Nice taking the issue and reversing it into a touchy feely they only want to help us argument.
No, I didn't. I gave an example of something that would be perfectly legitimate, a positive thing for all parties involved, that would be outlawed by poorly written laws that attempt to support network neutrality.
My point was doing something about unintended consequences. A service of the type I described would be valuable, and would be something that ISPs and content providers would both benefit from. However, over-broad laws on network neutrality would outlaw them.
As I said in my linked to JE, we need more Internet regulation. "Network neutrality" however is a single issue, which so far the proponents of appear to be unwilling to even consider the possibility of negative consequences. Without something that means a node can send data and expect some predictable QoS for it, many applications will be problematic at best.
More likely scenario... Apple goes to Earthlink and offers.01c per Kb to give them priority for iTV over youtube.com traffic. Or it's even Earthlink shopping around... will you pay us x extra per Kb to ensure your traffic doesn't drop into lower priority on the stack.
FWIW, neither are scenarios that Earthlink's customers would find acceptable.
More importantly though, neither are scenarios remotely relevant, as neither are legitimate services that would be outlawed by over-broad network neutrality laws. We already have a long list of potential abuses that would be outlawed, but at this stage, the question is whether we'd be throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I've given an example. It's up to you to show how NN laws can be written to avoid outlawing legitimate applications like the one I gave, particularly when my linked to JE, proposing the enforcement of minimum standards, also prevents such discrimination without preventing the legitimate scenario I presented.
Congress (or merely the FCC) passes a law (or regulation) which promotes net-neutrality.
Six months later, Apple approaches Earthlink (for example) with a deal. Normal Earthlink DSL subscribers pay for certain amounts of bandwidth, the limits being enforced in software at the DSLAM end. Apple suggests that to make the iTV practical for Earthlink subscribers, they'll pay 0.01c per kilobyte for traffic that doesn't count towards the bandwidth the subscriber pays for.
ie, someone paying for a 256k connection sees no reduction in service when someone else in their home is streaming "Star Wars: The Version Where Chewbacca shoots Greedo In Order To Save Wimpy Han" to their iTV box.
Everything looks great until the FCC unexpected intervenes and rules the practice unlawful under network neutrality rules, because they've been worded too broadly.
I'm concerned about network neutrality not being the panacea its supporters claim it is too. I'm not opposed to regulating the Internet (in terms of service quality, not, obviously, in terms of content), as I wrote here I think the Government needs to intervene to ensure a level playing field, and guarantee reasonable expectations are satisfied. But I have difficulty with the idea of bans on providing better services for those willing to pay for it. We need to make sure the minimum services are acceptable, not that the premium services are unavailable.
Of course, living in the UK lessens the chances that you'll be hit.
Not really, it just lessens the forces. Britain typically gets hit by a major storm close to or exceeding hurricane strength once every five to ten years. It's even possible, looking at current computer models, that Hurricane Helene may hit it in about seven days as a Tropical Storm. Certainly it will pass close by) Building codes are substantially stronger than they are across the Atlantic as a result.
The funny thing is that most Brits don't even know that, it's usually such a non-event when it happens. I've had my mother phone me up in the middle of a storm telling me what's happening, phoning me up a few days later to talk about the damage (friends having their car damaged by a falling wall, etc), and then a few months later say "Hurricane? We had a hurricane? When? I don't remember..." The media usually refers to them, regardless of whether they're a little strong for the term or not, as "gales".
(Funnily enough there are also supposedly more tornadoes per square mile in England than there are in Texas or Florida. I've only known about one, one that hit Reading shortly after I moved away, so I find it a little hard to believe. I suspect it's a strength issue and England gets plenty of them but most of them are too weak for anyone to care about.)
Wood vs Brick is not an issue in stormproofing homes. You'll find proportionally just as many CBS (concrete block - same as brick only a different sized "brick" and with stucco smeared on the outside) homes in Florida that had severe damage due to the last four hurricanes as wood frame homes.
The two major issues in terms of hurricane proofing are tornadoes (you can't tornado-proof a house short of burying it several feet underground. Building it out of brick will not help) and roofing tiedowns. The latter is where we saw the major avoidable issues last year and the year before. Poorly built roofs were easily ripped off by any winds that were able to get underneath.
While CBS is stronger than wood, wood is more flexible so can take just as much punishment without actually breaking. The major downside of wood isn't how it handles the weather, it's termites. For that reason, I went for a CBS home, but I wouldn't worry about going to a hurricane party in someone's wooden home if it's up to modern building codes.
True story: Janet Reno, Clinton's future AG, waited out Hurricane Andrew in her mother's home, wood, and of her own specifications, built fifty years previous. Because it was correctly built and maintained, it was one of the few homes on her street still standing afterwards.
Ignoring the conspiracy theorists for a moment, the major issues are coverage and speed.
A GSM (actually, any cellphone) at that height will "see" far more towers than a ground based phone (based upon uninterrupted line-of-sight access) and will have difficulty regulating its power output to ensure its transmissions only cover one cell. That means that, for an operator, an in-use GSM phone will be creating interference on several cells, resulting in deterioration of call quality.
Now, GSM uses a kind of spread spectrum system designed to minimize interference. Each GSM packet contains a huge amount of redundant information, and is broken down into much smaller frames for transmission. Each of these frames is transmitted on a different frequency (hence it's "spread spectrum", albeit not to the extreme of IS95/CDMA. The latter increases capacity by actually allowing multiple phones to transmit on the same frequencies, using mathematical algorithms to try to seperate the signals. But again, it would have problems in the above situation.) As a result, GSM phones can "cope" with a minimum amount of interference. But if many people were using cellphones in planes, the chances are that interference would go above a level where people on the ground would seriously start to notice. (This situation is worse with D-AMPS(IS-136/TDMA) phones - the digital phones offered by the companies that ended up as Cingular before 2001ish, as GSM's massive redundancy is sacrificed in the name of increased capacity with that technology.)
Speed is the other factor. If you're travelling in a car at 70mph, you're switching between towers at an expected rate and the "doppler effect" in terms of how the cellphone affects the signal is also within expected parameters. You're unlikely to be transmitting on the wrong frequency. If you're in a plane, however, you're travelling at 500mph, the doppler effect is massive, the chances are you're straddling neighbouring frequencies allocated to other cellphones, and you're changing towers every few seconds.
Essentially, use a GSM phone in the air, and you're guaranteed to be causing interference with the signals transmitted by phones on the ground.
The issue with GSM (and other technologies) phones in the air isn't that "you can't technically make a call that way". You can - if you can get a signal. It's that it creates havoc for other users of phones. Hence, this is an FCC regulation, not an FAA regulation.
BTW, Flight 93 was flying low as I understand it, and I'm not even certain the calls weren't placed from "Airphones", given the confusion of the days following where newspapers were using the terms interchangably.
Q: I've heard a lot about "business models", can you show me an example of a good one?
A: Certainly! A good business model is one where you provide a service without charging any money. For example, the original Napster would be an example. They did lots of research and development into their "file sharing" product, and co-opted the work of artists across the world to produce a product that people would want to use. How did they make a profit without charging anything? Answer: Volume!
Q: Ok, so can you give me an example of a bad business model
A: Sure. Just look at the music industry. They provide products (boo!) that people want, and sell these products to them.
Q: My gosh! How can they possibly survive with that model? Surely you profit more from giving everything away for free than you do by selling things
A: Quite right. This is why the music industry is unable to make a profit. Napster and other supporters of "sharing" have done what they can to change this around to no avail, even forcing the music industry to participate by, essentially, giving away their music. But for some reason, they don't like this, and keep running to the courts to tell people to stop!
Q: OMG! That sounds positively like a protection racket or extortion or something!
A: You betcha! Tehse... I mean these people are positively evil. They get their kicks funding the creation of new music and then charging people who want to own copies of it. Can you believe it?
Global warming is one of the things they wanted to cast doubt about. The problem they were facing was that warnings on second-hand smoke were being taken seriously. The intent was sow a general distrust of scientists, making it appear that that consensus is rare. If they'd limited their focus to only research into second hand smoke, it'd have looked suspicious and Philip Morris's actions would have been fairly obvious. However, a general discrediting of science... well, until this article came out, I wasn't even aware that part of the cause of the Cato/Crichton/"JunkScience.com" axis of uncertainty was the tobacco industry.
I'm waiting to find out how much they paid the International Astronomers Union...;)
I'd imagine it can be tuned to run from any hydrocarbon based fuel source. Sources such as alcohol should be carbon neutral. There's nothing that says it has to be from fossil fuels.
I know of no (democratic) country that has compulsory voting that has any law against turning in a blank ballot.
Most of the issues opponents of compulsory voting have are really dealt with. The only real problem I have with compulsory voting is that a perfectly legitimate reason for not voting is that you consider the whole deal a farce. But turning in a blank ballot will generally make much the same statement.
It wouldn't have been surprising if they'd said nothing. The fact that they promised region-free and are now withdrawing the statement will bring about a lot of negative publicity that they could have saved themselves by not lying to the public in the first place. It also casts doubt on their other statements.
I'm not sure they lied about anything. What Nintendo actually told Tired was:
es. Like the Nintendo DS, the Wii will be able to play games from other regions, such as Japan, without any restriction. Kaplan implied there might be a region lock that publishers would be able to flip on, but it doesn't sound like the first-party titles from Nintendo will be restricted.
In other words:
1. The Wii itself will support region locks.
2. First party Nintendo games will not be region locked
It looks to me like a confused marketing guy told a confused journalist that Nintendo wasn't planning to lock its titles or promote region locking, at least, not in the US. What the UK said doesn't contradict that.
All of which is a shame. I wish Nintendo had the balls to not implement a lock to begin with. Or even better, made an open environment on the system practical.
Well, true, but the context was that the iMac supports two monitors. The point was made that Macs have "always" supported, in some shape or form, two monitors, even before Windows did. So I don't think his comment was meant to be flamebait, and I do think discussions of colour are a little beside the point, especially as the Amiga did it better than the PC or Mac did anyway.;-P
I think he meant Windows was unable to support multiple displays at the time the Mac did. This seems quite possible, I, personally, saw Macs driving multiple displays in 1986/7 (albiet, at the time, this was a third party hack, IIRC, but I do know official support quickly followed), early versions of Windows at the time were relatively crude and it wouldn't surprise me if the support wasn't there for multiple monitors.
That's mostly right, but the Leia/Luke/Anakin thing was actually part of the original concept. That was basically the idea Lucas was playing with from the start, and built the story around. I can't comment on whether it was in the "original script", but it is known he played with several versions of the story before he put pen to paper.
The annoying part is that he felt he needed to downplay that for ANH because it needed some kind of love triangle (boy, that sounds stupid. But Lucas is all about cliches, erm, I mean recurring themes, as he's the first to admit. He's a self-taught myths and legends geek.)
When Ian McDiarmid was first introduced to the set in Return of the Jedi and sat for the first time on the throne, he was asked if he felt like he was sitting in the Whitehouse. Despite being ten years later, supposedly this was aluding to the Emperor as a Nixon like figure. Which might explain Lucas's initial scepticism at McDairmid as being the right actor for the role, as McDairmid's Sith Lord doesn't really bring to mind anyone in particular, Nixon or anyone else.
Given Spamhaus would have difficulty arguing that its use of "spam" and "spammer" is anything but negative, given it operates a blacklisting service, I doubt e360insight would have any difficulty claiming Spamhaus is damaging its reputation.
Funnily enough I've had anti-spammers call me a spammer because I operate my own mail server too - for incoming email only.
I've never trusted the bulk of anti-spammers and I see no reason to do so today. The bulk of them are stupid, and are more concerned with hurting perceived supporters of spammers (including the old "Person who has an account on an ISP that's owned by another ISP that has another subsidary that has a spammer as a customer" chestnut) than actually making the Internet work smoothly.
There are relatively easy ways, if you operate your own server, to deal with spam. The most obvious, which has worked for me for over a decade, is to provide every entity you do business with with a unique email address - an alias to contact you by - and close that email address if you start receiving spam on it. It's hard to go wrong, the only people who are hurt are those who provided the email address to spammers in the first place.
Unfortunately, with the anti-spam fuck-ups spending more and more time trying to convince ISPs to block all port 25 traffic and encouraging blanket anti-server policies, it's becoming harder and harder for an individual to implement this solution, despite the rather obvious fact that if it were commonplace, spam would become almost impossible to do as it would be in nobody's interests to sell email addresses. (Not to mention the fact that if the problem with spam is that it overloads ISP email servers, letting people run their own pretty much solves that problem.)
Real anti-spam solutions involve holding people accountable for their actions and their use of the Internet. That means encouraging the use of static IP addresses so repeat offenders can be blocked. It means encouraging people to run their own servers rather than sharing ISP machines. It means solutions like the one I've mentioned, one-to-one email addresses rather than one-to-many where any of the many can hurt all the others.
I can't comment on Spamhaus specifically, and it would be nice to think they recognize these issues, but I do believe they're proposing the wrong solutions. And perhaps in the short-term that's necessary, but it would be nice to hear the anti-spam lobby back away from the "We need to harm the Internet to save it" and "Trust us. And if you don't, we'll do what we can to undermine you" positions and move towards encouraging geniune accountability.
With libel laws being even worse in Britain, it'd be interesting for them to take the case to Britain now. In Britain, the burden of proof, in defamation cases, is actually against the defendant (that is, once it's proven a statement was made by the defendant that clearly harms the reputation of the plaintiff, the defendant has to prove it is truthful and fair. Yeah, fair. Truth is not always, by itself, a defense.)
I've been looking in to it and I've found some remarkable information that might be interesting here.
Apple has been trying to find a way to shoe the Core 2 Duo into a MacBook and, frankly, it's not working out. The chip just uses too much power and generates too much heat.
So, don't expect an upgraded MBP this year. Instead, look for an amazing announcement next August at the WWDC. Jobs is going to announce a remarkable new development - the entire Apple line is switching to Sparc. They've been talking to Jonathan Schwartz, and he's sold them on the next generation of multiple core Sparcs, the successor to Niagara, codenamed "Viagra." For the last eight years, Mac OS X has been living an amazing, hitherto secret, triple life, running on PowerPC, Intel, and Sparc architectures.
When the 64 bit version of that'll not fit in a laptop, they'll announce a switch to MIPS in 2009, and a switch to ARM in 2011.
Slashdot Mirror
No, I didn't. I gave an example of something that would be perfectly legitimate, a positive thing for all parties involved, that would be outlawed by poorly written laws that attempt to support network neutrality.
My point was doing something about unintended consequences. A service of the type I described would be valuable, and would be something that ISPs and content providers would both benefit from. However, over-broad laws on network neutrality would outlaw them.
As I said in my linked to JE, we need more Internet regulation. "Network neutrality" however is a single issue, which so far the proponents of appear to be unwilling to even consider the possibility of negative consequences. Without something that means a node can send data and expect some predictable QoS for it, many applications will be problematic at best.
FWIW, neither are scenarios that Earthlink's customers would find acceptable.
More importantly though, neither are scenarios remotely relevant, as neither are legitimate services that would be outlawed by over-broad network neutrality laws. We already have a long list of potential abuses that would be outlawed, but at this stage, the question is whether we'd be throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I've given an example. It's up to you to show how NN laws can be written to avoid outlawing legitimate applications like the one I gave, particularly when my linked to JE, proposing the enforcement of minimum standards, also prevents such discrimination without preventing the legitimate scenario I presented.
Unintended consequences.
Congress (or merely the FCC) passes a law (or regulation) which promotes net-neutrality.
Six months later, Apple approaches Earthlink (for example) with a deal. Normal Earthlink DSL subscribers pay for certain amounts of bandwidth, the limits being enforced in software at the DSLAM end. Apple suggests that to make the iTV practical for Earthlink subscribers, they'll pay 0.01c per kilobyte for traffic that doesn't count towards the bandwidth the subscriber pays for.
ie, someone paying for a 256k connection sees no reduction in service when someone else in their home is streaming "Star Wars: The Version Where Chewbacca shoots Greedo In Order To Save Wimpy Han" to their iTV box.
Everything looks great until the FCC unexpected intervenes and rules the practice unlawful under network neutrality rules, because they've been worded too broadly.
I'm concerned about network neutrality not being the panacea its supporters claim it is too. I'm not opposed to regulating the Internet (in terms of service quality, not, obviously, in terms of content), as I wrote here I think the Government needs to intervene to ensure a level playing field, and guarantee reasonable expectations are satisfied. But I have difficulty with the idea of bans on providing better services for those willing to pay for it. We need to make sure the minimum services are acceptable, not that the premium services are unavailable.
Not really, it just lessens the forces. Britain typically gets hit by a major storm close to or exceeding hurricane strength once every five to ten years. It's even possible, looking at current computer models, that Hurricane Helene may hit it in about seven days as a Tropical Storm. Certainly it will pass close by) Building codes are substantially stronger than they are across the Atlantic as a result.
The funny thing is that most Brits don't even know that, it's usually such a non-event when it happens. I've had my mother phone me up in the middle of a storm telling me what's happening, phoning me up a few days later to talk about the damage (friends having their car damaged by a falling wall, etc), and then a few months later say "Hurricane? We had a hurricane? When? I don't remember..." The media usually refers to them, regardless of whether they're a little strong for the term or not, as "gales".
(Funnily enough there are also supposedly more tornadoes per square mile in England than there are in Texas or Florida. I've only known about one, one that hit Reading shortly after I moved away, so I find it a little hard to believe. I suspect it's a strength issue and England gets plenty of them but most of them are too weak for anyone to care about.)
Wood vs Brick is not an issue in stormproofing homes. You'll find proportionally just as many CBS (concrete block - same as brick only a different sized "brick" and with stucco smeared on the outside) homes in Florida that had severe damage due to the last four hurricanes as wood frame homes.
The two major issues in terms of hurricane proofing are tornadoes (you can't tornado-proof a house short of burying it several feet underground. Building it out of brick will not help) and roofing tiedowns. The latter is where we saw the major avoidable issues last year and the year before. Poorly built roofs were easily ripped off by any winds that were able to get underneath.
While CBS is stronger than wood, wood is more flexible so can take just as much punishment without actually breaking. The major downside of wood isn't how it handles the weather, it's termites. For that reason, I went for a CBS home, but I wouldn't worry about going to a hurricane party in someone's wooden home if it's up to modern building codes.
True story: Janet Reno, Clinton's future AG, waited out Hurricane Andrew in her mother's home, wood, and of her own specifications, built fifty years previous. Because it was correctly built and maintained, it was one of the few homes on her street still standing afterwards.
Ignoring the conspiracy theorists for a moment, the major issues are coverage and speed.
A GSM (actually, any cellphone) at that height will "see" far more towers than a ground based phone (based upon uninterrupted line-of-sight access) and will have difficulty regulating its power output to ensure its transmissions only cover one cell. That means that, for an operator, an in-use GSM phone will be creating interference on several cells, resulting in deterioration of call quality.
Now, GSM uses a kind of spread spectrum system designed to minimize interference. Each GSM packet contains a huge amount of redundant information, and is broken down into much smaller frames for transmission. Each of these frames is transmitted on a different frequency (hence it's "spread spectrum", albeit not to the extreme of IS95/CDMA. The latter increases capacity by actually allowing multiple phones to transmit on the same frequencies, using mathematical algorithms to try to seperate the signals. But again, it would have problems in the above situation.) As a result, GSM phones can "cope" with a minimum amount of interference. But if many people were using cellphones in planes, the chances are that interference would go above a level where people on the ground would seriously start to notice. (This situation is worse with D-AMPS(IS-136/TDMA) phones - the digital phones offered by the companies that ended up as Cingular before 2001ish, as GSM's massive redundancy is sacrificed in the name of increased capacity with that technology.)
Speed is the other factor. If you're travelling in a car at 70mph, you're switching between towers at an expected rate and the "doppler effect" in terms of how the cellphone affects the signal is also within expected parameters. You're unlikely to be transmitting on the wrong frequency. If you're in a plane, however, you're travelling at 500mph, the doppler effect is massive, the chances are you're straddling neighbouring frequencies allocated to other cellphones, and you're changing towers every few seconds.
Essentially, use a GSM phone in the air, and you're guaranteed to be causing interference with the signals transmitted by phones on the ground.
The issue with GSM (and other technologies) phones in the air isn't that "you can't technically make a call that way". You can - if you can get a signal. It's that it creates havoc for other users of phones. Hence, this is an FCC regulation, not an FAA regulation.
BTW, Flight 93 was flying low as I understand it, and I'm not even certain the calls weren't placed from "Airphones", given the confusion of the days following where newspapers were using the terms interchangably.
I have to admit, I read the reply too and felt like I'd dropped several IQ points after reading it.
P6, the core used in the Pentium Pro and later the Pentium II was the first to use the hybrid RISC/CISC approach. FYI.
Q: I've heard a lot about "business models", can you show me an example of a good one?
A: Certainly! A good business model is one where you provide a service without charging any money. For example, the original Napster would be an example. They did lots of research and development into their "file sharing" product, and co-opted the work of artists across the world to produce a product that people would want to use. How did they make a profit without charging anything? Answer: Volume!
Q: Ok, so can you give me an example of a bad business model
A: Sure. Just look at the music industry. They provide products (boo!) that people want, and sell these products to them.
Q: My gosh! How can they possibly survive with that model? Surely you profit more from giving everything away for free than you do by selling things
A: Quite right. This is why the music industry is unable to make a profit. Napster and other supporters of "sharing" have done what they can to change this around to no avail, even forcing the music industry to participate by, essentially, giving away their music. But for some reason, they don't like this, and keep running to the courts to tell people to stop!
Q: OMG! That sounds positively like a protection racket or extortion or something!
A: You betcha! Tehse... I mean these people are positively evil. They get their kicks funding the creation of new music and then charging people who want to own copies of it. Can you believe it?
(...and so on...)
It's in the article.
Global warming is one of the things they wanted to cast doubt about. The problem they were facing was that warnings on second-hand smoke were being taken seriously. The intent was sow a general distrust of scientists, making it appear that that consensus is rare. If they'd limited their focus to only research into second hand smoke, it'd have looked suspicious and Philip Morris's actions would have been fairly obvious. However, a general discrediting of science... well, until this article came out, I wasn't even aware that part of the cause of the Cato/Crichton/"JunkScience.com" axis of uncertainty was the tobacco industry.
I'm waiting to find out how much they paid the International Astronomers Union... ;)
I'd imagine it can be tuned to run from any hydrocarbon based fuel source. Sources such as alcohol should be carbon neutral. There's nothing that says it has to be from fossil fuels.
Erm, yeah. A bulletin board for geeks should only carry questions concerning subjects of "broad general interest". That makes sense.
Seriously, fuck off. You're at the wrong place. Go to MySpace.com or something if you're not interested in technical questions.
Right, whatever.
No that would be a true free-market advocate, not a true capitalist.
Pro-Capitalist = in favour of concentrations of private capital.
Pro-Free Market = against government interventions into markets.
In this case, public money is being given to private entities, hence this is a pro-capitalist, anti-free-market situation.
I know of no (democratic) country that has compulsory voting that has any law against turning in a blank ballot.
Most of the issues opponents of compulsory voting have are really dealt with. The only real problem I have with compulsory voting is that a perfectly legitimate reason for not voting is that you consider the whole deal a farce. But turning in a blank ballot will generally make much the same statement.
Absolutely. That's also why all songs should be exactly three minutes long too!
1. The Wii itself will support region locks.
2. First party Nintendo games will not be region locked
It looks to me like a confused marketing guy told a confused journalist that Nintendo wasn't planning to lock its titles or promote region locking, at least, not in the US. What the UK said doesn't contradict that.
All of which is a shame. I wish Nintendo had the balls to not implement a lock to begin with. Or even better, made an open environment on the system practical.
Well, true, but the context was that the iMac supports two monitors. The point was made that Macs have "always" supported, in some shape or form, two monitors, even before Windows did. So I don't think his comment was meant to be flamebait, and I do think discussions of colour are a little beside the point, especially as the Amiga did it better than the PC or Mac did anyway. ;-P
I think he meant Windows was unable to support multiple displays at the time the Mac did. This seems quite possible, I, personally, saw Macs driving multiple displays in 1986/7 (albiet, at the time, this was a third party hack, IIRC, but I do know official support quickly followed), early versions of Windows at the time were relatively crude and it wouldn't surprise me if the support wasn't there for multiple monitors.
That's mostly right, but the Leia/Luke/Anakin thing was actually part of the original concept. That was basically the idea Lucas was playing with from the start, and built the story around. I can't comment on whether it was in the "original script", but it is known he played with several versions of the story before he put pen to paper.
The annoying part is that he felt he needed to downplay that for ANH because it needed some kind of love triangle (boy, that sounds stupid. But Lucas is all about cliches, erm, I mean recurring themes, as he's the first to admit. He's a self-taught myths and legends geek.)
Yep. "You're either with me or against me"
Not just Bush either.
When Ian McDiarmid was first introduced to the set in Return of the Jedi and sat for the first time on the throne, he was asked if he felt like he was sitting in the Whitehouse. Despite being ten years later, supposedly this was aluding to the Emperor as a Nixon like figure. Which might explain Lucas's initial scepticism at McDairmid as being the right actor for the role, as McDairmid's Sith Lord doesn't really bring to mind anyone in particular, Nixon or anyone else.
Given Spamhaus would have difficulty arguing that its use of "spam" and "spammer" is anything but negative, given it operates a blacklisting service, I doubt e360insight would have any difficulty claiming Spamhaus is damaging its reputation.
Funnily enough I've had anti-spammers call me a spammer because I operate my own mail server too - for incoming email only.
I've never trusted the bulk of anti-spammers and I see no reason to do so today. The bulk of them are stupid, and are more concerned with hurting perceived supporters of spammers (including the old "Person who has an account on an ISP that's owned by another ISP that has another subsidary that has a spammer as a customer" chestnut) than actually making the Internet work smoothly.
There are relatively easy ways, if you operate your own server, to deal with spam. The most obvious, which has worked for me for over a decade, is to provide every entity you do business with with a unique email address - an alias to contact you by - and close that email address if you start receiving spam on it. It's hard to go wrong, the only people who are hurt are those who provided the email address to spammers in the first place.
Unfortunately, with the anti-spam fuck-ups spending more and more time trying to convince ISPs to block all port 25 traffic and encouraging blanket anti-server policies, it's becoming harder and harder for an individual to implement this solution, despite the rather obvious fact that if it were commonplace, spam would become almost impossible to do as it would be in nobody's interests to sell email addresses. (Not to mention the fact that if the problem with spam is that it overloads ISP email servers, letting people run their own pretty much solves that problem.)
Real anti-spam solutions involve holding people accountable for their actions and their use of the Internet. That means encouraging the use of static IP addresses so repeat offenders can be blocked. It means encouraging people to run their own servers rather than sharing ISP machines. It means solutions like the one I've mentioned, one-to-one email addresses rather than one-to-many where any of the many can hurt all the others.
I can't comment on Spamhaus specifically, and it would be nice to think they recognize these issues, but I do believe they're proposing the wrong solutions. And perhaps in the short-term that's necessary, but it would be nice to hear the anti-spam lobby back away from the "We need to harm the Internet to save it" and "Trust us. And if you don't, we'll do what we can to undermine you" positions and move towards encouraging geniune accountability.
The Natwest 3 concerns a criminal case. This is a civil case. There's no risk of extradiction.
With libel laws being even worse in Britain, it'd be interesting for them to take the case to Britain now. In Britain, the burden of proof, in defamation cases, is actually against the defendant (that is, once it's proven a statement was made by the defendant that clearly harms the reputation of the plaintiff, the defendant has to prove it is truthful and fair. Yeah, fair. Truth is not always, by itself, a defense.)
I've been looking in to it and I've found some remarkable information that might be interesting here.
Apple has been trying to find a way to shoe the Core 2 Duo into a MacBook and, frankly, it's not working out. The chip just uses too much power and generates too much heat.
So, don't expect an upgraded MBP this year. Instead, look for an amazing announcement next August at the WWDC. Jobs is going to announce a remarkable new development - the entire Apple line is switching to Sparc. They've been talking to Jonathan Schwartz, and he's sold them on the next generation of multiple core Sparcs, the successor to Niagara, codenamed "Viagra." For the last eight years, Mac OS X has been living an amazing, hitherto secret, triple life, running on PowerPC, Intel, and Sparc architectures.
When the 64 bit version of that'll not fit in a laptop, they'll announce a switch to MIPS in 2009, and a switch to ARM in 2011.