I found it interesting that Mr. Kyanka just tossed in:
Every attempt to collect data on visitors has resulted in a media backlash, comparing networks to a Orwellian "Big Brother" and claiming viewers' rights had been violated.
without comment, as if such ``claims'' are purest paranoia.
Examine the situation in terms of TV's demographic knowledge, however: TV gets that knowledge by inviting households to allow their TV habits to be monitored---allowed explicitly. Does Mr. Kyanka think TV should simply do what web-based advertisers want to do: instrument the system so they know who's watching what programs at all times for all people. That would get some backlash for you!
Maybe, just maybe, web advertisers could take a clue from the other Neilsen in play here, and ask people to sign up for monitored surfing for a limited period. I suspect you'd get many folks willing to do so, and no cries of pain from people who think their surfing habits are nobody's business but their own.
The term
"compromising emanations" rather than "radiation" is used because the compromising signals can, and do, exist in several forms such as magnetic and/or electric field radiation, line conduction, (signal and power), xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, or acoustic emissions.
and analogous occurences throughout the document, where discussion of one compromising emanation is redacted.
Now the question is: Why is one of the entries struck out? What sort of emanations does the NSA deal in, simple knowledge of whose existence (or of the NSA's control efforts thereof) would give the black hats a leg up? Assuming the listing entries are mutually exclusive, then it's neither electromagnetic nor acoustic.
Can they sense non-acoustic vibrations with ultra-sensitive earthquake detectors? Heat? (Naah---that's E-M.) Neutrinos? Belly-button lint litter?
Offhand, sounds like ESP to me. Anyone have other ideas?
Because the cops can then arrest you for trivia, without a warrant, whereas otherwise they'd have to at least talk nice to a judge first. At least that's what Marc Perkel says happened to him, and it seems a judge is going along with it.
If this is true, your home may no longer be your castle unless you put a moat around it, and be awfully careful who you lower the drawbridge to.
Reminds me of when Isaac Asimov...
on
Free Books Online
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· Score: 5
...told his publisher it wouldn't make any difference to sales if the paperback and hardcover were published simultaneously, because they were bought by two disjoint sets of readers.
Though skeptical, they tried it, and surprise! it was so.
Unfortunately, I forget who the publisher was, though I suspect Doubleday. He wrote about it in one of his many essays.
My Visor is welded to me, it's great, but I really wish it were Flash upgradable. (Yeah, I know I can upgrade in RAM, but the waste of having duplicated information irks my Scots blood.)
I've poked around a bit, but not found any mention of trying to replace the ROM with Flash in a Visor. Can anyone point me to such a thing? I'm willing to try such a hardware hack given good instructions, but I'm in no way competent to figure it out for myself.
What, you're ever at a computer without access to TMMM!?:-)
Brooks does mention two mice, but has no pointers to further info.
In Chapter 19 (pp. 261--262 in my A-W softcover edition), the section ``Command utterances and the two-cursor problem'' discusses how most commands consist of a verb and a noun---action and object---and how convenient it would be to use two cursors to simultaneously select each. The notes for that chapter are prefaced with ``Material quoted without citation is from personal communications.'' The note from that subsection, says in its entirety:
7. It appears the Apple Desk Top Bus could handle two mice electronically, but the operating system provides no such function.
His thoughts on the human-machine interface are well worth considering, including ways around the need for two mice.
If you haven't read this book, do so now. If you wonder why, you might check some reviews:
In some legal cases, we see the computer being used in truly original ways which are beyond the scope of current law. This is not one of them.
Let us create a perfect analogy to test the lawsuit's reasonability:
Suppose our miscreant had taken a photo from Hustler magazine, and pasted on the victim's head from the school yearbook, then tacked it up to the telephone pole in front of his house. Apply the lawsuit to that.
No? You claim it's a difference in degree sufficient to become a difference in kind? OK, posit our creep going down to Kinko's and printing off a few thousand of these compositions, and posting them all over school/town/wherever. This seems to me sufficiently broadcast to generate the same degree of harm. (I.e., the real damage occurs when the work comes to the notice of someone who knows the victim. It matters not that fifteen thousand strangers on another continent view it, so long as they have no, and do not create any, connection to her.)
So, now we have a very close meatspace analogue of the crime. What is the father's failing here? Not checking under the mattress for copies of Hustler? Allowing Junior to make surreptitious forays to Kinko's? Overlooking the need to monitor the level in the paste pot? I think not. Any lawyer with the brains God gave a lemon could get this one laughed out of court.
[Note that this applies solely to the father---Junior should get as much of the book thrown at him as his age allows.]
Point out to them that insisting that you're working for hire means you're employees, and therefore entitled to organize. If they're antsy about grad-student unions, that might be an effective stick.
Then again, the recent NLRB decision may may lead them to believe it's a lost cause, and they'll just take the unionization hit to claim your work---it depends on how badly they foam at the mouth thinking of organized students.
OT:
The college-wants-it-both-ways aspect reminds me of when my Connecticut-resident girlfriend (now wife:-), going to the U. of Maryland, got a letter from the Md. DMV saying she had to register her car in-state. Her dad sent back a letter saying he'd be delighted to do so, so long as that implied in-state tuition, also. Never heard another word about it....
It lets them benefit from spam...
on
License To Spam?
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· Score: 1
...without actually sending it.
If I'm reading this correctly (it's kinda hard to make out) they're saying:
We (the client/spammer fellow-traveller) will abide by your AUP, and in return
You (the ISP) agree to look the other way while we provide the business outlet which is being advertised via spam from some other ISP.
In other words, we won't spam from our account, and you'll tacitly (or explicitly, given this letter) approve of spamming from elsewhere.
Your story reminds me of the time my wife was studying in Austria. I had her hostel's phone number and her room number, and I practised for days (literally---international calls were expensive then, and we were just above the starving student stage) to get my German pronunciation right.
Came the day, and I asked proudly for ``Zimmer drei hundert vier and zwanzig, bitte'', to get the response ``Yes sir, one moment please.''
I've spent too much time looking at logic-analyzer traces of 386s. Bless them, the analyzer manufacturer sold a trace program (read: hardware run-time disassembler) that could sort things out, and tell me which fetches were discarded prefetches (when the CPU took a jump to other than where the prefetched code was). Without it, it would have been an even bigger pain to debug.
Otherwise, the post is spot on. For instance, when the prefetch is invalidated, a 386 sits on its thumbs until the memory can be bothered to dig up the new opcodes. Nowadays, the newer chips have plenty to keep them busy at such times (mostly). As mentioned, some of them even fetch and executeboth code streams, keeping a finger in the book so when the time comes they can see which way the branch actually went, and throw away the results from the untaken path.
Maybe that's why we embedded types are so fond of Z80s and such: you can actually see what it's doing, when it does it, with a logic analyzer. You gotta be able to, when the question is whether you're diddling the right I/O port at the right time. With the new chips, which can suck up a few hundred K into cache, and show no bus activity thereafter, you need to be a mind-reader.
Nowadays the monitoring tools for these caching, prefetching, secretive bastards are enormously expensive, and are developed in parallel with the chip itself, to be released at the same time, 'cause nobody's going to buy an embedded processor for which `gdb' is the only debugging tool.
The folks who design these monstrosities deal with stuff that makes my head hurt just to understand the questions, much less figure out the answers.
Hats off to them!
The great old HP (or something much closer to it than the HP PC company you're ranting against) is Agilent Technologies---they still make the great oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, and all the other unkillable tools you've spent so many sleepless nights with:-).
For some reason, they sold off their old name to the PC purveyors, and took one of the new, shiny, meaningless ones so fashionable now.
If they stay on course, in a decade, all electro-geeks will revere ``Agilent'', and not care about that run-of-the-mill computer company (what was it's name again?).
The quality is in the product, not the name.
The TIGER database is also available, along with a mailing list talking about it, courtesy of Bruce Perens, who sprang a few hundred (thousand?) bucks to buy the CD-ROMs and put them on the net. It's more of a research project than a product, however. You can start looking at his
Free software website; it's the top item in the list.
A point many people miss is the different standards of proof in criminal vs. civil courts.
To be convicted in criminal court, the jury must believe the case proven ``beyond a reasonable doubt''. If you can reasonably question the prosecution's case, you must vote to acquit.
On the other hand, in civil court the standard is simply ``the proponderance of the evidence''---if the plaintiff (not prosecution: two different things) has better evidence, a more convincing case, than the defendant, then vote to award damages.
In other words, in criminal court, it's gotta be, say, 98% proven, while in civil court it's 50% plus epsilon.
Thus, it's perfectly reasonable for the two OJ trials to both have come to correct conclusions.
If you can package them well enough to be proof against the apes, the U.S. Postal Service will do it reasonably (if you're in the U.S.---sorry, rest of world:-).
See the ``book rate'' page for details---you can ship 70 pounds for 31 cents/lb., anywhere in the U.S.
Depending on distance, the ``bound printed matter'' rate might work---sounds like a book to me---but they limit you to 15 lbs./package.
My sisters have used it for exactly your purpose (getting books home from college) with great success.
I set up an address solely for anyone responding to my/. posts. I've never sent any mail from that address, but I've received spam on it. Ditto my address for Technocrat, which is different.
Some scum has the minimal smarts needed to scan weblogs for addresses. Ah, well, time for RBL/ORBS/whatever.
People who are getting what they want...
on
Selfish Society
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· Score: 1
People who are getting what they want often tend to promote the ideology that people get what they deserve[.]
Probably the major problem with weblogs is the instantaneous feedback. Remember the ``flash crowds'' in Niven's teleportation stories (All the Bridges Rusting IIRC)? We have exactly the same phenomenon going on here.
How to fix it? Put some damping in the feedback loop by delaying the appearance of posts, while still assigning karma. The higher your karma, the sooner the post appears. Voila---the trolls and kiddies no longer get the instant gratification they want. What's the fun in working for fifteen minutes to hose a thread when you don't see the results for half an hour?
What??!! I hear you scream, half an HOUR? The discussion's dead meat by then!
Erm, no. Any comments worth reading now will be worth reading in half an hour, or even an hour later. Such a delay would also help damp the rush of mis-informed comments from those who haven't digested (or even read) the story, and thus the reflecto-flames from those offended by such witlessness.
Take any civil or electrical engineering or differential equations class, and learn why damping is good. (Check out the Takoma Narrows Bridge for a short course.) That's part of why you always hear the New York Stock Exchange results are ``delayed fifteen minutes''. (I suspect the other part is so the dealers can get their cut before the unwashed get a shot.)
Bottom line: Slow things down, it can only make them better.
Since the letter specifies ``all proceeds that we receive from the transfer of your domain name registration (up to the full registration fee) will be retained by Network Solutions'', this raises the obvious question of what they do with the proceeds in excess of the registration fee. Seems obvious to me they'll go the the previous domain holder, right? That's the fair thing for NSI to do.
[Sound of hollow laughter in background]
Or maybe NSI doesn't expect anyone to pay more than $35 at the auction. Yeah, that's it---no one will pay more than the lowest alternate registrar's price.
I prefer to develop in a transparent environment---one where I know what code is being invoked, and by whom.
I'm developing under Next/Openstep, and while the Project Builder can be nice in some ways, when things don't quite work, it can be a bear to follow layer after layer of makefile to determine what library or header file is missing.
With standard Unix-like command-line developing, I know what I'm getting because I put it there, and if something's flaky, I can ask make (at least the FSF's version) to trace its ``thought'' processes for me to check. With the IDEs I've seen, too much is hidden, and if it doesn't work exactly as intended, or if you want it to do something that its designer hadn't provided for, you're in for quite a fight.
True, you can develop from the command line under msWin, but for it to be as powerful and convenient as Unix, you need to augment the shell and utilities extensively. Cygwin gives you the missing capabilities, but I'd rather not retrofit---just go to the system whose shell scripting capabilities are a full programming language, that has a ton of Lego-like utilities to be fit together as you wish, and that lets you see what's happening every step of the way. After all, the bottom line of correct programming is knowing exactly what your code will do.
There are lots of folks who run small sites, costing them $45/month or so, but they can serve only a very limited clientele. Either they're honed to razor sharpness in who they appeal to, or they're not well known, or they're just not so hot. But, once a hot site gets noticed, and everybody and her brother start hitting it, the costs go up rapidly. Much as we like to pretend otherwise, the Internet is not free---we're mostly just freeloaders.
Folks with popular sites, unless they're independently wealthy, must have some source of income from the site to support it, be it banner ads, a sugar-daddy corporation, sales of mugs and hats, or whatever.
I don't know about you, but I need a lot fewer mugs than there are good websites out there.
AFI's idea is to make it easy for sites and surfers to transfer cash in small amounts, paying for the one without costing the other very much, while protecting privacy and editorial independence. Think about it---if your site doesn't have to sell ads, it doesn't have to worry about advertisers (or owning corporations) being uncomfortable with the commentary.
Wake up! If we don't grow up and get used to paying for what we get, someone else will, and we'll get what they want!
I'm willing to pay for a good artist to write comics, or for Ars Technica to do unbiased reviews for me, or for a ton of other sites. It's only fair, and with the tens (hundreds?) of millions of surfers, none of us need pay much to get what we want. Unless we continue to insist it be fed to us at no (obvious, cash) cost. Then we will end up with the WWA (World-Wide AOL).
As I remember it, claim two was what really frosted Mr. Katz, and I agreed fully with him:
2.Usage of SEA's proprietary ARC file format.
SEA was claiming that no-one was allowed to write a program that was compatible with Arc!
When he wrote PKZip, one of the major changes was his adamant declaration that the format of.zip files was open for all to use, and would always be so. That's where the difference was in my mind---P.K. was willing to fight on a level playing field, and may the best programmer win. For years, P.K. was the winner.
I felt strongly enough about it to send in my $25 for registration. In a small way, Phil Katz was a forerunner of the Free Software movement; his software wasn't free, but his file format was---possibly an even more important freedom.
Slashdot Mirror
I found it interesting that Mr. Kyanka just tossed in:
without comment, as if such ``claims'' are purest paranoia.Examine the situation in terms of TV's demographic knowledge, however: TV gets that knowledge by inviting households to allow their TV habits to be monitored---allowed explicitly. Does Mr. Kyanka think TV should simply do what web-based advertisers want to do: instrument the system so they know who's watching what programs at all times for all people. That would get some backlash for you!
Maybe, just maybe, web advertisers could take a clue from the other Neilsen in play here, and ask people to sign up for monitored surfing for a limited period. I suspect you'd get many folks willing to do so, and no cries of pain from people who think their surfing habits are nobody's business but their own.
I love the lines:
and analogous occurences throughout the document, where discussion of one compromising emanation is redacted.Now the question is: Why is one of the entries struck out? What sort of emanations does the NSA deal in, simple knowledge of whose existence (or of the NSA's control efforts thereof) would give the black hats a leg up? Assuming the listing entries are mutually exclusive, then it's neither electromagnetic nor acoustic.
Can they sense non-acoustic vibrations with ultra-sensitive earthquake detectors? Heat? (Naah---that's E-M.) Neutrinos? Belly-button lint litter?
Offhand, sounds like ESP to me. Anyone have other ideas?
If this is true, your home may no longer be your castle unless you put a moat around it, and be awfully careful who you lower the drawbridge to.
...told his publisher it wouldn't make any difference to sales if the paperback and hardcover were published simultaneously, because they were bought by two disjoint sets of readers.
Though skeptical, they tried it, and surprise! it was so.
Unfortunately, I forget who the publisher was, though I suspect Doubleday. He wrote about it in one of his many essays.
My Visor is welded to me, it's great, but I really wish it were Flash upgradable. (Yeah, I know I can upgrade in RAM, but the waste of having duplicated information irks my Scots blood.)
I've poked around a bit, but not found any mention of trying to replace the ROM with Flash in a Visor. Can anyone point me to such a thing? I'm willing to try such a hardware hack given good instructions, but I'm in no way competent to figure it out for myself.
What, you're ever at a computer without access to TMMM!? :-)
Brooks does mention two mice, but has no pointers to further info. In Chapter 19 (pp. 261--262 in my A-W softcover edition), the section ``Command utterances and the two-cursor problem'' discusses how most commands consist of a verb and a noun---action and object---and how convenient it would be to use two cursors to simultaneously select each. The notes for that chapter are prefaced with ``Material quoted without citation is from personal communications.'' The note from that subsection, says in its entirety:
His thoughts on the human-machine interface are well worth considering, including ways around the need for two mice.If you haven't read this book, do so now. If you wonder why, you might check some reviews:
In some legal cases, we see the computer being used in truly original ways which are beyond the scope of current law. This is not one of them.
Let us create a perfect analogy to test the lawsuit's reasonability:
Suppose our miscreant had taken a photo from Hustler magazine, and pasted on the victim's head from the school yearbook, then tacked it up to the telephone pole in front of his house. Apply the lawsuit to that.
No? You claim it's a difference in degree sufficient to become a difference in kind? OK, posit our creep going down to Kinko's and printing off a few thousand of these compositions, and posting them all over school/town/wherever. This seems to me sufficiently broadcast to generate the same degree of harm. (I.e., the real damage occurs when the work comes to the notice of someone who knows the victim. It matters not that fifteen thousand strangers on another continent view it, so long as they have no, and do not create any, connection to her.)
So, now we have a very close meatspace analogue of the crime. What is the father's failing here? Not checking under the mattress for copies of Hustler? Allowing Junior to make surreptitious forays to Kinko's? Overlooking the need to monitor the level in the paste pot? I think not. Any lawyer with the brains God gave a lemon could get this one laughed out of court.
[Note that this applies solely to the father---Junior should get as much of the book thrown at him as his age allows.]
Thanks---I run without most of the /boxes, and thus never noted their ghetto.
Point out to them that insisting that you're working for hire means you're employees, and therefore entitled to organize. If they're antsy about grad-student unions, that might be an effective stick.
Then again, the recent NLRB decision may may lead them to believe it's a lost cause, and they'll just take the unionization hit to claim your work---it depends on how badly they foam at the mouth thinking of organized students.
If I'm reading this correctly (it's kinda hard to make out) they're saying:
In other words, we won't spam from our account, and you'll tacitly (or explicitly, given this letter) approve of spamming from elsewhere.
Disgusting.
Your story reminds me of the time my wife was studying in Austria. I had her hostel's phone number and her room number, and I practised for days (literally---international calls were expensive then, and we were just above the starving student stage) to get my German pronunciation right.
Came the day, and I asked proudly for ``Zimmer drei hundert vier and zwanzig, bitte'', to get the response ``Yes sir, one moment please.''
Crushed... :-) Thereafter I didn't even try.
... for a view of this situation taken to its logical conclusion. Hint: The insurance-company execs are not happy.
I've spent too much time looking at logic-analyzer traces of 386s. Bless them, the analyzer manufacturer sold a trace program (read: hardware run-time disassembler) that could sort things out, and tell me which fetches were discarded prefetches (when the CPU took a jump to other than where the prefetched code was). Without it, it would have been an even bigger pain to debug.
Otherwise, the post is spot on. For instance, when the prefetch is invalidated, a 386 sits on its thumbs until the memory can be bothered to dig up the new opcodes. Nowadays, the newer chips have plenty to keep them busy at such times (mostly). As mentioned, some of them even fetch and execute both code streams, keeping a finger in the book so when the time comes they can see which way the branch actually went, and throw away the results from the untaken path.
Maybe that's why we embedded types are so fond of Z80s and such: you can actually see what it's doing, when it does it, with a logic analyzer. You gotta be able to, when the question is whether you're diddling the right I/O port at the right time. With the new chips, which can suck up a few hundred K into cache, and show no bus activity thereafter, you need to be a mind-reader.
Nowadays the monitoring tools for these caching, prefetching, secretive bastards are enormously expensive, and are developed in parallel with the chip itself, to be released at the same time, 'cause nobody's going to buy an embedded processor for which `gdb' is the only debugging tool.
The folks who design these monstrosities deal with stuff that makes my head hurt just to understand the questions, much less figure out the answers. Hats off to them!
For some reason, they sold off their old name to the PC purveyors, and took one of the new, shiny, meaningless ones so fashionable now. If they stay on course, in a decade, all electro-geeks will revere ``Agilent'', and not care about that run-of-the-mill computer company (what was it's name again?). The quality is in the product, not the name.
The TIGER database is also available, along with a mailing list talking about it, courtesy of Bruce Perens, who sprang a few hundred (thousand?) bucks to buy the CD-ROMs and put them on the net. It's more of a research project than a product, however. You can start looking at his Free software website; it's the top item in the list.
A point many people miss is the different standards of proof in criminal vs. civil courts.
To be convicted in criminal court, the jury must believe the case proven ``beyond a reasonable doubt''. If you can reasonably question the prosecution's case, you must vote to acquit.
On the other hand, in civil court the standard is simply ``the proponderance of the evidence''---if the plaintiff (not prosecution: two different things) has better evidence, a more convincing case, than the defendant, then vote to award damages.
In other words, in criminal court, it's gotta be, say, 98% proven, while in civil court it's 50% plus epsilon. Thus, it's perfectly reasonable for the two OJ trials to both have come to correct conclusions.
If you can package them well enough to be proof against the apes, the U.S. Postal Service will do it reasonably (if you're in the U.S.---sorry, rest of world :-).
See the ``book rate'' page for details---you can ship 70 pounds for 31 cents/lb., anywhere in the U.S. Depending on distance, the ``bound printed matter'' rate might work---sounds like a book to me---but they limit you to 15 lbs./package.
My sisters have used it for exactly your purpose (getting books home from college) with great success.
I set up an address solely for anyone responding to my /. posts. I've never sent any mail from that address, but I've received spam on it. Ditto my address for Technocrat, which is different.
Some scum has the minimal smarts needed to scan weblogs for addresses. Ah, well, time for RBL/ORBS/whatever.
Probably the major problem with weblogs is the instantaneous feedback. Remember the ``flash crowds'' in Niven's teleportation stories (All the Bridges Rusting IIRC)? We have exactly the same phenomenon going on here.
How to fix it? Put some damping in the feedback loop by delaying the appearance of posts, while still assigning karma. The higher your karma, the sooner the post appears. Voila---the trolls and kiddies no longer get the instant gratification they want. What's the fun in working for fifteen minutes to hose a thread when you don't see the results for half an hour?
What??!! I hear you scream, half an HOUR? The discussion's dead meat by then!
Erm, no. Any comments worth reading now will be worth reading in half an hour, or even an hour later. Such a delay would also help damp the rush of mis-informed comments from those who haven't digested (or even read) the story, and thus the reflecto-flames from those offended by such witlessness.
Take any civil or electrical engineering or differential equations class, and learn why damping is good. (Check out the Takoma Narrows Bridge for a short course.) That's part of why you always hear the New York Stock Exchange results are ``delayed fifteen minutes''. (I suspect the other part is so the dealers can get their cut before the unwashed get a shot.)
Bottom line: Slow things down, it can only make them better.
Since the letter specifies ``all proceeds that we receive from the transfer of your domain name registration (up to the full registration fee) will be retained by Network Solutions'', this raises the obvious question of what they do with the proceeds in excess of the registration fee. Seems obvious to me they'll go the the previous domain holder, right? That's the fair thing for NSI to do.
Or maybe NSI doesn't expect anyone to pay more than $35 at the auction. Yeah, that's it---no one will pay more than the lowest alternate registrar's price.
I prefer to develop in a transparent environment---one where I know what code is being invoked, and by whom.
I'm developing under Next/Openstep, and while the Project Builder can be nice in some ways, when things don't quite work, it can be a bear to follow layer after layer of makefile to determine what library or header file is missing.
With standard Unix-like command-line developing, I know what I'm getting because I put it there, and if something's flaky, I can ask make (at least the FSF's version) to trace its ``thought'' processes for me to check. With the IDEs I've seen, too much is hidden, and if it doesn't work exactly as intended, or if you want it to do something that its designer hadn't provided for, you're in for quite a fight.
True, you can develop from the command line under msWin, but for it to be as powerful and convenient as Unix, you need to augment the shell and utilities extensively. Cygwin gives you the missing capabilities, but I'd rather not retrofit---just go to the system whose shell scripting capabilities are a full programming language, that has a ton of Lego-like utilities to be fit together as you wish, and that lets you see what's happening every step of the way. After all, the bottom line of correct programming is knowing exactly what your code will do.
I feel awfully lonely advocating this, but check out the Ad-Free Internet site. Curiously, the best discussion of it is on the Sluggy Freelance site.
There are lots of folks who run small sites, costing them $45/month or so, but they can serve only a very limited clientele. Either they're honed to razor sharpness in who they appeal to, or they're not well known, or they're just not so hot. But, once a hot site gets noticed, and everybody and her brother start hitting it, the costs go up rapidly. Much as we like to pretend otherwise, the Internet is not free---we're mostly just freeloaders.
Folks with popular sites, unless they're independently wealthy, must have some source of income from the site to support it, be it banner ads, a sugar-daddy corporation, sales of mugs and hats, or whatever.
I don't know about you, but I need a lot fewer mugs than there are good websites out there.
AFI's idea is to make it easy for sites and surfers to transfer cash in small amounts, paying for the one without costing the other very much, while protecting privacy and editorial independence. Think about it---if your site doesn't have to sell ads, it doesn't have to worry about advertisers (or owning corporations) being uncomfortable with the commentary.
Wake up! If we don't grow up and get used to paying for what we get, someone else will, and we'll get what they want!
I'm willing to pay for a good artist to write comics, or for Ars Technica to do unbiased reviews for me, or for a ton of other sites. It's only fair, and with the tens (hundreds?) of millions of surfers, none of us need pay much to get what we want. Unless we continue to insist it be fed to us at no (obvious, cash) cost. Then we will end up with the WWA (World-Wide AOL).
Dr. Pepper my nasturtium! It tastes exactly the way month-old, never-washed sweat socks smell. (Once was more than enough, in case you can't tell.)
I like Dr. Pepper, even if it does taste like carbonated prune juice. But then, I like prune juice....
As I remember it, claim two was what really frosted Mr. Katz, and I agreed fully with him:
SEA was claiming that no-one was allowed to write a program that was compatible with Arc!When he wrote PKZip, one of the major changes was his adamant declaration that the format of .zip files was open for all to use, and would always be so. That's where the difference was in my mind---P.K. was willing to fight on a level playing field, and may the best programmer win. For years, P.K. was the winner.
It was that format openness that allowed Info-ZIP to do their work, resulting in their claim that UnZip is ``The Third Most Portable Program in the World''. (See the tiny print at the bottom of the page for the footnote.)
I felt strongly enough about it to send in my $25 for registration. In a small way, Phil Katz was a forerunner of the Free Software movement; his software wasn't free, but his file format was---possibly an even more important freedom.