If it's obvious to someone learned in the art, then it is not (technically) patentable. Also, prior art exists with, ie: catalog call centers, where they store you CC info and process your order. Adding "on the internet" to that is pretty lame "invention"
That's not prior art. That's stretching an existing circumstance to try to relate it to a new 'invention'. Bags and boxes existed for centuries, yet McDonald's has a patent on their fry holder? Seems obvious to me (someone not 'learned in the art') that that's how you should hold fries, but someone developed that mechanism and made it work. That particular implementation of the box of fries is patentable. Nevermind the fact that people put fries in bags for years before McDonald's did and nevermind that it seems pretty obvious.
You cannot challenge a patent by saying, "Well, this industry does it similarly." The process of buying something over the Internet and buying something over a phone by catalog, while similar, require completely different interface designs. And that's what was patented by Amazon.
Do Slashdotters find a need to search out causes? On the one hand, we get articles on Slashdot completely supporting Apple for turning to a BSD-based OS and then we get articles lambasting them for completely logical business decisions, all because someone thinks a paten is dumb.
Do you guys know how many dumb patents there are? Have you ever looked at a McDonald's fry package? There's a patent there. There are patents on things like lamps, CD cases, even wrapping paper. We can look at it and say, "Oh, it's so obvious that wrapping paper should be like this," but that doesn't change the fact that the person/company/entity invented it first.
I still haven't seen a worthy challenge to the 1-Click philosophy. Yes, of course you can say, "Well, duh, it's obvious that you can do that," but these guys did it and said, "Hey, we did it first," and I haven't really seen a conclusive proof against that.
So now, a company decides to use this technology, technology which will obviously make it easier for consumers to purchase online things that Slashdot has already come out in favor of and you turn around and criticize them?! Shame on you. Boohoo that the world didn't turn out the way you want it and companies actually abide by laws instead of filling our courts with worthless and expensive litigation. Boohoo that Apple turns out to be interested in its bottom line rather than what you want it to be interested in. Boohoo that you didn't go out and register an idea that seems completely obvious (to you) with the patent office before some big company could.
Sometimes Slashdot sounds really insightful, and then sometimes, it sounds like a bunch of naive kids whining because things aren't going their way.
BTW, on another topic, this page was updated a good 10 days ago. What's that say about Apple when a geek news site doesn't notice this sort of thing for ten days?
Basically, people aren't moved to action until something goes wrong. I had DSL last summer in my apartment (summer apartment). Installation was painless. Service was great. I had no problems, and of course, there were no problems with my location. My father has also had DSL for over a year with very little in the way of problems (SWB accidentally switched him off his current ISP to theirs at one point, but a phone call cleared that up).
However, this summer, I tried to sign up for DSL at my new residence. I was told I was in the self-install area. Then I was told I wasn't. Then I was told I wasn't even eligible. In the span of two months I went from being able to just plug in the equipment to not being able to use it at all. I posted a few reviews, but lost interest. Of course, last summer, when the DSL installation went smoothly, I could care less about posting to message boards; I was too busy exploring the speeds that DSL gave me.
If you're a business. Put up the cash and get a T1. Don't depend on DSL and don't depend on ISDN. If you're a home consumer, go for DSL, but don't get pissed when it doesn't go your way. It works for some and it doesn't work for others. Get ISDN through an alternate provider if you can't get DSL. They're generally a lot (10-20%) cheaper, and the speeds are about the same as IDSL.
BTW, am I the only one who is bothered by the fact that state colleges have their own police force? I can see the practical need for policing a large group of people, but I see a real conflict of interest here, from the perspective of the surrounding community (college police are controlled by the college) and the students (police and professors, all working together...)
No, I'm much happier with a police force specifically for a campus than with a municipal police force. First off, think about how many potential crimes go on at a university. The police blotter at my school was always at least ten times as long per week as the municipal one. If I was a city cop, I wouldn't want to take part in that either. Secondly, campus police have, first and foremost, the protection of the student body in mind, not the protection of the city government (which I think is a bigger conflict of interest). Thus, you find that campus police are much more lenient on matters than their municipal counterparts. Finally, you don't have to deal with those nasty bureacratic funding deals. University cops get paid largely with university funds.
And besides, I guarantee you that those university cops aren't doing the forensic analysis of that kid's hard drive, unless of course, their analysis amounts to 'Quick, Jimbo, download all this kid's music before the Feds get their hands on it'.
They certainly aren't allowing students to copy books in the university library.
This just shows how in touch lawyers are with the real world. All students copy books in the university library. Professors do it, too. They copy to take pages back to their dorm rooms for studying purposes. They copy to write term papers (who says plagiarism's dead?!). Professors copy entire novellas for the express purpose of handing them out in class (students are notorious for not wanting to go to libraries, and libraries are notorious for never having the book).
Fair use copying goes on every day, and to compare the Internet to a library where nothing gets copied is to completely misunderstand how college libraries are used.
Lends more credibility to the disposable credit card concept.
You hit the nail on the head. American Express, a huge corporation, but second fiddle to the likes of Visa and MasterCard, needs something to promote its new idea. With the Internet at hand, it has its weapon. It sends some crackers to crack Western Union, thereby pushing people to the 'safer' disposable credit card.
Or maybe they didn't send anyone at all. Maybe they just got Western Union in bed with them. Who knows. The point is, CT found the conspiracy.
But "23 of the top 25 Web sites don't use the double opt-in," Black said. "By MAPS standards, 23 of the 25 Web sites should be blocked."
In my opinion, yeah 23 of the top 25 web sites should be blocked from sending me e-mail. I'm sick of automatically getting a bunch of crap from web sites that I don't even frequent.
But if you look at the quote, he's not saying that at all. He's talking about blocking web sites, which of course, MAPS isn't about at all. I'm glad all those big corporations are cowering to such genius.
No other property can be given away without loss by the owner.
As well reasoned as your post is, this one sentence completely destroys your argument.
Information is the most powerful piece of property someone can own, share, give away, sell, or keep a hold of. Entire courses in human history were charted by men and women maintaining a grasp on information (Manhattan Project comes to mind). Furthermore, entire other courses were charted by the dissemination of information (the Bible comes to mind). The point is, information being held on to can be/very/ beneficial for the owner, both in terms of monetary value and in terms of control. At the same time, giving away information can be/very/ detrimental to the owner.
People talk about how the next war will be the Information War. Media groups, from Slashdot to NBC base their entire livelihoods on information gathering and choice dissemination. Whether information gets given out or protected is the most crucial decision anyone can make.
And if you need an example that may hit closer to home, how come you haven't given me your credit card information? We get up in arms because people are giving away our information, and little do they realize that they already gave it away, much to their harm.
Do not underestimate how much of an effect giving away information can have. Not all information is harmless.
Can the phone company take away your phone number? I think they can. What may be questionable, though, is whether they can auction them off. Is the phone company allowed to 'sell' phone numbers? I know you can request them, but can the company actually sell them to you?
Seriously, sometimes the complete lunacy of Slashdot readers boggles my mind.
IANAL.
What the bill is essentially mandating is warranty. If you buy your computer from Dell or Gateway or any other major reputable computer retailer, you get one of these already (my warranty is 3 years on a Dell I have). This law is mainly to protect the consumer from those cheap computer builders who use refurbished parts, faulty returns, and just a dash of cluelessness to sell crappy computers, then charge people large amounts of money when they bring them back for repairs.
It's not about whether hardware works with Linux. It's not about making a faulty extension of the automobile lemon laws. It's about protecting the consumer. And personally, I don't think it goes far enough. It should extend to parts and systems sold at trade shows. There's a lot of people out there with enough knowledge of computers to completely screw people who have no knowledge.
Quit twisting good ideas and good intentions into some sort of cluelessness.
The problem is that you're making the assumption that because it happened to one big company it will happen to another. Microsoft of the 90s and IBM of the 80s are two very different companies. IBM is/was a hardware company whose forays into software were minor, merely suited to doing something specific for a machine. Microsoft, on the other hand, is a software company, not tied to the hardware market. Part of what weakened IBM and strengthened Microsoft is the fact that the IBM PC platform was open and clone-able. Thus, you didn't have to buy a computer from IBM, but you still had to buy the software from Microsoft.
But, of course, the real reason Microsoft got so strong is that IBM chose them to produce the OS. If IBM had developed this in-house, I don't think we'd have a Microsoft today. IBM would probably still be a juggernaut (if it survived anti-trust lawsuits). Translate this to Microsoft. Microsoft rarely shops out work. When they do, they usually end up either taking the idea and putting the company out of business or, more usually, buying the company and bringing them into the fold. Microsoft makes sure that others can not replicate its core software. There's only one Windows, not Windows clones, and Microsoft produces everything from the OS to the applications to the games to the drivers for mice and keyboard. Microsoft does not rely on anyone like IBM did and Microsoft does its damnedest to make sure that no one can do (not do better or do differently, but do) what they do.
So you're comparing apples to oranges. Take a look at the mistakes that IBM made and take a look at the mistakes that Microsoft hasn't made. About the only huge blunder on Microsoft's part was not recognizing the impact of the Internet, and we all saw how quickly they turned that around.
To be honest, I've never had much success with Mandrake (I've tried to install their distro both by FTP and from a CD image numerous times and always had it fail for some non-user-related error (a crash, a failed dependency, something). However, they most unheralded project which they currently support and use has got to be Supermount. The new author (forget his name) has managed to update the patches all the way up to 2.3.99pre5, and those patches should work with the latest 2.4.0test kernels as well.
What does supermount do? Basically, it virtually mounts your filesystems and then monitors the drives to see whether or not they should be really mounted. This means that you can mount the floppy drive as supermountfs, stick in a floppy, access the drive, remove the floppy, stick in a new floppy, access the drive, etc. etc. Basic removeable media flexibility, just like other OSs. It's something that Linux desperately needs to allow it to compete in the desktop market, and it isn't a kludge like autofs.
I've used it for quite some time with no problems, but Mandrake continues to help maintain this when it needs to and their distro has included it for quite some time. I may not be able to use Mandrake, but at least I can use some of their efforts.
Although I agree with your (and many others) posts on the principal that religious teachings have no place in a faith-neutral place like a public school, I do take exception to this statement. I personally do not partake in religion anymore, but it certainly does have a place in public life, to the extent that it does not intrude upon my rights. Kids should have moral guidance, preferably instilled in them by their parents, but religious institutions in general do a good job as well.
That's a load of crap. Religions instill a system of morals that they approve of, not ones that necessarily society approves of. And who decides what the difference is between moral 'guidance' and 'subversion'. I mean, hell, even on Slashdot, we see the constant battle between people with morals that say, "Be a law-abiding citizen" and people with morals that say, "You must do what you want and if it means breaking the law, so be it." Who's right? Who's wrong?
It's not even that clear. But what is clear is that the 'moral guidance' of religious institutions has led to more hatred and human suffering than any other factor in history. 'Moral guidance' (and those that tried to counter it) brought us such heavenly moments as the Crusades, forced conversion of Christians to Islam in Spain and south France, the Salem witchhunt, the house-arrest of Galileo, the decimation of American Indian culture, and our current little squabble in the Mideast.
As far as I'm concerned, religious institutions can stick to providing the masses with something to look forward to and stop telling people how to live their lives.
Man, maybe it's time to quit getting your panties all in a wad over something as simple as Apple protecting its business interests. Businesses do far worse than Apple to maintain their trade secrets. I've had to sign NDAs, and if I broke them, I'd expect to get my ass sued. I don't care if it was something as simple as a rumor. A contract (which is what an NDA is) is a contract, and if you violate that contract, there are expected legal recourses.
It's just like an open-source zealot to jump on the "Quick, let's punish them! Boycott their products and fill their President's inbox with complaints!" Get over it. There are far more important things to worry about in the software community than whether companies are going to punish their employees for violating agreements.
Sadly, the post office is doing what other people do just fine already, and not coming up with a way to stay relevent. Dare I wonder if we will soon even need a USPS?
I hate how every time someone decides to talk about that wonderous new invention e-mail, the end of the discussion always has to be a statement like this.
Yes, we will need a postal service of some sort for a long time, whether it's a corporation called the United States Postal Service or one called FedEx. You know why? Cause you can't ship stuff like auto parts, computers, eBay purchases, and Grandma's presents via e-mail. People tend to forget that cyberspace isn't real. It's just a virtual (read: imaginary) place that functions very well for information but sucks for actual atoms and molecules.
And as far as government organizations go, the post office isn't exactly like other governmental organizations. They don't depend on the Congressional budget and they operate as a corporation, not as an agency. They are actually an example of an excellently run part of the government and make a strong argument for modeling the different agencies after corporations. The post office is completely self-supporting and you can believe they're not going to attempt to do something if they're not going to make money on it.
While I don't think the e-mail address thing is a good idea, I don't think it is a bad one, either. And I think the Post Office will do a/much/ better job or regulating and controlling abuses to its system than organizations like Hotmail and Yahoo do.
I found myself on 555-1212, much to my surprise as I've only lived in this location for 2 months and I was entered twice (both with incorrect spellings). What's even worse are the tie-ins that companies like these use. At 555-1212, I could search public records, that required me to provide even more information, or I could look for classmates from high school, which required a host of information about my high-school years. And people will just enter this stuff. They have no worries.
Personally, I'm careful with the information that I give out, but I'm not paranoid. I know people can find out a lot about me with just very simple searches like this, but at the same time, I don't fill out surveys, I don't fill out sweepstakes registration, and I'm sure as hell not giving out any more personal information than I need to. Unfortunately, many of these sites present that personal information as information necessary to look up your request, which just isn't true, and people freely give it cause they're greedy for the specific information they want.
But again, I'm not intent on hiding my information. I just want to make sure that it's protected so that only I can change it and so that I can determine how it's used. I haven't heard any successful ideas on how to manage that.
You know what really pisses me off? There's all this talk about top level domains, and you give several examples of possible ones, except, they're all in English!. Not everyone on this planet speaks English, and the current TLD naming system is pretty language generic (.com,.net,.org) since they use abbreviations that can easily be transferred between both Germanic and Romance languages. How about thinking a little bit less egocentrically and more geocentric.
I for one don't understand cheaters anyway - whats the point of playing a game if your just going to cheat? It stops getting fun really quick.
As an expert on cheating (I downloaded the hack for SimCity 2000 that gave you $2,000,000,000 and I also told all my friends in the ninth grade that I slept with Sally Jenson even though all I could really do is go home and whack-off to porno), I will tell you what gives cheaters their kicks (besides said porno).
Have you ever played a practical joke on someone? Have you laughed your ass off when they step on that flaming bag of dog poo after you rang their doorbell and then snuck behind their bushes? It's the same damn thing. You got some guy who thinks he's a bad ass at whatever game, running around, killing everyone and never being able to be touched. You cheat, blow his ass out of the water, and then watch him try to figure out what happened. That's pretty hilarious when you get right down to it. The egos of people who play games is pretty funny itself when you think of it. So basically, you're lighting a bag of dog poo, ringing the doorbell, and sneaking behind the bushes.
Except he doesn't know who you are, how to stop you, nor can he come beat you up.
People don't cheat to win. People who cheat don't really care about winning. They care about the entertainment of the game, and sometimes the winners take the entertainment out of it. I would think that a community of geeks would get its kicks out of siccing it to the big bully, but I dunno.
And I was just kidding about the whole Sally Jenson thing. Really.
One of the Apple Vice Presidents, I forget the name, was quoted as saying (paraphrased):
The cube is squarely aimed at creatively oriented people who want a powerful computer and a sign of their creativity.
Basically, the cube is a status symbol, a conscious design decision, and is not designed to replace the G4 desktop. The people who want to buy a cube are not the die-hard techies but the graphic designers who want something cool to show their clients that basically says, "Oh yeah, I'm a designer".
The G4 cube is to the workplace as the iMac was to the home. A toy.
Has someone given the Slashdot editors a pay incentive for beating this dead horse?! Personally, it seems from most of the responses to the very first article that slashdot's readers were pretty much along the lines of, "Well, duh, of course it happens. That's how the real world works, dummy!" So then we get a follow-up article, and then another follow-up article. Wee. So we get to hear the same useless gripes about how that's how corporations work and we're all fools to think that even Linux, the Luke Skywalker of open-source software, can't be brought to the Dark Side.
If I had a big stick, I'd personally fwap a few Slashdot editors. They set up this wonderful tool called 'Slashback' which is probably the most favorably reviewed thing to come out of Slashdot since v1.0 of Slash was released and then they don't use it!
Note: This review of Slashdot editorial practices did not garner the author any free software from either Slashdot or Microsoft. The author still obtains all free software through traditional warez channels.
First off, IE's standards support isn't nearly as bad as some other browsers we all use (*cough* Netscape *cough*). As far as supporting the DOM and various CSS attributes, IE does a pretty good job. I can write pages that render perfectly in both Mozilla and IE with very little hassle by abiding to standards. That same code won't even show up in Netscape, much less render properly.
When Netscape had the browser market share, they did the exact same thing. Do we remember the tag? Do we remember the tag? Those were proprietary additions that took off and made pages completely unrenderable to browsers that didn't support them. IE's additions, on the other hand, are mainly aesthetic (e.g. alpha filters on CSS objects) or direct object tie-ins to the operating system. Face it, if you're writing web sites that strictly target one browser on one platform, you're not gonna give a damn about industry standards or what other people think.
The fact is, MSIE doesn't make it any harder nor does it make it impossible to write compliant web pages. Personally, I'm happy that someone is pushing the stodgy W3C forward with ideas, cause without moves like that, we wouldn't have the graphic oriented web pages that we have today (I know, some of you think that's a bad thing).
For those that have just come in to see what people's comments are, you should really go and read this article if you use either database.
The article does a pretty piss poor job of actually benchmarking either database, and the comparisons between the two are pretty wimpy, too. He seems afraid to say that one database is better than the other, even for specific applications.
What he does do is give a pretty careful examination of the strengths and, more importantly, the weaknesses of each database. Obviously, neither database is going to list their weaknesses (except for the obvious ones, like MySQL's transaction omission), so articles like this serve to show the way in which MySQL's inserting methods are pretty inefficient (although, honestly, I think his numbers.. 40-50 concurrent connections before crashing.. were a bit off and I think they fixed the problem in the new 3.23.xx series) and ways in which Postgres just isn't a great option for small database projects.
If you read this article, you're not going to be any closer to determining whether or not MySQL or Postgres is better for you, but if you've already decided which DB you're going to use, this article will help you work around the inherent limitations better.
I think the real problem is going to be getting the end-user machines upgraded to IPv6. Five years ago it could have been done, but now that grandma and grandpa and all sorts of redneck lusers are having a hard enough enough time just getting their little Windoze machine to read e-mail and browse cnn.com (or nascar.com), how easy will it be to get THEM to switch? You can try to wait them out until they get a new machine, but then someone will buy their old used machine.
Sounds like elitism to me. How many Grandmas, Grandpas, and 'redneck lusers' do you know that actually set their IP addresses? Most get them via DHCP. Most of these machines are Windows-based machines, which soon will quite easily support IPv6 (Windows ME) and may already (anyone know if Win98 supports it?). If anything, ISPs (who these end-users are connecting to) can mass e-mail their customers and say, "Look, we're moving over to IPv6. If you're running this version of this operating system, be sure to upgrade with files found here." Send that out over the course of a prep period (say, 4-6 months) and then when the time is up, just start migrating, leaving one bunch of lines using IPv4 addresses mapped to IPv6. It's not that hard.
And, I mean, that's just one very painful solution. You could also map IPv6 addresses on your end to a block of IPv4 addresses you keep for machines that specifically need them, making the entire process.
The whole, "Older users will be alienated!" is a cry of the alarmist. The true implementers will find a way around this. Yes, with all technology upgrades, a select few will be obsoleted, but don't you trust that the people who want to implement this have thought of ways to get around possible roadblocks?
Slashdot Mirror
If it's obvious to someone learned in the art, then it is not (technically) patentable. Also, prior art exists with, ie: catalog call centers, where they store you CC info and process your order. Adding "on the internet" to that is pretty lame "invention"
That's not prior art. That's stretching an existing circumstance to try to relate it to a new 'invention'. Bags and boxes existed for centuries, yet McDonald's has a patent on their fry holder? Seems obvious to me (someone not 'learned in the art') that that's how you should hold fries, but someone developed that mechanism and made it work. That particular implementation of the box of fries is patentable. Nevermind the fact that people put fries in bags for years before McDonald's did and nevermind that it seems pretty obvious.
You cannot challenge a patent by saying, "Well, this industry does it similarly." The process of buying something over the Internet and buying something over a phone by catalog, while similar, require completely different interface designs. And that's what was patented by Amazon.
Do Slashdotters find a need to search out causes? On the one hand, we get articles on Slashdot completely supporting Apple for turning to a BSD-based OS and then we get articles lambasting them for completely logical business decisions, all because someone thinks a paten is dumb.
Do you guys know how many dumb patents there are? Have you ever looked at a McDonald's fry package? There's a patent there. There are patents on things like lamps, CD cases, even wrapping paper. We can look at it and say, "Oh, it's so obvious that wrapping paper should be like this," but that doesn't change the fact that the person/company/entity invented it first.
I still haven't seen a worthy challenge to the 1-Click philosophy. Yes, of course you can say, "Well, duh, it's obvious that you can do that," but these guys did it and said, "Hey, we did it first," and I haven't really seen a conclusive proof against that.
So now, a company decides to use this technology, technology which will obviously make it easier for consumers to purchase online things that Slashdot has already come out in favor of and you turn around and criticize them?! Shame on you. Boohoo that the world didn't turn out the way you want it and companies actually abide by laws instead of filling our courts with worthless and expensive litigation. Boohoo that Apple turns out to be interested in its bottom line rather than what you want it to be interested in. Boohoo that you didn't go out and register an idea that seems completely obvious (to you) with the patent office before some big company could.
Sometimes Slashdot sounds really insightful, and then sometimes, it sounds like a bunch of naive kids whining because things aren't going their way.
BTW, on another topic, this page was updated a good 10 days ago. What's that say about Apple when a geek news site doesn't notice this sort of thing for ten days?
Basically, people aren't moved to action until something goes wrong. I had DSL last summer in my apartment (summer apartment). Installation was painless. Service was great. I had no problems, and of course, there were no problems with my location. My father has also had DSL for over a year with very little in the way of problems (SWB accidentally switched him off his current ISP to theirs at one point, but a phone call cleared that up).
However, this summer, I tried to sign up for DSL at my new residence. I was told I was in the self-install area. Then I was told I wasn't. Then I was told I wasn't even eligible. In the span of two months I went from being able to just plug in the equipment to not being able to use it at all. I posted a few reviews, but lost interest. Of course, last summer, when the DSL installation went smoothly, I could care less about posting to message boards; I was too busy exploring the speeds that DSL gave me.
If you're a business. Put up the cash and get a T1. Don't depend on DSL and don't depend on ISDN. If you're a home consumer, go for DSL, but don't get pissed when it doesn't go your way. It works for some and it doesn't work for others. Get ISDN through an alternate provider if you can't get DSL. They're generally a lot (10-20%) cheaper, and the speeds are about the same as IDSL.
BTW, am I the only one who is bothered by the fact that state colleges have their own police force? I can see the practical need for policing a large group of people, but I see a real conflict of interest here, from the perspective of the surrounding community (college police are controlled by the college) and the students (police and professors, all working together...)
No, I'm much happier with a police force specifically for a campus than with a municipal police force. First off, think about how many potential crimes go on at a university. The police blotter at my school was always at least ten times as long per week as the municipal one. If I was a city cop, I wouldn't want to take part in that either. Secondly, campus police have, first and foremost, the protection of the student body in mind, not the protection of the city government (which I think is a bigger conflict of interest). Thus, you find that campus police are much more lenient on matters than their municipal counterparts. Finally, you don't have to deal with those nasty bureacratic funding deals. University cops get paid largely with university funds.
And besides, I guarantee you that those university cops aren't doing the forensic analysis of that kid's hard drive, unless of course, their analysis amounts to 'Quick, Jimbo, download all this kid's music before the Feds get their hands on it'.
They certainly aren't allowing students to copy books in the university library.
This just shows how in touch lawyers are with the real world. All students copy books in the university library. Professors do it, too. They copy to take pages back to their dorm rooms for studying purposes. They copy to write term papers (who says plagiarism's dead?!). Professors copy entire novellas for the express purpose of handing them out in class (students are notorious for not wanting to go to libraries, and libraries are notorious for never having the book).
Fair use copying goes on every day, and to compare the Internet to a library where nothing gets copied is to completely misunderstand how college libraries are used.
Lends more credibility to the disposable credit card concept.
You hit the nail on the head. American Express, a huge corporation, but second fiddle to the likes of Visa and MasterCard, needs something to promote its new idea. With the Internet at hand, it has its weapon. It sends some crackers to crack Western Union, thereby pushing people to the 'safer' disposable credit card.
Or maybe they didn't send anyone at all. Maybe they just got Western Union in bed with them. Who knows. The point is, CT found the conspiracy.
But "23 of the top 25 Web sites don't use the double opt-in," Black said. "By MAPS standards, 23 of the 25 Web sites should be blocked."
In my opinion, yeah 23 of the top 25 web sites should be blocked from sending me e-mail. I'm sick of automatically getting a bunch of crap from web sites that I don't even frequent.
But if you look at the quote, he's not saying that at all. He's talking about blocking web sites, which of course, MAPS isn't about at all. I'm glad all those big corporations are cowering to such genius.
No other property can be given away without loss by the owner.
/very/ beneficial for the owner, both in terms of monetary value and in terms of control. At the same time, giving away information can be /very/ detrimental to the owner.
As well reasoned as your post is, this one sentence completely destroys your argument.
Information is the most powerful piece of property someone can own, share, give away, sell, or keep a hold of. Entire courses in human history were charted by men and women maintaining a grasp on information (Manhattan Project comes to mind). Furthermore, entire other courses were charted by the dissemination of information (the Bible comes to mind). The point is, information being held on to can be
People talk about how the next war will be the Information War. Media groups, from Slashdot to NBC base their entire livelihoods on information gathering and choice dissemination. Whether information gets given out or protected is the most crucial decision anyone can make.
And if you need an example that may hit closer to home, how come you haven't given me your credit card information? We get up in arms because people are giving away our information, and little do they realize that they already gave it away, much to their harm.
Do not underestimate how much of an effect giving away information can have. Not all information is harmless.
Can the phone company take away your phone number? I think they can. What may be questionable, though, is whether they can auction them off. Is the phone company allowed to 'sell' phone numbers? I know you can request them, but can the company actually sell them to you?
Seriously, sometimes the complete lunacy of Slashdot readers boggles my mind.
IANAL.
What the bill is essentially mandating is warranty. If you buy your computer from Dell or Gateway or any other major reputable computer retailer, you get one of these already (my warranty is 3 years on a Dell I have). This law is mainly to protect the consumer from those cheap computer builders who use refurbished parts, faulty returns, and just a dash of cluelessness to sell crappy computers, then charge people large amounts of money when they bring them back for repairs.
It's not about whether hardware works with Linux. It's not about making a faulty extension of the automobile lemon laws. It's about protecting the consumer. And personally, I don't think it goes far enough. It should extend to parts and systems sold at trade shows. There's a lot of people out there with enough knowledge of computers to completely screw people who have no knowledge.
Quit twisting good ideas and good intentions into some sort of cluelessness.
The problem is that you're making the assumption that because it happened to one big company it will happen to another. Microsoft of the 90s and IBM of the 80s are two very different companies. IBM is/was a hardware company whose forays into software were minor, merely suited to doing something specific for a machine. Microsoft, on the other hand, is a software company, not tied to the hardware market. Part of what weakened IBM and strengthened Microsoft is the fact that the IBM PC platform was open and clone-able. Thus, you didn't have to buy a computer from IBM, but you still had to buy the software from Microsoft.
But, of course, the real reason Microsoft got so strong is that IBM chose them to produce the OS. If IBM had developed this in-house, I don't think we'd have a Microsoft today. IBM would probably still be a juggernaut (if it survived anti-trust lawsuits). Translate this to Microsoft. Microsoft rarely shops out work. When they do, they usually end up either taking the idea and putting the company out of business or, more usually, buying the company and bringing them into the fold. Microsoft makes sure that others can not replicate its core software. There's only one Windows, not Windows clones, and Microsoft produces everything from the OS to the applications to the games to the drivers for mice and keyboard. Microsoft does not rely on anyone like IBM did and Microsoft does its damnedest to make sure that no one can do (not do better or do differently, but do) what they do.
So you're comparing apples to oranges. Take a look at the mistakes that IBM made and take a look at the mistakes that Microsoft hasn't made. About the only huge blunder on Microsoft's part was not recognizing the impact of the Internet, and we all saw how quickly they turned that around.
To be honest, I've never had much success with Mandrake (I've tried to install their distro both by FTP and from a CD image numerous times and always had it fail for some non-user-related error (a crash, a failed dependency, something). However, they most unheralded project which they currently support and use has got to be Supermount. The new author (forget his name) has managed to update the patches all the way up to 2.3.99pre5, and those patches should work with the latest 2.4.0test kernels as well.
What does supermount do? Basically, it virtually mounts your filesystems and then monitors the drives to see whether or not they should be really mounted. This means that you can mount the floppy drive as supermountfs, stick in a floppy, access the drive, remove the floppy, stick in a new floppy, access the drive, etc. etc. Basic removeable media flexibility, just like other OSs. It's something that Linux desperately needs to allow it to compete in the desktop market, and it isn't a kludge like autofs.
I've used it for quite some time with no problems, but Mandrake continues to help maintain this when it needs to and their distro has included it for quite some time. I may not be able to use Mandrake, but at least I can use some of their efforts.
The thing is, with Slashdot hitting the site so hard, you're probably getting a real-time simulation of how the pretty GUI will load on your system.
Cheers.
Although I agree with your (and many others) posts on the principal that religious teachings have no place in a faith-neutral place like a public school, I do take exception to this statement. I personally do not partake in religion anymore, but it certainly does have a place in public life, to the extent that it does not intrude upon my rights. Kids should have moral guidance, preferably instilled in them by their parents, but religious institutions in general do a good job as well.
That's a load of crap. Religions instill a system of morals that they approve of, not ones that necessarily society approves of. And who decides what the difference is between moral 'guidance' and 'subversion'. I mean, hell, even on Slashdot, we see the constant battle between people with morals that say, "Be a law-abiding citizen" and people with morals that say, "You must do what you want and if it means breaking the law, so be it." Who's right? Who's wrong?
It's not even that clear. But what is clear is that the 'moral guidance' of religious institutions has led to more hatred and human suffering than any other factor in history. 'Moral guidance' (and those that tried to counter it) brought us such heavenly moments as the Crusades, forced conversion of Christians to Islam in Spain and south France, the Salem witchhunt, the house-arrest of Galileo, the decimation of American Indian culture, and our current little squabble in the Mideast.
As far as I'm concerned, religious institutions can stick to providing the masses with something to look forward to and stop telling people how to live their lives.
Man, maybe it's time to quit getting your panties all in a wad over something as simple as Apple protecting its business interests. Businesses do far worse than Apple to maintain their trade secrets. I've had to sign NDAs, and if I broke them, I'd expect to get my ass sued. I don't care if it was something as simple as a rumor. A contract (which is what an NDA is) is a contract, and if you violate that contract, there are expected legal recourses.
It's just like an open-source zealot to jump on the "Quick, let's punish them! Boycott their products and fill their President's inbox with complaints!" Get over it. There are far more important things to worry about in the software community than whether companies are going to punish their employees for violating agreements.
Sadly, the post office is doing what other people do just fine already, and not coming up with a way to stay relevent. Dare I wonder if we will soon even need a USPS?
/much/ better job or regulating and controlling abuses to its system than organizations like Hotmail and Yahoo do.
I hate how every time someone decides to talk about that wonderous new invention e-mail, the end of the discussion always has to be a statement like this.
Yes, we will need a postal service of some sort for a long time, whether it's a corporation called the United States Postal Service or one called FedEx. You know why? Cause you can't ship stuff like auto parts, computers, eBay purchases, and Grandma's presents via e-mail. People tend to forget that cyberspace isn't real. It's just a virtual (read: imaginary) place that functions very well for information but sucks for actual atoms and molecules.
And as far as government organizations go, the post office isn't exactly like other governmental organizations. They don't depend on the Congressional budget and they operate as a corporation, not as an agency. They are actually an example of an excellently run part of the government and make a strong argument for modeling the different agencies after corporations. The post office is completely self-supporting and you can believe they're not going to attempt to do something if they're not going to make money on it.
While I don't think the e-mail address thing is a good idea, I don't think it is a bad one, either. And I think the Post Office will do a
Where'd I leave my keys?
I found myself on 555-1212, much to my surprise as I've only lived in this location for 2 months and I was entered twice (both with incorrect spellings). What's even worse are the tie-ins that companies like these use. At 555-1212, I could search public records, that required me to provide even more information, or I could look for classmates from high school, which required a host of information about my high-school years. And people will just enter this stuff. They have no worries.
Personally, I'm careful with the information that I give out, but I'm not paranoid. I know people can find out a lot about me with just very simple searches like this, but at the same time, I don't fill out surveys, I don't fill out sweepstakes registration, and I'm sure as hell not giving out any more personal information than I need to. Unfortunately, many of these sites present that personal information as information necessary to look up your request, which just isn't true, and people freely give it cause they're greedy for the specific information they want.
But again, I'm not intent on hiding my information. I just want to make sure that it's protected so that only I can change it and so that I can determine how it's used. I haven't heard any successful ideas on how to manage that.
You know what really pisses me off? There's all this talk about top level domains, and you give several examples of possible ones, except, they're all in English!. Not everyone on this planet speaks English, and the current TLD naming system is pretty language generic (.com, .net, .org) since they use abbreviations that can easily be transferred between both Germanic and Romance languages. How about thinking a little bit less egocentrically and more geocentric.
I for one don't understand cheaters anyway - whats the point of playing a game if your just going to cheat? It stops getting fun really quick.
As an expert on cheating (I downloaded the hack for SimCity 2000 that gave you $2,000,000,000 and I also told all my friends in the ninth grade that I slept with Sally Jenson even though all I could really do is go home and whack-off to porno), I will tell you what gives cheaters their kicks (besides said porno).
Have you ever played a practical joke on someone? Have you laughed your ass off when they step on that flaming bag of dog poo after you rang their doorbell and then snuck behind their bushes? It's the same damn thing. You got some guy who thinks he's a bad ass at whatever game, running around, killing everyone and never being able to be touched. You cheat, blow his ass out of the water, and then watch him try to figure out what happened. That's pretty hilarious when you get right down to it. The egos of people who play games is pretty funny itself when you think of it. So basically, you're lighting a bag of dog poo, ringing the doorbell, and sneaking behind the bushes.
Except he doesn't know who you are, how to stop you, nor can he come beat you up.
People don't cheat to win. People who cheat don't really care about winning. They care about the entertainment of the game, and sometimes the winners take the entertainment out of it. I would think that a community of geeks would get its kicks out of siccing it to the big bully, but I dunno.
And I was just kidding about the whole Sally Jenson thing. Really.
One of the Apple Vice Presidents, I forget the name, was quoted as saying (paraphrased):
The cube is squarely aimed at creatively oriented people who want a powerful computer and a sign of their creativity.
Basically, the cube is a status symbol, a conscious design decision, and is not designed to replace the G4 desktop. The people who want to buy a cube are not the die-hard techies but the graphic designers who want something cool to show their clients that basically says, "Oh yeah, I'm a designer".
The G4 cube is to the workplace as the iMac was to the home. A toy.
Has someone given the Slashdot editors a pay incentive for beating this dead horse?! Personally, it seems from most of the responses to the very first article that slashdot's readers were pretty much along the lines of, "Well, duh, of course it happens. That's how the real world works, dummy!" So then we get a follow-up article, and then another follow-up article. Wee. So we get to hear the same useless gripes about how that's how corporations work and we're all fools to think that even Linux, the Luke Skywalker of open-source software, can't be brought to the Dark Side.
If I had a big stick, I'd personally fwap a few Slashdot editors. They set up this wonderful tool called 'Slashback' which is probably the most favorably reviewed thing to come out of Slashdot since v1.0 of Slash was released and then they don't use it!
Note: This review of Slashdot editorial practices did not garner the author any free software from either Slashdot or Microsoft. The author still obtains all free software through traditional warez channels.
First off, IE's standards support isn't nearly as bad as some other browsers we all use (*cough* Netscape *cough*). As far as supporting the DOM and various CSS attributes, IE does a pretty good job. I can write pages that render perfectly in both Mozilla and IE with very little hassle by abiding to standards. That same code won't even show up in Netscape, much less render properly.
When Netscape had the browser market share, they did the exact same thing. Do we remember the tag? Do we remember the tag? Those were proprietary additions that took off and made pages completely unrenderable to browsers that didn't support them. IE's additions, on the other hand, are mainly aesthetic (e.g. alpha filters on CSS objects) or direct object tie-ins to the operating system. Face it, if you're writing web sites that strictly target one browser on one platform, you're not gonna give a damn about industry standards or what other people think.
The fact is, MSIE doesn't make it any harder nor does it make it impossible to write compliant web pages. Personally, I'm happy that someone is pushing the stodgy W3C forward with ideas, cause without moves like that, we wouldn't have the graphic oriented web pages that we have today (I know, some of you think that's a bad thing).
For those that have just come in to see what people's comments are, you should really go and read this article if you use either database.
.. 40-50 concurrent connections before crashing .. were a bit off and I think they fixed the problem in the new 3.23.xx series) and ways in which Postgres just isn't a great option for small database projects.
The article does a pretty piss poor job of actually benchmarking either database, and the comparisons between the two are pretty wimpy, too. He seems afraid to say that one database is better than the other, even for specific applications.
What he does do is give a pretty careful examination of the strengths and, more importantly, the weaknesses of each database. Obviously, neither database is going to list their weaknesses (except for the obvious ones, like MySQL's transaction omission), so articles like this serve to show the way in which MySQL's inserting methods are pretty inefficient (although, honestly, I think his numbers
If you read this article, you're not going to be any closer to determining whether or not MySQL or Postgres is better for you, but if you've already decided which DB you're going to use, this article will help you work around the inherent limitations better.
I think the real problem is going to be getting the end-user machines upgraded to IPv6. Five years ago it could have been done, but now that grandma and grandpa and all sorts of redneck lusers are having a hard enough enough time just getting their little Windoze machine to read e-mail and browse cnn.com (or nascar.com), how easy will it be to get THEM to switch? You can try to wait them out until they get a new machine, but then someone will buy their old used machine.
Sounds like elitism to me. How many Grandmas, Grandpas, and 'redneck lusers' do you know that actually set their IP addresses? Most get them via DHCP. Most of these machines are Windows-based machines, which soon will quite easily support IPv6 (Windows ME) and may already (anyone know if Win98 supports it?). If anything, ISPs (who these end-users are connecting to) can mass e-mail their customers and say, "Look, we're moving over to IPv6. If you're running this version of this operating system, be sure to upgrade with files found here." Send that out over the course of a prep period (say, 4-6 months) and then when the time is up, just start migrating, leaving one bunch of lines using IPv4 addresses mapped to IPv6. It's not that hard.
And, I mean, that's just one very painful solution. You could also map IPv6 addresses on your end to a block of IPv4 addresses you keep for machines that specifically need them, making the entire process.
The whole, "Older users will be alienated!" is a cry of the alarmist. The true implementers will find a way around this. Yes, with all technology upgrades, a select few will be obsoleted, but don't you trust that the people who want to implement this have thought of ways to get around possible roadblocks?