have to get a subscription to a REAL news server.
I hardly see how I should be at fault because a sysadmin wanted to keep his little discussions under his control and not allow anyone by his close friends or others who have a spare T-1 to use get a newsfeed
that's like complaining becuase the guy down the street won't let you into his party -- it's his party, and he can cry if he wants to. if you want news access from someone's computer that they control and are incharge of, you'll have to work out some sort of a deal with him, whether it's paying for it or getting to be friends with him.
Is there any way to actually do an end run around the news servers and simply create my own private slow nntp server? Everyone says that hd space is so cheap now adays so why can't I get a standard 56k modem and then get all the data from some reliable server
Guy, do you have any clue how large and expensive it is to run a news server? This isn't a mailing list, you're talking about a few hundred gigabytes a day of data. if you don't have a t1 line and a lot of servers don't think you can just "hook up" for free. No one gets news feeds for free, they have to pay for them. @Home pays for theirs, and so does every other ISP.
I would love to have digests of my favorite newsgroups mailed to me every let's say day or so. The news server could just in fact mail me the digest hourly or so if it was too much to do it daily. With all this magical bandwith I see no reason that someone can't do something to see this through to reality.
What magical bandwidth? We're not talking about a mailing list here -- this is gigabytes and gigabytes of data! If you want someone to send you a digest, then find someone willing to give you that service. if you can't, maybe you SHOULD set up a news server to provide that service. You'll have to pay for news feeds from others (until you're big enough to get a free peering agreement), but you get to resell it to customers.
I suppose if THAT's what katz was saying -- that degrading images of sexuality/pornograhy is new -- then he'd be *less* wrong.
We'd be pushing even later into the 19th century when people started creating truly demeaning works (not simply nudes/eroticism). before that it simply wasn't acceptable to do that kind of work. By that time you had relatively cheap printers and could make postcards/novelty porn with prostitutes. before that you couldn't call anything really "pornography" in the degrading/submissive/objective sense.
The very notion of pornography is a relatively new concept in human history
now this isn't even remotely accurate. The entire field of fine arts was considered "gentleman's pornigraphy" for centuries because the soft-porn nudes were acceptable to be viewed under the auspice of art.
That is some of the cynicism that the more modern artists rebelled against -- Manet got in trouble and caused such a scandal in high society not because he wasn't a fantastic painter (he was always regarded as a decent craftsman) but because he painted nudes in a way that did not "apologize" or cover them up with mythological overtones ("you see, gentlemen, this nude is Europa, and Zeus is raping her, so it's a mythological illustration, not a soft-porn image").
It was simply unacceptable to a society that had embraced nudes as something "artistic" only in their disconnection from reality, and refused to state the genuine sexual content of the images they had been consuming and displaying for centuries.
Except that AOL, much as we hate it, is the real deal. They have 4 times the profit of Time-Warner (real cash money, not stock profit) on a quarter the sales.
this isn't a shell game, much as we hate AOL it is a seriously profitable company that is the envy of every other market.
Apple killed firwire by putting restrictions on the ability to use the trademarked name "firwire".
try selling a technology to consumers under 3 different names. Gee, is it FireWire, 1394, i.Link? or any of a couple OTHER names that companies have come up with.
It's like Beta/VHS all over -- FireWire is faster (and I know, i do DV editing with it every day) but USB is open for anyone who wants it without worrying about liscensing issue. And it's "good enough" for the average consumer, so it wins...
Okay, fine -- he gives away less of his NET WORTH than the average american. No matter how you cut it, he's less generous than the average american (who is generally living with a net worth of a NEGATIVE amount thanks to things like mortgages , car loans, student loans, and credit card debt).
The vast majority of his money will go to one of two places: charitible foundations or estate taxes. It doesn't make him generous, it means that the tax incentives in place to encourage wealthy folks to give to charity is effective.
When he starts giving away money that doesn't give him a tax break (as the majority of americans do, since relatively few people itemize deductions) then I'll be impressed.
Slashdot Mirror
"This one really took me by surprise as a web developer."
:-)
Not much of a web developer are you?
I knew someone would have that reaction.
let me clarify: I build web sites. I design pages, write HTML and do wonderful things like that. I don't build databases, enact security measures, or enable filtering or processing of form input. I'm not at all involved in developing the format of URLs or the formats in which we accept data. I build web sites, not networks or security protocols.
That said, as a "web developer", I'm perfectly aware of what CERT says:
When client-to-client communications are mediated by a server, site developers explicitly recognize that data input is untrustworthy when it is presented to other users. Most discussion group servers either will not accept such input or will encode/filter it before sending anything to other readers.
And I doubt, as they do, that many people do no processing whatsoever on public data. the issue at hand is what happens to private data, which CERT seems to think (and I tend to agree with them) not so many developers get concerned about.
I can certainly think of situations (like, say, a free web hosting service or web-based email) where having HTML more complex than bold, italic, etc would be desired as input.
This one really took me by surprise as a web developer. I have to admit that it had never occurred to me not to trust the client in this manner (although there's nothing on any of my sites that would be capable of being abused in this way).
But considering the number of dynamic sites that are being thrown up on a regular basis, especially with folks adding messageboards as quickly as possible in hopes of building a "community", i suspect this failure is present on a lot of large sites.
For those who aren't reading the advisory, it essentially says that sending a malicious link (a link that puts code in the input strings) to someone could cause a server to return that malicious code, assuming that the client sent it knowingly.
Needless to say, a lot of folks who don't pay attention to status bars and address bars could fall prey to all sorts of exploits based on this that don't require "running" anything on the client machine that a typical security app could catch. The only way we can reliably fix this hole is for all of us running servers to remove trust of clients -- we can't depend on clients to disable scripting or cookies.
Their is no law against selling competing products from the same vending machine No law, but the contracts prohibit it. Who pays for the vending machines? they don't spring out of the ground. Coke and Pepsi (their local distributer, really) provide the machines and prohibit you from placing other vendors' products in them. That's not to say you couldn't have a coke machine next to a pepsi machine, but having them both in the same machine will cost a lot more money because you'll ahve to pay for the machine yourself...
72202,142 myself -- been the same since 1979 (pretty good considering I was born in '75!).
Former Sysop/AssistOp -- Adobe; Comics; Artists
Unfortunately folks jumped ship to save a few dollars a month so we could spend hours longer searching for the same information. Now I'm on email lists that have 10 times as much noise, no threading and half the information of the old fora. But I guess that's progress!...
There were no cookies, spam, or ads. The information was accurate, up-to-date and well-moderated. The conversations were ALL on-topic and intelligent. It was called compuserve. The web underbid it.
The post office is the only entity legally allowed to convey a one-ounce letter over the course of 3 or 4 days
I can send a one ounce letter 3-day fedex any time, so what the heck are you talking about? I believe it's called "economy 3 day" delivery or such.
Of course, because of that, they're evil bad private companies who can't do half the job of the shining government monopoly
You're the only one saying they're evil. All I said was that they'd like to have their cake (profits from easy deliveries) and eat it to (not have to deliver to or from less profitable areas). Show me a plan that fedex has to deliver the mail even if they go bankrupt and I'll support letting them do first-class mail. Show me the commitment fedex has to do daily pickup and delivery in nowhere, arkansas, and I'll support them. Until such time I suppose they'll have to be happy making gobs of money the way they are now...
yeah, i was referring to the mug shot incident...
Wow, the US is expanding its borders ... "anywhere in the 50 US states" ... those retrograde louts at the USPS still recognize
Canada (and, depending on your view of what constitutes "North" America, Mexico) as international destinations and charges
higher postage accordingly =)
Really! I thought they did include Mexico/Canada as non-international destinations. Now I'm bummed...
Duh! Fedex would love to be able to take a letter from you for $0.25 and deliver it the next day. But they can't, because that
would be illegal. Read up on the history of the Post Office sometime, and how they got the government to ban cheaper
competition.
Perhaps you should do the same -- the problem is that the USPS is required by law to deliver mail, from anywhere to anywhere. Fedex and UPS (and other, earlier competitors) don't want to HAVE to deliver mail. They want to deliver mail where it's profitable and not deliver it where it isn't profitable for them. Good deal for the stockholders, bad deal for citizens of the country who are left without mail service.
And then you could explain just why postage *should* be the same regardless of distance? Why shouldn't I pay less for a letter
which is only going ten miles to a letter which is going a thousand miles?
I never even addressed variable rates in my first response -- simply stated that fedex charges 30 times what the post office does. The fact that fedex will charge you a hundred times that rate for a delivery further away simply proves what a good job the USPS does.
However, I believe that -- like flat-rate calling plans and unlimited internet access -- it's simply easier to deal with a single price for all domestic mail (keeping in mind you can pay less for 2nd or third class mail, or for postcards, or pay more for international, so it isn't quite as "flat rate" as it seems). For the volume of mail the USPS handles it's just a headache they don't need to have to deal with calculating rates on a case-by-case basis (keeping in mind they were handling fedex's volume of mail manually in the 1800s and currently process an order of magnitude more than fedex or UPS does).
I'm personally quite glad I can just buy a roll of stamps and know that my letter will get there without having to write my credit-card number on the letter (ala fedex/ups) or wait in line for a person to tell me what it'll cost. Stick on a stamp, drop it in the mailbox.
What exactly is the relationship between the USPS and the United States government? Not to start some sort of conspiracy
theory or anything, but this raises some serious privacy issues
The USPS is a private-public corporation, mandated by the government to deliver the mail. They're supposed to turn a profit (and do) but if they can't they still have to deliver the mail (unlike fedex and UPS who are allowed to say "screw you", burn all your packages, and declare bankruptcy).
As a government agency, they have all governmental restrictions on them that any other agency does -- meaning its probably less likely your privacy will be violated by the USPS (which has to declare damn near everything publicly and ask your permission) than by a private company that is entitled to do whatever they want with your information behind closed doors.
Perhaps you missed the point--
For 33 cents, you can put a letter in a box out in front of your house. A person will drive to your house, pick up the letter, take it to the airport, fly it to anywhere in north america, and drive it to the recipients house. For 33 cents.
Fedex and UPS will charge you at least 30 times that amount (about $10 for a letter), and they won't pick it up unless you are a business. If there's no UPS or Fedex near you, you're SOL.
Of all the monopolies in the world to complain about the USPS is about the last that deserves it. For as insanely inexpensive as the service is, the fact that 99.99999% of mail gets to its destination on time, and that it is available even in the most remote parts of the country, is an amazing accomplishment.
As the first poster pointed out, it's one of the only government agencies (and indeed one of the first companies ON EARTH) to completely embrace technology and automation to save time, money, and reduce costs. The USPS has been using automated systems to sort mail since before Bill gates was arrested and Fedex was a gleam in a venture capitalist's eye.
Save your attitude for the phone companies...
Or this university pays less for access because they have more to offer than a community college in terms of infrastructure. if they provide half of the bandwidth available for their region, they'll get significant discounts on the charge for bandwidth outside their region, in excange for those outside the region getting access to their local bandwidth.
It's like a news feed -- UUnet doesn't have to pay anyone for their news feeds because they are the biggest provider themselves. Everyone wants to peer with them to get the content and banwidth they offer. It's the small guy who has to pay cash for the bandwidth -- the larger ones provide the cable...
you have to vote for someone. Your only option if you don't like any
of the candidates is to stay at home
Or you can write-in a vote. It's less convenient than punching out the little holes with the pin, but then a few minutes out of your life for the sake of democracy isn't such a big deal...
They have to believe that
corruption is beatable. Right now, even I have a hard time believing that.
rent "All the President's Men". Ironically, the reason so many people are distrustful of government, while also being the single greatest example of how -- no matter how powerful you think you are -- your dirty laundry will eventually be aired.
"Who is Janet Reno to decide what a private and voluntary
association of owners, employees, customers, and other contractually bound participants can do with their time and effort?"
They can do whatever they like in a closed room. Once the door opens and they start impacting other people's lives, the communal agreements we refer to as "laws" are the best solutions we have to settling the inevitable disagreements over boundaries.
Janet Reno is, last time I checked, the duly appointed head of the section of government in charge of enforcing those laws. Disagree with the law, but don't try to make it out like Janet reno has no business doing her job.
But they can sell MEMBERSHIPS to an organization which will distribute only the
binaries!
Where in the GPL does it say that clubs/organizations can distribute internally without source?
There is a big difference between a club member and an corporate employee, and those differences is why this "club" idea has no basis in legal reality at all (keeping in mind the GPL is a legal contract)...
"Organizations" don't have any speacial status that prevents them from being held to the GNU license for distribution. Corporations would, as they are legally the liscensing entity, so if Bob in IS gives Mary in accounting an update of the internal version of a GNU app, it's the same as Bob copying his customized version from one home computer to another -- totally kosher, as we're talking about a legal individual. You seem to be saying that any "organization" could use this to their advantage, but being an "organization" doesn't make one a Corporation (a legal individual entity). Your church group is not a legal entity (although the church is), so if the group sets fire to a warehouse or distibutes GNU software without source, the individual members will be legally accountable. Being an "organization" is nothing different than being in the same room as other people -- it gives no special legal privleges or responsibilities. Being a Corporation has many responsibilities (corporate taxes for one!). If someone wants to make a "club" that involves incorporating and hiring as employees every person they want to distribute GPL software to without source, then I guess you're right -- that corporation will be the biggest company in history just to avoid doing something that doesn't cost them any money in the first place. Seriously, OVERREACTION ALERT!!!...
"A few hundred gigabytes a day" is obviously
way too high, but what is it really?
I apologize -- it's "only" 90 gigabytes a day. News statistics
What if I want to get say a binary group or two?
Then subrscribe to a news service -- you seem to be under the impression that having an ISP account gives your rightful access to anything you want. it doesn't. if you want a good quality newsfeed without restrictions and wihtout this kind of idiocy, you have to get a subscription to a REAL news server.
I hardly see how I should be at fault because a sysadmin wanted
to keep his little discussions under his control and not allow anyone by his close friends or others who have a spare T-1 to
use get a newsfeed
that's like complaining becuase the guy down the street won't let you into his party -- it's his party, and he can cry if he wants to. if you want news access from someone's computer that they control and are incharge of, you'll have to work out some sort of a deal with him, whether it's paying for it or getting to be friends with him.
Is there any way to actually do an end run around the news servers and simply create my own private
slow nntp server? Everyone says that hd space is so cheap now adays so why can't I get a standard 56k modem and then
get all the data from some reliable server
Guy, do you have any clue how large and expensive it is to run a news server? This isn't a mailing list, you're talking about a few hundred gigabytes a day of data. if you don't have a t1 line and a lot of servers don't think you can just "hook up" for free. No one gets news feeds for free, they have to pay for them. @Home pays for theirs, and so does every other ISP.
I would love to have digests of my favorite newsgroups mailed to me every let's say day or so. The
news server could just in fact mail me the digest hourly or so if it was too much to do it daily. With all this magical bandwith
I see no reason that someone can't do something to see this through to reality.
What magical bandwidth? We're not talking about a mailing list here -- this is gigabytes and gigabytes of data! If you want someone to send you a digest, then find someone willing to give you that service. if you can't, maybe you SHOULD set up a news server to provide that service. You'll have to pay for news feeds from others (until you're big enough to get a free peering agreement), but you get to resell it to customers.
I suppose if THAT's what katz was saying -- that degrading images of sexuality/pornograhy is new -- then he'd be *less* wrong.
We'd be pushing even later into the 19th century when people started creating truly demeaning works (not simply nudes/eroticism). before that it simply wasn't acceptable to do that kind of work. By that time you had relatively cheap printers and could make postcards/novelty porn with prostitutes. before that you couldn't call anything really "pornography" in the degrading/submissive/objective sense.
Damn it, users should have to scour the net looking for drivers, like in the old days!
heaven forbid a manufacturer should not only officially support an OS but provide all the drivers for your hardware in one place.
The very notion of pornography is a relatively new concept in human history
now this isn't even remotely accurate. The entire field of fine arts was considered "gentleman's pornigraphy" for centuries because the soft-porn nudes were acceptable to be viewed under the auspice of art.
That is some of the cynicism that the more modern artists rebelled against -- Manet got in trouble and caused such a scandal in high society not because he wasn't a fantastic painter (he was always regarded as a decent craftsman) but because he painted nudes in a way that did not "apologize" or cover them up with mythological overtones ("you see, gentlemen, this nude is Europa, and Zeus is raping her, so it's a mythological illustration, not a soft-porn image").
It was simply unacceptable to a society that had embraced nudes as something "artistic" only in their disconnection from reality, and refused to state the genuine sexual content of the images they had been consuming and displaying for centuries.
Except that AOL, much as we hate it, is the real deal. They have 4 times the profit of Time-Warner (real cash money, not stock profit) on a quarter the sales.
this isn't a shell game, much as we hate AOL it is a seriously profitable company that is the envy of every other market.
Apple killed firwire by putting restrictions on the ability to use the trademarked name "firwire".
try selling a technology to consumers under 3 different names. Gee, is it FireWire, 1394, i.Link? or any of a couple OTHER names that companies have come up with.
It's like Beta/VHS all over -- FireWire is faster (and I know, i do DV editing with it every day) but USB is open for anyone who wants it without worrying about liscensing issue. And it's "good enough" for the average consumer, so it wins...
Okay, fine -- he gives away less of his NET WORTH than the average american. No matter how you cut it, he's less generous than the average american (who is generally living with a net worth of a NEGATIVE amount thanks to things like mortgages , car loans, student loans, and credit card debt).
The vast majority of his money will go to one of two places: charitible foundations or estate taxes. It doesn't make him generous, it means that the tax incentives in place to encourage wealthy folks to give to charity is effective.
When he starts giving away money that doesn't give him a tax break (as the majority of americans do, since relatively few people itemize deductions) then I'll be impressed.