It's just amazing to me that content control freaks can actually impede the progress of broadband network access in the U.S., yet people still oppose vigorous anti-trust enforcement (e.g., keeping the same people who collude to control content from colluding to control the pipes) and campaign finance reform (i.e., the outright purchase from legsliators of a desired regulatory environment).
BTW: I know the blurb above says that regulatory issues aren't the problem, but I don't buy it - not while content-control interests can buy something like the DMCA.
And of course, I can't get to the article at the post - likely because they can't get enough cheap, high-bandwidth connections. Who says irony is dead?
A UNANIMOUS COURT ruled that Ella Williams' partial disability did not obligate her employer, car manufacturer Toyota, to tailor a job to suit her wrist, arm and shoulder problems.
So companies can require people to perform jobs that are injurous to them? I know the Libertarian readers will probably just respond by saying, "Get a job that's not on an assembly line", but then they probably have sufficient education and wealth that they can actually get other kinds of work.
Isn't OSHA supposed to step in somewhere? Do companies actually not realize that it's in their interest to attempt to ensure that their workers' jobs can be performed without injuring them?
Also from the article:
Disability cannot be assessed by looking only at someone's fitness to work, the court said.
So pursuing a livelihood doesn't meet the ADA criterion of "major life activity"?
ZeoSync said its scientific team had succeeded on a small scale...
The company's claims, which are yet to be demonstrated in any public forum...
...if ZeoSync's formulae succeed in scaling up...
Call the editors at Wired... I think we have an early nominee for the 2k2 vaporware list.
ZeoSync expects to overcome the existing temporal restraints of its technology
Ah... So even if it's not outright bullshit, it's too slow to use?
"Either this research is the next 'Cold Fusion' scam that dies away or it's the foundation for a Nobel Prize," said David Hill...
Somehow I think this is going to turn out more Pons-and-Fleischmann than Watson-and-Crick. Almost anytime there's a press release with such startling claims but no peer review or public demonstration, someone has forgotten to stir the jar.
When they become laughingstocks, and their careers are forever wrecked, I hope they realized they deserve it. And I hope their investors sue them.
I should really post after I've had my coffee... I sound mean...
Hmm... Didn't see SimNeighborhood (or whatever the hell it was that EA & Maxis were going to call the game on the scale in-between SimCity and The Sims) mentioned anywhere. Seems good for at least an honorable mention, no?
Then there was also <insert Microsoft slam here>. And don't forget <insert Sun's latest Java-enabled pipe dream> - I mean, who couldn't see that coming!
"Giving away the software of failed companies could turn every corporate failure into a disaster for everyone else."
This comment would actually make sense if the recent storm of software company failures had anything to do with the software. While in many cases I'm sure it did, in many more cases it had to do with reliance on leveraged financing or a management team that hadn't yet successfully wrapped up puberty. Also, a lot of companies turned out software that should have been Open Source in the first place - cool and occassionally useful stuff that nobody was willing to pay for, but that could have raised the writers' profile in the community.
I also cc:ed lmcinnis@boston.com, who is apparently somehow personally responsible for all this.
To whom it may concern:
I just had the single most annoying experience I have ever had on the web. These benighted spawn of the popup-window, "Shoshkeles", effectively bar me from viewing content until they're done pushing for the duration of their existence on the screen - that is to say, they impede me from doing what I came to the site to do in the first place.
I'm a Boston resident with great interest in the local news, local events, and the arts - but you may be assured that I'll be going elsewhere online or (dare I say it?) to a newspaper for my local information needs until this damned nuisance is removed from the pages of Boston.com. I will also not purchase products or services pushed at me in this manner.
To drive the point home again: Stopping me from doing what I came to the site to do is not going to amuse me or inform me, it is going to annoy me. Keeping me from viewing the information the site offers is not going to endear me of either the site or the wares advertised in this manner.
- Brad Heintz
Well, since I can't get to the site, I don't have the whole story. But if CRC sued this site because, for example, it contained values for natural constants (pi, e, Planck's constant, etc.) that also happened to be published in the CRC handbook, then it raises the question: Does the CRC own numbers that they didn't make up (though they may have put in effort calculating or measuring them to some precision)?
It strikes me that if this in fact what happened, then the CRC was crassly trying to remove free-as-in-beer competition through a frivolous lawsuit, by claiming to own a copyright on the basic physical and mathematical constants.
So, to answer your question, it does relate to your rights, because it's yet another story about how well-monied corporations try to restrict speech on the net by suing those who speak in ways they don't like, and hoping that the financial burden of pursuing the suit will cause the speaker to give in.
If that doesn't make it clear for you, then I suggest you put up a large and well-documented website devoted to exposing abuses of corporate power by some large and litigious corporation (Walmart, Sony, any of the big names will do), and see if you feel empowered when you get the first letter from their lawyers.
You know, at first I was telling myself, "Well, at least this isn't the Sedition Act or internment camps." But upon closer reading, I'm not sure.
The lack of judicial oversight, the broadened definition of "terrorism" to include common civil disobedience tactics, and the ability to continue surveillance after it's no longer useful to an investigation all sounds tailor-made for keeping tabs on and incarcerating political dissidents.
Time to waste more postage on my representatives...
Depends where the logger is peeking - if it's watching down closer to the hardware, that might work. If it's watching keystroke messages going to a particular window, that would almost certainly fail.
Now that the DOJ has been ordered to back off, I can't see that the Supreme Court appeal is anything but a pro forma attempt to keep from having to negotiate which wrist gets slapped. Painful though it is to say, although I'd normally rejoice at Microsoft's misfortune, this barely even rates as news.
Microsoft: Who do you want to sell your domestic policy to today?
The cards are a fucking cheat anyway - I mean, if you can give me a lower price, just give me the lower price, damn it!
This, above all, is the saddest thing about the HomeRuns/WebVan/insert-failed-groceries-over-the-n et-company-here failures - that grocery stores still aren't subject to enough price competition through side-by-side price comparison that they can get away with giving people price breaks for giving up their privacy.
Are the Dutch members of NATO? Just curious... I mean, even a few pictures of the interior (bridge, sonar room, engine spaces, etc.) could be a major intelligence win if one were of that disposition.
...my favorite part of this article was reading JonKatz calling someone else a pompous gasbag.
Katz-bashing aside (fun though it is), I don't see where it comes as a surprise that a major media outlet would do this. If they thought they could get away with it, they'd be airing the knife incident thrice nightly and charging Superbowl prices for ad time. They apparently don't think they can get that past the FCC and the angry parents, though, so they'll do it on the 'Net, and charge what the market will bear.
The only way to stop it, of course, is to either censor it - a bad idea, I'm sure most of us agree - or somehow get people to tune out such trash in favor of better programming.
What I find intriguing about this is what might happen if (read: when) someone with an underdeveloped sense of ethics tries a similar technique on humans. I've read a few articles about how modern humans may not have derived strictly from the Cro-Magnon strain, but by miscegenation between Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals. Ethical questions aside, it would be an intersting window into human origins, and could clear up more than one debate on the subject...
Ethical questions not aside, that really squicks me. Someday they'll be able to run just such an experiment and bring a "retro-hybrid" fetus of that sort to term. And what do you do with a kinda-sorta-human living experiment like that? Terminate it when you're finished with the experiment? Raise it as part of a regular human family? Raise it in a Skinner box? Put it on a subway in Brooklyn and see who notices?
Judge Patel appears to lack the technicall savvy of say, Judge Jackson - he clearly has no clue what he's asking for. The only really reliable way to ensure this would be to only allow users to swap authorized files with, for example, known names, sizes, and MD5 checkums.
He should really have appointed a special master to help him deal with the technical issues (which are clearly over his head).
Of course, the other explanation is that he's in someone's pocket. Hmm... Are judges required to give disclosure of their personal finances - investments and all that?
Anyway, I have to bet this will get overturned by any half-bright appeals court.
The article was a little light on technical details. Does anyone know if they were using interferometric GPS or what? I know that was supposed to get down to ~2mm resolution...
Slashdot Mirror
BTW: I know the blurb above says that regulatory issues aren't the problem, but I don't buy it - not while content-control interests can buy something like the DMCA.
And of course, I can't get to the article at the post - likely because they can't get enough cheap, high-bandwidth connections. Who says irony is dead?
OK,
- B
Isn't OSHA supposed to step in somewhere? Do companies actually not realize that it's in their interest to attempt to ensure that their workers' jobs can be performed without injuring them?
Also from the article:
So pursuing a livelihood doesn't meet the ADA criterion of "major life activity"?OK,
- B
See you all later - I have some coding to do!
OK,
- B
The company's claims, which are yet to be demonstrated in any public forum...
Call the editors at Wired... I think we have an early nominee for the 2k2 vaporware list.
ZeoSync expects to overcome the existing temporal restraints of its technology
Ah... So even if it's not outright bullshit, it's too slow to use?
"Either this research is the next 'Cold Fusion' scam that dies away or it's the foundation for a Nobel Prize," said David Hill...
Somehow I think this is going to turn out more Pons-and-Fleischmann than Watson-and-Crick. Almost anytime there's a press release with such startling claims but no peer review or public demonstration, someone has forgotten to stir the jar.
When they become laughingstocks, and their careers are forever wrecked, I hope they realized they deserve it. And I hope their investors sue them.
I should really post after I've had my coffee... I sound mean...
OK,
- B
OK,
- B
OK,
- B
Then there was also <insert Microsoft slam here>. And don't forget <insert Sun's latest Java-enabled pipe dream> - I mean, who couldn't see that coming!
OK,
- B
This comment would actually make sense if the recent storm of software company failures had anything to do with the software. While in many cases I'm sure it did, in many more cases it had to do with reliance on leveraged financing or a management team that hadn't yet successfully wrapped up puberty. Also, a lot of companies turned out software that should have been Open Source in the first place - cool and occassionally useful stuff that nobody was willing to pay for, but that could have raised the writers' profile in the community.
Just my US$2e-02.
OK,
- B
I also cc:ed lmcinnis@boston.com, who is apparently somehow personally responsible for all this. To whom it may concern: I just had the single most annoying experience I have ever had on the web. These benighted spawn of the popup-window, "Shoshkeles", effectively bar me from viewing content until they're done pushing for the duration of their existence on the screen - that is to say, they impede me from doing what I came to the site to do in the first place. I'm a Boston resident with great interest in the local news, local events, and the arts - but you may be assured that I'll be going elsewhere online or (dare I say it?) to a newspaper for my local information needs until this damned nuisance is removed from the pages of Boston.com. I will also not purchase products or services pushed at me in this manner. To drive the point home again: Stopping me from doing what I came to the site to do is not going to amuse me or inform me, it is going to annoy me. Keeping me from viewing the information the site offers is not going to endear me of either the site or the wares advertised in this manner. - Brad Heintz
It strikes me that if this in fact what happened, then the CRC was crassly trying to remove free-as-in-beer competition through a frivolous lawsuit, by claiming to own a copyright on the basic physical and mathematical constants.
So, to answer your question, it does relate to your rights, because it's yet another story about how well-monied corporations try to restrict speech on the net by suing those who speak in ways they don't like, and hoping that the financial burden of pursuing the suit will cause the speaker to give in.
If that doesn't make it clear for you, then I suggest you put up a large and well-documented website devoted to exposing abuses of corporate power by some large and litigious corporation (Walmart, Sony, any of the big names will do), and see if you feel empowered when you get the first letter from their lawyers.
OK,
- B
Sorry, just had to get that one out of my system.
OK,
- B
The lack of judicial oversight, the broadened definition of "terrorism" to include common civil disobedience tactics, and the ability to continue surveillance after it's no longer useful to an investigation all sounds tailor-made for keeping tabs on and incarcerating political dissidents.
Time to waste more postage on my representatives...
OK,
- B
Just my $2e-02.
OK,
- B
OK,
- B
Yet.
OK,
- B
Well, there's that, too.
Microsoft: Who do you want to sell your domestic policy to today?
OK,
- B
This, above all, is the saddest thing about the HomeRuns/WebVan/insert-failed-groceries-over-the-n et-company-here failures - that grocery stores still aren't subject to enough price competition through side-by-side price comparison that they can get away with giving people price breaks for giving up their privacy.
OK, I'm done peeving now.
OK,
- B
OK,
- B
And does anyone know if that link is incorrect in some way? My DNS can't resolve it.
OK,
- B
--
For info on local quake risk: enter your zipcode.
OK,
- B
--
Katz-bashing aside (fun though it is), I don't see where it comes as a surprise that a major media outlet would do this. If they thought they could get away with it, they'd be airing the knife incident thrice nightly and charging Superbowl prices for ad time. They apparently don't think they can get that past the FCC and the angry parents, though, so they'll do it on the 'Net, and charge what the market will bear.
The only way to stop it, of course, is to either censor it - a bad idea, I'm sure most of us agree - or somehow get people to tune out such trash in favor of better programming.
Yeah, right.
OK,
- B
--
Ethical questions not aside, that really squicks me. Someday they'll be able to run just such an experiment and bring a "retro-hybrid" fetus of that sort to term. And what do you do with a kinda-sorta-human living experiment like that? Terminate it when you're finished with the experiment? Raise it as part of a regular human family? Raise it in a Skinner box? Put it on a subway in Brooklyn and see who notices?
Weird weird weird.
OK,
- B
--
He should really have appointed a special master to help him deal with the technical issues (which are clearly over his head).
Of course, the other explanation is that he's in someone's pocket. Hmm... Are judges required to give disclosure of their personal finances - investments and all that?
Anyway, I have to bet this will get overturned by any half-bright appeals court.
Just my US$2e-02,
- B
--
OK,
- B
--