A close friend has gone into complete remission of a cancer of which there is only a single (disputed) remission in the medical literature? How? By being treated with a device set up by a retired electrical engineer based on a Tesla design. It's not the first cancer cured by the device either, by a long shot. So how do we support real research into real cures that won't enrich the drug companies at all - in fact will impoverish them? This is a serious question; people are dying.
If I publish a book that's a compilation of articles, it requires but one copyright registration. So where would we be if a service was set up where anything under appropriate license (say, GNU) could be uploaded to a site from which it would be (in compressed form) added to a DVD compilation-of-the-month (or so) that would be duly registered with the Feds under an "all rights revert to the authors of the individual packages" arrangement? After all, if I copyright a book or magazine - which will in some instances contain such an assignment to the original authors - and you steal a single article from it, you're guilty. And this means it wouldn't take 100s of folks submitting registration to the feds (and the fees that involves) but only one small organization with the ability to collect the stuff and burn the DVD (it would also I think be necessary to actually offer the DVD for sale in order to secure the copyright - so that it's actually published - but hey, that could be a useful thing to have or subscribe to for some).
What if SGI licensed the trademark to OpenIL for a token fee? After all, trademarks are often licensed (for instance, to display a logo with a compatibility claim), without diluting them. This way SGI would still fully protect its own trademark from real infringement, and not lose face with the open source/free software community which will stay away from its products if it does much bullying of noncommercial uses of obvious names that somewhat resemble its trademarks.
Considering you can get 2 1.5 meg DSL lines for less than 1 1.5 meg T1... and if you're lucky enough to be where there are two different providers, with two different wholesalers, have good redundancy... even now there are few cases where a data-intensive small business should really have a T1. Hell, any SDSL line is capable of hosting a modestly trafficked Website, plus ftp, plus whatever for a smallish firm.
But I sure am glad I told me only client on Northpoint that yes he really needed to have a second line from Covad installed months ago.
Haven't looked at Progeny - but a better installer is exactly what Debian needs. The current installer leaves you up a creek if, for instance, the stock kernel doesn't support your NIC - there's no way back into what it then automatically refuses to set up after you compile a module or new kernel to deal with that. The maintainer of the installation routine doesn't care for suggestions on improvement either. Maybe he sees Progeny coming and knows he'll soon be obsolete. I hope so, because once it's installed Debian is much better than Red Hat in most regards, especially apt-get.
Legally, if a magazine buys your short story, it is for publication only in that magazine - unless they've had you sign a contract covering other media, which is common now but wasn't five years ago. So if they then issue a book and want to include your story, they have to buy it from you again. But under current law if they merely reprint the issue of the magazine, they don't. What the Supreme's are facing is an argument from the Times and other publishers that putting the story in a large online database is the same as reprinting the magazine, and not the same as presenting the story in a fresh collection (like a book) that would require them buying it from you again. Since an online database is obviously less like a magazine than even a book is, this should be a slam dunk - if at least 5 of the Supremes weren't known to be crooked.
Now, one claim that the publishers are making is "If we have to buy the stories again, gee, we can't afford that, and civilization can't afford for the old stories (which we bought before we had 'all rights' contracts standard) to be left out of the databases and forgotten... so screw the authors."
Charlie Rose interviewed Michael Eisner, head of Disney (do I remember his name right?) a few days ago. Disney is very pleased, he said, with the response from Congress to its educating them regarding the need for legislation to compel hardware makers "not to continue to virtually encourage piracy." He also explained how hardware makers, in his view, will be cutting their own throats if they don't provide equipment "compatible" with Disney's need to protect its ownership of its broadband content, which he predicted will overwhelm all other uses of the Internet in the near future, if hardware makers will only be sensible, and thus drive hardware sales as nothing else can. He also thinks firms like Disney are necessary to "consolidate" the work of creative people. Scarey mo'fo'. Charlie was treating him like diety.
So how do we make Eisner wrong? How do we be sure that there's always strong demand for open hardware? Hell, how do we keep it legal? How do we make sure that every CTO tells his CEO that the networks of every sector outside of entertainment (and many within) absolutely depend on open hardware availability? How do we provide means for independent creative types with their low cost digital equipment to present better animation through open Web broadcasts than Disney can ever do on proprietary hardware (because Disney is creatively terminally lame, because the original Disney cartoon crew was a small, lean group itself)? Hell, how do we get the hardware companies see that they can make more money by sponsoring independent artists (and maybe even take charitable writeoffs) than by shifting to closed devices?
... what this means is all scientists need low- or no-pay grad students and interns to handle their mundane coding and computer baby-sitting, and realize that they can never compete with private industry for those with solid coding skills (more art than engineering - and it _should_ be so - but that's a different discussion), so they figure they'll offer a small fraction of their prestige: handle my essentially-clerical computing administration and instead of calling you my clerk - no, secretary - no, administrative assistant - no, junior associate bio-genetic engineer! Yes, you'll be recognized as a high-prestige real scientist (TM)!
And in five or ten years, you may even get a byline as the last name on a published paper in some really, really obscure journal.
There are basically two schemes for justifying strong government control: without government 'protection' the criminal will get you, or the other, enemy government will get you. Any government, as an organism favoring its own survival, will be sure to manufacture one or the other, or some mix of the two. As subjects^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hcitizens we might consider which we prefer as the excuse: an 'evil empire' to face down or 'criminal terrorists' to suppress. The costs of the 'evil empire' model have been reasonably small in recent decades: entertainments like Viet Nam (for the French and US) or Afghanistan (for the Soviets), and a certain conformist jingoism. The costs of the 'criminal terrorists' model perhaps haven't been so fully explored lately (except when used by the Nazis against Jews). But keep in mind, if we distract our rulers from their current posturing against 'criminal terrorists' they will be sure to tilt back towards 'evil empire' - which probably means preparing for large-scale war against, say, China or Iran plus the Muslim former Soviet republics - and there are fewer truly out-of-the-way places to fight the Nam-style side battles that used to ease the friction of such posturing, more likelihood that the battles will involve Taiwan or oil fields, and lead to much more destruction than a game requiring someone to play the role of criminal terrorist is likely to lead to -- which is perhaps why our rulers favor the 'counter-terrorist' posture. Even when the obvious strategic aim of the missle shield, for instance, is to prepare for all-out war with China, still the public game is about 'rogue states' more on the scale of isolated terrorists than empires that can seriously challenge us.
We're going to lose more freedom by either game, but the style of loss, the trade-offs differ, and we might consider which we prefer. Just keep in mind that if we ease the official paranoia about hacker terrorists, our government will tilt back towards the model of assured mutual destruction as its legitimating excuse.
The reason Taiwan has such a small pipe is because all Net connections go through a government data center for security reasons - a justifiable degree of paranoia considering that mainland China is anxious to invade, execute the current government leaders, and harvest their organs for transplants.
# telnet www.microsoft.com 80
Trying 207.46.230.218...
Connected to www.microsoft.akadns.net.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET / HTTP1.0 [\n\n]
HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request
Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0
Date: Fri, 09 Mar 2001 02:51:16 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 87
<html><head><title>Error</tit le></head><body>The parameter is incorrect. </body></html>Connection closed by foreign host.
-----
Yes, you can set up the server to fib, but most servers will tell you what they're running, so it should be trivial for Mozilla to give warnings for particular servers.
"Not quite. Software is implementation of ideas. The source is speech, and could be classified as an idea, in the loosest sense."
So I have free speech, as long as I don't implement it? Real speech, if well-crafted and executed, causes effects - and the very meaning in language, according to many philosophers (following Paul Grice and John Searle) is grounded in the 'speech act,' which depends on there being a context to which it is spoken. The fact that effective speech can change the behavior of others (human, animal, machine) is essential to the very nature of speech. Computer language is precisely identical to other language performance here, unless we are to construe special legal restrictions on how we can speak to machines, or have machines modulate our speech - which would be very weird indeed, and nothing to do with the essential nature of speech, but only local social customs - the development of which in this direction should be strongly resisted, in my political and technological opinion.
The whole point of fair use is that we are not 'consumers,' but rather engaged participants in the larger dialog which constitutes our society and civilization. Because engagement is hindered if we cannot quote from other participants, thus we derive the doctrine of fair use.
This guy may be hip to mp3.com's lobbyist, but never trust anyone who uses 'consumers' as if it were a neutral term. There's always the implication that we're the baby and they're the teat, or worse. It's not just infantalizing, but contemptuous, a language of serfdom rather than free-and-equal engagement.
"walking a fine line between not regulating the Internet to death and keeping it the open, vibrant network it is today"
Say again? No, that makes sense, to keep it open and vibrant it has to be regulated, but not to death. ?? But this is in the context of the Time/AOL merger, so it's Time/AOL that has to be regulated, but not to death? Why not?
Legally, in most states in the U.S., a 'non-profit organization' is a 'not-for-profit corporation.' That is, you are not legally a non-profit organization unless you have obtained not-for-profit corporate status.
Now, the only way they can propose to limit.org to 'non-profit organizations' is to require evidence of synonymous legal status, which in my state means establishing a 'not-for-profit corporation.' There's no such animal, legally, as a non-profit organization that's not a corporation.
Or are you suggesting that they will accept a mere assertion of 'Yeah, we're organized, and we're not in it for profit'? If it was handled that way, and if.org domains were only revoked on presentation of a high level of proof that they are in fact being used primarily for profit-making activities (as compared to associated income-generating activities of non-profit organizations, such as a museum shop), then there's not such a problem.
But also, keep in mind that in many states a corporation may consist of one person; the requirements to be an 'organization' should be similarly lax.
"Don't fit in anywhere else" would seem to suggest that what belongs under.org should not be anything that clearly belongs under.com (business operated for profit),.net (network services, although it seems to be an extension of.com now),.edu (eduational) or the country domains. So ruling out commercial enterprises would make the most sense - not restricting it to government-chartered not-for-profits.
If an individual's business should be.com the same as a corporation's, why should an individual's non-profit activities not be an.org the same as a corporation's? This establishes a special requirement - a bar to jump over - to do things for no profit that does not exist when individuals (or partnerships) do things for profit. Are we trying to discourage individual good works in the name of further corporatizing society?
For example, I provide free hosting and webmastering for jazzhouse.org, the Jazz Journalists Associations' site. I just like promoting this end of our culture. But guess what, the Association isn't formally incorporated. So I have to tell them "You have to pony up the legal expenses for formal incorporation or they're going to take away your well-established domain"?
1. You can't copyright or trademark the title of a book (which is why there are many books with duplicate names), only something like the name and logo of the publishing house can be trademarked. Should movies be different?
2. The mark has to be in use in association with the goods before you can validly trademark it. So you can't have a valid trademark on a movie called Diablo until the movie is released. Period.
It's becoming increasingly obvious Australia doesn't believe in freedom - the original prisoner/jailer mentality must have held on. What's happening in New Zealand? Is there an English-language alternative homeland after Australia follows England and the States down the tube of tyranny? (Don't say Canada, that's not really an independent country... and already rights-deprived in many respects.) South Africa? India (English spoken, but getting a bit crowded)?
Obviously there are a lot of idiots sharing space they should rather not. But consider, if the RIAA succeeds in shutting down folks purposely providing mp3 files (say, in conjunction with Gnutella), what happens if we extend the current state of affairs and mount a lot of open shares to the Net, all innocently like - sort of a public filespace project? Then it becomes less like leaving your front door open, more like maintaining the sidewalk in front of your house.
Having a sidewalk the public can use, and which you are legally required to fix cracks in and shovel snow off, does not in addition legally require you to post a private cop out there to make sure only reputable people walk across it... it is public space; even though the private property owner has both rights and obligations concerning it, the property owner is not responsible for public passage through that space... even when the person on your walk is carrying items of disputed ownership. No jurisdiction would make you remove the sidewalk.
Since the manufacturers want to be standards compliant, the way to beat one standard is with another. Multiply standards, so that the 'open' equipment makers end up complying with more standards than the fascist-collaborators.
A related business opportunity also presents itself: Set up an equipment vendor that specializes in selling only stuff that would meet the OMI standard. Hell, guarantee that all your stuff meets the standard.
Or even set up a standard for equipment resellers that's the equivalent of being a certified organic grocery (not that there is such a thing - but there should be).
Or set up your meta-site, your Cnet or whatever, so that I can search for the best price on a 100 gig OMI-compliant drive, ranking certified OMI-only vendors first.
Get Lloyds of London to back policies to manufacturers and resellers to back up their OMI-compliance guarantees.
As a (hey, what's the cheapest hardware we can throw at this? type of) Webserver admin, I know the deeper the encryption the more often served, the higher the load on the server - way beyond the load in clear. What could be useful now is to know and implement the minimal level of encryption to use to get past the dogs - not trying to do everything at the max. Like, 8-bit or so might go through just fine, and not require hardware upgrades for busy sites. Why wear a full suit of armor when ninja pjs will do?
The study showed that adults prefer lavender to whatever other color(s) were presented. This shows enculturated bad taste. They've also been enculturated to pretend not to notice skin color.
The kids on the other hand went by a naive appreciation over-all aesthetic effect - the lavender didn't match the darker Barbie so well, perhaps. Most likely all of the dresses were originally designed to compliment pale skin. Or the kids favored a doll that served the traditional doll function of being believable as a standin for their own future child (or in the case of Barbie: future self), this being a beautiful possibility to a kid, and most of the kids in Boulder being pale. One African tribe gives a woman a doll at marriage, which is given the name which is to be transferred to her first baby later on, and stands in for the child until then.
Dolls and school are both about pretending: learning to pretend to be adults. The older people in Boulder have obviously been well schooled. This in a state that voted for a man who pretends that there's no global warming, who pretends that he won the presidency, who favors federal funds for schools teaching 'creation science' - in our virtual present, we don't need science anymore, just engineering to remove the unsightly refuse so we can get on with our pretend individuality with our pretend SUVs and our toy guns... also popular it seems in Colorado. Oops, that wasn't a toy?!
I'm not a lawyer, but I used to tell lawyers where to get off when I was the Trademarks portion of the Corporations and Trademarks division of a Western state some years back. In other words, this is what the staff lawyer had me tell the outside lawyers, who generally charged $1000 for a state filing that went for $50, and more often than not could not follow simple directions on a one page form. The federal form is similarly simple - hiring a lawyer for trademark filing is foolish, the ones practicing in this area mostly do so because they can't handle real law, and even this stuff challenges them.
Trademark is based in common law, and depends on first use in a particular product or trade category. You can also register it federally or in individual states, but this is essentially to have proof of use on file, it isn't what actually establishes the mark. What we required with a filing is a copy of the mark as it is in use. What we wouldn't accept was something just hand written - just not credible.
Now, there's also a difference between just using it in one state and interstate - you want interstate for the federal rights. As for the folks posting here saying you should incorporate - can't see why, corporations have no more rights here than individuals or partnerships, and partnerships have a common law basis too... but that's getting outside the scope (and varies by state law - in many states you can just write up something declaring your partnership in the trade you're using the mark for and voila!).
If you have proof of first use of a mark in trade, and someone else comes along and registers it later, you can appeal their registration and get it thrown out. It's all a matter of how you pin down proof. You want to get the mark printed up looking professional, use it in conjunction with your goods or services (the more sorts of goods and services the better), and send a few copies of this use by certified mail to yourself, which you then keep unopened, for starters. Basically the trick is to get a bunch of stuff firmly dated - a notary public's stamp on a few items can help here too.
The need to enforce a mark that other folks are citing here is real too - but it applies if your concern is to keep it a trademark, not so much if your concern is to keep others from using trademark to deprive you of it. If your concern is just to keep use open, then having proof of use prior to anyone else's in interstate trade is enough to get anyone else's attempt to own it thrown out (there are filing fees for the challenges at state level, but they're reasonable - not sure on the federal procedure). Isn't that the main point with open source?
Y'all probably believe that the performance of surgery shouldn't require a license, that any kid up the street with a sharp knife and a how-to book should be allowed to hang a shingle and start cutting up the citizenry. Now, what's the difference between sawboning and network hacking? How is the quality of the latter less important to society than that of the former? Sure, some kids might make great natural neurosurgeons, but isn't it better to block their practice until they get recognized degrees? It's okay if they practice on frogs, or on machines not connected to the Internet, but to allow unlicensed individuals with amateur tools to link their experiments into our infrastructure is as foolish as letting them make mind-altering drugs in their bathtubs, and then letting them sell these alongside the products of respectable pharmeceutical firms in our drugstores. Even a licensed doctor can't prescribe such amateur medicines. If they were allowed they would threaten our pharmeceutical industry in exactly the same way Redmond is threatened by open source.
Also, compare what pretend president George said about Willie's blocking some private uses of public lands: that this amounted to 'takings,' to appropriation by the government of what by right should be private profit opportunities. Well, open source isn't 'takings' by the government - it's takings by a mob. The notion that "You can't fence this land off and call it your own" was defeated along with the Native American tribes that espoused it, and to the victor go the spoils. A lot of these open source folk may look like cowboys, but they've gone native.
I dunno. Look at Speakeasy.net in Seattle. Started as a coffee shop with a few Net terminals. Became a local ISP and grew to a couple thousand users. Signed up to resell Covad and realized they might as well do it nationally. Now highly rated, fast growing (have hired a few bozos lately because too fast growing), but mostly competent and human staff, and doing well when scams like Flashcom have gone belly up due to greed and incompetence.
The point is if you're a mom & pop and do your business straight up, and can recruit the right staff, there's no limit, you can be as big as you're comfortable with. However, while the best mom & pop is always better than a chain store, most mom & pops are worse - which is why we have the blight of chain stores. Anyone in a town with an independent hardware store which knows its business will never defect to Home Depot. But if it's a little store that's haphazardly run and stupid, national merchandising will win every time.
Slashdot Mirror
A close friend has gone into complete remission of a cancer of which there is only a single (disputed) remission in the medical literature? How? By being treated with a device set up by a retired electrical engineer based on a Tesla design. It's not the first cancer cured by the device either, by a long shot. So how do we support real research into real cures that won't enrich the drug companies at all - in fact will impoverish them? This is a serious question; people are dying.
If I publish a book that's a compilation of articles, it requires but one copyright registration. So where would we be if a service was set up where anything under appropriate license (say, GNU) could be uploaded to a site from which it would be (in compressed form) added to a DVD compilation-of-the-month (or so) that would be duly registered with the Feds under an "all rights revert to the authors of the individual packages" arrangement? After all, if I copyright a book or magazine - which will in some instances contain such an assignment to the original authors - and you steal a single article from it, you're guilty. And this means it wouldn't take 100s of folks submitting registration to the feds (and the fees that involves) but only one small organization with the ability to collect the stuff and burn the DVD (it would also I think be necessary to actually offer the DVD for sale in order to secure the copyright - so that it's actually published - but hey, that could be a useful thing to have or subscribe to for some).
What if SGI licensed the trademark to OpenIL for a token fee? After all, trademarks are often licensed (for instance, to display a logo with a compatibility claim), without diluting them. This way SGI would still fully protect its own trademark from real infringement, and not lose face with the open source/free software community which will stay away from its products if it does much bullying of noncommercial uses of obvious names that somewhat resemble its trademarks.
Considering you can get 2 1.5 meg DSL lines for less than 1 1.5 meg T1 ... and if you're lucky enough to be where there are two different providers, with two different wholesalers, have good redundancy ... even now there are few cases where a data-intensive small business should really have a T1. Hell, any SDSL line is capable of hosting a modestly trafficked Website, plus ftp, plus whatever for a smallish firm.
But I sure am glad I told me only client on Northpoint that yes he really needed to have a second line from Covad installed months ago.
Haven't looked at Progeny - but a better installer is exactly what Debian needs. The current installer leaves you up a creek if, for instance, the stock kernel doesn't support your NIC - there's no way back into what it then automatically refuses to set up after you compile a module or new kernel to deal with that. The maintainer of the installation routine doesn't care for suggestions on improvement either. Maybe he sees Progeny coming and knows he'll soon be obsolete. I hope so, because once it's installed Debian is much better than Red Hat in most regards, especially apt-get.
Legally, if a magazine buys your short story, it is for publication only in that magazine - unless they've had you sign a contract covering other media, which is common now but wasn't five years ago. So if they then issue a book and want to include your story, they have to buy it from you again. But under current law if they merely reprint the issue of the magazine, they don't. What the Supreme's are facing is an argument from the Times and other publishers that putting the story in a large online database is the same as reprinting the magazine, and not the same as presenting the story in a fresh collection (like a book) that would require them buying it from you again. Since an online database is obviously less like a magazine than even a book is, this should be a slam dunk - if at least 5 of the Supremes weren't known to be crooked.
... so screw the authors."
Now, one claim that the publishers are making is "If we have to buy the stories again, gee, we can't afford that, and civilization can't afford for the old stories (which we bought before we had 'all rights' contracts standard) to be left out of the databases and forgotten
Charlie Rose interviewed Michael Eisner, head of Disney (do I remember his name right?) a few days ago. Disney is very pleased, he said, with the response from Congress to its educating them regarding the need for legislation to compel hardware makers "not to continue to virtually encourage piracy." He also explained how hardware makers, in his view, will be cutting their own throats if they don't provide equipment "compatible" with Disney's need to protect its ownership of its broadband content, which he predicted will overwhelm all other uses of the Internet in the near future, if hardware makers will only be sensible, and thus drive hardware sales as nothing else can. He also thinks firms like Disney are necessary to "consolidate" the work of creative people. Scarey mo'fo'. Charlie was treating him like diety.
So how do we make Eisner wrong? How do we be sure that there's always strong demand for open hardware? Hell, how do we keep it legal? How do we make sure that every CTO tells his CEO that the networks of every sector outside of entertainment (and many within) absolutely depend on open hardware availability? How do we provide means for independent creative types with their low cost digital equipment to present better animation through open Web broadcasts than Disney can ever do on proprietary hardware (because Disney is creatively terminally lame, because the original Disney cartoon crew was a small, lean group itself)? Hell, how do we get the hardware companies see that they can make more money by sponsoring independent artists (and maybe even take charitable writeoffs) than by shifting to closed devices?
... what this means is all scientists need low- or no-pay grad students and interns to handle their mundane coding and computer baby-sitting, and realize that they can never compete with private industry for those with solid coding skills (more art than engineering - and it _should_ be so - but that's a different discussion), so they figure they'll offer a small fraction of their prestige: handle my essentially-clerical computing administration and instead of calling you my clerk - no, secretary - no, administrative assistant - no, junior associate bio-genetic engineer! Yes, you'll be recognized as a high-prestige real scientist (TM)!
And in five or ten years, you may even get a byline as the last name on a published paper in some really, really obscure journal.
There are basically two schemes for justifying strong government control: without government 'protection' the criminal will get you, or the other, enemy government will get you. Any government, as an organism favoring its own survival, will be sure to manufacture one or the other, or some mix of the two. As subjects^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hcitizens we might consider which we prefer as the excuse: an 'evil empire' to face down or 'criminal terrorists' to suppress. The costs of the 'evil empire' model have been reasonably small in recent decades: entertainments like Viet Nam (for the French and US) or Afghanistan (for the Soviets), and a certain conformist jingoism. The costs of the 'criminal terrorists' model perhaps haven't been so fully explored lately (except when used by the Nazis against Jews). But keep in mind, if we distract our rulers from their current posturing against 'criminal terrorists' they will be sure to tilt back towards 'evil empire' - which probably means preparing for large-scale war against, say, China or Iran plus the Muslim former Soviet republics - and there are fewer truly out-of-the-way places to fight the Nam-style side battles that used to ease the friction of such posturing, more likelihood that the battles will involve Taiwan or oil fields, and lead to much more destruction than a game requiring someone to play the role of criminal terrorist is likely to lead to -- which is perhaps why our rulers favor the 'counter-terrorist' posture. Even when the obvious strategic aim of the missle shield, for instance, is to prepare for all-out war with China, still the public game is about 'rogue states' more on the scale of isolated terrorists than empires that can seriously challenge us.
We're going to lose more freedom by either game, but the style of loss, the trade-offs differ, and we might consider which we prefer. Just keep in mind that if we ease the official paranoia about hacker terrorists, our government will tilt back towards the model of assured mutual destruction as its legitimating excuse.
The reason Taiwan has such a small pipe is because all Net connections go through a government data center for security reasons - a justifiable degree of paranoia considering that mainland China is anxious to invade, execute the current government leaders, and harvest their organs for transplants.
# telnet www.microsoft.com 80
Trying 207.46.230.218...
Connected to www.microsoft.akadns.net.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET / HTTP1.0 [\n\n]
HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request
Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0
Date: Fri, 09 Mar 2001 02:51:16 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 87
<html><head><title>Error</tit le></head><body>The parameter is incorrect. </body></html>Connection closed by foreign host.
-----
Yes, you can set up the server to fib, but most servers will tell you what they're running, so it should be trivial for Mozilla to give warnings for particular servers.
"Not quite. Software is implementation of ideas. The source is speech, and could be classified as an idea, in the loosest sense."
So I have free speech, as long as I don't implement it? Real speech, if well-crafted and executed, causes effects - and the very meaning in language, according to many philosophers (following Paul Grice and John Searle) is grounded in the 'speech act,' which depends on there being a context to which it is spoken. The fact that effective speech can change the behavior of others (human, animal, machine) is essential to the very nature of speech. Computer language is precisely identical to other language performance here, unless we are to construe special legal restrictions on how we can speak to machines, or have machines modulate our speech - which would be very weird indeed, and nothing to do with the essential nature of speech, but only local social customs - the development of which in this direction should be strongly resisted, in my political and technological opinion.
"... the interests of information consumers ..."
The whole point of fair use is that we are not 'consumers,' but rather engaged participants in the larger dialog which constitutes our society and civilization. Because engagement is hindered if we cannot quote from other participants, thus we derive the doctrine of fair use.
This guy may be hip to mp3.com's lobbyist, but never trust anyone who uses 'consumers' as if it were a neutral term. There's always the implication that we're the baby and they're the teat, or worse. It's not just infantalizing, but contemptuous, a language of serfdom rather than free-and-equal engagement.
Say again? No, that makes sense, to keep it open and vibrant it has to be regulated, but not to death. ?? But this is in the context of the Time/AOL merger, so it's Time/AOL that has to be regulated, but not to death? Why not?
Now, the only way they can propose to limit .org to 'non-profit organizations' is to require evidence of synonymous legal status, which in my state means establishing a 'not-for-profit corporation.' There's no such animal, legally, as a non-profit organization that's not a corporation.
Or are you suggesting that they will accept a mere assertion of 'Yeah, we're organized, and we're not in it for profit'? If it was handled that way, and if .org domains were only revoked on presentation of a high level of proof that they are in fact being used primarily for profit-making activities (as compared to associated income-generating activities of non-profit organizations, such as a museum shop), then there's not such a problem.
But also, keep in mind that in many states a corporation may consist of one person; the requirements to be an 'organization' should be similarly lax.
"Don't fit in anywhere else" would seem to suggest that what belongs under .org should not be anything that clearly belongs under .com (business operated for profit), .net (network services, although it seems to be an extension of .com now), .edu (eduational) or the country domains. So ruling out commercial enterprises would make the most sense - not restricting it to government-chartered not-for-profits.
If an individual's business should be .com the same as a corporation's, why should an individual's non-profit activities not be an .org the same as a corporation's? This establishes a special requirement - a bar to jump over - to do things for no profit that does not exist when individuals (or partnerships) do things for profit. Are we trying to discourage individual good works in the name of further corporatizing society?
For example, I provide free hosting and webmastering for jazzhouse.org, the Jazz Journalists Associations' site. I just like promoting this end of our culture. But guess what, the Association isn't formally incorporated. So I have to tell them "You have to pony up the legal expenses for formal incorporation or they're going to take away your well-established domain"?
1. You can't copyright or trademark the title of a book (which is why there are many books with duplicate names), only something like the name and logo of the publishing house can be trademarked. Should movies be different?
2. The mark has to be in use in association with the goods before you can validly trademark it. So you can't have a valid trademark on a movie called Diablo until the movie is released. Period.
It's becoming increasingly obvious Australia doesn't believe in freedom - the original prisoner/jailer mentality must have held on. What's happening in New Zealand? Is there an English-language alternative homeland after Australia follows England and the States down the tube of tyranny? (Don't say Canada, that's not really an independent country ... and already rights-deprived in many respects.) South Africa? India (English spoken, but getting a bit crowded)?
Having a sidewalk the public can use, and which you are legally required to fix cracks in and shovel snow off, does not in addition legally require you to post a private cop out there to make sure only reputable people walk across it ... it is public space; even though the private property owner has both rights and obligations concerning it, the property owner is not responsible for public passage through that space ... even when the person on your walk is carrying items of disputed ownership. No jurisdiction would make you remove the sidewalk.
A related business opportunity also presents itself: Set up an equipment vendor that specializes in selling only stuff that would meet the OMI standard. Hell, guarantee that all your stuff meets the standard.
Or even set up a standard for equipment resellers that's the equivalent of being a certified organic grocery (not that there is such a thing - but there should be).
Or set up your meta-site, your Cnet or whatever, so that I can search for the best price on a 100 gig OMI-compliant drive, ranking certified OMI-only vendors first.
Get Lloyds of London to back policies to manufacturers and resellers to back up their OMI-compliance guarantees.
As a (hey, what's the cheapest hardware we can throw at this? type of) Webserver admin, I know the deeper the encryption the more often served, the higher the load on the server - way beyond the load in clear. What could be useful now is to know and implement the minimal level of encryption to use to get past the dogs - not trying to do everything at the max. Like, 8-bit or so might go through just fine, and not require hardware upgrades for busy sites. Why wear a full suit of armor when ninja pjs will do?
The study showed that adults prefer lavender to whatever other color(s) were presented. This shows enculturated bad taste. They've also been enculturated to pretend not to notice skin color.
... also popular it seems in Colorado. Oops, that wasn't a toy?!
The kids on the other hand went by a naive appreciation over-all aesthetic effect - the lavender didn't match the darker Barbie so well, perhaps. Most likely all of the dresses were originally designed to compliment pale skin. Or the kids favored a doll that served the traditional doll function of being believable as a standin for their own future child (or in the case of Barbie: future self), this being a beautiful possibility to a kid, and most of the kids in Boulder being pale. One African tribe gives a woman a doll at marriage, which is given the name which is to be transferred to her first baby later on, and stands in for the child until then.
Dolls and school are both about pretending: learning to pretend to be adults. The older people in Boulder have obviously been well schooled. This in a state that voted for a man who pretends that there's no global warming, who pretends that he won the presidency, who favors federal funds for schools teaching 'creation science' - in our virtual present, we don't need science anymore, just engineering to remove the unsightly refuse so we can get on with our pretend individuality with our pretend SUVs and our toy guns
I'm not a lawyer, but I used to tell lawyers where to get off when I was the Trademarks portion of the Corporations and Trademarks division of a Western state some years back. In other words, this is what the staff lawyer had me tell the outside lawyers, who generally charged $1000 for a state filing that went for $50, and more often than not could not follow simple directions on a one page form. The federal form is similarly simple - hiring a lawyer for trademark filing is foolish, the ones practicing in this area mostly do so because they can't handle real law, and even this stuff challenges them.
... but that's getting outside the scope (and varies by state law - in many states you can just write up something declaring your partnership in the trade you're using the mark for and voila!).
Trademark is based in common law, and depends on first use in a particular product or trade category. You can also register it federally or in individual states, but this is essentially to have proof of use on file, it isn't what actually establishes the mark. What we required with a filing is a copy of the mark as it is in use. What we wouldn't accept was something just hand written - just not credible.
Now, there's also a difference between just using it in one state and interstate - you want interstate for the federal rights. As for the folks posting here saying you should incorporate - can't see why, corporations have no more rights here than individuals or partnerships, and partnerships have a common law basis too
If you have proof of first use of a mark in trade, and someone else comes along and registers it later, you can appeal their registration and get it thrown out. It's all a matter of how you pin down proof. You want to get the mark printed up looking professional, use it in conjunction with your goods or services (the more sorts of goods and services the better), and send a few copies of this use by certified mail to yourself, which you then keep unopened, for starters. Basically the trick is to get a bunch of stuff firmly dated - a notary public's stamp on a few items can help here too.
The need to enforce a mark that other folks are citing here is real too - but it applies if your concern is to keep it a trademark, not so much if your concern is to keep others from using trademark to deprive you of it. If your concern is just to keep use open, then having proof of use prior to anyone else's in interstate trade is enough to get anyone else's attempt to own it thrown out (there are filing fees for the challenges at state level, but they're reasonable - not sure on the federal procedure). Isn't that the main point with open source?
Y'all probably believe that the performance of surgery shouldn't require a license, that any kid up the street with a sharp knife and a how-to book should be allowed to hang a shingle and start cutting up the citizenry. Now, what's the difference between sawboning and network hacking? How is the quality of the latter less important to society than that of the former? Sure, some kids might make great natural neurosurgeons, but isn't it better to block their practice until they get recognized degrees? It's okay if they practice on frogs, or on machines not connected to the Internet, but to allow unlicensed individuals with amateur tools to link their experiments into our infrastructure is as foolish as letting them make mind-altering drugs in their bathtubs, and then letting them sell these alongside the products of respectable pharmeceutical firms in our drugstores. Even a licensed doctor can't prescribe such amateur medicines. If they were allowed they would threaten our pharmeceutical industry in exactly the same way Redmond is threatened by open source.
Also, compare what pretend president George said about Willie's blocking some private uses of public lands: that this amounted to 'takings,' to appropriation by the government of what by right should be private profit opportunities. Well, open source isn't 'takings' by the government - it's takings by a mob. The notion that "You can't fence this land off and call it your own" was defeated along with the Native American tribes that espoused it, and to the victor go the spoils. A lot of these open source folk may look like cowboys, but they've gone native.
I dunno. Look at Speakeasy.net in Seattle. Started as a coffee shop with a few Net terminals. Became a local ISP and grew to a couple thousand users. Signed up to resell Covad and realized they might as well do it nationally. Now highly rated, fast growing (have hired a few bozos lately because too fast growing), but mostly competent and human staff, and doing well when scams like Flashcom have gone belly up due to greed and incompetence.
The point is if you're a mom & pop and do your business straight up, and can recruit the right staff, there's no limit, you can be as big as you're comfortable with. However, while the best mom & pop is always better than a chain store, most mom & pops are worse - which is why we have the blight of chain stores. Anyone in a town with an independent hardware store which knows its business will never defect to Home Depot. But if it's a little store that's haphazardly run and stupid, national merchandising will win every time.