Well, you forget who was entrusted with the choice. Accenture chose VeriSign for this project. In case you don't remember who Accenture is, there was once this accounting company called Arthur Andersen who were responsible for auditing the financial books of a bunch of companies like Enron, Worldcom, etc. After all the bad press when those companies went bankrupt, Arthur Andersen ceased to be. But not before they spun off companies like Andersen Consulting, who wisely changed their name to Accenture to further distance themselves from the bad smell of Arthur Andersen. I don't know why we should trust a corporation famous for allowing fraud to occur on their watch, just because they changed their name twice. How do they win the contract to create Internet voting and distribute funds to people like VeriSign?
"What's wrong with being able to make a few bucks off of something unique, new and original of yours?"
And what's right about it?
Really, what is wrong about it is it creates a complex system where it is hard to find solid ground from which to build new ideas without threat of lawsuits.
And I am serious about "what is right about it." I mean, would people really stop inventing things if they couldn't patent them? Most of the poeple I know with the passion to explore the edges of knowledge would do so even without patents. And while everyone needs to be able to feed their family, there are tons of better systems for creating environments that allow for creativity -- the research university being just one example.
Really, this is fundamental to the philosophy of open source software. Don't restrict access to the invention, take advantage of the head start you have in the realm of your invention to market a superior product or servicing or supporting companies that make or use such products, or one of the other inumerable methods open source software companies have found to make a living.
Wrong. These guys didn't have to know any of this. All they had to know was that crashing a big plane with a lot of fuel on board will make a big explosion.
I'm sure they hoped to completely destroy the buildings, but I do not assume they did the math ahead of time to assure themselves that they would completely destroy the buildings.
These may be the same group of people who tried to knock these same buildings down 8 years ago. They underestimated the required explosive force that time and simply tried again.
The sophistication was in getting four suicidal maniac killers capable of flying a 767 or 757 into the cockpits of fully fueled planes -- without tipping their hands ahead of time, backing out whilst in the act, etc.
The writer of this article has a clear bias, being a reference writer specializing in rare Taoist religious texts and medical works. He certainly doesn't seem concerned about encoding Egyptian hieroglyphs or sanskrit. Or what about mathematical or chemcial symbolic systems.
If the web handled day-to-day writing that would be pretty remarkable. Classicists specializing in arcane texts of certain era's may have to install special plug-ins to be able quote from original arcane works. Why should the day-to-day system be burdened with ancient languages that one small group of specialists use?
I agree, ESRI is worse than MS. Government agencies all over the world are now all migrating to ESRI as ESRI locks up the market. ESRI now owns the default file standard (just as MS owns the Word.doc standard and can keep messing with it to make life difficult for competitors). But in ESRI's case, a seat at ESRI's ArcInfo costs about $18,000. So if you want to open one of those, now standard file types, better be prepared to pony up some real cash. My small town government can't afford this, and the county is even more financially strapped, but they feel they must in order to keep up to date, technologically.
Really, I wish the GRASS project were moving faster (or moving at all). It was well positioned some years ago, but hast lost badly to ESRI in the past year or two.
The point the study was making was that, just because there are better privacy laws in France, the fact that web site companies abuse these laws means there is still less privacy at some of these sites.
To quote from the consumer report:
"A special opt-out procedure that seems to
appear on many French websites raised an
interesting point. The procedures made it very
cumbersome for consumers to act on their right
to opt out of mailing lists. Several of the sites
tested did not provide the usual method of
opting out of further emails - by ticking a
certain box, for example, while placing an
order. Instead, at some point during the
transaction, the sites alerted consumers,
although rarely in a prominent place, to their
rights under Article 36 of the French
Information & Liberty Law of 1978. In order to
prevent a company from using the consumer's
information or from sending him or her further
information in the future, it is necessary to
send a postal letter to the company. This was
the case with the sites www.lalibrairie.com and
www.avecbebe.com. The two French sites
www.rouge-blanc.com and www.nature-bio.
com, notably did not make a reference to
this law on their websites, nor did they
provide opt-out choices."
What the consumer organization is saying is that until European governments actually enforce the laws they have, the laws provide no more privacy than US web sites are providing, despite US web sites operating in a nation with fewer relevant regulations.
I hope someone in France takes rouge-blanc and nature-bio to court for a significant penaly in a well enough publicized case that web sites begin to take the privacy seriously.
It constantly amazes me how all discussion on this topic conveniently overlooks the utility companies mistakes and centers blame on the form of deregulation. Yes the deregulation laws require a fixed price for consumers at this time, but this is still the short term, in terms of the deregulation project. The idea was to hold prices down during the interim period before the effects of deregulation had an opportunity to take. Most electricity distributors buy electricity using long term contracts of five years or more. If PG&E had purchased long term contracts two years ago, as they should have, they would have a guaranteed supply of electricity at a guaranteed price and would not be so upset now. But they gambled on prices on short term contracts to continue low. Now that they lost their gamble they are looking for a bail out. To make matters worse, although the centerpiece of the deregulation effort was to get PG&E and So. Cal. Edison etc. out of the production business and solely into distribution, it only mandates certain percentages of production be given up. These companies unloaded far more production facilities than they were required to by law. Again, they gambled that electricity would be cheap to buy. They lost their gamble and now they want the government and the consumer to pay.
This is not to say that the deregulation system isn't completely f@c%ed up too. For instance, I have no idea whose idea it was that electricity sales all occur at the highest negotiated price (a bit complicated to explain, but basically let's say three companies are auctioning off electricity for immediate consumption, one company sells at 7 cents/kwh and the next at 8 and the third at 9, all sales that day are consummated at the 9 cent price even though the first company was willing to sell at 7). I just think the utility companies have some serious weight of responsibility in all this that I never see in most news accounts, and hence in most discussions, of the issue.
Its been a long time since I used I-Cab on my old Atari computer (which is where I-Cab was born and evolved most of the cool features, including the image filtering and the small footprint -- [4 megs] that was really necessary in its original environment -- that the Cnet reviewer appreciated). Nobody bothers to review browsers for the odd little platforms in the mainstream press, but there was a lot of good and innovative stuff going on out there while IE and Netscape were butting heads. I-Cab wasn't even the best Atari browser, in my mind (I liked the Draconis browser better).
I'm a little suspicious. There's only the story on the front page, and it is chock full of type-o's. What's more, the graphic with the article links to a completely unrelated discussion. There is absolutely no discussion of Remarq's closure in the remarq newsgroup (discuss.remarq.remarq.status), or at fuckedcompany.com. And to top it all off, Remarq is hosted on Windows IIS. Couldn't someone have just hacked the site and posted this? Well, maybe that is naive on my part, but it just seems a little suspicious.
I haven't used a dime of the resources of the state of California (for example and because many e-businesses are there), and I resent CA's or any state's attempts to extort money from me on that account.
Actually, you have it backwards. The proposed "sales tax remedies" would make it possible for your state to capture sales tax on a sale made by that California company. The money would go to your local government to pay for your local schools, streets, or whatever.
I wouldn't worry about bankrupting the company, apparently they are about to IPO. A sudden surge in sales will probably look very good to investors (which investors are going to suspect where these sales are actually going?).
I think the customization features are great, but I too have a few suggestions.
First, when turning display of icons off, this should include the icons to the right of the masthead (the whole point for turning them off, to me, is to avoid downloading all those graphics, if I'm going to have to download them for the masthead anyway, and they are therefore in my cache, I might as well display them).
Also, I like the way some of the slashbox titles are links and think you should take advantage of this and, at the same time, increase the standarization of the layout by having some of the other slashbox titles be links. Some suggestions would be to have the poll slashbox title link to http://slashdot.org/pollBooth.pl? have the older stuff slashbox title link to http://www.slashdot.org/search.pl?section=&min=30 have the user slashbox link to http://www.slashdot.org/users.pl?op=edituser and etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, you forget who was entrusted with the choice. Accenture chose VeriSign for this project. In case you don't remember who Accenture is, there was once this accounting company called Arthur Andersen who were responsible for auditing the financial books of a bunch of companies like Enron, Worldcom, etc. After all the bad press when those companies went bankrupt, Arthur Andersen ceased to be. But not before they spun off companies like Andersen Consulting, who wisely changed their name to Accenture to further distance themselves from the bad smell of Arthur Andersen. I don't know why we should trust a corporation famous for allowing fraud to occur on their watch, just because they changed their name twice. How do they win the contract to create Internet voting and distribute funds to people like VeriSign?
"What's wrong with being able to make a few bucks off of something unique, new and original of yours?"
And what's right about it?
Really, what is wrong about it is it creates a complex system where it is hard to find solid ground from which to build new ideas without threat of lawsuits.
And I am serious about "what is right about it." I mean, would people really stop inventing things if they couldn't patent them? Most of the poeple I know with the passion to explore the edges of knowledge would do so even without patents. And while everyone needs to be able to feed their family, there are tons of better systems for creating environments that allow for creativity -- the research university being just one example.
Really, this is fundamental to the philosophy of open source software. Don't restrict access to the invention, take advantage of the head start you have in the realm of your invention to market a superior product or servicing or supporting companies that make or use such products, or one of the other inumerable methods open source software companies have found to make a living.
Wrong. These guys didn't have to know any of this. All they had to know was that crashing a big plane with a lot of fuel on board will make a big explosion.
I'm sure they hoped to completely destroy the buildings, but I do not assume they did the math ahead of time to assure themselves that they would completely destroy the buildings.
These may be the same group of people who tried to knock these same buildings down 8 years ago. They underestimated the required explosive force that time and simply tried again.
The sophistication was in getting four suicidal maniac killers capable of flying a 767 or 757 into the cockpits of fully fueled planes -- without tipping their hands ahead of time, backing out whilst in the act, etc.
The writer of this article has a clear bias, being a reference writer specializing in rare Taoist religious texts and medical works. He certainly doesn't seem concerned about encoding Egyptian hieroglyphs or sanskrit. Or what about mathematical or chemcial symbolic systems.
If the web handled day-to-day writing that would be pretty remarkable. Classicists specializing in arcane texts of certain era's may have to install special plug-ins to be able quote from original arcane works. Why should the day-to-day system be burdened with ancient languages that one small group of specialists use?
I agree, ESRI is worse than MS. Government agencies all over the world are now all migrating to ESRI as ESRI locks up the market. ESRI now owns the default file standard (just as MS owns the Word .doc standard and can keep messing with it to make life difficult for competitors). But in ESRI's case, a seat at ESRI's ArcInfo costs about $18,000. So if you want to open one of those, now standard file types, better be prepared to pony up some real cash. My small town government can't afford this, and the county is even more financially strapped, but they feel they must in order to keep up to date, technologically.
Really, I wish the GRASS project were moving faster (or moving at all). It was well positioned some years ago, but hast lost badly to ESRI in the past year or two.
The point the study was making was that, just because there are better privacy laws in France, the fact that web site companies abuse these laws means there is still less privacy at some of these sites.
To quote from the consumer report:
"A special opt-out procedure that seems to
appear on many French websites raised an
interesting point. The procedures made it very
cumbersome for consumers to act on their right
to opt out of mailing lists. Several of the sites
tested did not provide the usual method of
opting out of further emails - by ticking a
certain box, for example, while placing an
order. Instead, at some point during the
transaction, the sites alerted consumers,
although rarely in a prominent place, to their
rights under Article 36 of the French
Information & Liberty Law of 1978. In order to
prevent a company from using the consumer's
information or from sending him or her further
information in the future, it is necessary to
send a postal letter to the company. This was
the case with the sites www.lalibrairie.com and
www.avecbebe.com. The two French sites
www.rouge-blanc.com and www.nature-bio.
com, notably did not make a reference to
this law on their websites, nor did they
provide opt-out choices."
What the consumer organization is saying is that until European governments actually enforce the laws they have, the laws provide no more privacy than US web sites are providing, despite US web sites operating in a nation with fewer relevant regulations.
I hope someone in France takes rouge-blanc and nature-bio to court for a significant penaly in a well enough publicized case that web sites begin to take the privacy seriously.
It constantly amazes me how all discussion on this topic conveniently overlooks the utility companies mistakes and centers blame on the form of deregulation. Yes the deregulation laws require a fixed price for consumers at this time, but this is still the short term, in terms of the deregulation project. The idea was to hold prices down during the interim period before the effects of deregulation had an opportunity to take. Most electricity distributors buy electricity using long term contracts of five years or more. If PG&E had purchased long term contracts two years ago, as they should have, they would have a guaranteed supply of electricity at a guaranteed price and would not be so upset now. But they gambled on prices on short term contracts to continue low. Now that they lost their gamble they are looking for a bail out. To make matters worse, although the centerpiece of the deregulation effort was to get PG&E and So. Cal. Edison etc. out of the production business and solely into distribution, it only mandates certain percentages of production be given up. These companies unloaded far more production facilities than they were required to by law. Again, they gambled that electricity would be cheap to buy. They lost their gamble and now they want the government and the consumer to pay.
This is not to say that the deregulation system isn't completely f@c%ed up too. For instance, I have no idea whose idea it was that electricity sales all occur at the highest negotiated price (a bit complicated to explain, but basically let's say three companies are auctioning off electricity for immediate consumption, one company sells at 7 cents/kwh and the next at 8 and the third at 9, all sales that day are consummated at the 9 cent price even though the first company was willing to sell at 7). I just think the utility companies have some serious weight of responsibility in all this that I never see in most news accounts, and hence in most discussions, of the issue.
Its been a long time since I used I-Cab on my old Atari computer (which is where I-Cab was born and evolved most of the cool features, including the image filtering and the small footprint -- [4 megs] that was really necessary in its original environment -- that the Cnet reviewer appreciated). Nobody bothers to review browsers for the odd little platforms in the mainstream press, but there was a lot of good and innovative stuff going on out there while IE and Netscape were butting heads. I-Cab wasn't even the best Atari browser, in my mind (I liked the Draconis browser better).
I'm a little suspicious. There's only the story on the front page, and it is chock full of type-o's. What's more, the graphic with the article links to a completely unrelated discussion. There is absolutely no discussion of Remarq's closure in the remarq newsgroup (discuss.remarq.remarq.status), or at fuckedcompany.com. And to top it all off, Remarq is hosted on Windows IIS. Couldn't someone have just hacked the site and posted this? Well, maybe that is naive on my part, but it just seems a little suspicious.
Actually, you have it backwards. The proposed "sales tax remedies" would make it possible for your state to capture sales tax on a sale made by that California company. The money would go to your local government to pay for your local schools, streets, or whatever.
I wouldn't worry about bankrupting the company, apparently they are about to IPO. A sudden surge in sales will probably look very good to investors (which investors are going to suspect where these sales are actually going?).
I think the customization features are great, but I too have a few suggestions.
First, when turning display of icons off, this should include the icons to the right of the masthead (the whole point for turning them off, to me, is to avoid downloading all those graphics, if I'm going to have to download them for the masthead anyway, and they are therefore in my cache, I might as well display them).
Also, I like the way some of the slashbox titles are links and think you should take advantage of this and, at the same time, increase the standarization of the layout by having some of the other slashbox titles be links. Some suggestions would be to have the poll slashbox title link to http://slashdot.org/pollBooth.pl? have the older stuff slashbox title link to http://www.slashdot.org/search.pl?section=&min=30 have the user slashbox link to http://www.slashdot.org/users.pl?op=edituser and etc.