>that's because this is so highly publicized. The media is raising a big stink about how King is (gasp!) releasing a book for free. It was even in my local newspaper this morning. > But once this becomes commonplace, people are going to stop caring.
Oh good grief. In Germany people ride the subways on an honor-payment system, where it is far cheaper not to pay and get caught now and then. The fact is, as with shareware, MOST people will pay a reasonable amont for what they use, if given a reasonably simple way to do so. And for those who don't -- regulating them costs far more than the losses; its usually the people on the low-end of your margins who don't pay.
I dare say, if everyone began to distribute like King, and if every time you went online there was a simple debit system for novels -- and CDs, and DVDs, and software -- people would get paid, creativity and production would go up, and all the marketing guys at Time-Warner would be preparing to get on the first Ark right beside the telephone booth cleaners.
>there was a good quote by oppenheimer in james gleick's book "Genius", to the effect that as a scientist, he had to believe that to know was ALWAYS better than not to know, even when that knowledge was dangerous. "god created this world, not us" (saw this in a post a bit down). if god created this world (i'm not arguing either way), i doubt that he wanted us to sit here and live in self-imposed ignorance.
This was true of Oppenheimer's opinion before Alamagordo... not after.
On the train back to Chicago, he wrote in his notebook, "I have become Shiva, the destroyer of worlds."
His opinion was that, in taking on the capacity to destroy the world, men had become G-ds -- and thereby overstepped their capacity. Learning how to split the atom had released the Furies into the world -- an unknown and horrific possible destruction. Oppenheimer spent much of the rest of his life, along with other Atomic Scientists, trying to put them back in the bag.
This gained him little to nothing, exclusion from the labs he created, and government reactions like Harry Truman's "never let that bastard in my office again."
Scientists may create the technology, but once it has a useful effect for some other group, they never control it. The geneticists who think they'll be helping the world should keep this in mind -- once created, these technologies will be USED. And people like William Gibson seem to have a much better idea of how this will happen than any of the rosy-cheeked "oh, we're eliminating disease" geneticists. Obviously, as in the case of nanotechnology, Genome sequencing will fundamentally change how the world works, and there are profound military implications (particularly, in the conjunction of the two). Ever hear of assassination politics? Guess not... especially if you happen to be one of those overgrown children who work on the technologies which will make them possible:)
I've been thinking about the comparison with disobedience against racism for a while, and I think the supposed difference is a crock.
I met Rosa Parks at a college seminar over a decade ago. Someone asked her if she was thinking about taking on the system when she sat down on the bus. She said, simply, "no, I was tired after a long day at work, and needed a place to sit. The back of the bus was full. I thought that it was stupid not to sit in the front." Civil disobedience followed -- afterwards -- because people saw that it was stupid to have a law that prevented black people from sitting in the front.
DeCSS is essentially the same case. One (bright) kid wanted to play a DVD he had purchased, and thought a law against doing that was stupid. Thus his father's comments on taking on the Nazis, etc.
Again, the issue is the same. Race laws were a load of bull, designed to protect the interests of a few, by telling others what they couldn't do. DCMA is a load of bull, designed to protect the interests of a few, by telling others what they can't do.
In both cases, a bunch of irrational prejudice is piled on top to confuse the issue and make it seem like what you're told not to do is something you shouldn't do -- even though it's obvious you should be able to sit down, or watch a DVD.
Jews are subhuman monsters that will eat your children. Black people are stupid and dirty, and we can't sit next to them. Movies are owned by the people who make them, the industry should decide how and when you see them, and the whole world would collapse if we let kids in Norway learn how to watch them on their Linux boxes.
All the same load of bull, all for the same purpose, to stop people from doing what is possible and sensible -- because it treatens what someone else wants.
>>everyone involved knows for a fact that the defendant is innocent the conviction rate in moot court is about the same as it is in real courts, the prosecution wins about 90% of the cases.
Yes, and isn't it an American tragedy that all these budding lawyers must then spend years in moot prison? After all, a lawyer is a terrible thing to waste.
Surely there is a formal term for the huge logical error you make above.
One good reason to use CCs is that there is quite a bit more insurance that, if there is a problem with the vendor or product, you won't get screwed. This varies from vendor to vendor, but a responsible MC/Visa vendor will do a lot of work for you, and take good care of gold card holders. AmEx will basically take any dispute over for you, acting as your representative and screwing the vendor with a charge-back that costs more than a refund. I have NEVER had AmEx not resolve a dispute. Their policy is so liberal that people I know in the restaurant business budget out a portion of January revenues to deal with the number of people who get their Christmas bills and then call up saying "I never went to that restaurant!"
Using paypal is only slightly better than sending a cashier's check in advance; and e-gold a couple of steps above that (which may be better than a cut-all-costs CC provider, of course...).
Paul was called to be an apostle through the will of G-d, but Sosthenes our brother had hitherto registered the name Paul in the Roman registry of Licensed Apostles.
At the church of God which is at Corinth, there was great legal battle with much quoting of scripture, wherein Sosthenses was given the right to use "Paul" for purposes of religious marketing and branding. In a separate petition, Pilate's Goat Meat in Galilee was granted rights to the phrase "Jesus Christ." Their claim rested on the fact that they had registered the phrase several hours before "Jesus Christ" was listed on the birth certificate of the well-known Phrophet from the same region. Mr. Pilate, a shepard at the time, successfully proved that he had uttered the phrase when he witnessed the birth of a two-headed sheep on December 25th, 1 B.C.E.
As a result, in an official press statement the Son of God declared today that he has decided to name his new religion "The-Prophet-Formerly-Known-As-Jesus-Christ and-His-Apostle-Sosthenes -ity," in the hope that this name will allow him to avoid the costs of further legal representation. Stay tuned for follow-up reports.
>>How many people are realizing that OS X is, >>essentially, a remake of NeXTStep?
> 1. Absolutely every last person who has seen any NeXT product ever.
All twelve of them?
> 2. Absolutely everybody who has >read even one column describing MacOS X and the >history of its development.
That'd bring us to a hundred, not counting my Uncle Joe, who can't speak anytime he gets near a computer.
> 3. Pretty much everybody on/. who has read an Apple-related story in the past year.
Adding another 40, evidently.
> Other than that, you are the only one to make the connection. Nice work.:)
Seriously, while you are very funny, _I_'ve only seen (many) isolated mentions of the rather obvious connections, but no one going very far into them. And it would be nice to see some discussion of the interfacing choices and goals, etc... which, again, I haven't seen.
OR, if you have seen it, please be a kind karma whore and provide references...
I just read quickly over the decision, and, frankly, this seems like a lot of hype on Garbus's part. The Judge's decision, for instance, makes it clear that he left Paul, Weiss (the firm that advised Time/Warner) before T/W hired them, etc... and that Garbus was otherwise playing with fairly shaky grounds for dismissal.
Sure, there's some animousity between Garbus and the Kaplan-- and with due reason, since Garbus seems to want a trial that plays well for the media. A recent poster complains that the Court was testy when Garbus repeated the point about no ripped DVDs being available...
The poster clearly doesn't get that such a thing is A WASTE OF THE COURT'S TIME. The judge is bright enough to understand the point, and doesn't need Matlock making it with grand rhetorical flourish. As the Judge states, he's there to get the business at hand done... and judges are usually fairly pissed off when people waste their time.
The comment that "he probably wrote this over the weekend..." was also low. OK, he writes like a judge... who work with code, and write more like coders than Shakespeare. The judgement starts off boring, and makes some dumb points that make you think the judge is against Garbus...
And, in fact, the judge clearly is. But not because of Time/Warner -- because, as the record states, Garbus&Co. are acting like jerks, not caring about pissing off the judge, etc. IMHO, Garbus is lucky to get the leeway he has...
Which raises a lot of questions: does he expect to win this one, or does he want to sap public opinion and increase the chances of winning on appeal (Kaplan sounds like a real old-school one, and like he sees DeCSS as clear cut, so why not piss him off and try to get positive press?).
Evidently their email address, phone and fax are now widely available.
I'd like to suggest that we all take the time to send them a short note, fax, or call, exercising our Constitutional right to express our opinions -- a right Apple seems to have little respect for...
> My other thought: > > 1989 -- NeXT cube > 2000 -- Mac cube
How many people are realizing that OS X is, essentially, a remake of NeXTStep? The first pictures I saw in MacWorld reminded me fondly of my NeXT cube (I called it fuzzy:) and the write-up made me realize that the resemblence wasn't just superficial... the GUI details and ideas (even ports) are very similar... UNIX is layered in very similar ways (if with a lot of new solutions!)...
It is amazing how Jobs couldn't get NeXT to beat Apple, so finally got Apple to buy NeXT, then spent years re-making Apple into NeXT... (go for HP next, as someone said...).
Unfortunately, as fond as I am of the Cube, it seems to me like an old fight, a 1989 solution... not an significantly new GUI, but an old PUI (PARC User Interface)...
> We have an absolute right for that speech to be gobbledigook, or to merely seem like gobbledigook until the proper key is applied.
Aye, no, I'm afraid. I believe it was Justice Scalia who, in a majority opinion, did opine tha the lyrics of 2LiveCrew were a "noisy sound truck" (whatever that is, maybe what politicians run through neighborhoods when they campaign...:) and had no right to constitutional protection... I can hardly see the current collection of Supremes saying you have a right splatter out a random stream...
>Better watch the movie again. The company was B&W, he was testifying in Mississippi, and apparently even KY wasn't too keen on enforcing the order
The company was Liggett, actually in fact, and testimony was ultimately given in both Mississippi and Florida cases. Don't count on movies for your facts -- _The Insider_ was widely summary in many places.
KY was never in a position to enforce the order per se, as the actions violating the order did not take place outside of KY -- so they could not be "restrained" by KY. Outside of KY, the legal question was much more tangled... and since Attorneys General in both states were bringing the cases, the police weren't going to stop him from going into Court (which very well might have happened in KY). ROs are fairly complext things, as they're easy to get (a lot easier than you might think) -- and I've heard, for example, local police tell people that they simply wouldn't enforce certain ROs (like banning someone from an entire town).
Also, as far as I know, _The Insider's_ stuff about Wiegland worrying about being arresting in KY was also make-believe: no warrant was brought in KY for him having violated the RO (Liggett could have done this easily; it wasn't a matter of KY not being "keen"; but probably they didn't really want further bad press).
>Don't take this personally... but I am sick and tired of people who don't seem to have a junior-high-school >the United States Constitution, Article IV, Section I, states the following:
> Full Faith and Credit shall be given in each State to the public Acts[...]
Down boy. Full Faith and Credit does not apply to state issued restraining orders -- for instance, RJR convinced a KY state court to issue a restraining order against Jeff Wiegland when he wanted to testify in Georgia against them. Only KY would enforce the order; no other state, or the Feds, would or could touch it.
Which is to say, this is a bit more complex than High School Gov't.
>It's pretty irrelevant to this case, though, which is in a Federal court.
>>Is this a *FEDERAL* judge, whose bench just happens to be in Illinois?
So federal vs. state is not irrelevant at all here. So don't get snotty about someone not knowing this, &etc. There are three Ph.D.s, including a PolSci-er, here, and we had to look it the fact that a district court was a Federal jurisdiction, in fact; and some of us here have had to file petitions before...
Slashdot is about the exchange of information -- community education. If you wanna get fed up, complain that the poster was too lazy to bring up google and find out himself... or that his concerns about State's rights are ill-defined. And help him on by explaining the situation.
But don't bat him down for asking a question. That's something we should be fed up of...
>that they block sites that run mailing lists that simply don't require a conformation for a mailing list subscription. These people are not spammers...
You neglect to mention that they don't do this without a complaint involving involuntary subscriptions.
Many universities run very, very large non-confirmed listserv ops. I don't see several on the RBL... presumably because they're not causing a problem.
If you're dumb enough to operate an unsecured maillist program in public view, you're creating a hazard that should be on the RBL.
>Dunno if this is all over the country, but PacBell sends us here in California a list of legal notifications to have your phone tapped. They include beeping every 10 or so seconds, a verbal notification, and others.
These are standard notifications that a conversation is being *RECORDED* (by a corporation), not that it is being *TAPPED*. (What, you think the FBI is going to play a bunch'o beeps to warn the terrorists:P)
> But if there is a third party tapping your email line, they don't have to notify you.
Unless that third party is acting under a court order, they'd be in violation of the Electronic Privacy act of 1991. Class 2 felony, I believe.
Alright, I'm a bit late inta this one, but as I know a few people at RasorFish, USWeb/CKS, and the rest, lemme take a few stabs at providing background.
1) COST. Someone said "they probably paid 50-100K for this." Er, last I checked USWeb/CKS's lowest billing rate is $300/hr (compare to $395/hr. for a junior partner at a local law firm such as HEWM). Looking over IAM and a RFP from USWeb, I'd guess that USWeb would have bid over $1 million on this site, and RazorFish probably put in $600-800K. (Assuming prices haven't changed in 6 months).
2) DELIVERABLES. USWeb, according to reputation, bids high and gets the work done more or less within budget; RazorFish, and many others, tend to bid low to get the contract and then pile on additional costs as "unforseen" events arize. Usually this stuff is retainer work anyway...
3) WHAT THEY COMPLAINING ABOUT??? The site is, really, pretty typical and average for what web design companies produce: nothing that 20 bright college kids couldn't do by looking at any firms' clients' pages and replicating... they asked for what a web design firm produces, they got what a web design firm produces. Caveat Emptor.
4) THE WEB DESIGN INDUSTRY IS LUDICROUS. OK, I know USWeb the best, and they run an incredibly tight shop that... well, works (slowly but surely) by strict adherance to formulas, guidelines and regulations. (Don't even mention perl if you want to be hired by them!). But billing at $300/hr and up for this crap? The work because Marketing is Big, CKS is a Real Ad Firm, and their clients Don't Know A Fuck about what is going on.
Should the law intervene? How? Should RazorFish be regulated -- or fools like IAM? (or: was PT Barnum right when he said "never call a man a fool -- take his money!")
Lemme offer a counterpoint: Business Week recently offered up tidbits from the Boo.com fiasco -- like the founders' weekly trips on the Concorde. Something about the Valley and Technology seems to inspire a total lack of financial oversight... and that money, after all, comes from somewhere...
>When I ran a restaruant the police told me that once I warned someone to leave, if they didn't depart immeadiatly they were then tresspassing.
Maybe. And state/local laws vary a lot as to what public accomodation entails (I doubt your parking lot was public accomodation to a non-paying customer) and what is legal behavior (if no shirt/shoes didn't violate health codes, you'd have a harder time excluding them).
If you were excluding the above folks from eating in your restaurant because of their appearance -- without having a fairly clear dress code or something like that -- you were (likely) breaking the law. If the police would help you remove them, they were also taking on quite a responsibility.
Fortunately or unfortunately, most teenagers who dress as you describe above don't have access to many legal resources to defend themselves, nor much knowledge of the law -- of how to conduct themselves. If you denied me access to your restaurant, I'd likely be the one to call the police, and I'd explain the situation very clearly, carefully, and to my advantage:)
I'm not saying you're not reasonable above. I'd just as rather have the annoying teenagers go somewhere else, and get a life. Or be stuck at home (programming, maybe:). But the myth that restaurants are on "private property" and you can do what you wish is simply wrong. A restaurant is not your home. If someone won't leave my home, I can have the police remove them at my request, or beat the crap out of them for that matter (in most states, not CA!). Act the same way in a restaurant and you're setting yourself up for legal trouble -- unless, of course, as in the example above, you do it to people who aren't going to be able to defend themselves legally.
(Footnotes: for a general review of public accomidation laws, take a look at the case of the gay scoutmaster vs. the Boy Scouts; at issue, whether the Boy Scouts could ask him to leave. In general, after the Boy Scouts were deemed to be offering public accomidation, the issue turned to whether (1) the Scouts has a _rational_ reason for excluding the gay Scoutmaster and (2) whether the exclusion was (since they were a private group) essential to their identity as a group. So, something like "exclusive restaurant can have people who don't dress up thrown out," Dennys you can't.
My patent attorneys are Townsend and Townsend & Crew LLP, Palo Alto. After a phone call, they inform me that competitive grading of employees has been based on the number of processed applications for several years, with heavy weighting to approved patents processed (approvals, after all, lead to more fees). Advancement tracks on the GS scale have been accelerated for people who perform on this measurement.
I believe if you do a news search of NYT/sfgate about patent law, you'll find a number of articles that refer to this factor in the accelerated ease of obtaining patents.
>If I ran a store, and someone kept entering that was asked to leave, I could no doubt call the police and have them removed.
Not in most states, if the business is offering walk-in "public accomodation." Just because you don't like someone, you can't ban him from your restaurant, and you certainly can't get the police to remove him.
I don't know what this guy's actions were. In most places, you can have someone who starts a fight thrown out. But fighting is against local law, imposes a threat of loss and liability on the business, etc. Does cussing at a bunch of folks constitute a threat or crime?
Depends on how or where. If he's grabbing random email addresses, then sending people unsolicited curse mail, cream him (or at least get a restraining order). If he's a jerk that gets into arguments with people and winds up cursing them out on the public forums, well, oh well. You can call the bouncer to rough up the village idiot, but you can't ask the police to get rid of him. (Well, unless you live in NY under Guilianni.)
What I'm saying is that the situation here matters, what he's done matters, and CNN reports none of that.
Somewhere in the US patent law, it states that the thing produced must be "non-obvious."
>Would Rambus and Amazon.com have any reason to create new technologies if they wouldn't profit from them? If every other retailer immediately instituted One-Click Shopping, then what would have Amazon.com gained? Nothing!
RAMBUT is using patent law to claim it owns something it didn't make on its own... so it can force its stock price up and get money from whomever caves in (not to mention how often Hitachi, Toshiba and RAMBUT executives are in bed together anyway...).
Amazon did nothing that wasn't really, really obvious.
In both cases, the 'patents' discourage others and hurt the marketplace. Patents are supposed to strike a balance between rewarding innnovation and allowing cheap, easy use -- not provide a playground for money-hungry corporations to gobble up whatever they can as the lawyers duke it out, while (I've said it before) the rest of us take it up the BUTT).
1) There's no such thing as a straightforward patent in days when the patent office pays people on the number they approve per month.
2) And even if there way, RAMBUS wouldn't be it. They filed a 'simultaneous patent' after engaging in talks & work with most of these companies -- who were working on the technologies on their own.
3) 'Tis to say, it's not clear the technology is theirs -- what is clear is that they've muddied the issue and are using legal brinkmanship to try and get $s out of the technology, whether or not they own it.
Which makes them a class act, 'specially as we're paying up the nose for it.
RAMBUT would be a better name, but it's the rest of the industry's butt...
Let's start with Apple and MOSR -- you can find more interesting rumors by sitting in coffee shops in Cupertino and SF. Because that's where the Apple guys are sitting.
But, like, fat lot of good it'd do you. Fact is, Apple's teams don't know what the fuck they're working on (read Scully's 500 days, people!). The iBook guys thought it'd weigh in under 4 lbs... or at least some of them did; others thought it had a touch screen;...
Not even Apple's managers know what Apple is going to produce. Again, go read Scully.
And then the lawyers: they send out the cease&desists to anyone who gets attention, 'cause, well, they don't have a clue what Apple is working on, but they wanna get paid, and have to find SOMEONE to send cease&desists to.
And MOSR again: well, like being "Mac-centered" means caving in to Apple. Anyway, they're just following their own interest, and this is a good publicity stunt op -- if they told Apple's lawyers to bugger off, they'd bugger off since they don't have a case, but there'd be no story...
Slashdot Mirror
>that's because this is so highly publicized. The media is raising a big stink about how King is (gasp!) releasing a book for free. It was even in my local newspaper this morning.
> But once this becomes commonplace, people are going to stop caring.
Oh good grief. In Germany people ride the subways on an honor-payment system, where it is far cheaper not to pay and get caught now and then. The fact is, as with shareware, MOST people will pay a reasonable amont for what they use, if given a reasonably simple way to do so. And for those who don't -- regulating them costs far more than the losses; its usually the people on the low-end of your margins who don't pay.
I dare say, if everyone began to distribute like King, and if every time you went online there was a simple debit system for novels -- and CDs, and DVDs, and software -- people would get paid, creativity and production would go up, and all the marketing guys at Time-Warner would be preparing to get on the first Ark right beside the telephone booth cleaners.
>there was a good quote by oppenheimer in james gleick's book "Genius", to the effect that as a scientist, he had to believe that to know was ALWAYS better than not to know, even when that knowledge was dangerous. "god created this world, not us" (saw this in a post a bit down). if god created this world (i'm not arguing either way), i doubt that he wanted us to sit here and live in self-imposed ignorance.
:)
This was true of Oppenheimer's opinion before Alamagordo... not after.
On the train back to Chicago, he wrote in his notebook, "I have become Shiva, the destroyer of worlds."
His opinion was that, in taking on the capacity to destroy the world, men had become G-ds -- and thereby overstepped their capacity. Learning how to split the atom had released the Furies into the world -- an unknown and horrific possible destruction. Oppenheimer spent much of the rest of his life, along with other Atomic Scientists, trying to put them back in the bag.
This gained him little to nothing, exclusion from the labs he created, and government reactions like Harry Truman's "never let that bastard in my office again."
Scientists may create the technology, but once it has a useful effect for some other group, they never control it. The geneticists who think they'll be helping the world should keep this in mind -- once created, these technologies will be USED. And people like William Gibson seem to have a much better idea of how this will happen than any of the rosy-cheeked "oh, we're eliminating disease" geneticists. Obviously, as in the case of nanotechnology, Genome sequencing will fundamentally change how the world works, and there are profound military implications (particularly, in the conjunction of the two). Ever hear of assassination politics? Guess not... especially if you happen to be one of those overgrown children who work on the technologies which will make them possible
I've been thinking about the comparison with disobedience against racism for a while, and I think the supposed difference is a crock.
I met Rosa Parks at a college seminar over a decade ago. Someone asked her if she was thinking about taking on the system when she sat down on the bus. She said, simply, "no, I was tired after a long day at work, and needed a place to sit. The back of the bus was full. I thought that it was stupid not to sit in the front." Civil disobedience followed -- afterwards -- because people saw that it was stupid to have a law that prevented black people from sitting in the front.
DeCSS is essentially the same case. One (bright) kid wanted to play a DVD he had purchased, and thought a law against doing that was stupid. Thus his father's comments on taking on the Nazis, etc.
Again, the issue is the same. Race laws were a load of bull, designed to protect the interests of a few, by telling others what they couldn't do. DCMA is a load of bull, designed to protect the interests of a few, by telling others what they can't do.
In both cases, a bunch of irrational prejudice is piled on top to confuse the issue and make it seem like what you're told not to do is something you shouldn't do -- even though it's obvious you should be able to sit down, or watch a DVD.
Jews are subhuman monsters that will eat your children. Black people are stupid and dirty, and we can't sit next to them. Movies are owned by the people who make them, the industry should decide how and when you see them, and the whole world would collapse if we let kids in Norway learn how to watch them on their Linux boxes.
All the same load of bull, all for the same purpose, to stop people from doing what is possible and sensible -- because it treatens what someone else wants.
All a matter of power. Period.
>>everyone involved knows for a fact that the defendant is innocent the conviction rate in moot court is about the same as it is in real courts, the prosecution wins about 90% of the
cases.
Yes, and isn't it an American tragedy that all these budding lawyers must then spend years in moot prison? After all, a lawyer is a terrible thing to waste.
Surely there is a formal term for the huge logical error you make above.
One good reason to use CCs is that there is quite a bit more insurance that, if there is a problem with the vendor or product, you won't get screwed. This varies from vendor to vendor, but a responsible MC/Visa vendor will do a lot of work for you, and take good care of gold card holders. AmEx will basically take any dispute over for you, acting as your representative and screwing the vendor with a charge-back that costs more than a refund. I have NEVER had AmEx not resolve a dispute. Their policy is so liberal that people I know in the restaurant business budget out a portion of January revenues to deal with the number of people who get their Christmas bills and then call up saying "I never went to that restaurant!"
Using paypal is only slightly better than sending a cashier's check in advance; and e-gold a couple of steps above that (which may be better than a cut-all-costs CC provider, of course...).
Galilee, 4:59 PM CIT --
Paul was called to be an apostle through the will of G-d, but Sosthenes our brother
had hitherto registered the name Paul in the
Roman registry of Licensed Apostles.
At the church of God which is at Corinth, there was great legal battle with much quoting of scripture, wherein Sosthenses was given the right to use "Paul" for purposes of religious marketing and branding. In a separate petition, Pilate's Goat Meat in Galilee was granted rights to the phrase "Jesus Christ." Their claim rested on the fact that they had registered the phrase several hours before "Jesus Christ" was listed on the birth certificate of the well-known Phrophet from the same region. Mr. Pilate, a shepard at the time, successfully proved that he had uttered the phrase when he witnessed the birth of a two-headed sheep on December 25th, 1 B.C.E.
As a result, in an official press statement the Son of God declared today that he has decided to name his new religion "The-Prophet-Formerly-Known-As-Jesus-Christ and-His-Apostle-Sosthenes -ity," in the hope that this name will allow him to avoid the costs of further legal representation. Stay tuned for follow-up reports.
One large Super Supreme for all Mankind. Hold the Onions.
>>How many people are realizing that OS X is, >>essentially, a remake of NeXTStep?
/. who has read an Apple-related story in the past year.
:)
> 1. Absolutely every last person who has seen any NeXT product ever.
All twelve of them?
> 2. Absolutely everybody who has >read even one column describing MacOS X and the >history of its development.
That'd bring us to a hundred, not counting my Uncle Joe, who can't speak anytime he gets near a computer.
> 3. Pretty much everybody on
Adding another 40, evidently.
> Other than that, you are the only one to make the connection. Nice work.
Seriously, while you are very funny, _I_'ve only seen (many) isolated mentions of the rather obvious connections, but no one going very far into them. And it would be nice to see some discussion of the interfacing choices and goals, etc... which, again, I haven't seen.
OR, if you have seen it, please be a kind karma whore and provide references...
I just read quickly over the decision, and, frankly, this seems like a lot of hype on Garbus's part. The Judge's decision, for instance, makes it clear that he left Paul, Weiss (the firm that advised Time/Warner) before T/W hired them, etc... and that Garbus was otherwise playing with fairly shaky grounds for dismissal.
Sure, there's some animousity between Garbus and the Kaplan-- and with due reason, since Garbus seems to want a trial that plays well for the media. A recent poster complains that the Court was testy when Garbus repeated the point about no ripped DVDs being available...
The poster clearly doesn't get that such a thing is A WASTE OF THE COURT'S TIME. The judge is bright enough to understand the point, and doesn't need Matlock making it with grand rhetorical flourish. As the Judge states, he's there to get the business at hand done... and judges are usually fairly pissed off when people waste their time.
The comment that "he probably wrote this over the weekend..." was also low. OK, he writes like a judge... who work with code, and write more like coders than Shakespeare. The judgement starts off boring, and makes some dumb points that make you think the judge is against Garbus...
And, in fact, the judge clearly is. But not because of Time/Warner -- because, as the record states, Garbus&Co. are acting like jerks, not caring about pissing off the judge, etc. IMHO, Garbus is lucky to get the leeway he has...
Which raises a lot of questions: does he expect to win this one, or does he want to sap public opinion and increase the chances of winning on appeal (Kaplan sounds like a real old-school one, and like he sees DeCSS as clear cut, so why not piss him off and try to get positive press?).
Annoys us greatly or, at least, many of us.
Evidently their email address, phone and fax are now widely available.
I'd like to suggest that we all take the time to send them a short note, fax, or call, exercising our Constitutional right to express our opinions -- a right Apple seems to have little respect for...
> My other thought:
:) and the write-up made me realize that the resemblence wasn't just superficial... the GUI details and ideas (even ports) are very similar... UNIX is layered in very similar ways (if with a lot of new solutions!)...
>
> 1989 -- NeXT cube
> 2000 -- Mac cube
How many people are realizing that OS X is, essentially, a remake of NeXTStep? The first pictures I saw in MacWorld reminded me fondly of my NeXT cube (I called it fuzzy
It is amazing how Jobs couldn't get NeXT to beat Apple, so finally got Apple to buy NeXT, then spent years re-making Apple into NeXT... (go for HP next, as someone said...).
Unfortunately, as fond as I am of the Cube, it seems to me like an old fight, a 1989 solution... not an significantly new GUI, but an old PUI (PARC User Interface)...
> We have an absolute right for that speech to be gobbledigook, or to merely seem like gobbledigook until the proper key is applied.
:) and had no right to constitutional protection... I can hardly see the current collection of Supremes saying you have a right splatter out a random stream...
Aye, no, I'm afraid. I believe it was Justice Scalia who, in a majority opinion, did opine tha the lyrics of 2LiveCrew were a "noisy sound truck" (whatever that is, maybe what politicians run through neighborhoods when they campaign...
>Better watch the movie again. The company was B&W, he was testifying in Mississippi, and apparently even KY wasn't too keen on enforcing the order
The company was Liggett, actually in fact, and testimony was ultimately given in both Mississippi and Florida cases. Don't count on movies for your facts -- _The Insider_ was widely summary in many places.
KY was never in a position to enforce the order per se, as the actions violating the order did not take place outside of KY -- so they could not be "restrained" by KY. Outside of KY, the legal question was much more tangled... and since Attorneys General in both states were bringing the cases, the police weren't going to stop him from going into Court (which very well might have happened in KY). ROs are fairly complext things, as they're easy to get (a lot easier than you might think) -- and I've heard, for example, local police tell people that they simply wouldn't enforce certain ROs (like banning someone from an entire town).
Also, as far as I know, _The Insider's_ stuff about Wiegland worrying about being arresting in KY was also make-believe: no warrant was brought in KY for him having violated the RO (Liggett could have done this easily; it wasn't a matter of KY not being "keen"; but probably they didn't really want further bad press).
>Don't take this personally ... but I am sick and tired of people who don't seem to have a junior-high-school
>the United States Constitution, Article IV, Section I, states the following:
> Full Faith and Credit shall be given in each State to the public Acts[...]
Down boy. Full Faith and Credit does not apply to state issued restraining orders -- for instance, RJR convinced a KY state court to issue a restraining order against Jeff Wiegland when he wanted to testify in Georgia against them. Only KY would enforce the order; no other state, or the Feds, would or could touch it.
Which is to say, this is a bit more complex than High School Gov't.
>It's pretty irrelevant to this case, though, which is in a Federal court.
>>Is this a *FEDERAL* judge, whose bench just happens to be in Illinois?
So federal vs. state is not irrelevant at all here. So don't get snotty about someone not knowing this, &etc. There are three Ph.D.s, including a PolSci-er, here, and we had to look it the fact that a district court was a Federal jurisdiction, in fact; and some of us here have had to file petitions before...
Slashdot is about the exchange of information -- community education. If you wanna get fed up, complain that the poster was too lazy to bring up google and find out himself... or that his concerns about State's rights are ill-defined. And help him on by explaining the situation.
But don't bat him down for asking a question. That's something we should be fed up of...
>that they block sites that run mailing lists that simply don't require a conformation for a mailing list subscription. These people are not spammers ...
You neglect to mention that they don't do this without a complaint involving involuntary subscriptions.
Many universities run very, very large non-confirmed listserv ops. I don't see several on the RBL... presumably because they're not causing a problem.
If you're dumb enough to operate an unsecured maillist program in public view, you're creating a hazard that should be on the RBL.
>Dunno if this is all over the country, but PacBell sends us here in California a list of legal notifications to have your phone tapped. They include beeping every 10 or so seconds, a verbal notification, and others.
:P)
These are standard notifications that a conversation is being *RECORDED* (by a corporation), not that it is being *TAPPED*. (What, you think the FBI is going to play a bunch'o beeps to warn the terrorists
> But if there is a third party tapping your email line, they don't have to notify you.
Unless that third party is acting under a court order, they'd be in violation of the Electronic Privacy act of 1991. Class 2 felony, I believe.
Alright, I'm a bit late inta this one, but as I know a few people at RasorFish, USWeb/CKS, and the rest, lemme take a few stabs at providing background.
1) COST. Someone said "they probably paid 50-100K for this." Er, last I checked USWeb/CKS's lowest billing rate is $300/hr (compare to $395/hr. for a junior partner at a local law firm such as HEWM). Looking over IAM and a RFP from USWeb, I'd guess that USWeb would have bid over $1 million on this site, and RazorFish probably put in $600-800K. (Assuming prices haven't changed in 6 months).
2) DELIVERABLES. USWeb, according to reputation, bids high and gets the work done more or less within budget; RazorFish, and many others, tend to bid low to get the contract and then pile on additional costs as "unforseen" events arize. Usually this stuff is retainer work anyway...
3) WHAT THEY COMPLAINING ABOUT??? The site is, really, pretty typical and average for what web design companies produce: nothing that 20 bright college kids couldn't do by looking at any firms' clients' pages and replicating... they asked for what a web design firm produces, they got what a web design firm produces. Caveat Emptor.
4) THE WEB DESIGN INDUSTRY IS LUDICROUS. OK, I know USWeb the best, and they run an incredibly tight shop that... well, works (slowly but surely) by strict adherance to formulas, guidelines and regulations. (Don't even mention perl if you want to be hired by them!). But billing at $300/hr and up for this crap? The work because Marketing is Big, CKS is a Real Ad Firm, and their clients Don't Know A Fuck about what is going on.
Should the law intervene? How? Should RazorFish be regulated -- or fools like IAM?
(or: was PT Barnum right when he said "never call a man a fool -- take his money!")
Lemme offer a counterpoint: Business Week recently offered up tidbits from the Boo.com fiasco -- like the founders' weekly trips on the Concorde. Something about the Valley and Technology seems to inspire a total lack of financial oversight... and that money, after all, comes from somewhere...
>When I ran a restaruant the police told me that once I warned someone to leave, if they didn't depart immeadiatly they were then tresspassing.
:)
:). But the myth that restaurants are on "private property" and you can do what you wish is simply wrong. A restaurant is not your home. If someone won't leave my home, I can have the police remove them at my request, or beat the crap out of them for that matter (in most states, not CA!). Act the same way in a restaurant and you're setting yourself up for legal trouble -- unless, of course, as in the example above, you do it to people who aren't going to be able to defend themselves legally.
:)
Maybe. And state/local laws vary a lot as to what public accomodation entails (I doubt your parking lot was public accomodation to a non-paying customer) and what is legal behavior (if no shirt/shoes didn't violate health codes, you'd have a harder time excluding them).
If you were excluding the above folks from eating in your restaurant because of their appearance -- without having a fairly clear dress code or something like that -- you were (likely) breaking the law. If the police would help you remove them, they were also taking on quite a responsibility.
Fortunately or unfortunately, most teenagers who dress as you describe above don't have access to many legal resources to defend themselves, nor much knowledge of the law -- of how to conduct themselves. If you denied me access to your restaurant, I'd likely be the one to call the police, and I'd explain the situation very clearly, carefully, and to my advantage
I'm not saying you're not reasonable above. I'd just as rather have the annoying teenagers go somewhere else, and get a life. Or be stuck at home (programming, maybe
(Footnotes: for a general review of public accomidation laws, take a look at the case of the gay scoutmaster vs. the Boy Scouts; at issue, whether the Boy Scouts could ask him to leave. In general, after the Boy Scouts were deemed to be offering public accomidation, the issue turned to whether (1) the Scouts has a _rational_ reason for excluding the gay Scoutmaster and (2) whether the exclusion was (since they were a private group) essential to their identity as a group. So, something like "exclusive restaurant can have people who don't dress up thrown out," Dennys you can't.
But remember the fiction above is for teenagers
ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS.
EXCEPT ONE.
TITAN.
ATTEMPT NO LANDINGS THERE.
Keep yer whirly-butt gizmo off Europa, too.
(Mods: if ya don't get the ref, maybe spare my karma, mmkay?)
My patent attorneys are Townsend and Townsend & Crew LLP, Palo Alto. After a phone call, they inform me that competitive grading of employees has been based on the number of processed applications for several years, with heavy weighting to approved patents processed (approvals, after all, lead to more fees). Advancement tracks on the GS scale have been accelerated for people who perform on this measurement.
I believe if you do a news search of NYT/sfgate about patent law, you'll find a number of articles that refer to this factor in the accelerated ease of obtaining patents.
>If I ran a store, and someone kept entering that was asked to leave, I could no doubt call the police and have them removed.
Not in most states, if the business is offering walk-in "public accomodation." Just because you don't like someone, you can't ban him from your restaurant, and you certainly can't get the police to remove him.
I don't know what this guy's actions were. In most places, you can have someone who starts a fight thrown out. But fighting is against local law, imposes a threat of loss and liability on the business, etc. Does cussing at a bunch of folks constitute a threat or crime?
Depends on how or where. If he's grabbing random email addresses, then sending people unsolicited curse mail, cream him (or at least get a restraining order). If he's a jerk that gets into arguments with people and winds up cursing them out on the public forums, well, oh well. You can call the bouncer to rough up the village idiot, but you can't ask the police to get rid of him. (Well, unless you live in NY under Guilianni.)
What I'm saying is that the situation here matters, what he's done matters, and CNN reports none of that.
Somewhere in the US patent law, it states that the thing produced must be "non-obvious."
>Would Rambus and Amazon.com have any reason to create new technologies if they wouldn't profit from them? If every other retailer immediately instituted One-Click Shopping, then what would have Amazon.com gained?
Nothing!
RAMBUT is using patent law to claim it owns something it didn't make on its own... so it can force its stock price up and get money from whomever caves in (not to mention how often Hitachi, Toshiba and RAMBUT executives are in bed together anyway...).
Amazon did nothing that wasn't really, really obvious.
In both cases, the 'patents' discourage others and hurt the marketplace. Patents are supposed to strike a balance between rewarding innnovation and allowing cheap, easy use -- not provide a playground for money-hungry corporations to gobble up whatever they can as the lawyers duke it out, while (I've said it before) the rest of us take it up the BUTT).
1) There's no such thing as a straightforward patent in days when the patent office pays people on the number they approve per month.
2) And even if there way, RAMBUS wouldn't be it. They filed a 'simultaneous patent' after engaging in talks & work with most of these companies -- who were working on the technologies on their own.
3) 'Tis to say, it's not clear the technology is theirs -- what is clear is that they've muddied the issue and are using legal brinkmanship to try and get $s out of the technology, whether or not they own it.
Which makes them a class act, 'specially as we're paying up the nose for it.
RAMBUT would be a better name, but it's the rest of the industry's butt...
To quote the article:
"Rambus was... in JEDEC... but pulled out... in 1995."
Despite the premature withdrawal last time, evidently they're hoping to get another chance to screw their old buddies good this time.
Hitachi has bent over, but I'm expecting a premature ejaculation.
I don't know where to start, so I'll just rant:
...
Let's start with Apple and MOSR -- you can find more interesting rumors by sitting in coffee shops in Cupertino and SF. Because that's where the Apple guys are sitting.
But, like, fat lot of good it'd do you. Fact is, Apple's teams don't know what the fuck they're working on (read Scully's 500 days, people!). The iBook guys thought it'd weigh in under 4 lbs... or at least some of them did; others thought it had a touch screen;
Not even Apple's managers know what Apple is going to produce. Again, go read Scully.
And then the lawyers: they send out the cease&desists to anyone who gets attention, 'cause, well, they don't have a clue what Apple is working on, but they wanna get paid, and have to find SOMEONE to send cease&desists to.
And MOSR again: well, like being "Mac-centered" means caving in to Apple. Anyway, they're just following their own interest, and this is a good publicity stunt op -- if they told Apple's lawyers to bugger off, they'd bugger off since they don't have a case, but there'd be no story...
And that's view today from Saw Mill Road...