Okay, playing devil's advocate here, let's assume that the guy is domain squatting. Then no way does he have rights to the thing.
But, there is a problem in this whole domain name mess. You can sell a product in a noncompeting industry and call it something that is trademarked in another industry. So, for example, I could make a new quadruple pane window frame for use in new house construction and call it Windows, and Microsoft, who owns the trademark Windows in the computing world, could do nothing to me since I am not competing with them in the computer industry. If I started to sell software to design quadruple pane windows, then I could not call it Windows. This all makes sense, and IMHO, it is the right thing to do.
But, now we get into a problem here on the net.
Say that I own a company called Slashdot Farm Implements and it is trademarked. We have been in business for 100 years, and back in 1998 we finally got an ISP in Podunk, Wyoming so we want to set us up a website. We find out that a bunch of geeks back in 1997 went and set up a website called Slashdot that deals in computer geek news. Since they are not in the farm implement industry, they too could get a trademark on their name, which they do. Who the hell has the right to the domain? They are not squatting, we are both in different industries, and neither of us are competing with one another.
Granted, here in the states we have.com,.org,.net that we can use, which makes things a little easier to deal with. But other countries don't have this.
Who would get the name slashdot in that case if things were pressed?
Lately in the news there has been some stuff about Coke Industries doing a lot of polluting somewhere around the US. Does Coke have the right to go after them? What if Coke Industries wants to set up a domain? If they call it coke.net, is Coca-Cola going to go after them?
Same with Zoom, etc? Modems are going to be going away pretty fast over the next few years, and I would think that perhaps 3Com pretty much milked USR for everything they could. Sure, they are still making money for them, but how can a modem compete with DSL or Cable, or whatever new broadband service that is going to be showing up soon. It can't.
It sounds to me like 3Com sees this (if they can't then they are pretty bloody stupid) and is now letting them float out there for someone to buy in the next few years.
Think about it. DDL brought us such wonderful movies as Barbarella, King Kong, King Kong Lives (where they give King Kong an artificial heart!), and last, but not least, Danger: Diabolik, which was the last episode of MST3K.
DDL must be stopped! One can not trust a man who lets a line like "Is that stud coming?" get into a film!
The only person who could possibly be worse is Irwin Allen.
I have been doing a lot of thinking lately on the subject of patents and copyrights and am quickly coming to the conclusion that we are seeing the real Johnny Mnemonic right now, albeit without Keanu Reeves, thank goodness.
Think about it - on one side we have MegaCorp patenting everything under the sun or being really assholeish with copyrights (played by Bezos and Valente) On the other we have the good Dr. and the hacker (played by Henry Rollins and Ice-T) trying to get the information out to everyone.
Instead of doing good for humanity, MegaCorp holds back because they are making more money by selling something to give relief instead of the cure.
When is this "everything for a buck" mentality going to stop? I have no problem with folks making money, but this is all just getting too insane for humanity's good.
Really, the only thing we are missing from the whole Johnny Mnemonic thing is a bunch of gun toting hitmen out to get JM... but then again they are here - in the form of lawyers.
First, I like Linksys for a number of reasons, mainly that they state on the box "Linux supported". I always make it a point now to only buy hardware with the 'L' word in plain view. A few weeks ago I was in Best Buy looking at PCMCIA cards and had to choose between a Net Gear card which said "Windows, and other operating systems" and a Linksys which explicitly stated "Linux". Who got my money? Linksys of course!
Secondly, something I noticed at the Linux Demo Day we just had - people were amazed that we were giving them a complete operating system for free. They were walking out of the Microsoft show into the throng of friendly smiling Linux folks. They had just been told that they were going to have to pony up $500 for a buggy as hell piece of software, and here we were handing out a very worthy competitor. Hell, a lot of people even came to the show just so they could get a CD which they read about in the Kansas City Star.
People want to try Linux. Will they keep using it? I don't know. I hope they do, and I am going to do my best to see that they are happy running it and will be there to answer their questions. I am sure they will enjoy it. Linksys is helping to spread the word here. Sure, people are going to mess up their systems, but to that I say "big deal!" I can't even begin to tell you the number of times I have messed up my system because I did something stupid and boneheaded. But another way to look at it is this... When I ran Windows I would reinstall the OS every 6 months. After six months the system would come to a crawl. That is part of my normal MO here at work too - reinstall it at least 2 times a year on every desktop. If you don't you are asking for trouble from all the absolute crap that gets in there and clogs it up.
Yeah, I think she could. After all there are packages such as gnorpm and kpackage, plus it is not all that difficult to do a rpm -Uvh filename. Now, as for building a program from scratch, I think she would freak out over that.
In reading the article, it got me to thinking about Linux and all that I have had to strugle through. The answers are always there - it may take me time to find them, and I may get to reinstall everything because I goofed something up really bad, but it is getting there.
For example, right now on this har laptop I am using, I have a problem when I boot and forget to take the network card out or forget to put it in during the boot sequence - the machine ends up without networking, so I have to remember to do a ifup eth0 and then everything is fine.... it is an annoyance to me, but if this was in the hands of my mom, she would have a fit. Can't say as I would blame her either.
I don't quite know that I can go along with the statement that there just are not a lot of apps out there. The only two programs I use in Windows are Quicken and Turbo Tax. Everything else I ever ran over on the Microsoft platform I have been able to find most excellent replacements for under Linux. And trust me, I am a hardware junkie from hell. I have so many stupid things that my computer is doing it is not even funny, so don't even start to think to yourself "what, this guy only runs minesweeper?":)
I gotta say though, things have come a hell of a long way since I first installed (er, tried) slackware in 1995. I gave up on Linux until the first part of 1999 and I have seen a hell of a lot of improvement since I started mucking with Red Hat 5.1. Now I am a 100% convert.
As for my mom, well, I am tempted to hand her a CD and see what happens... At least now I know enough to fix whatever she screws up.
I have mixed feelings on this. Yeah, it will be nice to see something new from Real, but the whole privacy violation thing still sticks with me.
On the other hand, Real seems to be stuck with an old, slow, not very good codec. Yeah, in the beginning it worked great considering you were looking at it over a 28.8k modem, but today all I see it doing is dropping frames and doing a hell of a lot of buffering - even on xDSL.
I have farted around a bit with Windows Media Player and was most impressed with it - even on a 56k modem you got a lot of decent video. xDSL really helps it out. Of course, that is a Windows program and I like Linux better, so I use Real.
I am open to the whole thing, but am going to really reseve my judgement on the whole thing until we actually see the player and the servers in action. It would be cool as all heck though.
Vice President Al "Internet" Gore has decided to call it quits in his bid for the Office of the President of the United States as he has been offered the part of Little Wooden Boy for the upcomming TV series.
Also, Bob Dole is being considered to play the part of The Terror, and Bill Gates was offered the part of Brainchild.
In related news, Hemos the Hamster is rumored to be "putting on a few pounds" so that he can try out for the part of Speak.
There was a man named Mahlon Loomis who in 1866 sent a message between two mountaintops in West Virginia. For antennas he used kites, and the receiver was a galvanometer.
I mean, should I laugh at the stupidity of corporate America or should I be crying that someone at the airline actually thought this was a good idea?
All I gotta say is that I am glad I am running an alternative OS. I know for a fact that nobody at my company could even figure out the whole lilo: thing, let alone get inside my machine and poke around.
CERT put out a thing about this a few months ago in this document - also see some of the links they have to past documents.
It looks like the script kiddies are basically getting a bunch of insecure machines to just all start pinging the hell out of something from different places around the net. Ya gotta admit, you could flood the hell out of a connection pretty fast just by finding even 20 insecure hosts.
I myself fail to see what the point of attacking Yahoo is. AFAIK, they are not domain name hijacking like a certain e-tailer nor are they trying to enforce a stupid patent like another certain e-tailer, and they did not try to trademark WHOIS, so what is the point of going after them?
I found on the MP3.com site this open letter to Hillary over at RIAA. I must say that I could not have said it better myself.
I really think it is time for us consumers to step up to the plate and let folks know that we are not going to put up with being bullied any more. We have had to endure taxes on recordable media because "we might make a copy of that N*sync album for our friends". What were the actual numbers for people who recorded stuff and gave it away? Something around 10%. So, instead of trying to get people to realize that piracy is wrong, let's just make everybody pay so that The Rolling Stones can make even more money! (And trust me folks, the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, etc. are the ones raking in the money over this. Folks like the late Muddy Waters, etc. are getting a paltry sum since the tax is distributed based on record sales.)
Remember also the other things the RIAA wanted to do - wonderful things like making used record stores pay them a tax each time a used CD/LP/tape was sold. Why? To get even more money, of course!
A good friend of mine is blind. I can tell you from my conversations with him that all the crap "look what I can do in java!" stuff and lack of alt= tags really irritates him. He is a websurfing fool, so for the folks at Adventis to say "So? How many blind people will visit our site?" is something I find very irritating and unfortunately it is not just them that is thinking this way.
When I design my webpages, I don't give a rat's patoot what anyone in corporate thinks - I always design them with my blind friend in mind and I stick with it.
For the past three weeks this salesdrone from Verio has been calling me - every time he does he ruins my thought process on whatever bit of code I am working on. Yeah, I have told him to take me off his list, but the next time I am really gonna let him know what I think of Verio...
Thanks Slashdot! You just brought some joy into my life!
Back in 1995 I sent email to every senator and congressperson I could to let them know how I stood on the CDA proposal. I put a return receipt on it and was quite amazed how fast a lot of them got to it. Some it was a matter of minutes. Others it was the next day. Most had read it within 48 hours, and a few responded back via email.
The most impressive of the bunch were Senators Ashcroft and Kennedy who both emailed back as well as followed up with a postal letter.
However, there was one congressman who did not read my email for over eight (8) months - a full 7 months after the CDA passed - well past the time my letter to him could have had an influence on how he voted. I was not impressed with this yahoo.
If there is one thing I miss about MS Windows, it is Flight Simulator. Most of the other games that are mentioned here I now play on the Playstation - and as far as driving games go, NFS II and III are excellent, but nothing beats Gran Turismo 2.
But, back to FS and why I think we should have one on Linux - First, I just really enjoy it. Secondly, there is a thriving group of developers making scenery, airplanes, utilities, etc. One of the coolest things is the addon ATC. You start off sitting at an airport and you must contact ground control, who is some guy sitting at his computer who knows where. He will get you to the runway, and then you have to contact departure etc. etc. etc.
Some of the planes people make are pretty good too. But the best thing that they create is the scenery - the guys who do the OzPack stuff are fantastic.
I just found linuxnewbie.org yesterday and can say with 100% confidence that you have not a clue what you are talking about. I found the site to be most informative. Yes, I found a problem with one of the articles there, and I wrote to the guy who wrote the article and let him know what the problem was. If you find a problem someplace why don't you write to the author and let them know? After all, that is why HOWTO authors put their email addresses in there - so people can comment on their work and they can fix what needs fixing - just like they do on linuxnewbie.org.
Making such idiotic comments such as you have made about this site does nobody any good. It misleads those who could benefit from its content yet now will not visit and it just makes you look like a fool.
When I play any of the VR type games such as Quake, I get ill. I don't mean ill from the gore. I mean physically ill from what is being shown to me. I read someplace that the problem is that your eyes are seeing motion, yet your inner ear is not detecting that you are moving.
If this would solve that problem I would be first in line. I love the Quake stuff, but feeling absolutely horrid after 10 minutes is not fun.
Slashdot Mirror
Ahhhh.... that makes sense. :) Thanks for the correction.
Okay, playing devil's advocate here, let's assume that the guy is domain squatting. Then no way does he have rights to the thing.
.com, .org, .net that we can use, which makes things a little easier to deal with. But other countries don't have this.
But, there is a problem in this whole domain name mess. You can sell a product in a noncompeting industry and call it something that is trademarked in another industry. So, for example, I could make a new quadruple pane window frame for use in new house construction and call it Windows, and Microsoft, who owns the trademark Windows in the computing world, could do nothing to me since I am not competing with them in the computer industry. If I started to sell software to design quadruple pane windows, then I could not call it Windows. This all makes sense, and IMHO, it is the right thing to do.
But, now we get into a problem here on the net.
Say that I own a company called Slashdot Farm Implements and it is trademarked. We have been in business for 100 years, and back in 1998 we finally got an ISP in Podunk, Wyoming so we want to set us up a website. We find out that a bunch of geeks back in 1997 went and set up a website called Slashdot that deals in computer geek news. Since they are not in the farm implement industry, they too could get a trademark on their name, which they do. Who the hell has the right to the domain? They are not squatting, we are both in different industries, and neither of us are competing with one another.
Granted, here in the states we have
Who would get the name slashdot in that case if things were pressed?
Lately in the news there has been some stuff about Coke Industries doing a lot of polluting somewhere around the US. Does Coke have the right to go after them? What if Coke Industries wants to set up a domain? If they call it coke.net, is Coca-Cola going to go after them?
I'm confused now.
Same with Zoom, etc? Modems are going to be going away pretty fast over the next few years, and I would think that perhaps 3Com pretty much milked USR for everything they could. Sure, they are still making money for them, but how can a modem compete with DSL or Cable, or whatever new broadband service that is going to be showing up soon. It can't.
It sounds to me like 3Com sees this (if they can't then they are pretty bloody stupid) and is now letting them float out there for someone to buy in the next few years.
Dino De Laurentiis.
Think about it. DDL brought us such wonderful movies as Barbarella, King Kong, King Kong Lives (where they give King Kong an artificial heart!), and last, but not least, Danger: Diabolik, which was the last episode of MST3K.
DDL must be stopped! One can not trust a man who lets a line like "Is that stud coming?" get into a film!
The only person who could possibly be worse is Irwin Allen.
I have been doing a lot of thinking lately on the subject of patents and copyrights and am quickly coming to the conclusion that we are seeing the real Johnny Mnemonic right now, albeit without Keanu Reeves, thank goodness.
Think about it - on one side we have MegaCorp patenting everything under the sun or being really assholeish with copyrights (played by Bezos and Valente) On the other we have the good Dr. and the hacker (played by Henry Rollins and Ice-T) trying to get the information out to everyone.
Instead of doing good for humanity, MegaCorp holds back because they are making more money by selling something to give relief instead of the cure.
When is this "everything for a buck" mentality going to stop? I have no problem with folks making money, but this is all just getting too insane for humanity's good.
Really, the only thing we are missing from the whole Johnny Mnemonic thing is a bunch of gun toting hitmen out to get JM... but then again they are here - in the form of lawyers.
First, I like Linksys for a number of reasons, mainly that they state on the box "Linux supported". I always make it a point now to only buy hardware with the 'L' word in plain view. A few weeks ago I was in Best Buy looking at PCMCIA cards and had to choose between a Net Gear card which said "Windows, and other operating systems" and a Linksys which explicitly stated "Linux". Who got my money? Linksys of course!
Secondly, something I noticed at the Linux Demo Day we just had - people were amazed that we were giving them a complete operating system for free. They were walking out of the Microsoft show into the throng of friendly smiling Linux folks. They had just been told that they were going to have to pony up $500 for a buggy as hell piece of software, and here we were handing out a very worthy competitor. Hell, a lot of people even came to the show just so they could get a CD which they read about in the Kansas City Star.
People want to try Linux. Will they keep using it? I don't know. I hope they do, and I am going to do my best to see that they are happy running it and will be there to answer their questions. I am sure they will enjoy it. Linksys is helping to spread the word here. Sure, people are going to mess up their systems, but to that I say "big deal!" I can't even begin to tell you the number of times I have messed up my system because I did something stupid and boneheaded. But another way to look at it is this... When I ran Windows I would reinstall the OS every 6 months. After six months the system would come to a crawl. That is part of my normal MO here at work too - reinstall it at least 2 times a year on every desktop. If you don't you are asking for trouble from all the absolute crap that gets in there and clogs it up.
Yeah, I think she could. After all there are packages such as gnorpm and kpackage, plus it is not all that difficult to do a rpm -Uvh filename. Now, as for building a program from scratch, I think she would freak out over that.
I know about gnucash, but I do online banking, so Quicken is the only method I have at my disposal.
In reading the article, it got me to thinking about Linux and all that I have had to strugle through. The answers are always there - it may take me time to find them, and I may get to reinstall everything because I goofed something up really bad, but it is getting there.
:)
For example, right now on this har laptop I am using, I have a problem when I boot and forget to take the network card out or forget to put it in during the boot sequence - the machine ends up without networking, so I have to remember to do a ifup eth0 and then everything is fine.... it is an annoyance to me, but if this was in the hands of my mom, she would have a fit. Can't say as I would blame her either.
I don't quite know that I can go along with the statement that there just are not a lot of apps out there. The only two programs I use in Windows are Quicken and Turbo Tax. Everything else I ever ran over on the Microsoft platform I have been able to find most excellent replacements for under Linux. And trust me, I am a hardware junkie from hell. I have so many stupid things that my computer is doing it is not even funny, so don't even start to think to yourself "what, this guy only runs minesweeper?"
I gotta say though, things have come a hell of a long way since I first installed (er, tried) slackware in 1995. I gave up on Linux until the first part of 1999 and I have seen a hell of a lot of improvement since I started mucking with Red Hat 5.1. Now I am a 100% convert.
As for my mom, well, I am tempted to hand her a CD and see what happens... At least now I know enough to fix whatever she screws up.
I have mixed feelings on this. Yeah, it will be nice to see something new from Real, but the whole privacy violation thing still sticks with me.
On the other hand, Real seems to be stuck with an old, slow, not very good codec. Yeah, in the beginning it worked great considering you were looking at it over a 28.8k modem, but today all I see it doing is dropping frames and doing a hell of a lot of buffering - even on xDSL.
I have farted around a bit with Windows Media Player and was most impressed with it - even on a 56k modem you got a lot of decent video. xDSL really helps it out. Of course, that is a Windows program and I like Linux better, so I use Real.
I am open to the whole thing, but am going to really reseve my judgement on the whole thing until we actually see the player and the servers in action. It would be cool as all heck though.
Okay, I have it mirrored on my site as well, if anyone wants a copy of it.
This program is really cool. Check it out!
Vice President Al "Internet" Gore has decided to call it quits in his bid for the Office of the President of the United States as he has been offered the part of Little Wooden Boy for the upcomming TV series.
Also, Bob Dole is being considered to play the part of The Terror, and Bill Gates was offered the part of Brainchild.
In related news, Hemos the Hamster is rumored to be "putting on a few pounds" so that he can try out for the part of Speak.
There was a man named Mahlon Loomis who in 1866 sent a message between two mountaintops in West Virginia. For antennas he used kites, and the receiver was a galvanometer.
I mean, should I laugh at the stupidity of corporate America or should I be crying that someone at the airline actually thought this was a good idea?
All I gotta say is that I am glad I am running an alternative OS. I know for a fact that nobody at my company could even figure out the whole lilo: thing, let alone get inside my machine and poke around.
CERT put out a thing about this a few months ago in this document - also see some of the links they have to past documents.
It looks like the script kiddies are basically getting a bunch of insecure machines to just all start pinging the hell out of something from different places around the net. Ya gotta admit, you could flood the hell out of a connection pretty fast just by finding even 20 insecure hosts.
I myself fail to see what the point of attacking Yahoo is. AFAIK, they are not domain name hijacking like a certain e-tailer nor are they trying to enforce a stupid patent like another certain e-tailer, and they did not try to trademark WHOIS, so what is the point of going after them?
I found on the MP3.com site this open letter to Hillary over at RIAA. I must say that I could not have said it better myself.
I really think it is time for us consumers to step up to the plate and let folks know that we are not going to put up with being bullied any more. We have had to endure taxes on recordable media because "we might make a copy of that N*sync album for our friends". What were the actual numbers for people who recorded stuff and gave it away? Something around 10%. So, instead of trying to get people to realize that piracy is wrong, let's just make everybody pay so that The Rolling Stones can make even more money! (And trust me folks, the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, etc. are the ones raking in the money over this. Folks like the late Muddy Waters, etc. are getting a paltry sum since the tax is distributed based on record sales.)
Remember also the other things the RIAA wanted to do - wonderful things like making used record stores pay them a tax each time a used CD/LP/tape was sold. Why? To get even more money, of course!
A good friend of mine is blind. I can tell you from my conversations with him that all the crap "look what I can do in java!" stuff and lack of alt= tags really irritates him. He is a websurfing fool, so for the folks at Adventis to say "So? How many blind people will visit our site?" is something I find very irritating and unfortunately it is not just them that is thinking this way.
When I design my webpages, I don't give a rat's patoot what anyone in corporate thinks - I always design them with my blind friend in mind and I stick with it.
in my case. They are calling me at work and businesses are not included in the TCPA...
For the past three weeks this salesdrone from Verio has been calling me - every time he does he ruins my thought process on whatever bit of code I am working on. Yeah, I have told him to take me off his list, but the next time I am really gonna let him know what I think of Verio...
Thanks Slashdot! You just brought some joy into my life!
Hemos does not want it to be known that he lost the Hemos award.
Back in 1995 I sent email to every senator and congressperson I could to let them know how I stood on the CDA proposal. I put a return receipt on it and was quite amazed how fast a lot of them got to it. Some it was a matter of minutes. Others it was the next day. Most had read it within 48 hours, and a few responded back via email.
The most impressive of the bunch were Senators Ashcroft and Kennedy who both emailed back as well as followed up with a postal letter.
However, there was one congressman who did not read my email for over eight (8) months - a full 7 months after the CDA passed - well past the time my letter to him could have had an influence on how he voted. I was not impressed with this yahoo.
If there is one thing I miss about MS Windows, it is Flight Simulator. Most of the other games that are mentioned here I now play on the Playstation - and as far as driving games go, NFS II and III are excellent, but nothing beats Gran Turismo 2.
But, back to FS and why I think we should have one on Linux - First, I just really enjoy it. Secondly, there is a thriving group of developers making scenery, airplanes, utilities, etc. One of the coolest things is the addon ATC. You start off sitting at an airport and you must contact ground control, who is some guy sitting at his computer who knows where. He will get you to the runway, and then you have to contact departure etc. etc. etc.
Some of the planes people make are pretty good too. But the best thing that they create is the scenery - the guys who do the OzPack stuff are fantastic.
I just found linuxnewbie.org yesterday and can say with 100% confidence that you have not a clue what you are talking about. I found the site to be most informative. Yes, I found a problem with one of the articles there, and I wrote to the guy who wrote the article and let him know what the problem was. If you find a problem someplace why don't you write to the author and let them know? After all, that is why HOWTO authors put their email addresses in there - so people can comment on their work and they can fix what needs fixing - just like they do on linuxnewbie.org.
Making such idiotic comments such as you have made about this site does nobody any good. It misleads those who could benefit from its content yet now will not visit and it just makes you look like a fool.
When I play any of the VR type games such as Quake, I get ill. I don't mean ill from the gore. I mean physically ill from what is being shown to me. I read someplace that the problem is that your eyes are seeing motion, yet your inner ear is not detecting that you are moving.
If this would solve that problem I would be first in line. I love the Quake stuff, but feeling absolutely horrid after 10 minutes is not fun.
Here are the spots you can see the big images over at the Space Telescope Science Institute.
First, the Eskimo Nebula. And Abell 2218. Both sets of images are really really pretty.