SCO is arguing that Linux is software, which US copyright law limits to one copy for backup purposes. What they fail to mention is that the US law is made to guarantee you the right to make at least one backup copy, even if the copyright holder expressly forbids any copies at all. However, if the copyright holder expressly grants you the right to make more than one copy, then it's nonsense, Alice-in-Wonderland-type talk to insist that US copyright law still limits you to that one copy limit.
Wait! Why do they limit discussion of this phenomenon to just the merging of fraternal twins? Why, I could be the product of a merger between myself and my own identical twin. And, the implications of that are... uh... well, something.
Try the Visible Earth site and the Blue Marble site. Both have stunning images of day/night earth. BTW, the images map perfectly onto a 3D globe shape in your favorite 3D API, so you can create an earth visualization of your own. <rummage>Somewhere around here, I even have a Java applet I created to generate a rotating globe wallpaper.<\rummage>
Many of the debt-relief/counseling corporations in the U.S. are registered as not-for-profit corporations to take advantage of certain laws. Perhaps the do-not-call list will simply lead to an explosion of ostensibly not-for-profit telemarketing "charities." The current telemarketers will register as not-for-profit corporations with some statement about how all profits after taxes go to charity. Then, the telemarketers are back to business as usual, representing commercial clients, but calling as a charities (allowed by the do-not-call list). Perhaps, existing charities with their own telemarketing departments will be take initial advantage of this loophole.
I emailed Office Depot Customer Service about this policy. This was their response:
From:
"Customer-Relations"<Customer.Relations@OfficeDepo t.com> To: "'XXXXXXX@yahoo.com'" <XXXXXXX@yahoo.com> Subject:Ref Number: 0459208A Date:Fri, 28 Mar 2003 07:30:31-0500
Dear Mr. XXXXXX:
We are in receipt of your E-mail and thank you for your interest in Office Depot. The article you mention in your E-mail contains inaccuracies in both the information presented and the conclusions drawn. Office Depot will continue to carry a broad array of products in its stores. In addition, through our website, www.techdepot.com, we stock over 60,000 different technology items and will continue to stock them. In fact, the broad assortment stocked by our www.techdepot.com website is accessible in all of our stores via our Internet kiosk. We trust this fuller explanation
addresses the concerns that you expressed.
Sincerely
Customer Relations
Office Depot, Inc.
-----Original Message-----
From: XXXXXXX@yahoo.com
Sent: Tuesday, March 25, 2003 7:12 AM
To: Orders
Subject: 1407 Other Company Information
Name: XXXXXXX XXXXXX
email: XXXXXXX@yahoo.com
Phone Number:
Order No:
Web Account:
Response Requested
Message: According to this article, Office Depot will drop all products not carrying the "Windows XP" logo:
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=8472 I shop at Office Depot. I want access to a variety of products, including those computer products which do not bear Microsoft's approval. Please, drop this policy, and continue to stock products which do not bear Microsoft's logo.
Some of the earlier posters are getting at the problem, here. This phone is basically the same as any other mobile phone device, it just wraps around your wrist a little better. Waterproof? It had better be, since your wrist goes near a faucet much more often than a mobile phone normally would. I have a Sony radio that fits on an armband or on a belt clip. That seems like a much better form factor than the wrist.
A friend in the locksmith biz operates almost exclusively by mobile phone. He has a yellow pages ad, of course; it costs him a fortune. The yellow pages company (same as the phone company) won't let him list his mobile number in his yellow pages ad. So, he has to get a (more expensive) business land line, which he forwards to his mobile phone. When he's "closed" for business, he stops the land line forwarding and lets the voice mail answer the business line. After all, he only gives out his land line number, and nobody can get his mobile number, right? Well, now he will (likely) have to pay extra to have that mobile number be unlisted. For essentially the same service, he will have to pay both to be listed and unlisted.
Since the legal and financial ramifications have already been discussed... I understand how the outbound filter prevents the cable box itself from reporting when a subscriber orders a pay-per-view event. I am surprised that no one has designed and built a "smart" filter that would intercept the cable company request and report "no new pay-per-view orders, thank you very much." This seems like a more insidious threat to the pay-per-view system. The cable company's box would "believe" that it had reported all pay-per-view orders, and the cable company home office would always "believe" that no pay-per-view content had been ordered. I assume that such a device would have been mentioned in the article, if it existed.
I'd heard the analogy before, and whether or not it is actually true or has been scientifically proven is irrelevant. It still has some merit as an analogy.
Apparently, you haven't been following the Doonesbury comic strip lately... An untrue analogy is worse than having no merit --It actually discredits the target of your analogy. In this case, if a frog really does jump out before it lets you boil it alive, then maybe the analogous case (where this German law leads to worse resrictions) is equally false. For example, if I said, "This law will further restrict freedom the same way that rocks roll up hill", then you would recognize the analogy as false and reason (perfectly justified) that my point about restricting freedom was probably unfounded or incorrect, as well.
This "boiled frog" analogy sounds like a variation on the "excluded middle" argument, in Carl Sagan's Baloney Detection Kit. Can you (or anyone) provide a reference to a documented experiment on a frog? I found vague references to "classical physiology experiments" on Google, but nothing more concrete. If there's no current work in this area, perhaps we could persuade someone to perform this experiment and document it. Okay, okay! Stop making that face! Maybe someplace that already serves frog legs, eh?
Given what little we now know about Echelon's capabilities, how could you avoid identification and triangulation? Encrypted phones only help so much. They disguise your voice and the content, but they narrow down the monitoring pool, since only so many people in the world will have or use encrypted wireless phones. Echelon can simply triangulate ALL of the encrypted calls and narrow the search to the most likely targets. Using multiple anonymous wireless phones clearly doesn't help; the subject of this article was caught despite their use. Should the you leave the phones connected all the time, and fill the air time with idle chatter? Should you use wireless voice-over-ip in an anonymous setting, such as an Internet cafe? How can you initiate a real time voice conversation with who you want, when you want, without revealing your own identity, location, or conversation content? If I understand the implications of this article, the solution does not involve wireless phones.
When I was in high school, a local library had hard-copy teletypes for a state-wide university network. Frequently, users would type their passwords at the wrong time, and it would show up on the tape. Some of my friends (not me, of course) would root through the trash to get the passwords and login to chat on the state network. At the time, there was no dialup access within financial reach of a teenager --and certainly not for chat sessions.
I can already see the same thing happening at McDonalds, as teens without broadband at home search through the trash bins and dumpsters to get the access codes for a few more hours of free, high speed Internet.
Sure, you could plug your Tivo into this and use it the same as before. But, many of the Tivo advantages are already there: you can watch the programs you want, when you want (sorta). You gotta watch some ads, especially when you pause. But, hey, those ads are targeted at you anyway. After awhile, you find yourself using the Tivo less and less, since you have to plan ahead to use it. Eventually, the Tivo is reduced to a fancy piece of your stereo equipment that serves only as a status symbol, if that.
Which means that at some point these seven points are going to be debunked by one of these guns for hire scientists:D
Indeed, it seems the article comes pre-debunked.
I have identified seven indicators that a scientific claim lies well outside the bounds of rational scientific discourse. Of course, they are only warning signs -- even a claim with several of the signs could be legitimate.
"Too good to be true" is heavily related to the evaluator's background in the subject matter. That's part of the problem: judges are not steeped in the evidence they must weigh. They need a more thorough guideline of what "too good" would mean to a knowledgeable expert.
The previous posters are on the right track here with insurance. You offer subscribers a policy based (somehow?) on their relative risk of having unexpected bandwith spikes, and sell them coverage on that basis. The problem is, how do you know when their usage is really spiking, or just increasing as a normal part of their business? That's where averaging comes in. The power company in my area has a program whereby they average your usage over the previous year. Then, they charge you a flat monthly fee for the next year, based on your previous usage (plus some adjustment for inflation or whatever). If your actual usage is below the new estimated level, your monthly cost goes down for the next period to compensate. If your usage goes up, your monthly cost goes up. The evaluation period doesn't have to be as long as a year, of course; an ISP could average usage over a rolling 6 months, 3 months, or 2 weeks. This system helps businesses manage their costs and budget, and it keeps the ISP's from getting stuck with usage bursts just to keep a good customer. The customer covers the cost of the bursted bandwidth with insurance, or effectively self-insures and pays for a burst event when it happens. The ISP assumes less risk of unexpected costs, and should be able to provide service at an overall lower cost to customers (since they don't have to factor in unexpected, unpaid burst costs).
Essentially, this seems like a great idea to me. The university sets some threshold for usage, after which higher charges kick in. That threshold actually helps the university estimate their typical bandwidth requirements to the ISP, since most users will have an incentive to gravitate to their limit. However, usage above that threshold is still available, albeit at a higher price. The university can use the additional funds to contract for burstable pipes, when demand exceeds nominal contracted bandwidth. As nominal usage creeps above the 2G mark per IP, the university can buy more constant bandwidth and reset the threshold. The high bandwidth users essentially help the university plan and pay for their current and future bandwidth requirements. So long as the "tariff" on high bandwidth use remains manageable (in terms of budgeting) for the end users, the system effectively self regulates.
The way I heard it, NT's name was based on Digital Equipment's VMS OS. The story goes something like this: MS recruited the top developers of VMS away from DEC to build a new OS. The developers based the new OS on DEC's VMS OS. So, what to name the new MS OS? Why not just use the next letters in the alphabet? V -> W M -> N S -> T After that little epiphany, someone decided that WNT had to stand for something, so they called it "Windows New Technology." I'm sorry that I can provide no proof for this story, but I find it has a certain appeal, just the same.
Slashdot Mirror
SCO is arguing that Linux is software, which US copyright law limits to one copy for backup purposes. What they fail to mention is that the US law is made to guarantee you the right to make at least one backup copy, even if the copyright holder expressly forbids any copies at all. However, if the copyright holder expressly grants you the right to make more than one copy, then it's nonsense, Alice-in-Wonderland-type talk to insist that US copyright law still limits you to that one copy limit.
Wait! Why do they limit discussion of this phenomenon to just the merging of fraternal twins? Why, I could be the product of a merger between myself and my own identical twin. And, the implications of that are... uh... well, something.
Try the Visible Earth site and the Blue Marble site. Both have stunning images of day/night earth. BTW, the images map perfectly onto a 3D globe shape in your favorite 3D API, so you can create an earth visualization of your own. <rummage>Somewhere around here, I even have a Java applet I created to generate a rotating globe wallpaper.<\rummage>
Many of the debt-relief/counseling corporations in the U.S. are registered as not-for-profit corporations to take advantage of certain laws. Perhaps the do-not-call list will simply lead to an explosion of ostensibly not-for-profit telemarketing "charities." The current telemarketers will register as not-for-profit corporations with some statement about how all profits after taxes go to charity. Then, the telemarketers are back to business as usual, representing commercial clients, but calling as a charities (allowed by the do-not-call list). Perhaps, existing charities with their own telemarketing departments will be take initial advantage of this loophole.
People already run these things off of a monitor power supply. Somewhere in here are the makings of a sweet case mod.
I think the subject speaks for itself.
Apparently, it doesn't.
I emailed Office Depot Customer Service about this policy. This was their response:
o t.com>
From: "Customer-Relations"<Customer.Relations@OfficeDep
To: "'XXXXXXX@yahoo.com'" <XXXXXXX@yahoo.com>
Subject:Ref Number: 0459208A
Date:Fri, 28 Mar 2003 07:30:31-0500
Dear Mr. XXXXXX:
We are in receipt of your E-mail and thank you for your interest in Office Depot. The article you mention in your E-mail contains inaccuracies in both the information presented and the conclusions drawn. Office Depot will continue to carry a broad array of products in its stores. In addition, through our website, www.techdepot.com, we stock over 60,000 different technology items and will continue to stock them. In fact, the broad assortment stocked by our www.techdepot.com website is accessible in all of our stores via our Internet kiosk. We trust this fuller explanation addresses the concerns that you expressed.
Sincerely
Customer Relations
Office Depot, Inc.
-----Original Message-----
From: XXXXXXX@yahoo.com
Sent: Tuesday, March 25, 2003 7:12 AM
To: Orders
Subject: 1407 Other Company Information
Name: XXXXXXX XXXXXX
email: XXXXXXX@yahoo.com
Phone Number:
Order No:
Web Account:
Response Requested
Message: According to this article, Office Depot will drop all products not carrying the "Windows XP" logo:
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=8472
I shop at Office Depot. I want access to a variety of products, including those computer products which do not bear Microsoft's approval. Please, drop this policy, and continue to stock products which do not bear Microsoft's logo.
Some of the earlier posters are getting at the problem, here. This phone is basically the same as any other mobile phone device, it just wraps around your wrist a little better. Waterproof? It had better be, since your wrist goes near a faucet much more often than a mobile phone normally would. I have a Sony radio that fits on an armband or on a belt clip. That seems like a much better form factor than the wrist.
If you believe that Office Depot has made a mistake (or even if you don't), tell them yourself. I did.
Customer Service Email
A friend in the locksmith biz operates almost exclusively by mobile phone. He has a yellow pages ad, of course; it costs him a fortune. The yellow pages company (same as the phone company) won't let him list his mobile number in his yellow pages ad. So, he has to get a (more expensive) business land line, which he forwards to his mobile phone. When he's "closed" for business, he stops the land line forwarding and lets the voice mail answer the business line. After all, he only gives out his land line number, and nobody can get his mobile number, right? Well, now he will (likely) have to pay extra to have that mobile number be unlisted. For essentially the same service, he will have to pay both to be listed and unlisted.
Here is a link to that story about that 36-inch TV for $99 on Amazon. People sued to get the TV for the advertised price, and lost.
Amazon has said before that these things happen, and they won't honor orders for honest price mistakes.
Since the legal and financial ramifications have already been discussed...
I understand how the outbound filter prevents the cable box itself from reporting when a subscriber orders a pay-per-view event. I am surprised that no one has designed and built a "smart" filter that would intercept the cable company request and report "no new pay-per-view orders, thank you very much." This seems like a more insidious threat to the pay-per-view system. The cable company's box would "believe" that it had reported all pay-per-view orders, and the cable company home office would always "believe" that no pay-per-view content had been ordered. I assume that such a device would have been mentioned in the article, if it existed.
I'd heard the analogy before, and whether or not it is actually true or has been scientifically proven is irrelevant. It still has some merit as an analogy.
Apparently, you haven't been following the Doonesbury comic strip lately... An untrue analogy is worse than having no merit --It actually discredits the target of your analogy. In this case, if a frog really does jump out before it lets you boil it alive, then maybe the analogous case (where this German law leads to worse resrictions) is equally false. For example, if I said, "This law will further restrict freedom the same way that rocks roll up hill", then you would recognize the analogy as false and reason (perfectly justified) that my point about restricting freedom was probably unfounded or incorrect, as well.
This "boiled frog" analogy sounds like a variation on the "excluded middle" argument, in Carl Sagan's Baloney Detection Kit. Can you (or anyone) provide a reference to a documented experiment on a frog? I found vague references to "classical physiology experiments" on Google, but nothing more concrete. If there's no current work in this area, perhaps we could persuade someone to perform this experiment and document it. Okay, okay! Stop making that face! Maybe someplace that already serves frog legs, eh?
Given what little we now know about Echelon's capabilities, how could you avoid identification and triangulation? Encrypted phones only help so much. They disguise your voice and the content, but they narrow down the monitoring pool, since only so many people in the world will have or use encrypted wireless phones. Echelon can simply triangulate ALL of the encrypted calls and narrow the search to the most likely targets. Using multiple anonymous wireless phones clearly doesn't help; the subject of this article was caught despite their use. Should the you leave the phones connected all the time, and fill the air time with idle chatter? Should you use wireless voice-over-ip in an anonymous setting, such as an Internet cafe? How can you initiate a real time voice conversation with who you want, when you want, without revealing your own identity, location, or conversation content? If I understand the implications of this article, the solution does not involve wireless phones.
When I was in high school, a local library had hard-copy teletypes for a state-wide university network. Frequently, users would type their passwords at the wrong time, and it would show up on the tape. Some of my friends (not me, of course) would root through the trash to get the passwords and login to chat on the state network. At the time, there was no dialup access within financial reach of a teenager --and certainly not for chat sessions.
I can already see the same thing happening at McDonalds, as teens without broadband at home search through the trash bins and dumpsters to get the access codes for a few more hours of free, high speed Internet.
Sure, you could plug your Tivo into this and use it the same as before. But, many of the Tivo advantages are already there: you can watch the programs you want, when you want (sorta). You gotta watch some ads, especially when you pause. But, hey, those ads are targeted at you anyway. After awhile, you find yourself using the Tivo less and less, since you have to plan ahead to use it. Eventually, the Tivo is reduced to a fancy piece of your stereo equipment that serves only as a status symbol, if that.
Science Club Rules
The 1st rule of Science is you don't talk about Science
The 2nd rule of Science is you don't talk about Science
The 3rd rule of Science is when someone says stop, or goes limp, the research is over
The 4th rule of Science is only two guys to a research project
The 5th rule of Science is one research project at a time.
The 6th rule of Science is no shirts, no shoes
The 7th rule of Science is research projects go on a long as they have to
The 8th and final rule of Science is if this is your first night, you have to do research
Which means that at some point these seven points are going to be debunked by one of these guns for hire scientists :D
Indeed, it seems the article comes pre-debunked.
I have identified seven indicators that a scientific claim lies well outside the bounds of rational scientific discourse. Of course, they are only warning signs -- even a claim with several of the signs could be legitimate.
Because these new rules are not scientific claims of new discoveries.
"Too good to be true" is heavily related to the evaluator's background in the subject matter. That's part of the problem: judges are not steeped in the evidence they must weigh. They need a more thorough guideline of what "too good" would mean to a knowledgeable expert.
The previous posters are on the right track here with insurance. You offer subscribers a policy based (somehow?) on their relative risk of having unexpected bandwith spikes, and sell them coverage on that basis. The problem is, how do you know when their usage is really spiking, or just increasing as a normal part of their business? That's where averaging comes in. The power company in my area has a program whereby they average your usage over the previous year. Then, they charge you a flat monthly fee for the next year, based on your previous usage (plus some adjustment for inflation or whatever). If your actual usage is below the new estimated level, your monthly cost goes down for the next period to compensate. If your usage goes up, your monthly cost goes up. The evaluation period doesn't have to be as long as a year, of course; an ISP could average usage over a rolling 6 months, 3 months, or 2 weeks. This system helps businesses manage their costs and budget, and it keeps the ISP's from getting stuck with usage bursts just to keep a good customer. The customer covers the cost of the bursted bandwidth with insurance, or effectively self-insures and pays for a burst event when it happens. The ISP assumes less risk of unexpected costs, and should be able to provide service at an overall lower cost to customers (since they don't have to factor in unexpected, unpaid burst costs).
Essentially, this seems like a great idea to me. The university sets some threshold for usage, after which higher charges kick in. That threshold actually helps the university estimate their typical bandwidth requirements to the ISP, since most users will have an incentive to gravitate to their limit. However, usage above that threshold is still available, albeit at a higher price. The university can use the additional funds to contract for burstable pipes, when demand exceeds nominal contracted bandwidth. As nominal usage creeps above the 2G mark per IP, the university can buy more constant bandwidth and reset the threshold. The high bandwidth users essentially help the university plan and pay for their current and future bandwidth requirements. So long as the "tariff" on high bandwidth use remains manageable (in terms of budgeting) for the end users, the system effectively self regulates.
The way I heard it, NT's name was based on Digital Equipment's VMS OS. The story goes something like this: MS recruited the top developers of VMS away from DEC to build a new OS. The developers based the new OS on DEC's VMS OS. So, what to name the new MS OS? Why not just use the next letters in the alphabet?
V -> W
M -> N
S -> T
After that little epiphany, someone decided that WNT had to stand for something, so they called it "Windows New Technology." I'm sorry that I can provide no proof for this story, but I find it has a certain appeal, just the same.