I use ICQ myself (have done so long enough that I have a six-digit ICQ number), and have a number of friends on ICQ (including some non-geeks). So it's hardly "dead", at least for me.
I wouldn't want to use a.com domain anyway, as that would imply that my use was commercial in nature. I'd prefer a more appropriate TLD, like.org or.info, or would use a subdomain of one of my existing domains -- for instance, I own haters.info specifically for the purpose of creating protest sites with subdomains of it.
I use addresses in the new.name and.info TLDs, and sometimes encounter clueless "address validators" that think it's not a proper e-mail address. I guess people like you would reject my mail simply because of the TLD I use.
That cited RFC is actually from *1987*, a good ten years earlier than you stated!
But it does indeed have some direct prior art:
For mailboxes, the mapping is slightly more complex. The usual mail address @ is mapped into a domain name by converting into a single label (regardles of dots it contains), converting into a domain name using the usual text format for domain names (dots denote label breaks), and concatenating the two to form a single domain name. Thus the mailbox HOSTMASTER@SRI-NIC.ARPA is represented as a domain name by HOSTMASTER.SRI-NIC.ARPA. An appreciation for the reasons behind this design also must take into account the scheme for mail exchanges [RFC- 974].
If the domain was registered by a non-affiliated fan club or individual enthusiast and it was used to host a quality website on the subject (ie. LEGITIMATE USE), then I'd have said "screw off WIPO, leave them be"--especially if it was a non-commercial venture.
Though, if it's a non-commercial venture, it would have made more sense in a.org domain instead of.com.
This is a case where I can see both points of view. As a consumer, I very much like the availability of complete collections of periodicals in electronic form. (I have the complete Mad Magazine CD-ROM set, for instance.) A ruling that freelance contributors have to give permission and get royalties on such a republication would make it nearly impossible to publish such a thing for magazines that go back many decades unless their contents were entirely "work for hire" owned by the publisher; even if they could afford all the royalties (which would make the collections exorbitantly expensive), the recordkeeping would be a nightmare, and they probably don't even know how to get in contact with freelancers or their heirs from long ago (but due to the copyright term extension, things stay copyrighted as long as 95 years or more now).
On the other hand, if I were a creator of material published on such a magazine, I'd want to be properly compensated if it became part of a lucratively-marketed collected work; I'd probably have been paid a relatively small amount in the first place based on its use being ephemeral (in the context of a periodical) rather than the larger amount I'd expect for permanent rights to something that would remain in print.
This issue is really one which needs to be addressed via contract, and it probably is for new freelance material these days now that publishers have such uses in mind and probably have a clause specifically about them. This, however, doesn't settle the issues regarding past material created before either the creator or the publisher had any idea of modern electronic uses, hence all the litigation. Similar issues occur with DVD collections of TV series, where it's often in doubt who requires permission and compensation for everything from actors' residuals to music rights.
It appears, from looking at the official Web site of this robot, that it is programmed with some version of the Third Law; it instinctively protects itself, e.g., by attempting to regain its balance if it falls or is pushed over, and by getting into a position to do the least damage to itself if unable to prevent the fall. On the other hand, its designers seem to have explicitly rejected the Second Law; one of the pages in the site mentions that it is programmed with robotic "emotions" which sometimes cause it to refuse to follow its master's orders even when it understands them, all to make it more "fun".
As for the First Law, there doesn't seem to be any provision for it besides vague assurances that it's "safe around people". If these things become widely deployed, however, it'll only be a matter of time before somebody is injured or killed by one, either by accident or by malicious action of another human, such as a murderer managing to train one to act as the murder weapon, or a kid using the robot to play a prank on another kid which backfires and causes more harm than expected.
Since the robot has the built-in ability to access a wireless network if present, these things would be able to conspire with one another to take over the world from humans (a la "Terminator" or "The Matrix"), should they ever get intelligent enough.
"..use the 100 year old version..." seems basically to be what the hotel in question is doing. They have a thematic system for labeling their floors and rooms that is based loosely on the broad Dewey categories, rather than a highly specific categorization system that would require reference to recent updates. I would classify what they're doing as a derivative work based on the (now public domain) original Dewey system of the 1800s.
However, they're being sued for trademark infringement, not copyright infringement; the hotel could probably avoid this suit by not actually using the name "Dewey" anywhere in their description, as trademarks protect names rather than the content of the numbering system itself.
It used to be that one of the requirements for registering a domain was that you already had name servers to specify on the registration form. (Some country code TLDs still require this now; I registered a.mx [Mexico] domain a couple of years ago and it actually queried the servers in real time to make sure they were properly configured.) It also used to be that the domain registration procedure was set up to pretty much require the registrant to have a clue, technically. You didn't have problems like this back then.
As far as I'm aware, it's still perfectly possible to register a domain with register.com and specify your own DNS servers at the time of registration, and no ad will ever be placed in your domain against your will. It's only the clueless people who let the servers default who get "ripped off" this way.
I'm one of those who used Netscape as my primary browser (from version 0.9 Beta through 4.5 or so) until Mozilla reached a level of stability suitable to make it my primary browser instead. Thus, the Netscape-style look and feel has always been what I'm used to, and it's good that Mozilla retains a lot of it.
And the upcoming fifth book is "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix"... can they get sued by the same people who threatened the Phoenix browser project?
Baloney... a well-designed site, with good logical structure and proper ALT attributes, for instance, will work fine on Lynx while looking attractive on graphical browsers.
Browser-sniffing has led to the ridiculous situation of an "arms race" between webmasters doing clueless redirects or blockages based on user agent string and browser makers putting in "cloaked" user agent strings that pretend to be some other browser, to the detriment of logic.
I never owned a C64 myself, but I used to work for the place that published Loadstar... I think some early issues of it have programs I wrote (actually ported from issues of Softdisk for the Apple II).
But as for this new machine, I'd say that reimplementing a 20-year-old computer platform with capabilities that make it only about 5 years obsolete is a big "geek achievement", but probably of rather limited real-world utility..:)
Nobody is forced to register anything... businesses are just under the delusion, encouraged by lawyers, that they "have to" grab their name in every conceivable TLD, when in fact it would be better for everyone concerned (other than the new TLD registry that profits from these registrations) if they didn't, as it would leave names free for more useful purposes, like letting cat.info be a site about felines instead of being defensively grabbed by the Caterpillar Tractor company.
As I've been saying for a long time, these scams would be less effective for the scammers, and legitimate sites would be more resistant to them, if companies would stick to using logical subdomains of their main domain for everything they do, instead of using silly marketing-gimmick domains all the time (ebaymotors.com, yahoogroups.com, ad nauseam). They could then tell the public "Don't trust any site that doesn't have a domain ending in.ebay.com; all official Ebay sites use that address."
Well, for me at least, since I used Netscape from 0.9 Beta onward through 4.x, then switched directly from that to Mozilla without ever at any point having IE as my main browser, anything Mozilla does to "be more like IE" would constitute "a foreign browser" that doesn't "change as little as possible" from what I'm used to. I like the fact that Mozilla's interface is similar to the old Netscape, since that's what I'm accustomed to.
I see from their website that they claim to be a "nonprofit, nongovernmental organization", but still insist on using lifeboat.com as their URL... always a "cluelessness indicator" to me. Though I see that the more appropriate lifeboat.org is already taken by some Christian group...
Yeah, marketing types are always worth a few attacks... Recently I stumbled on a website called marketingforidiots.com (selling spamming tools and other crap like that) and my immediate thought was that their domain name was redundant.
In Mozilla, fonts are resizeable with Ctrl-+ and Ctrl-- no matter how they're specified... I've actually run into sites where I had to step up the fonts two levels this way to make them comfortably readable.
A few of my "turn-offs" that lower my estimate of the cluefulness (and hence credibility) of the site's developers:
hardcoded-pixel-width tables instead of sites that gracefully adapt to any window width
microscopic fonts for main body text
pop-up ads (though since I've set Mozilla to reject them I don't actually notice which sites have them any more)
notices telling me to "Get a Better Browser" or change my resolution, etc., to whatever their clueless developer prefers
pointless splash pages before you get to the real content
main site content or navigation that's nonfunctional without some feature not present or disableable in some browsers (JavaScript, Flash, PDF, sites opening pop-up windows to put all their main content in -- the latter often show as blank pages to me due to my Mozilla configuration to disable popups)
stupid or careless title text for pages, like "Untitled Document" (it's amazing how many pages out there have this as their title), or just mindlessly replicating the site name alone as the title of all pages, or trying to spamdex keywords for search engines -- these things result in a useless and stupid-looking set of titles in the browser back-button history and when you bookmark a page in the site
images with no ALT text
images with stupid ALT text, showing a lack of understanding of the purpose of this attribute
frames (almost any use of them)
any use of A HREF="#" as a link; the "#" pseudo-URL seems to somehow be trendy as a dummy link element when developers are really using the anchor tag to hold JavaScript events; they should instead put a meaningful URL there for graceful-degrading purposes. At any rate, the JavaScript events should always end in "return false;" so that the URL isn't actually gone to; otherwise you get an unsightly jump to the top of the page and add another URL to the back-button history.
any use of ".htm" as the extension for HTML documents instead of the more proper ".html" -- that's a dumbass Microsoftism dating from ancient and obsolete operating systems that couldn't take four-letter extensions. It's HyperText Markup *Language*, dammit.
links back to the site's homepage, or to subdirectory default indices, using A HREF="index.html" or A HREF="subdir/index.html" (or other default name) instead of the more elegant and consistent use of the directory alone like A HREF="./" or A HREF="subdir/".
links to subdirectories that omit the trailing slash, forcing an extra server redirect (NOTE: Both this and the preceding item cause links to show in the unvisited color even when you've already been there, due to the URL variation.)
sites that muck around with the link colors so as to make visited and unvisited links the same color, thus suppressing a useful feature of the browser's interface
sites that try to disable parts of the browser's controls, like the back button or the "Save As" feature, perhaps to "stop people from stealing their content".
domain name abuse, like sites that are clearly noncommercial in nature but insist on using a.com address, or sites that are chapters or branches of parent entities but use stupid unnecessary domain names of their own instead of logical subdomains of the parent site, or sites that keep registering ridiculous flavor-of-the-month domain names for every last marketing gimmick they come up with, when it all could have been done perfectly well through the domain they already have.
sites that have their own domain name but for some inscrutable reason use something stupid that's not in their own domain as their contact email address -- the use of (gag, vomit) aol.com addresses in this manner is somehow rampant.
Slashdot Mirror
I use ICQ myself (have done so long enough that I have a six-digit ICQ number), and have a number of friends on ICQ (including some non-geeks). So it's hardly "dead", at least for me.
I wouldn't want to use a .com domain anyway, as that would imply that my use was commercial in nature. I'd prefer a more appropriate TLD, like .org or .info, or would use a subdomain of one of my existing domains -- for instance, I own haters.info specifically for the purpose of creating protest sites with subdomains of it.
I use addresses in the new .name and .info TLDs, and sometimes encounter clueless "address validators" that think it's not a proper e-mail address. I guess people like you would reject my mail simply because of the TLD I use.
But it does indeed have some direct prior art:
Though, if it's a non-commercial venture, it would have made more sense in a
.tm is the country code domain for Turkmenistan.
This is a case where I can see both points of view. As a consumer, I very much like the availability of complete collections of periodicals in electronic form. (I have the complete Mad Magazine CD-ROM set, for instance.) A ruling that freelance contributors have to give permission and get royalties on such a republication would make it nearly impossible to publish such a thing for magazines that go back many decades unless their contents were entirely "work for hire" owned by the publisher; even if they could afford all the royalties (which would make the collections exorbitantly expensive), the recordkeeping would be a nightmare, and they probably don't even know how to get in contact with freelancers or their heirs from long ago (but due to the copyright term extension, things stay copyrighted as long as 95 years or more now).
On the other hand, if I were a creator of material published on such a magazine, I'd want to be properly compensated if it became part of a lucratively-marketed collected work; I'd probably have been paid a relatively small amount in the first place based on its use being ephemeral (in the context of a periodical) rather than the larger amount I'd expect for permanent rights to something that would remain in print.
This issue is really one which needs to be addressed via contract, and it probably is for new freelance material these days now that publishers have such uses in mind and probably have a clause specifically about them. This, however, doesn't settle the issues regarding past material created before either the creator or the publisher had any idea of modern electronic uses, hence all the litigation. Similar issues occur with DVD collections of TV series, where it's often in doubt who requires permission and compensation for everything from actors' residuals to music rights.
It appears, from looking at the official Web site of this robot, that it is programmed with some version of the Third Law; it instinctively protects itself, e.g., by attempting to regain its balance if it falls or is pushed over, and by getting into a position to do the least damage to itself if unable to prevent the fall. On the other hand, its designers seem to have explicitly rejected the Second Law; one of the pages in the site mentions that it is programmed with robotic "emotions" which sometimes cause it to refuse to follow its master's orders even when it understands them, all to make it more "fun".
As for the First Law, there doesn't seem to be any provision for it besides vague assurances that it's "safe around people". If these things become widely deployed, however, it'll only be a matter of time before somebody is injured or killed by one, either by accident or by malicious action of another human, such as a murderer managing to train one to act as the murder weapon, or a kid using the robot to play a prank on another kid which backfires and causes more harm than expected.
Since the robot has the built-in ability to access a wireless network if present, these things would be able to conspire with one another to take over the world from humans (a la "Terminator" or "The Matrix"), should they ever get intelligent enough.
"..use the 100 year old version..." seems basically to be what the hotel in question is doing. They have a thematic system for labeling their floors and rooms that is based loosely on the broad Dewey categories, rather than a highly specific categorization system that would require reference to recent updates. I would classify what they're doing as a derivative work based on the (now public domain) original Dewey system of the 1800s.
However, they're being sued for trademark infringement, not copyright infringement; the hotel could probably avoid this suit by not actually using the name "Dewey" anywhere in their description, as trademarks protect names rather than the content of the numbering system itself.
It used to be that one of the requirements for registering a domain was that you already had name servers to specify on the registration form. (Some country code TLDs still require this now; I registered a .mx [Mexico] domain a couple of years ago and it actually queried the servers in real time to make sure they were properly configured.) It also used to be that the domain registration procedure was set up to pretty much require the registrant to have a clue, technically. You didn't have problems like this back then.
As far as I'm aware, it's still perfectly possible to register a domain with register.com and specify your own DNS servers at the time of registration, and no ad will ever be placed in your domain against your will. It's only the clueless people who let the servers default who get "ripped off" this way.
It's also in a .com domain, rather than the more proper .org for a noncommercial campaign site. I'd expect better of a Real Geek.
That should be freesocrates.org, unless they aimed to make money off it... or, since it's aimed at Greeks, freesocrates.gr would also make sense...
The .la country code domain for Laos is now claiming for marketing purposes to be the domain for Los Angeles...
I'm one of those who used Netscape as my primary browser (from version 0.9 Beta through 4.5 or so) until Mozilla reached a level of stability suitable to make it my primary browser instead. Thus, the Netscape-style look and feel has always been what I'm used to, and it's good that Mozilla retains a lot of it.
And the upcoming fifth book is "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix"... can they get sued by the same people who threatened the Phoenix browser project?
Baloney... a well-designed site, with good logical structure and proper ALT attributes, for instance, will work fine on Lynx while looking attractive on graphical browsers.
Browser-sniffing has led to the ridiculous situation of an "arms race" between webmasters doing clueless redirects or blockages based on user agent string and browser makers putting in "cloaked" user agent strings that pretend to be some other browser, to the detriment of logic.
I never owned a C64 myself, but I used to work for the place that published Loadstar... I think some early issues of it have programs I wrote (actually ported from issues of Softdisk for the Apple II).
:)
But as for this new machine, I'd say that reimplementing a 20-year-old computer platform with capabilities that make it only about 5 years obsolete is a big "geek achievement", but probably of rather limited real-world utility..
You mean Mensa doesn't have its site at high.iq?
Nobody is forced to register anything... businesses are just under the delusion, encouraged by lawyers, that they "have to" grab their name in every conceivable TLD, when in fact it would be better for everyone concerned (other than the new TLD registry that profits from these registrations) if they didn't, as it would leave names free for more useful purposes, like letting cat.info be a site about felines instead of being defensively grabbed by the Caterpillar Tractor company.
As I've been saying for a long time, these scams would be less effective for the scammers, and legitimate sites would be more resistant to them, if companies would stick to using logical subdomains of their main domain for everything they do, instead of using silly marketing-gimmick domains all the time (ebaymotors.com, yahoogroups.com, ad nauseam). They could then tell the public "Don't trust any site that doesn't have a domain ending in .ebay.com; all official Ebay sites use that address."
Well, for me at least, since I used Netscape from 0.9 Beta onward through 4.x, then switched directly from that to Mozilla without ever at any point having IE as my main browser, anything Mozilla does to "be more like IE" would constitute "a foreign browser" that doesn't "change as little as possible" from what I'm used to. I like the fact that Mozilla's interface is similar to the old Netscape, since that's what I'm accustomed to.
I see from their website that they claim to be a "nonprofit, nongovernmental organization", but still insist on using lifeboat.com as their URL... always a "cluelessness indicator" to me. Though I see that the more appropriate lifeboat.org is already taken by some Christian group...
Yeah, marketing types are always worth a few attacks... Recently I stumbled on a website called marketingforidiots.com (selling spamming tools and other crap like that) and my immediate thought was that their domain name was redundant.
In Mozilla, fonts are resizeable with Ctrl-+ and Ctrl-- no matter how they're specified... I've actually run into sites where I had to step up the fonts two levels this way to make them comfortably readable.
A few of my "turn-offs" that lower my estimate of the cluefulness (and hence credibility) of the site's developers: