Or more likely, the guys at WebSideStory will just modify their link-tracking code to make use of the ping attribute if it's available and you can use the existing HBX tools. That'll be an improvement for users too, link-tracking using the ping attribute will be much cleaner and less likely to interact badly with other page elements. And from a privacy standpoint, the ping attribute'll likely be controllable through the Mozilla security policies so users will have the option of disabling or limiting it without having to disable Javascript completely.
One question: when did "search engine" get equated to "paid link placement"? The whole article seems to be predicated on the idea that the only way to get into search-engine listings is by paying for placement. If one doesn't pay for placement, the whole thesis of the article breaks down. I know I for one tend to avoid pay-for-placement search engines precisely because their results are based on payment, not relevance to me. The exception is Google, and even there I tend to look at the search results before the paid links.
Another question: the article seems to be complaining that a site can't just rest on it's laurels when other sites are improving, but when was it ever otherwise? Back in the real world when the other guys make improvements to match you and can afford to pay more for advertising then advertising rates are going to go up and you either pay them or stop advertising as much, with roughly the same results as the author's complaining about in his article.
That sounds about right. I see mainly comic books and graphic novels, and it's even worse there. Diamond pays at most 40% of cover price, more often 30-35%, to the publisher/creator. If the publisher doesn't use Diamond's affiliated printing house, the publisher's also responsible for shipping to Diamond's warehouse. Then Diamond charges the retail shops about 70% of cover price and shipping from Diamond to the shop. And Diamond doesn't order until after they've got orders in hand from retailers, so they rarely get stuck with unsold inventory. Amazon's positively benevolent by comparison.
Baen may have the right method, electronic forms direct from the publisher without needing any aggregator.
For digital content the equations are the same, but the coefficients are drastically different so the outcome's different. With digital content there's no physical shipping costs and minimal costs to maintain inventory (you can basically xerox off a new copy when you're ready to send it out the door). At that point the only part of the aggregator's function left is as a search engine. So aggregators don't do well in the digital realm (eg. the RIAA) but dedicated search engines do.
On the producer/consumer gap, companies like Amazon aren't as useless as you make them out to be. What Amazon is is an aggregator. Amazon buys in bulk from the authors/publishers. That lets the author deal with one buyer rather than having to maintain a full-blown e-commerce site for the relatively low volume of books that any one author sells. Then Amazon turns around and runs a full-blown e-commerce site for all the authors/publishers they stock, which lets them spread the fixed costs out over a much larger volume than any one author/publisher could manage. For example, Amazon probably pays a better rate to FedEx and UPS than an individual could get simply because Amazon ships such a large number of packages and can prep the shipments to make it easier on the shipping company to handle them. Amazon works by making it cheaper/easier for everyone and keeping a slice of those savings for itself.
Were I a provider, I'd decline to pay. If BellSouth doesn't want to let people visit my website because I won't pay, we'll let the subscribers decide. My little website won't make a difference, but what happens when BellSouth subscribers can't get to Google or iTunes all of a sudden? Somehow I don't think people are so enamored of BellSouth that they'll give up major sites to stick with their ISP.
To be truly annoying, a provider might turn it around and send BellSouth a bill for their use of the provider's resources. After all, all those BellSouth subscribers are using Yahoo's server CPU time and bandwidth without paying for it...:)
Not really. Someone with administrative access broke into a network. That means he potentially messed with every server on that network. Assume 40 servers (not a lot, I routinely have access to that many). That's 10 hours per server to completely check not just the logs (since one of the potentially-compromised machines is the log server) but all the software, data and access-control settings for alterations. And it's not just changes since he left you have to look for, once you've figured out it was a former administrator who did this you have to go back over everything he did all the way back to when he was hired to make sure he didn't plant any time-bombs earlier in his employment. And you have to document everything you do during this entire process so if it later turns out you missed something you can show you excercised due care and followed accepted best practices. 10 hours, a little over 1 working day, per machine isn't what I'd call unreasonable.
And the fact that he's spilled his guts doesn't really cut down the work. He's already proven, by pulling this stunt, that I can't trust him. I can't trust that he did what he said he did, and even if he did I can't trust that that's all he did. So even if I've got a complete statement from him, I have to check everything anyway just to make sure.
Given the certifications you put after your name, you should know the first rule of a security investigation: never ever assume you know what happened at the outset. One of the first things IBM would've had to do is check everything to make sure what the logs were showing them was reliable and not something the cracker had planted to divert an investigation away from his real activities.
Your last override won't work. Even aside from the normal case of users not using an e-mail provider not associated with their ISP (Yahoo, Google, etc.), e-mail addresses typically use domains while DNS PTR records point to hostnames. Thus, assuming I'm using my ISP-associated e-mail address and I'm sending through my ISP's mail servers, you'll be looking up isp.net as the originating domain but a) there'll be no PTR record in DNS for isp.net since there's no host with that name and b) even if there were it's IP address wouldn't be the same as mailserver.isp.net which is the machine that'll be sending the mail to you.
Your method #1 also assumes that people are using a mail client that understands and parses HTML and is capable of handling images. Safety from phishing and malware, OTOH, dictates that one use an e-mail client that does not parse HTML, and one that doesn't handle images avoids a lot of problems as well (HTML e-mail with attached or referenced images is for me 99% likely to be spam and gets filtered as such).
The fundamental problem is that I do want previously-unknown people to be able to e-mail me. It's advertisers I want out of my inbox, not merely people I haven't talked to before.
Ancient and respected rule of thumb: if you've found it, the bad guys have. I assume that any vulnerability has black-hats trying to exploit it, and that if I haven't seen any evidence of exploits that simply means I haven't noticed my being cracked yet. Assuming otherwise leads to the WMF situation. I don't consider "given no widespread use by the bad guys" to be a valid modifier ever, because all too often it turns out to be false. To me the question is "Given that there's a vulnerability you must assume is being exploited, is it better to know about it or not?".
I've kept my systems virus-, trojan- and malware-free for 25 years. This does not seem to be the case with anyone taking other positions, else we wouldn't be seeing the mass infestations we see regularly.
If so, people really are safer when the exploit is not published before Microsoft releases a patch despite the significant lag time for those fixes.
I'd counter that with the WMF vulnerability. The details of it were released with no Microsoft patch available. Now, once I know where the vulnerability is, I can protect myself immediately by unregistering the offending DLL and using my registry-monitoring tool to block any attempt by other software to re-register it. Or I can take advantage of a third-party patch. Either way, I'm protected during the window from disclosure to me until Microsoft releases a permanent fix. Without disclosure, I'm wide open during that window and I don't even know it.
That's the down-side of non-disclosure that the anti-full-disclosure people don't want to mention: non-disclosure may keep the bad guys from finding out about the problem, but it also prevents users from taking any prophylactic steps of their own like blocking firewall ports, disabling vulnerable services or removing the offending software pending a fix.
IBM's not going to buy SCO out, or settle on any terms SCO would agree to. And nobody else is crazy enough to buy SCO out and take on the legal problems. The big problem is that SCO didn't just sue IBM, they publicly claimed IBM stole from SCO and ignored contract terms. Those are deadly serious claims to make considering the amount of business IBM does with governments, militaries and financial institutions (domestic and foreign) who have less than no tolerance for shenanigans and who won't do business with a company they don't trust completely. To make it worse, some of what SCO claimed IBM stole from them isn't just Unix stuff, it's things like JFS and RCU that're at the heart of IBM's mainframe systems. You know mainframes, the big boxes that're at the heart of IBM's business, the ones that run the boring accounting and payroll systems without which the corporate world wouldn't exist. IBM can't tolerate that sort of cloud hanging over it. Right now IBM's got two goals:
Clear it's name. Demonstrate publicly that not only are SCO's claims wrong, but that SCO never had even a scrap of a reason to justify making those claims in the first place. They aren't going to accept any outcome that doesn't involve either a court ruling or a public admission by SCO that they never had a case at all and they knew it.
Make an example of SCO. Demonstrate to anyone else with visions of dollar signs in their heads that it Is Not Worth It.
Re:Gaming the patent system...
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The Patent Epidemic
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I'm thinking of a comment a professional writer made: "Oh, so you'll come up with the plot, all I have to do is actually write the story and sell it and we'll split the money 50/50? Coming up with a plot's easy. Takes a bit of imagination, but it's no more than a few days work. I'd have to spend months typing it all in, correcting spelling and grammar so it's all right, editing and shuffling things to make the whole thing work right, editing it down to fit the page count, putting it in proper form for the publishers. Then more months of back-and-forth with the editor getting it ready for publication, and more time yet checking galleys before publication. You want me to do 90% of the work while you take 50% of the money? Such a deal that is.". My thought is that if A wants to come up with the idea and then sit and wait for some B to come up with it independently and do the hard work of turning the idea into a product, A doesn't deserve a slice of B's hard work just for being lazy. Now, if A's shopping it around to people who can actually produce it, that's another matter, but these patent holding companies don't put any effort of their own in, they just wait for someone else to expend the effort and then demand a slice of the profit. That's not the way to create an incentive for anyone else to do anything new.
Re:Everyone loves to hate patents, but...
on
The Patent Epidemic
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· Score: 3, Insightful
All true a decade ago. Today, though, you aren't going to be sued by someone who makes something. You're going to be sued by a patent holding firm whose only "product" is patent litigation. What good is your patent portfolio when your opponent doesn't make anything that could infringe on your patents? You can't horse-trade when you don't have anything the other guy wants (except money).
As far as protecting intellectual property goes, again most of the problem patents these days are of the "Balance your checkbook using exactly the same procedure used by millions of housewives for decades, but LETTING A COMPUTER PERFORM THE STEPS!" sort. That kind of "intellectual property" doesn't need or deserve protection.
You'll notice that more than a few large ISPs are starting to risk losing customers by completely cutting off service to people whose PCs are infected and are trying to spread the infection. It's purely financial from the ISP's standpoint. Each subscriber represents about $40/month or $480/year in revenue for the ISP part of the business. As long as there's no liability, it doesn't make sense to annoy the customers. However, when ISPs start to be named in lawsuits by people who've been attacked by infected PCs on the ISP's network, the financial picture changes. Now those infected PCs represent not just a revenue stream but a liability. If a single infected PC on the ISP's network can cost them court time, the value of each subscriber is now $40/month minus amortized liability. There's a bunch of probability and time-value-of-money calculations that go into this, but at a certain point it becomes more profitable to get rid of customers that represent a potential liability than to keep them. Which is where Comcast, Cox and others are at now. Start throwing in potential fines and Federal prosecution, not just involvement in a civil lawsuit as one of several defendants, and the bar for "Get those liabilities off our network!" starts to get significantly lower.
That'll actually not work for most ISPs. If you call my ISP (Cox Cable) for a new installation these days, the installer will show up with a home router/firewall along with the modem. You have to ask to get a direct computer-modem hookup, or do the installation yourself. Windows-only access agents don't play well with that setup. Cox went with it, BTW, because it's cheaper and easier for them to manage the firewall and router than it is to keep dealing with malware/virus-related support calls from clueless Windows users.
Of course Microsoft would object to this proposal. Any objective analysis (which the ISPs are certain to do) would put Windows high on the list of vulnerable systems. No matter how much Microsoft tries, it's always hard to configure a Windows system to be both secure and capable of easily running the software most users want to run without glitches. Putting a hardware firewall in front of it's just as bad from Microsoft's point of view: you're still telling users they have to spend more money and do more work to use Windows on the Internet. By contrast, many of the competing systems (Max OSX, *nix) are at low risk and would pass most security checks easily out of the box. No way does Microsoft want ISPs making it easier to put a Mac or a Linux box on the Internet than a Windows box.
I think it's a difference in attitude. Take "Media Player" for example. The very name implies that there's only this one media player, no others. Linux tends to distinguish the application from the type of application, eg. xine is a media player, one of several you can use. People may not know the names of the various software of each type, but that's a brand-recognition issue not a fundamental problem with seperating the name of a particular product from the type of product.
We don't have a car manufacturer "Automobile" making the "Sedan". We have Ford, Chrysler, BMW, Honda et. al. each making several models of sedan-type automobiles (and many models of types of automobiles other than sedans). People don't have any problem with cars with names like "Infiniti Q45" or "Ford Cobalt", so the concept of "the name isn't the type" can't be that alien.
There's one challenge missing from the list, and it's probably the biggest one. It's related to getting Vista into the boardroom, but distinct in a number of ways. It is: convince the CFO that he'll see a positive ROI on the upgrade within 2 years.
That's going to be a hard sell. The CFO remembers the last round of licensing changes, where Microsoft promised that those expensive licenses would cover all the upgrades and then released their major upgrade just after the license coverage ended. IT remembers too, but the CFO had to sign the checks. The CFO also remembers that the Win2K upgrade is only a year or so old, less if they went to XP, and the company hasn't recovered the costs of that yet. He's also going to be looking at the cost analysis from his IT guys, backed up by vendor quotes, for upgrading the hardware in his company to the bare minimums for Vista, and wondering where in the budget he's going to find that big a chunk of change. And last but not least, he's going to be looking at the analysis by the IT guys of what Vista will give that they can use that they don't already have, and despite all Microsoft's hype and whiz-bang features very few of them actually show up for the users. With the economy not so hot and investors demanding profits, the dog-and-pony extravaganza will have a hard time competing with the dollar signs.
On the other hand, why would I subscribe to a cable Internet service unless I can get high speeds on the services I the customer want (even if those aren't the cable company's services)? The only way I'd do it is if the cable company gave me a significant break on the price for accepting the slowdown.
The judge thinks you've every right in the world to decide what your child has access to. He just doesn't think other people have the right to decide what your child has access to. I'd also note that the games affected by this law are already almost universally labelled "MA" by the ESRB, which means few stores are going to sell them to your kid unless you're there and buy them for her (which is, BTW, exactly what happened in the cases that're used to justify the law). Interestingly enough the law as written specifically exempted parents from liability if they buy those games for their kids, and it's rather amusing that the law would leave such a glaring loophole for exactly the thing used to justify the law itself.
Not quite, as far as Miller's tests are concerned. I'd note that in those tests there's no observed evidence of outside interference with the experiment, no evidence to support a Designer involving himself. They do demolish the ID tenet that it's unlikely to the point of impossibility that the building blocks of organic life could simply have spontaneously appeared without some outside influence, so if one does treat ID as a scientific theory it's immediately shot down by observed evidence. The only presupposition is "What we see is what's there.". One can, of course, posit a Designer who can influence the experiment without leaving any observable evidence of his influence, but that destroys the ability of your theory to predict anything because any outcome could then be handwaved by recourse to this invisible, undetectable Designer.
Problem is, you're looking at half the theory and ignoring the other half, then complaining that what you look at only provides half the explanation. Take that mutant mosquito, for example. That's an example of the first half of evolution: genetic variation. You exclude the second half, natural selection. What the theory of evolution says is that if you take those mosquitos near the nucler power plant and let them go for a long time (measured in hundreds to thousands of generations) you'll see some of those mutations turn out to provide a survival advantage in that environment (say, a resistance to the harmful effects of ionizing radiation), and after long enough you'll find that those traits have spread to the entire population in the area and that those mosquitos no longer interbreed with the mosquitos they came from (either they simply won't mate, or they're genetically different enough that matings won't successfully produce offspring).
And as I said, we've observed this kind of change happen. There's researchers who've claimed to see it not happen, but that's entirely possible. That still leaves all the times it has happened. A better theory is going to have to explain why we see evolution happen, or it's going to have to explain why all those observations of evolution happening are mistaken. ID does neither. And by the time you've got done adding enough bits of evolution and biogenesis to ID to cover all the things we've actually observed, you end up with either a Designer who didn't do anything that wouldn't have happened anyway without him or a Designer who's deliberately emulating evolution so precisely that the results are indistinguishable. This is what causes ID to be untestable: the Designer introduced must insure at all times that there's no way to test for his presence, because if he doesn't then the theory would predict an outcome at odds with observed reality.
I'm not sure Juniper will win, but this looks like a clean suit.
Juniper's suing the actual posters, anonymous though they might be at the moment, not the message board they posted on. Juniper might have to subpoena the message board to get identities, but they're targeting the correct targets.
Juniper's identifying specific posts and statements that they claim constitute libel. This isn't some amorphous "they said bad things about us" allegation, it gives the posters clear notice exactly what they're being sued about so they can defend against it.
On the surface the posts in question are arguably libel. This isn't a case of someone being sued for a factual account of their own experiences or for just saying "Juniper's products suck!".
It remains to be seen whether Juniper can make this all stick in court once defendants get a chance at discovery, and Juniper might get burned badly even if they win if in the process defendants turn up evidence supporting the posts.
You omit some mixture of ID and evolution (initial creatures were created by some entity, then evolution took over from there), and you omit the possibility that there wasn't any intelligent design and that evolution also turns out to be incorrect and some other mechanism is responsible. Evolution isn't the only theoretically conceivable alternative to intelligent design, it's just the only one we currently know of that's supported by evidence and hasn't been contradicted by evidence. Attempting to define "evolution" as "not intelligent design" is a nice rhetorical device but it's not a correct statement of the situation.
And yes, scientific theories that differ from evolution deserve investigation. That's science. Intelligent design merely fails to be a scientific theory, for the reasons I've noted.
Slashdot Mirror
Or more likely, the guys at WebSideStory will just modify their link-tracking code to make use of the ping attribute if it's available and you can use the existing HBX tools. That'll be an improvement for users too, link-tracking using the ping attribute will be much cleaner and less likely to interact badly with other page elements. And from a privacy standpoint, the ping attribute'll likely be controllable through the Mozilla security policies so users will have the option of disabling or limiting it without having to disable Javascript completely.
One question: when did "search engine" get equated to "paid link placement"? The whole article seems to be predicated on the idea that the only way to get into search-engine listings is by paying for placement. If one doesn't pay for placement, the whole thesis of the article breaks down. I know I for one tend to avoid pay-for-placement search engines precisely because their results are based on payment, not relevance to me. The exception is Google, and even there I tend to look at the search results before the paid links.
Another question: the article seems to be complaining that a site can't just rest on it's laurels when other sites are improving, but when was it ever otherwise? Back in the real world when the other guys make improvements to match you and can afford to pay more for advertising then advertising rates are going to go up and you either pay them or stop advertising as much, with roughly the same results as the author's complaining about in his article.
That sounds about right. I see mainly comic books and graphic novels, and it's even worse there. Diamond pays at most 40% of cover price, more often 30-35%, to the publisher/creator. If the publisher doesn't use Diamond's affiliated printing house, the publisher's also responsible for shipping to Diamond's warehouse. Then Diamond charges the retail shops about 70% of cover price and shipping from Diamond to the shop. And Diamond doesn't order until after they've got orders in hand from retailers, so they rarely get stuck with unsold inventory. Amazon's positively benevolent by comparison.
Baen may have the right method, electronic forms direct from the publisher without needing any aggregator.
For digital content the equations are the same, but the coefficients are drastically different so the outcome's different. With digital content there's no physical shipping costs and minimal costs to maintain inventory (you can basically xerox off a new copy when you're ready to send it out the door). At that point the only part of the aggregator's function left is as a search engine. So aggregators don't do well in the digital realm (eg. the RIAA) but dedicated search engines do.
On the producer/consumer gap, companies like Amazon aren't as useless as you make them out to be. What Amazon is is an aggregator. Amazon buys in bulk from the authors/publishers. That lets the author deal with one buyer rather than having to maintain a full-blown e-commerce site for the relatively low volume of books that any one author sells. Then Amazon turns around and runs a full-blown e-commerce site for all the authors/publishers they stock, which lets them spread the fixed costs out over a much larger volume than any one author/publisher could manage. For example, Amazon probably pays a better rate to FedEx and UPS than an individual could get simply because Amazon ships such a large number of packages and can prep the shipments to make it easier on the shipping company to handle them. Amazon works by making it cheaper/easier for everyone and keeping a slice of those savings for itself.
Were I a provider, I'd decline to pay. If BellSouth doesn't want to let people visit my website because I won't pay, we'll let the subscribers decide. My little website won't make a difference, but what happens when BellSouth subscribers can't get to Google or iTunes all of a sudden? Somehow I don't think people are so enamored of BellSouth that they'll give up major sites to stick with their ISP.
To be truly annoying, a provider might turn it around and send BellSouth a bill for their use of the provider's resources. After all, all those BellSouth subscribers are using Yahoo's server CPU time and bandwidth without paying for it... :)
Not really. Someone with administrative access broke into a network. That means he potentially messed with every server on that network. Assume 40 servers (not a lot, I routinely have access to that many). That's 10 hours per server to completely check not just the logs (since one of the potentially-compromised machines is the log server) but all the software, data and access-control settings for alterations. And it's not just changes since he left you have to look for, once you've figured out it was a former administrator who did this you have to go back over everything he did all the way back to when he was hired to make sure he didn't plant any time-bombs earlier in his employment. And you have to document everything you do during this entire process so if it later turns out you missed something you can show you excercised due care and followed accepted best practices. 10 hours, a little over 1 working day, per machine isn't what I'd call unreasonable.
And the fact that he's spilled his guts doesn't really cut down the work. He's already proven, by pulling this stunt, that I can't trust him. I can't trust that he did what he said he did, and even if he did I can't trust that that's all he did. So even if I've got a complete statement from him, I have to check everything anyway just to make sure.
Given the certifications you put after your name, you should know the first rule of a security investigation: never ever assume you know what happened at the outset. One of the first things IBM would've had to do is check everything to make sure what the logs were showing them was reliable and not something the cracker had planted to divert an investigation away from his real activities.
Your last override won't work. Even aside from the normal case of users not using an e-mail provider not associated with their ISP (Yahoo, Google, etc.), e-mail addresses typically use domains while DNS PTR records point to hostnames. Thus, assuming I'm using my ISP-associated e-mail address and I'm sending through my ISP's mail servers, you'll be looking up isp.net as the originating domain but a) there'll be no PTR record in DNS for isp.net since there's no host with that name and b) even if there were it's IP address wouldn't be the same as mailserver.isp.net which is the machine that'll be sending the mail to you.
Your method #1 also assumes that people are using a mail client that understands and parses HTML and is capable of handling images. Safety from phishing and malware, OTOH, dictates that one use an e-mail client that does not parse HTML, and one that doesn't handle images avoids a lot of problems as well (HTML e-mail with attached or referenced images is for me 99% likely to be spam and gets filtered as such).
The fundamental problem is that I do want previously-unknown people to be able to e-mail me. It's advertisers I want out of my inbox, not merely people I haven't talked to before.
Ancient and respected rule of thumb: if you've found it, the bad guys have. I assume that any vulnerability has black-hats trying to exploit it, and that if I haven't seen any evidence of exploits that simply means I haven't noticed my being cracked yet. Assuming otherwise leads to the WMF situation. I don't consider "given no widespread use by the bad guys" to be a valid modifier ever, because all too often it turns out to be false. To me the question is "Given that there's a vulnerability you must assume is being exploited, is it better to know about it or not?".
I've kept my systems virus-, trojan- and malware-free for 25 years. This does not seem to be the case with anyone taking other positions, else we wouldn't be seeing the mass infestations we see regularly.
If so, people really are safer when the exploit is not published before Microsoft releases a patch despite the significant lag time for those fixes.
I'd counter that with the WMF vulnerability. The details of it were released with no Microsoft patch available. Now, once I know where the vulnerability is, I can protect myself immediately by unregistering the offending DLL and using my registry-monitoring tool to block any attempt by other software to re-register it. Or I can take advantage of a third-party patch. Either way, I'm protected during the window from disclosure to me until Microsoft releases a permanent fix. Without disclosure, I'm wide open during that window and I don't even know it.
That's the down-side of non-disclosure that the anti-full-disclosure people don't want to mention: non-disclosure may keep the bad guys from finding out about the problem, but it also prevents users from taking any prophylactic steps of their own like blocking firewall ports, disabling vulnerable services or removing the offending software pending a fix.
IBM's not going to buy SCO out, or settle on any terms SCO would agree to. And nobody else is crazy enough to buy SCO out and take on the legal problems. The big problem is that SCO didn't just sue IBM, they publicly claimed IBM stole from SCO and ignored contract terms. Those are deadly serious claims to make considering the amount of business IBM does with governments, militaries and financial institutions (domestic and foreign) who have less than no tolerance for shenanigans and who won't do business with a company they don't trust completely. To make it worse, some of what SCO claimed IBM stole from them isn't just Unix stuff, it's things like JFS and RCU that're at the heart of IBM's mainframe systems. You know mainframes, the big boxes that're at the heart of IBM's business, the ones that run the boring accounting and payroll systems without which the corporate world wouldn't exist. IBM can't tolerate that sort of cloud hanging over it. Right now IBM's got two goals:
I'm thinking of a comment a professional writer made: "Oh, so you'll come up with the plot, all I have to do is actually write the story and sell it and we'll split the money 50/50? Coming up with a plot's easy. Takes a bit of imagination, but it's no more than a few days work. I'd have to spend months typing it all in, correcting spelling and grammar so it's all right, editing and shuffling things to make the whole thing work right, editing it down to fit the page count, putting it in proper form for the publishers. Then more months of back-and-forth with the editor getting it ready for publication, and more time yet checking galleys before publication. You want me to do 90% of the work while you take 50% of the money? Such a deal that is.". My thought is that if A wants to come up with the idea and then sit and wait for some B to come up with it independently and do the hard work of turning the idea into a product, A doesn't deserve a slice of B's hard work just for being lazy. Now, if A's shopping it around to people who can actually produce it, that's another matter, but these patent holding companies don't put any effort of their own in, they just wait for someone else to expend the effort and then demand a slice of the profit. That's not the way to create an incentive for anyone else to do anything new.
All true a decade ago. Today, though, you aren't going to be sued by someone who makes something. You're going to be sued by a patent holding firm whose only "product" is patent litigation. What good is your patent portfolio when your opponent doesn't make anything that could infringe on your patents? You can't horse-trade when you don't have anything the other guy wants (except money).
As far as protecting intellectual property goes, again most of the problem patents these days are of the "Balance your checkbook using exactly the same procedure used by millions of housewives for decades, but LETTING A COMPUTER PERFORM THE STEPS!" sort. That kind of "intellectual property" doesn't need or deserve protection.
You'll notice that more than a few large ISPs are starting to risk losing customers by completely cutting off service to people whose PCs are infected and are trying to spread the infection. It's purely financial from the ISP's standpoint. Each subscriber represents about $40/month or $480/year in revenue for the ISP part of the business. As long as there's no liability, it doesn't make sense to annoy the customers. However, when ISPs start to be named in lawsuits by people who've been attacked by infected PCs on the ISP's network, the financial picture changes. Now those infected PCs represent not just a revenue stream but a liability. If a single infected PC on the ISP's network can cost them court time, the value of each subscriber is now $40/month minus amortized liability. There's a bunch of probability and time-value-of-money calculations that go into this, but at a certain point it becomes more profitable to get rid of customers that represent a potential liability than to keep them. Which is where Comcast, Cox and others are at now. Start throwing in potential fines and Federal prosecution, not just involvement in a civil lawsuit as one of several defendants, and the bar for "Get those liabilities off our network!" starts to get significantly lower.
That'll actually not work for most ISPs. If you call my ISP (Cox Cable) for a new installation these days, the installer will show up with a home router/firewall along with the modem. You have to ask to get a direct computer-modem hookup, or do the installation yourself. Windows-only access agents don't play well with that setup. Cox went with it, BTW, because it's cheaper and easier for them to manage the firewall and router than it is to keep dealing with malware/virus-related support calls from clueless Windows users.
Of course Microsoft would object to this proposal. Any objective analysis (which the ISPs are certain to do) would put Windows high on the list of vulnerable systems. No matter how much Microsoft tries, it's always hard to configure a Windows system to be both secure and capable of easily running the software most users want to run without glitches. Putting a hardware firewall in front of it's just as bad from Microsoft's point of view: you're still telling users they have to spend more money and do more work to use Windows on the Internet. By contrast, many of the competing systems (Max OSX, *nix) are at low risk and would pass most security checks easily out of the box. No way does Microsoft want ISPs making it easier to put a Mac or a Linux box on the Internet than a Windows box.
I think it's a difference in attitude. Take "Media Player" for example. The very name implies that there's only this one media player, no others. Linux tends to distinguish the application from the type of application, eg. xine is a media player, one of several you can use. People may not know the names of the various software of each type, but that's a brand-recognition issue not a fundamental problem with seperating the name of a particular product from the type of product.
We don't have a car manufacturer "Automobile" making the "Sedan". We have Ford, Chrysler, BMW, Honda et. al. each making several models of sedan-type automobiles (and many models of types of automobiles other than sedans). People don't have any problem with cars with names like "Infiniti Q45" or "Ford Cobalt", so the concept of "the name isn't the type" can't be that alien.
There's one challenge missing from the list, and it's probably the biggest one. It's related to getting Vista into the boardroom, but distinct in a number of ways. It is: convince the CFO that he'll see a positive ROI on the upgrade within 2 years.
That's going to be a hard sell. The CFO remembers the last round of licensing changes, where Microsoft promised that those expensive licenses would cover all the upgrades and then released their major upgrade just after the license coverage ended. IT remembers too, but the CFO had to sign the checks. The CFO also remembers that the Win2K upgrade is only a year or so old, less if they went to XP, and the company hasn't recovered the costs of that yet. He's also going to be looking at the cost analysis from his IT guys, backed up by vendor quotes, for upgrading the hardware in his company to the bare minimums for Vista, and wondering where in the budget he's going to find that big a chunk of change. And last but not least, he's going to be looking at the analysis by the IT guys of what Vista will give that they can use that they don't already have, and despite all Microsoft's hype and whiz-bang features very few of them actually show up for the users. With the economy not so hot and investors demanding profits, the dog-and-pony extravaganza will have a hard time competing with the dollar signs.
On the other hand, why would I subscribe to a cable Internet service unless I can get high speeds on the services I the customer want (even if those aren't the cable company's services)? The only way I'd do it is if the cable company gave me a significant break on the price for accepting the slowdown.
The judge thinks you've every right in the world to decide what your child has access to. He just doesn't think other people have the right to decide what your child has access to. I'd also note that the games affected by this law are already almost universally labelled "MA" by the ESRB, which means few stores are going to sell them to your kid unless you're there and buy them for her (which is, BTW, exactly what happened in the cases that're used to justify the law). Interestingly enough the law as written specifically exempted parents from liability if they buy those games for their kids, and it's rather amusing that the law would leave such a glaring loophole for exactly the thing used to justify the law itself.
Not quite, as far as Miller's tests are concerned. I'd note that in those tests there's no observed evidence of outside interference with the experiment, no evidence to support a Designer involving himself. They do demolish the ID tenet that it's unlikely to the point of impossibility that the building blocks of organic life could simply have spontaneously appeared without some outside influence, so if one does treat ID as a scientific theory it's immediately shot down by observed evidence. The only presupposition is "What we see is what's there.". One can, of course, posit a Designer who can influence the experiment without leaving any observable evidence of his influence, but that destroys the ability of your theory to predict anything because any outcome could then be handwaved by recourse to this invisible, undetectable Designer.
Problem is, you're looking at half the theory and ignoring the other half, then complaining that what you look at only provides half the explanation. Take that mutant mosquito, for example. That's an example of the first half of evolution: genetic variation. You exclude the second half, natural selection. What the theory of evolution says is that if you take those mosquitos near the nucler power plant and let them go for a long time (measured in hundreds to thousands of generations) you'll see some of those mutations turn out to provide a survival advantage in that environment (say, a resistance to the harmful effects of ionizing radiation), and after long enough you'll find that those traits have spread to the entire population in the area and that those mosquitos no longer interbreed with the mosquitos they came from (either they simply won't mate, or they're genetically different enough that matings won't successfully produce offspring).
And as I said, we've observed this kind of change happen. There's researchers who've claimed to see it not happen, but that's entirely possible. That still leaves all the times it has happened. A better theory is going to have to explain why we see evolution happen, or it's going to have to explain why all those observations of evolution happening are mistaken. ID does neither. And by the time you've got done adding enough bits of evolution and biogenesis to ID to cover all the things we've actually observed, you end up with either a Designer who didn't do anything that wouldn't have happened anyway without him or a Designer who's deliberately emulating evolution so precisely that the results are indistinguishable. This is what causes ID to be untestable: the Designer introduced must insure at all times that there's no way to test for his presence, because if he doesn't then the theory would predict an outcome at odds with observed reality.
I'm not sure Juniper will win, but this looks like a clean suit.
- Juniper's suing the actual posters, anonymous though they might be at the moment, not the message board they posted on. Juniper might have to subpoena the message board to get identities, but they're targeting the correct targets.
- Juniper's identifying specific posts and statements that they claim constitute libel. This isn't some amorphous "they said bad things about us" allegation, it gives the posters clear notice exactly what they're being sued about so they can defend against it.
- On the surface the posts in question are arguably libel. This isn't a case of someone being sued for a factual account of their own experiences or for just saying "Juniper's products suck!".
It remains to be seen whether Juniper can make this all stick in court once defendants get a chance at discovery, and Juniper might get burned badly even if they win if in the process defendants turn up evidence supporting the posts.You omit some mixture of ID and evolution (initial creatures were created by some entity, then evolution took over from there), and you omit the possibility that there wasn't any intelligent design and that evolution also turns out to be incorrect and some other mechanism is responsible. Evolution isn't the only theoretically conceivable alternative to intelligent design, it's just the only one we currently know of that's supported by evidence and hasn't been contradicted by evidence. Attempting to define "evolution" as "not intelligent design" is a nice rhetorical device but it's not a correct statement of the situation.
And yes, scientific theories that differ from evolution deserve investigation. That's science. Intelligent design merely fails to be a scientific theory, for the reasons I've noted.