Just to be pedantic, neither postscript nor PDF make that formatting guarantee either unless you embed all necessary fonts. Ask yourself how many people know how to do that....:-)
OpenOffice.org embeds all fonts (subsetted) by default. So does PDFCreator or Distiller. I'd be hard pressed to come up with an example of a widely used pdf creation tool that doesn't.
1) "Emotiflags" is a brand new term. A search on Google only showed 5 hits, all of which were emoticon flags (as in country flags), not emotional flags like:) and:(
A word isn't patentable.
2) One of the biggest problems people have with email is that it doesn't convey emotion. If the use of this concept becomes commonplace, it could mean good things for email. Being able to look at the emotion prior to opening the message will mean a lot less miscommunication.
Which has no bearing on patentability.
3) While message forums have been doing this for ages, this is the first time I've seen it applied to email as some kind of header deta along with the to, from, subject, importance, etc.
That fact that message forums have been doing this for ages pretty much constitues prior art. And then there's the X-Face header used on usenet (where messages have a similar header structure to e-mail), which even includes the graphical data. That itself was a spin off from ideas from the ca 1985 Vismon/picons project at Bell Labs.
I think the correct legal term for why this would not constitute a novel, unobvious idea is "done to death".
Half of Belgium TV is French, all of it (French AND Dutch) seems rather crappy (CSI:whatever x7 and Big Brother VIPs) At least it is Analog for all over-the-air, and all digital TV seems to be some poor-quality IPTV (Belgacom is REALLY bad).
I thought that "The Netherlands" (pl) were more than just Holland. Guess I was wrong?
Noord-Holland and South-Holland are provinces of The Netherlands (along with 10 others; Friesland, Zeeland, Gelderland, Utrecht, Flevoland, Noord-Brabant, Limburg, Groningen, Drenthe and Overijssel), which is an independent country.
Belgium is also an independent country. Some parts of Belgium, historically, have been incorporated in the territories of France and/or The Netherlands. The Dutch speaking part of Belgium (roughly) and The Netherlands are sometimes referred to collectively as the Low Countries, but mostly in historical terms.
Reception of Belgium analogue TV over the air is limited to the southern provinces, but Dutch language Belgium public TV stations can be received on basic cable troughout the country (unlike commercial TV from Belgium).
Actually, the state-supported media are more objective than any of the commercial channels.
Any club of people that can raise a significant number of members will get public funding and can participate in the public channel. There are broadcasting organisations with socialist, catholic, buddhist, islam, etc. backgrounds, and they all get their voice.
In addition to this, you have to realize 1) public broadcasters also feature advertising 2) it has been known for a public broadcaster to become a commercial broadcaster (veronica) 3) workers from failed commercial broadcasters have been known to rejoin the public system (tv10) All of this mitigates the influence of government. (And the government money mitigates undue influence from advertisers).
The public broadcasters themselves are independent member-run organizations and can (and have) defied government positions. More successfully than the BBC has managed, for instance (turns out they were right about reports about Iraq's weapons being 'sexed up', but they didn't have the balls to say to the government 'you can put in a complaint like any regular citizen').
Additionally, public broadcasters are required by law to have editorial codes that guarantee editorial/journalistic independence for their employees - independence from both the government, advertisers AND the broadcaster itself. The journalist's trade union is always keen to complain about instances of this independence being threatened.
Getting impartial/non-partisan news is hardly the problem. The problem is that the news is either boring (especially the christian broadcasters, always yapping on about 'church matters' or, for some not well understood reason, every minute detail of the troubles in Israel) or alarmist and/or xenophobic drivel designed to compete with the commercial channels.
No, it's The Netherlands. Plural, and with an article.
2. It's not a tiny country, Luxembourg is. No, The Holy See is!
3. Germany, Denmark, France and England don't broadcast in Dutch. But Belgium does. Besides, we're used to US movies and series broadcast in English, albeit with subtitles.
This is more death of free media. If the only FTA transmissions you can get are either state-sponsored or state-supported, how can you reliably get news?
The analogue broadcast that was switched off was these same handful of channels - which will now be FTA on the (as of yet crappy) digital network. The commercial channels were never broadcast on the analogue network at all. If you splash for a dish, you can get a card that will decrypt both the public broadcasters as well as the commercial channels for a one time fee.
Even if the commercial channels were FTA, you'd still need equipment to receive them. Plus, you pay for the public broadcasters via taxes (though you're now not paying for analogue over the air distribution anymore). TANSTAAFL.
So what about cars and portable TVs? I'm guessing a market will emerge for portable set top boxes / converters.
a) there are few, if any, cars with TV sets in them. The primary market for in-vehicle TV is for truckdrivers. These have had to deal with quite some advertising over the past year for both digital terrestrial as satellite sets - the latter make most sense seeing as most truckers drive internationally (being a small country, The Netherlands is one of the world's leaders when it comes to the amount of territory outside its borders). b) portable TVs are fucked c) digital sets are pretty much non-existant, for terrestrial digital you always get a set top box, as well as for (digital) satellite.
The article only mentions the 'cost per household' as a reason for switching the signal off. In reality, the reasons are even less enlightened: - the only service you got on analogue was the 3 public broadcasting channels, the 7(!) remaining national channels (not counting theme channels like MTV etc.) were never on analog, but only on (basic) cable and (basic) satellite[*]. As such, analogue service was already a joke. - In fact, gives The Netherlands small size, you were more likely to get good reception on German and English channels in a large portion of the country any way; the number of usuable channels was few - Given this, they want to reuse the frequencies for more regional services, like wimax and digital radio (which is even less successful than digital terrestrial TV because of its poor coverage).
[*] That's 10 general interest channels (comparable to networks) on a population of 16 million.
Let's see what his 10 year old has to say about it when he wants to play the latest PC games, copy music to his iPod using iTMS, and/or run software his friends are running.
Do you want kids at school to play the latest PC games, copy music and run their own software?
I'm sorry, I AM a K-12 admin for a fairly large school system (10,000 desktops) and we use Windows for several non-linux bashing reasons: Exchange, AD, compatibility with other districts, and price/support to staying the course as opposed to rebuilding everything.
AD is probably a good reason. Exchange, perhaps. Unspecified (openoffice?) compatibility? Meh. Strangely missing from your list though; downloading and copyin music, runnning games, etc.
A patent, once granted, is considered valid until proven - at great expense - otherwise. That's what my post said. There's no shortcut to disproving a patent, once granted, you have get involved in litigation - and only a fool will hit you with a lawsuit until the patent has been actually granted, since the whole purpose of patents is to be used as near-unimpeachable evidence in litigation. It's like a cop's evidence - good luck disproving it unless you happened to have the foresight to get the facts on videotape; the default assumption is they're right, and you're not.
The patent application phase precedes that. Now, you're right that in theory this is a stage where anyone who would later be inconvenienced by the patent is supposed to magically know about this and is able to levy objections and prior art, but this rarely happens, since keeping an eye on every patent application is absurdly difficult and expensive (which, incidentally, is why the patent offices do such a bad job at it, and they're funded by government..)
So, if someone has a patent on something you do, and sues you, whatcha gonna do? Duke it out in the courts, at great expense, or pay the protection money? (This is the reason submarine-patent litigation-shops sue small companies one at a time, building up their capital to sue bigger fish. If they sued all companies in breach of the patent at the same time, they might band together and pool their money to invalidate the patent).
Large corporations like Microsoft or IBM have patent portfolios they can use to sue all but the biggest and most powerful corporation (i.e. each other) out of existense. The only reason they don't do this is because it would come to attention of politics much quicker when they're hardballing, than the way they're currently using their portfolios as bargaining chips with the same endresults (but achieved over a longer course of time).
Mark Cuban made his money selling Broadcast.com to Yahoo, so is it possible he still has a stake in Yahoo and this is nothing more than a territorial piss and moan contest at the competition?
Of course. If he just wanted to make money out of Google's impending utter failure, he'd put his money where his mouth is not by sueing them, but by shorting the stock.
A business can be in two businesses. Verizon is both a webhost, which pretty much never qualify for 'common carrier' consideration, and it's in the internet tubing business, where its tubes transport god-knows-what. If the very same websites are hosted somewhere else tomorrow, Verizon will still carry their internets through their tubes (though the internets may arrive late, because of all the movies).
Likewise, theoretically "Pall Mall" and "Camel Club" clothing isn't advertising for cigarettes. And Microsoft's hardware division doesn't have to worry about being a monopolist.
Not that Verizons WANTS to be a Common Carrier. That would imply some sort of network neutrality. They would love to use inferior internet tubing for 'non monitored content', which might contain kiddy porn, as opposed to 'Verizon approved content', which they'd push to much wider tubes with higher pressure and less leaks.
I disagree. Never attribute to malice what you can attribute to idiocy, carelessness, ignorance, stupidity, incompetence, or laziness; particularly in combination with each other.
Never attribute to failure in technology that which can be adequately explained by human error. Grandparent poster merely stated that blaming the screens for getting un-calibrated is a cop out, which it is. Some flesh-and-blood human being coded the thing such that it malfunctions. It's probably just due to the way voting machines are made in the first place - bid on government contracts that pay millions of dollars, and have some 13-year old Vietnamese kid with no formal education put together the software to run on it. But blaming the screen??
Please don't tell me that's meant to be a pejorative. That a company is a monopolist over their own products. Please.
Many companies aren't monopolists over their own products because they manufacture or deal in things called 'commodoties'. Many companies try to de-commodotize their items, by using branding etc., but in the case of Sony, they actually are a party which has a great market power in some well-defined markets, where they have established vertical monopolies. You can't make PlayStation games without paying Sony, for example. Contrast this with making after-market parts for automobiles. In a market with only 3 major players, agressively imposing vertical restrictions can very easily spill over in predatory trade practices. With its playstation franchise, Sony is in a very different market from milk, grain, TV sets, speedboats, clothes, etc. etc.
You did realize the story was about playstation consoles, games and accesories, right?
Enter DJB's scheme. Now, my friend delivers 25,000 "you've got mail!" notifications. Then, he watches in horror as 9AM EDT rolls around and 5,000 of his customer's customers simultaneously try to fetch unique copies of the newsletter to read with their morning coffee. Repeat at 9AM CDT, MDT, and PDT. His choice is to get out of the newsletter delivery business, or spend $$$$ on vastly increasing his bandwidth.
Of course, you say this as if his newsletter doesn't contain any hyperlinks to http://yourfriendswebsite.com/ - most newsletters contain such references, and deal with the onslaught on the main website just fine.
That's not to say your example is wrong, but even so, the number of times people would be hit with problems from the reverse model would be limited. In fact, many subscribers will also neglect to fetch the actual newsletter's contents, saving your friend bandwidth as well.
The reverse model is already being used (even more inefficiently since many clients disregard ETAGs etc.) in RSS, and hasn't led to the end of the world.
In the end DJBs model doesn't solve much, because you'll still have to wade through an inbox filled with spammy mail headers, which is the biggest waste of time. In fact, spamfilters will be less effective because they won't have access to the message contents, and if they do, when they retrieve the contents, maybe they're getting a different version from when you retrieve the contents (or should the spamfilter fetch the message, and if not found to be spam, store it in your local mailbox? but then you're fetching the contents without human interaction again!)
Wraught with problems, it is. But the slashdot effect would be the least of its problems.
Lik-Sang was given the right to distribute products within a certain region, they broke the terms of their contract with sony and now they're closing their doors, and blaming it on sony.
1) the fact that those were the terms of the contract, doesn't mean those terms are legal (and not void) 2) if they are legal, they may not have been entered into voluntarily (Sony is a monopolist w.r.t. Sony products), this makes for a very shaky basis for a contract 3) if the above are taken as read, and the whole thing is legal, that doesn't mean Sony are right. If everything that is legal is right, then we can get rid of Congress because no law needs to be changed or written ever again! I'd posit that this is fairly unlikely.
Huh? Since when do companies make more money than they know what to do with? The profits are reinvested and/or end up with investors.
For a publically owned corporation, paying out dividends to stockholders is a bad thing. Why? Because it shows that you don't know what to do with your money! The thinking is that a corporation should be able to invest back in itself, and that investment should be the best investment it can make, otherwise it's obviously in the business of being a less wise investment than putting your money into something else. Basically, unless a corporation is shouting "come on! pump money into us! we know how to spend it for you!" it's showing a lack of selfconfidence.
That's why often corporations choose not to pay out dividends, but instead go on mergers&acquisitions hunt, launch vanity projects, etc.
Yahoo notes that there are 'no security risks' since they keep absolute control of usernames and passwords. [..] I forsee an explot being developed or maybe someone will just write a new "service" that makes use of Yahoo's systems that also happens to pass the username/pass to a more nafarious author.
No need for exploits, even.
When any random blog starts asking for your yahoo account and password, do you think people will even notice that some of them don't redirect to loginservicethingy.yahoo.com? Most people won't notice, and the web shall be littered with their credentials.
While impressive, the feat was accomplished over a single optical fiber using proprietary amplifiers not in production. It certainly is innovative, but it is not an indication of speeds you will see in consumer level services.
That goes without saying, right? It is, after all, a record. People don't usually turn to the Guinness book of world records for guidance on, say, what a realistic number of hotdogs is to consume within 12 minutes.
Now of course, greater bandwidth is cool and all, but 14 Tbps is obviously impractical for actual use, even in specialist medical imaging applications -- for the simple reason you couldn't fill up your harddrive (or even RAM) as quick as that!
On the one hand, he's probably right. On the other, you've got examples like paypal.com - they've basically been enronning their ways around banking laws for years and no one has sued them to oblivion for not having a license, stealing money, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Just to be pedantic, neither postscript nor PDF make that formatting guarantee either unless you embed all necessary fonts. Ask yourself how many people know how to do that.... :-)
OpenOffice.org embeds all fonts (subsetted) by default. So does PDFCreator or Distiller. I'd be hard pressed to come up with an example of a widely used pdf creation tool that doesn't.
1) "Emotiflags" is a brand new term. A search on Google only showed 5 hits, all of which were emoticon flags (as in country flags), not emotional flags like :) and :(
A word isn't patentable.
2) One of the biggest problems people have with email is that it doesn't convey emotion. If the use of this concept becomes commonplace, it could mean good things for email. Being able to look at the emotion prior to opening the message will mean a lot less miscommunication.
Which has no bearing on patentability.
3) While message forums have been doing this for ages, this is the first time I've seen it applied to email as some kind of header deta along with the to, from, subject, importance, etc.
That fact that message forums have been doing this for ages pretty much constitues prior art. And then there's the X-Face header used on usenet (where messages have a similar header structure to e-mail), which even includes the graphical data. That itself was a spin off from ideas from the ca 1985 Vismon/picons project at Bell Labs.
I think the correct legal term for why this would not constitute a novel, unobvious idea is "done to death".
Half of Belgium TV is French, all of it (French AND Dutch) seems rather crappy (CSI:whatever x7 and Big Brother VIPs)
At least it is Analog for all over-the-air, and all digital TV seems to be some poor-quality IPTV (Belgacom is REALLY bad).
I thought that "The Netherlands" (pl) were more than just Holland. Guess I was wrong?
Noord-Holland and South-Holland are provinces of The Netherlands (along with 10 others; Friesland, Zeeland, Gelderland, Utrecht, Flevoland, Noord-Brabant, Limburg, Groningen, Drenthe and Overijssel), which is an independent country.
Belgium is also an independent country. Some parts of Belgium, historically, have been incorporated in the territories of France and/or The Netherlands. The Dutch speaking part of Belgium (roughly) and The Netherlands are sometimes referred to collectively as the Low Countries, but mostly in historical terms.
Reception of Belgium analogue TV over the air is limited to the southern provinces, but Dutch language Belgium public TV stations can be received on basic cable troughout the country (unlike commercial TV from Belgium).
Actually, the state-supported media are more objective than any of the commercial channels.
Any club of people that can raise a significant number of members will get
public funding and can participate in the public channel. There are broadcasting organisations
with socialist, catholic, buddhist, islam, etc. backgrounds, and they all get their voice.
In addition to this, you have to realize
1) public broadcasters also feature advertising
2) it has been known for a public broadcaster to become a commercial broadcaster (veronica)
3) workers from failed commercial broadcasters have been known to rejoin the public system (tv10)
All of this mitigates the influence of government. (And the government money mitigates undue influence from advertisers).
The public broadcasters themselves are independent member-run organizations and can (and have) defied government positions. More successfully than the BBC has managed, for instance (turns out they were right about reports about Iraq's weapons being 'sexed up', but they didn't have the balls to say to the government 'you can put in a complaint like any regular citizen').
Additionally, public broadcasters are required by law to have editorial codes that guarantee editorial/journalistic independence for their employees - independence from both the government, advertisers AND the broadcaster itself. The journalist's trade union is always keen to complain about instances of this independence being threatened.
Getting impartial/non-partisan news is hardly the problem. The problem is that the news is either boring (especially the christian broadcasters, always yapping on about 'church matters' or, for some not well understood reason, every minute detail of the troubles in Israel) or alarmist and/or xenophobic drivel designed to compete with the commercial channels.
1. It's NETHERLAND.
No, it's The Netherlands. Plural, and with an article.
2. It's not a tiny country, Luxembourg is.
No, The Holy See is!
3. Germany, Denmark, France and England don't broadcast in Dutch.
But Belgium does. Besides, we're used to US movies and series broadcast in English, albeit with subtitles.
This is more death of free media. If the only FTA transmissions you can get are either state-sponsored or state-supported, how can you reliably get news?
The analogue broadcast that was switched off was these same handful of channels - which will now be FTA on the (as of yet crappy) digital network. The commercial channels were never broadcast on the analogue network at all.
If you splash for a dish, you can get a card that will decrypt both the public broadcasters as well as the commercial channels for a one time fee.
Even if the commercial channels were FTA, you'd still need equipment to receive them. Plus, you pay for the public broadcasters via taxes (though you're now not paying for analogue over the air distribution anymore). TANSTAAFL.
So what about cars and portable TVs? I'm guessing a market will emerge for portable set top boxes / converters.
a) there are few, if any, cars with TV sets in them. The primary market for in-vehicle TV is for truckdrivers. These have had to deal with quite some advertising over the past year for both digital terrestrial as satellite sets - the latter make most sense seeing as most truckers drive internationally (being a small country, The Netherlands is one of the world's leaders when it comes to the amount of territory outside its borders).
b) portable TVs are fucked
c) digital sets are pretty much non-existant, for terrestrial digital you always get a set top box, as well as for (digital) satellite.
The article only mentions the 'cost per household' as a reason for switching the signal off. In reality, the reasons are even less enlightened:
- the only service you got on analogue was the 3 public broadcasting channels, the 7(!) remaining national channels (not counting theme channels like MTV etc.) were never on analog, but only on (basic) cable and (basic) satellite[*]. As such, analogue service was already a joke.
- In fact, gives The Netherlands small size, you were more likely to get good reception on German and English channels in a large portion of the country any way; the number of usuable channels was few
- Given this, they want to reuse the frequencies for more regional services, like wimax and digital radio (which is even less successful than digital terrestrial TV because of its poor coverage).
[*] That's 10 general interest channels (comparable to networks) on a population of 16 million.
Let's see what his 10 year old has to say about it when he wants to play the latest PC games, copy music to his iPod using iTMS, and/or run software his friends are running.
Do you want kids at school to play the latest PC games, copy music and run their own software?
I'm sorry, I AM a K-12 admin for a fairly large school system (10,000 desktops) and we use Windows for several non-linux bashing reasons: Exchange, AD, compatibility with other districts, and price/support to staying the course as opposed to rebuilding everything.
AD is probably a good reason. Exchange, perhaps. Unspecified (openoffice?) compatibility? Meh. Strangely missing from your list though; downloading and copyin music, runnning games, etc.
The detectors described in the article are built by Laser Technology Inc.,
Wow, what a name. Wonder how they came up with it? I guess they're just creative.
Yeah, but that name was already taken.
He has a valid point - the law is hypocrital.
The Feds should ALSO be banned from using cell phone jammers.
A patent, once granted, is considered valid until proven - at great expense - otherwise. That's what my post said. There's no shortcut to disproving a patent, once granted, you have get involved in litigation - and only a fool will hit you with a lawsuit until the patent has been actually granted, since the whole purpose of patents is to be used as near-unimpeachable evidence in litigation. It's like a cop's evidence - good luck disproving it unless you happened to have the foresight to get the facts on videotape; the default assumption is they're right, and you're not.
The patent application phase precedes that. Now, you're right that in theory this is a stage where anyone who would later be inconvenienced by the patent is supposed to magically know about this and is able to levy objections and prior art, but this rarely happens, since keeping an eye on every patent application is absurdly difficult and expensive (which, incidentally, is why the patent offices do such a bad job at it, and they're funded by government..)
So, if someone has a patent on something you do, and sues you, whatcha gonna do? Duke it out in the courts, at great expense, or pay the protection money? (This is the reason submarine-patent litigation-shops sue small companies one at a time, building up their capital to sue bigger fish. If they sued all companies in breach of the patent at the same time, they might band together and pool their money to invalidate the patent).
Large corporations like Microsoft or IBM have patent portfolios they can use to sue all but the biggest and most powerful corporation (i.e. each other) out of existense. The only reason they don't do this is because it would come to attention of politics much quicker when they're hardballing, than the way they're currently using their portfolios as bargaining chips with the same endresults (but achieved over a longer course of time).
The patent system is so broken (even MS admits it) that Linux is very probably infringing thousand of Microsoft patents.
Thousands of Microsoft patents, or thousands of valid Microsoft patents?
The patent system is so broken.. it doesn't matter. Patents are considered valid until proven - at great expense - otherwise.
Mark Cuban made his money selling Broadcast.com to Yahoo, so is it possible he still has a stake in Yahoo and this is nothing more than a territorial piss and moan contest at the competition?
Of course. If he just wanted to make money out of Google's impending utter failure, he'd put his money where his mouth is not by sueing them, but by shorting the stock.
A business can be in two businesses. Verizon is both a webhost, which pretty much never qualify for 'common carrier' consideration, and it's in the internet tubing business, where its tubes transport god-knows-what. If the very same websites are hosted somewhere else tomorrow, Verizon will still carry their internets through their tubes (though the internets may arrive late, because of all the movies).
Likewise, theoretically "Pall Mall" and "Camel Club" clothing isn't advertising for cigarettes. And Microsoft's hardware division doesn't have to worry about being a monopolist.
Not that Verizons WANTS to be a Common Carrier. That would imply some sort of network neutrality. They would love to use inferior internet tubing for 'non monitored content', which might contain kiddy porn, as opposed to 'Verizon approved content', which they'd push to much wider tubes with higher pressure and less leaks.
I disagree. Never attribute to malice what you can attribute to idiocy, carelessness, ignorance, stupidity, incompetence, or laziness; particularly in combination with each other.
Never attribute to failure in technology that which can be adequately explained by human error.
Grandparent poster merely stated that blaming the screens for getting un-calibrated is a cop out, which it is.
Some flesh-and-blood human being coded the thing such that it malfunctions.
It's probably just due to the way voting machines are made in the first place - bid on government contracts that pay millions of dollars, and have some 13-year old Vietnamese kid with no formal education put together the software to run on it.
But blaming the screen??
I think Nelson phrased it best..
"Hah-hah!"
I am of course referring to Nelson off of The Simpsons, not the the admiral, or the guy from South Africa..
Well, we haven't had a terrorist attack on our soil in 6 years.
And I have, in my pocket, a rock that keeps away tigers.
See?
No tigers.
Sony is a monopolist w.r.t. Sony products
Please don't tell me that's meant to be a pejorative. That a company is a monopolist over their own products. Please.
Many companies aren't monopolists over their own products because they manufacture or deal in things called 'commodoties'. Many companies try to de-commodotize their items, by using branding etc., but in the case of Sony, they actually are a party which has a great market power in some well-defined markets, where they have established vertical monopolies. You can't make PlayStation games without paying Sony, for example. Contrast this with making after-market parts for automobiles. In a market with only 3 major players, agressively imposing vertical restrictions can very easily spill over in predatory trade practices. With its playstation franchise, Sony is in a very different market from milk, grain, TV sets, speedboats, clothes, etc. etc.
You did realize the story was about playstation consoles, games and accesories, right?
Enter DJB's scheme. Now, my friend delivers 25,000 "you've got mail!" notifications. Then, he watches in horror as 9AM EDT rolls around and 5,000 of his customer's customers simultaneously try to fetch unique copies of the newsletter to read with their morning coffee. Repeat at 9AM CDT, MDT, and PDT. His choice is to get out of the newsletter delivery business, or spend $$$$ on vastly increasing his bandwidth.
Of course, you say this as if his newsletter doesn't contain any hyperlinks to http://yourfriendswebsite.com/ - most newsletters contain such references, and deal with the onslaught on the main website just fine.
That's not to say your example is wrong, but even so, the number of times people would be hit with problems from the reverse model would be limited. In fact, many subscribers will also neglect to fetch the actual newsletter's contents, saving your friend bandwidth as well.
The reverse model is already being used (even more inefficiently since many clients disregard ETAGs etc.) in RSS, and hasn't led to the end of the world.
In the end DJBs model doesn't solve much, because you'll still have to wade through an inbox filled with spammy mail headers, which is the biggest waste of time. In fact, spamfilters will be less effective because they won't have access to the message contents, and if they do, when they retrieve the contents, maybe they're getting a different version from when you retrieve the contents (or should the spamfilter fetch the message, and if not found to be spam, store it in your local mailbox? but then you're fetching the contents without human interaction again!)
Wraught with problems, it is. But the slashdot effect would be the least of its problems.
Sony was right to do what they did in this case.
Lik-Sang was given the right to distribute products within a certain region, they broke the terms of their contract with sony and now they're closing their doors, and blaming it on sony.
1) the fact that those were the terms of the contract, doesn't mean those terms are legal (and not void)
2) if they are legal, they may not have been entered into voluntarily (Sony is a monopolist w.r.t. Sony products), this makes for a very shaky basis for a contract
3) if the above are taken as read, and the whole thing is legal, that doesn't mean Sony are right. If everything that is legal is right, then we can get rid of Congress because no law needs to be changed or written ever again! I'd posit that this is fairly unlikely.
Um... you are aware of how Spamhaus's list is distributed, right?
People who use spamhaus usually have some inkling how DNS works (being, for example, ISPs).
They can just add spamhaus to their hints file.
Huh? Since when do companies make more money than they know what to do with? The profits are reinvested and/or end up with investors.
For a publically owned corporation, paying out dividends to stockholders is a bad thing. Why? Because it shows that you don't know what to do with your money! The thinking is that a corporation should be able to invest back in itself, and that investment should be the best investment it can make, otherwise it's obviously in the business of being a less wise investment than putting your money into something else. Basically, unless a corporation is shouting "come on! pump money into us! we know how to spend it for you!" it's showing a lack of selfconfidence.
That's why often corporations choose not to pay out dividends, but instead go on mergers&acquisitions hunt, launch vanity projects, etc.
Yahoo notes that there are 'no security risks' since they keep absolute control of usernames and passwords.
[..]
I forsee an explot being developed or maybe someone will just write a new "service" that makes use of Yahoo's systems that also happens to pass the username/pass to a more nafarious author.
No need for exploits, even.
When any random blog starts asking for your yahoo account and password, do you think people will even notice that some of them don't redirect to loginservicethingy.yahoo.com? Most people won't notice, and the web shall be littered with their credentials.
While impressive, the feat was accomplished over a single optical fiber using proprietary amplifiers not in production. It certainly is innovative, but it is not an indication of speeds you will see in consumer level services.
That goes without saying, right? It is, after all, a record. People don't usually turn to the Guinness book of world records for guidance on, say, what a realistic number of hotdogs is to consume within 12 minutes.
Now of course, greater bandwidth is cool and all, but 14 Tbps is obviously impractical for actual use, even in specialist medical imaging applications -- for the simple reason you couldn't fill up your harddrive (or even RAM) as quick as that!
On the one hand, he's probably right.
On the other, you've got examples like paypal.com - they've basically been enronning their ways around banking laws for years and no one has sued them to oblivion for not having a license, stealing money, etc.