IAM's suit hinges on their position that five days to accept or regect deliverables, as specified in their agreement with Razorfish is 'unconscionable'. They go on to say that Razorfish missed nearly every deliverable deadline.
I'll admit I know nothing about the internal workings of this particular engagement, but I do know four things:
You shouldn't sign an agreement with another company if you find unconscionable clauses in it.
Five days is plenty of time to find problems with a home page.
More often than not, delivery schedules slip because of client changes, or because they need an extraordinary amount of time to accept or regect comps and templates.
Clients often have a problem understanding that production work is held up intul a design approval comes through.
I just wonder who they'll be able to get for their next site redesign when they sue their previous agency for standard practices.
PS: An 'AOL 4.0 browser' is actually one of over 9 different browsers depending on platform, OS, and AOL whim.
In 108 years, the Olympic Committee seems to have forgotten that the very spirit and name of the olympics was lifted wholesale from the ancient games. It's not as if they obtained rights to the term in a legal transaction with the original trademark owners.
They could use the term 'olympics' for the modern game because it was already in the three-thousand year old public domain. Just because the modern incarnation has been around for a century and has become high profile doesn't give them a magical right to take the trademark out of the public domain!
Going after others that use the name in the spirit of the original games (science olympiad, special olympics, etc.) is admitting that the modern olympics shouldn't have had the right to use the name for the past century!
Personally, I'm waiting with baited breath for the sequel: The X-10 Men, a cadre of mutants who have the amazing ability to turn lights and household appliances on and off at will!
Don't even get me started on the rumored conclusion to the trilogy: The X11 Men where the mutants take on the evil Microsoft Empire.
Hopefully this will be the end of it, but somehow I doubt it:
Your in-depth factfinding mission was based on the assumption that I only have one domain name, fury.com. That assumption is incorrect.
If you had dug a little deeper, you'd have noticed that fury.com was registered before anyone offered DSL service, and before PacBell offered dialup internet service at all.
If you dug deeper than that, you'd notice that I have three domain names registered, and that two of them fulfill all the criteria you mentioned, except for the backup MX records. As I said on my earlier post, I don't use PBI for backup MX service.
To respond to your final query, anyone who wonders why someone might choose to use two ISPs for their business isn't someone I'd want in my IS department.
The point I was making in my original post, since you obviously missed it, is that for those people who want more than 5 IP addresses, regardless of other services, PBI grants no other option than to step up to a level of service that costs a great deal more.
That this expanded service offers more bells and whistles is immaterial to those consumers who don't need them, and serve only to distract managerial boneheads from the fact that they're being forced to pay a great deal more for what, in their case, amounts only to more static IP addresses.
Along with the concept of free market economy is the concept of a cartel. If a business can make more money withholding a service, they are likely to do so as long as their competition does so as well.
Witness the (until recent) stagnation of ISDN and DSL, in favor of higher cost T-1 and fracT-1 lines, astronomical gas prices in the western states, and airfare wars.
The free-market model doesn't hold well in this particular instance because for IPv6 to really take hold will require its implementation (at some level) by ISPs.
Regardless of what that page says, I've received everything on that list except for a secondary MX service with my 5-ip home account. Functionally, the only differences between the 5-ip home and/27 business are the extra IP numbers.
I understand though, how experience can often be confused with stupidity, especially if you're the sort who always believes what you read, even from PBI.
But then you need to ask yourself the real question: 'What am I smoking and why do I think that ISPs depend on the revenue from "selling" IP blocks?'
I'm not smoking anything. Money is money, and when the only difference between several of PBI's Consumer and Business DSL packages is the size of the subnet, instead of bandwidth, then I think they make money from renting larger subnets. Duh.
While I understand that every ISP out there would like to have a virtually limitless number of IP addresses to alocate to their subscribers, won't this damage their business model?
If I pay PacBell nearly twice as much so I can have 5 IPs instead of one, or pay five times as much for a 32-address subnet, will they still be able to justify charging more for multiple IP addresses when they grow on trees?
Will the switch to IPv6 end up costing them a good deal using this revenue model, or will we all switch to (horror of horrors) a per-byte revenue model?
As a Microsoft shareholder (I know, I know, but I do think they're undervalued, even if they're evil), I received a reply card inviting me to join the Freedom to Innovate network, along with other shareholder materials.
I'm left-handed, and I can't recall seeing a lefty using the left hand for a mouse. I have seen some righties do it though.
I don't dispute that a unidexterous design would alienate some, but I don't know what the percent is.
Then again, Logitech makes several righty products without lefty compliments, but they're not including them standard in a package, so it is a different story.
If the letters are from RIAA personnel, they're worthless. The RIAA doesn't hold any music copyrights.
Each recording label would have to stand on its own, and the collective 'letters' couldn't be used against all of them. Only the letters from agents of that particular label. I don't think this'll end up holding up. This is why associations like the RIAA and MPAA exist.
I'm from 10,000 years in the future: What does a microscope look like?
Granted though. There could be some brief iconography to indicate:
This thing is important.
You need to magnify it.
I wonder how small it should be made. If I found a disk that said 'magnify me' and I looked at it at 400x and didn't see anything because I actually needed an electron microscope, I wouldn't take it down to the university and beg for time just to see if there's something there.
I like the fact that it's in analog form, showing actual type istead of binary information, but if the creators are expecting the object to be seen for what it is upon discovery, it needs some work.
Digging up this item out of the rest of the techno-rubble, it would just look like a magnet or other piece of machinary. To be useful it must visibly represent information to the naked eye, without thousands of levels of magnification.
Perhaps if it had some text large enough to read, then more text was embedded within those letters, etc, so that a casual observer would realize there is additional information, and would go through the trouble of magnifying and discovering just how much.
If the creators are counting on the significance of the object to be retained for 10,000 years, as it sits in a time capsule or clean room, they're mistaken. Besides, if this was the case, all the data encoded on the object could just as easily be stored digitally, along with the equipment needed to read it.
It would make more sense to have a series of diagrams explaining binary code and its conversion into unicode characters, audio waves, and pixel representations, then have a digital stream which can contain multimedia which has all the translation information as well as multimedia information on the actual pronunciation of dialects, etc.
The subject of dispute here, which is decided in the courtroom, is when, exactly, a secret has been given out to the public.
If MacNN can show that the informant gave info to MacNN, as well as other rumor sites (given the nature of rumor sites, even one would likely do), the court would likely decide that the secret had been 'given out to the public' when MacNN had it.
Putting something on a web site is an easy way to say something has been given out to the public, but a much smaller segment can be 'the public' as well. For example, if the screen shots had been mailed to an employee at Quark. Poof. No more trade secret, as a competitor would qualify as 'the public'. Does MacInsider qualify? Probably.
Unless they somehow find a way to turn the payload itself into the flywheel, capable of 50,000 rpm.
Of course, that raises two problems: First, there would need to be a casing to slow it down. One solution is form the payload into two counterrotating flywheels.
The second is the horrendous gyroscopic forces would interfere with changing orientation. Rotating a flywheel 90 degrees perpendicular to its initial orientation requires exactly the same amount of energy as it took to spin it up in the first place.
Hmm, maybe three pairs of counterrotating flywheels along the three dimensional axes.
"Trade secrets do not lose protection if they are stolen or otherwise illegally obtained."
Once a trade secret is leaked, it's no longer a trade secret. If someone steals a trade secret, and it's later reclaimed, it's still a trade secret. But the moment they tell the secret to someone who didn't play a part in the theft, the info is no longer a trade secret, and the thief is liable for the damages. tbo's comment is correct if you replace "if they" with "when they".
In this scenario, the trade secret was leaked when Joe Beta Tester gave the details to MacNN, not later when MacNN posted them to the world.
And of course, once a trade secret is leaked, it's no longer a trade secret, not having the protections of copyright or patent law.
The recource of the injured party is to sue the person who leaked the trade secret, the beta tester. Even if MacNN was certain that it was a trade secret, it was no longer a trade secret when it was in their hands.
Of course, the situation is entirely different if Adobe can prove that MacNN stole the secrets themselves, i.e. that they swiped a copy from a beta tester without their consent.
Somehow I doubt MacNN was a beta seed site for Adobe. If someone else broke their NDA, then Adobe needs to prove that they did it, but having received the information, MacNN was under no obligation to not publish the leak, nor are they obligated to reveal their source.
If Adobe can determine in another way who violated the NDA, or if MacNN chooses to reveal it (doubtful), then Adobe can sue for damages from breach of contract.
This is great and all but the most fundamental difference between this engine and a chemical rocket is that the energy source is electric instead of chemical, and that that energy has to come from somewhere.
It's interesting that in none of the press releases do they mention that any ship using this propulsion system would need to have a fair sized nuclear pile (likely more than Cassini's 76 pounds of plutonium) to generate the electricity needed.
Deep Space's ion drive, while having an incredible specific impulse, was pushing so little fuel at any given time that a moderate power source would work. If we're talking about driving 100 tons of cargo to Mars in a speed race however, it's going to require far, far more electricity than a solar cell could reasonably capture, and forget batteries. They can't store enough, even if they weren't damned heavy.
I'm not saying it's for better or worse, but the fact that this propulsion system would mean launching large amounts of plutonium atop a chemical rocket to get out of the Earth's gravity well shouldn't be overlooked or swept under the rug. The potential for disaster is there.
Slashdot Mirror
If you want more than charts and graphs, check out this realtime picture of Auroral Activity in the Northern Hemisphere.
It's usually cool to look at, but now it's fascinating!
Kevin Fox
I'll admit I know nothing about the internal workings of this particular engagement, but I do know four things:
I just wonder who they'll be able to get for their next site redesign when they sue their previous agency for standard practices.
PS: An 'AOL 4.0 browser' is actually one of over 9 different browsers depending on platform, OS, and AOL whim.
Kevin Fox
In 108 years, the Olympic Committee seems to have forgotten that the very spirit and name of the olympics was lifted wholesale from the ancient games. It's not as if they obtained rights to the term in a legal transaction with the original trademark owners.
They could use the term 'olympics' for the modern game because it was already in the three-thousand year old public domain. Just because the modern incarnation has been around for a century and has become high profile doesn't give them a magical right to take the trademark out of the public domain!
Going after others that use the name in the spirit of the original games (science olympiad, special olympics, etc.) is admitting that the modern olympics shouldn't have had the right to use the name for the past century!
Kevin Fox
If complimentary Linux reviews are fixed, then complimentary Wondows reviews are assuredly ab0rken.
After all, fixing Linux is what open source is all about!
Kevin Fox
That was amazing.
Be careful where you click that Maus though. You never know who's watching.
Kevin Fox
Personally, I'm waiting with baited breath for the sequel: The X-10 Men, a cadre of mutants who have the amazing ability to turn lights and household appliances on and off at will!
Don't even get me started on the rumored conclusion to the trilogy: The X11 Men where the mutants take on the evil Microsoft Empire.
Kevin Fox
Hopefully this will be the end of it, but somehow I doubt it:
Your in-depth factfinding mission was based on the assumption that I only have one domain name, fury.com. That assumption is incorrect.
If you had dug a little deeper, you'd have noticed that fury.com was registered before anyone offered DSL service, and before PacBell offered dialup internet service at all.
If you dug deeper than that, you'd notice that I have three domain names registered, and that two of them fulfill all the criteria you mentioned, except for the backup MX records. As I said on my earlier post, I don't use PBI for backup MX service.
To respond to your final query, anyone who wonders why someone might choose to use two ISPs for their business isn't someone I'd want in my IS department.
The point I was making in my original post, since you obviously missed it, is that for those people who want more than 5 IP addresses, regardless of other services, PBI grants no other option than to step up to a level of service that costs a great deal more.
That this expanded service offers more bells and whistles is immaterial to those consumers who don't need them, and serve only to distract managerial boneheads from the fact that they're being forced to pay a great deal more for what, in their case, amounts only to more static IP addresses.
I hope this answers your questions.
Kevin Fox
Along with the concept of free market economy is the concept of a cartel. If a business can make more money withholding a service, they are likely to do so as long as their competition does so as well.
Witness the (until recent) stagnation of ISDN and DSL, in favor of higher cost T-1 and fracT-1 lines, astronomical gas prices in the western states, and airfare wars.
The free-market model doesn't hold well in this particular instance because for IPv6 to really take hold will require its implementation
(at some level) by ISPs.
Kevin Fox
Regardless of what that page says, I've received everything on that list except for a secondary MX service with my 5-ip home account. Functionally, the only differences between the 5-ip home and /27 business are the extra IP numbers.
I understand though, how experience can often be confused with stupidity, especially if you're the sort who always believes what you read, even from PBI.
Kevin Fox
But then you need to ask yourself the real question: 'What am I smoking and why do I think that ISPs depend on the revenue from "selling" IP blocks?'
I'm not smoking anything. Money is money, and when the only difference between several of PBI's Consumer and Business DSL packages is the size of the subnet, instead of bandwidth, then I think they make money from renting larger subnets. Duh.
Kevin Fox
While I understand that every ISP out there would like to have a virtually limitless number of IP addresses to alocate to their subscribers, won't this damage their business model?
If I pay PacBell nearly twice as much so I can have 5 IPs instead of one, or pay five times as much for a 32-address subnet, will they still be able to justify charging more for multiple IP addresses when they grow on trees?
Will the switch to IPv6 end up costing them a good deal using this revenue model, or will we all switch to (horror of horrors) a per-byte revenue model?
Kevin Fox
As a Microsoft shareholder (I know, I know, but I do think they're undervalued, even if they're evil), I received a reply card inviting me to join the Freedom to Innovate network, along with other shareholder materials.
Hardly a grassroots effort.
Kevin Fox
Why does 10% of the population get ripped off?
I'm left-handed, and I can't recall seeing a lefty using the left hand for a mouse. I have seen some righties do it though.
I don't dispute that a unidexterous design would alienate some, but I don't know what the percent is.
Then again, Logitech makes several righty products without lefty compliments, but they're not including them standard in a package, so it is a different story.
Kevin Fox
Here's a mirror for just the pictures.
Kevin Fox
If the letters are from RIAA personnel, they're worthless. The RIAA doesn't hold any music copyrights.
Each recording label would have to stand on its own, and the collective 'letters' couldn't be used against all of them. Only the letters from agents of that particular label. I don't think this'll end up holding up. This is why associations like the RIAA and MPAA exist.
Kevin Fox
Granted though. There could be some brief iconography to indicate:
I wonder how small it should be made. If I found a disk that said 'magnify me' and I looked at it at 400x and didn't see anything because I actually needed an electron microscope, I wouldn't take it down to the university and beg for time just to see if there's something there.
Kevin Fox
I like the fact that it's in analog form, showing actual type istead of binary information, but if the creators are expecting the object to be seen for what it is upon discovery, it needs some work.
Digging up this item out of the rest of the techno-rubble, it would just look like a magnet or other piece of machinary. To be useful it must visibly represent information to the naked eye, without thousands of levels of magnification.
Perhaps if it had some text large enough to read, then more text was embedded within those letters, etc, so that a casual observer would realize there is additional information, and would go through the trouble of magnifying and discovering just how much.
If the creators are counting on the significance of the object to be retained for 10,000 years, as it sits in a time capsule or clean room, they're mistaken. Besides, if this was the case, all the data encoded on the object could just as easily be stored digitally, along with the equipment needed to read it.
It would make more sense to have a series of diagrams explaining binary code and its conversion into unicode characters, audio waves, and pixel representations, then have a digital stream which can contain multimedia which has all the translation information as well as multimedia information on the actual pronunciation of dialects, etc.
Kevin Fox
So then what makes you think the internet will be different? Why should more or better movies be released on the net than on video or cable?
Without a clear advantage in quality (or possible volume, though doubltful), my point is still valid.
Kevin Fox
If VHS players and Cable didn't stop people from going to the movies, why should the Internet? It's evolution, not revolution.
Besides, I'd rather watch video on TV than my monitor any day, and a theater screen before TV.
Kevin Fox
So this paves the way for my Transmeta Dreamcast with bluetooth controllers and an ethernet connection, right?
...so you can stop
Pair that with my glasstrons, 802.11 wireless card, and the optional belt-clip and I'll never have to leave the fantasy world again!
It's thinking...
Kevin Fox
The subject of dispute here, which is decided in the courtroom, is when, exactly, a secret has been given out to the public.
If MacNN can show that the informant gave info to MacNN, as well as other rumor sites (given the nature of rumor sites, even one would likely do), the court would likely decide that the secret had been 'given out to the public' when MacNN had it.
Putting something on a web site is an easy way to say something has been given out to the public, but a much smaller segment can be 'the public' as well. For example, if the screen shots had been mailed to an employee at Quark. Poof. No more trade secret, as a competitor would qualify as 'the public'. Does MacInsider qualify? Probably.
Kevin Fox
Unless they somehow find a way to turn the payload itself into the flywheel, capable of 50,000 rpm.
Of course, that raises two problems: First, there would need to be a casing to slow it down. One solution is form the payload into two counterrotating flywheels.
The second is the horrendous gyroscopic forces would interfere with changing orientation. Rotating a flywheel 90 degrees perpendicular to its initial orientation requires exactly the same amount of energy as it took to spin it up in the first place.
Hmm, maybe three pairs of counterrotating flywheels along the three dimensional axes.
Now try to stick a person in it...
Kevin Fox
"Trade secrets do not lose protection if they are stolen or otherwise illegally obtained."
Once a trade secret is leaked, it's no longer a trade secret. If someone steals a trade secret, and it's later reclaimed, it's still a trade secret. But the moment they tell the secret to someone who didn't play a part in the theft, the info is no longer a trade secret, and the thief is liable for the damages. tbo's comment is correct if you replace "if they" with "when they".
In this scenario, the trade secret was leaked when Joe Beta Tester gave the details to MacNN, not later when MacNN posted them to the world.
And of course, once a trade secret is leaked, it's no longer a trade secret, not having the protections of copyright or patent law.
The recource of the injured party is to sue the person who leaked the trade secret, the beta tester. Even if MacNN was certain that it was a trade secret, it was no longer a trade secret when it was in their hands.
True, IANAL, but this info is straight from Pamela Samuelson's course on intellectual property law at UC Berkeley.
Of course, the situation is entirely different if Adobe can prove that MacNN stole the secrets themselves, i.e. that they swiped a copy from a beta tester without their consent.
Kevin Fox
Somehow I doubt MacNN was a beta seed site for Adobe. If someone else broke their NDA, then Adobe needs to prove that they did it, but having received the information, MacNN was under no obligation to not publish the leak, nor are they obligated to reveal their source.
If Adobe can determine in another way who violated the NDA, or if MacNN chooses to reveal it (doubtful), then Adobe can sue for damages from breach of contract.
(IANALY)
Kevin Fox
This is great and all but the most fundamental difference between this engine and a chemical rocket is that the energy source is electric instead of chemical, and that that energy has to come from somewhere.
It's interesting that in none of the press releases do they mention that any ship using this propulsion system would need to have a fair sized nuclear pile (likely more than Cassini's 76 pounds of plutonium) to generate the electricity needed.
Deep Space's ion drive, while having an incredible specific impulse, was pushing so little fuel at any given time that a moderate power source would work. If we're talking about driving 100 tons of cargo to Mars in a speed race however, it's going to require far, far more electricity than a solar cell could reasonably capture, and forget batteries. They can't store enough, even if they weren't damned heavy.
I'm not saying it's for better or worse, but the fact that this propulsion system would mean launching large amounts of plutonium atop a chemical rocket to get out of the Earth's gravity well shouldn't be overlooked or swept under the rug. The potential for disaster is there.
Kevin Fox