I can't find the link right now but I read a summary of a study just a few weeks back around the use of hand sanitizers, soap, etc. They placed samples of a common stomach virus on the hands of test subjects then had them wash with either a hand sanitizer, soap, or just plain tap water. The hand santizier actually proved worst and plain tap water was best. The sanitizer got rid of only about 1/2 of the virus but the plain tap water got rid of something like 90%.
I wonder if their decision to make this announcement is directly related to their ongoing lawsuit against IBM over linux? I can't believe it's entirely unrelated.
The wikipedia entry for OpenLinux describes it as "now-defunct".
The current linux kernel is version 2.6.x. IIRC, the 2.5 branch was a development branch. Why would anybody want to use a linux distro based on an old developers version of the kernel?
The real basis behind this law was lobbying from the tribal casinos. They don't want people gambling online because they think those gamblers will then, in turn, be more likely to drive over to the casinos to play in person.
And the reason the politcians agreed with this is because by the same logic it means the state collects more taxes. More gambling in the casinos means more income for the casinos which means more taxes levied against those casinos by the state. It's "win-win" for both the casino operators and the state, in theory.
What happens when a bank robber flees to the Dominican Republic? Do we throw up our hands and say 'well, he's just too damn wily for us!'?
No, but in that case it's up to federal law enforcement to deal with it. As soon as they cross outside of the state of WA it becomes a federal offense. Once they cross the US border it becomes an issue for both US and foriegn federal law enforcement officials. It's the federal government that has extradition laws, not each state. Since there's no corresponding federal law on the books there's nothing WA police can do to casino operators in the Dominican Republic. And considering online gambling is apparently legal in the Dominican Republic I also doubt the any extradition treaties we have with them would be valid. Extradition treaties deal with issues that are illegal in both countries (murder, bank robbery, etc), not social issues that may be legal in one country and illegal in the other.
Actually if you RTFA it's more like just discussing child porn (or any illegal activity). Linking to a site about the illegal activity doesn't appear to be necessary. Apparently the WA state law makes it illegal to transmit "gambling information." (nice & vague, ain't it?) The state is interpreting that to mean things like reviews of gambling sites are illegal. Even if the site didn't link to the reviewed gambling site I'd bet they'd just say "well people could easily find the website by searching for it on Google".
It's intention is to save tax dollars. Every state in the US collects taxes from any legal casinos, bingo parlors, etc. located within their borders (this includes any casinos on indian reservations). Since these on-line casinos are located outside the US there's no way to collect taxes. That's one of the reasons why the federal government still has laws on the books about this. Ever since early 20th century it's been technically illegal to place any wager by electronic means in which the wager crosses state lines.
So what's next, WA outlawing poker on TV? After all, it's promoting poker electronically. So all WA residents can say "bye-bye" to TV shows like the World Series of Poker, Celebrity Poker Showdown, etc? Then after that there's all the movies that depict gambling in them - from classics like "The Sting" to movies like Casino, Oceans 11, etc.
Maybe this will provide some legal leverage to go after people who spam blogs and forums with adds for online poker, etc?
Don't count on it. WA state laws have no effect on blogs and/or bloggers located in other states, much less the activities of casinos located outside the USA. How could a state law (not even a federal one) have any impact on a casino operator operating in the Dominican Republic?
...any discussion whatsoever of rape, incest, murder, drug use, etc. must also be illegal.
Reminds me of when AOL added the word "breast" to their filters without thinking through the consequences. All the members of a breast cancer group suddenly had to start referring to themselves as survivors of "hooter cancer".
I've successfully run Windows 2000 on any machine which used to run Win98
My parents ran Win98 on an old Gateway with a 386 processor for a number of years. I think it was something like 66MHz. Care to try running Win2K, or Vista on that?
It will be very interesting to see what happens during the 2008 Olympics when a ton of Westerners are getting their internet gimped.
My guess is that they'll set up unfiltered internet cafes in Olympic venues that are only for access by Olympic staff, athletes, and foreign visitors . They'll keep Chinese nationals out of them. It wouldn't be all that difficult for a communist government to restrict access, especially considering the security that Olympic venues typically have.
Given Microsofts track record, and the fact that they've made similar claims with other releases of Windows, I'll wait to see if they speak the truth. Only after Vista has been widely deployed and all the worlds hackers have had plenty of time to bang on it will I believe what Microsoft has to say.
Now all the terrorists, enemies of the US, etc. know where they should target their nukes. One EMP pulse over Oregon will take out Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc. How will the country (and in fact the world) survive without access to their favorite portals, search engines, etc.?
Maybe not, but posession of stolen property is a felony. They know that it's stolen property. There's a police report filed regarding the stolen property. T-Mobile is apparently going to shut off the service, which means they're convinced it's stolen property.
If this guy really is an MP then he's putting his military career in jeopardy. This is the sort of thing that could get him booted out of the military, possibly after a trip to the brig, and undoubtedly with a dishonorable discharge.
Seriously though. You don't have to use data mining for that. All you need is a directory.
And where do you think all these portals get the data for their directories from? Not all of them blindly use DMOZ data and nothing else. Most, if not all, use a blend of DMOZ data, data collected from their own web spiders, and data collected from user interaction as I described in my original post. Once again, the data collected from user interaction tends to provide high quality relevancy because its derived from human beings, not from computers running some algorithm.
Not so subtle clue - I used to work for a major search engine, first as a software engineer then as a sysadmin. I know what I'm talking about because I implemented some of these technologies.
You might as well stop using the web altogether then (or at least search engines). When it comes to search engines, tracking users behavior helps them to improve their results significantly. Human-based results are infinitely better than machine-generated results in the vast majority of cases, so tracking how users respond to results is something virtually every mainstream search engine is going to do. A company called Direct Hit Technologies pioneered popularity-based search engine results back around 1995 that were based entirely on the anonymous tracking of users search engine usage. They were eventually bought by Ask.com (still known as Ask Jeeves) in early 2000, before Ask bought Teoma.
There are a number of useful reasons for anonymously tracking user behavior in search engines. For example:
user A issues query Q. They visit website X, then a minute later website Y. user B issues the same query. They also visit website X followed by website Y.
If this similar pattern occurs multiple times then it implies that the users found website Y better than website X as a result for query Q. The more you see this pattern the more you boost the ranking for website Y.
Another type of example:
user 1 issues the query "used cars" and eventually goes to website W. user 2 issues the query "antique automobiles" and also eventually goes to website W.
If this pattern is repeated numerous times then the search engine can deduce that "used cars" is a good alternative to "antique automobiles" and vice versa. The search engine can combine the results of these queries to come up with better results and/or provide the queries as alternatives to the end user (if the search engine in question does provide alternative queries to try out).
Slightly more complex:
user C issues the query "auto mechanic". A minute or two later he issues the query "car parts". user D issues the query "car parts". A minute or two later he issues the query "engine repair".
Again, if these patterns appear again and again over a period of time then the search engine can start equating the query "auto mechanic" with "engine repair". Once again the search engine can suggest one query in lieu of the other, or simply blend the results of the two queries together. If the search engine already knows that both "auto mechanic" and "engine repair" have website R as a search result then they may want to raise the relevency of that website for both queries, and as a result rank it higher in the results.
None of these sorts of ranking scenarios would be possible without minimal tracking of user interaction. It basically turns every user of the search engine into judges to help improve the results of search queries.
They didn't exactly consider cable modems when the law was written back in the '30s. However I believe the wording said something fairly generic like "placing wagers by means of electronic communications that cross state lines". Besides, just because your end of the connection is a cable modem doesn't mean that the entire path from you to the server you're placing your bet on is a cable connection. Chances are fairly high that at some point your traffic passes over telco lines.
It dates back to around the 1930's (I think) when organized crime was rampant thanks to things like prohibition. The feds tried to crack down on illegal betting way back then by passing laws that made it illegal to place any sort of wager by phone. Betting parlors, bookies, etc. relied heavily on people placing bets via the phone. (For it to be a federal offense the call actually had to cross state lines.) Needless to say, those laws still remain on the books some 75 years later, and they're now applied to internet wagering as well...
Hell, by that wording they've banned DVD players, TV's, etc.
Buy a TV, hook it up to a DVD burner or VCR (yeah, one of those ancient devices), record a movie broadcast via cable or TV, and voila, you've violated the copyright.
Buy a DVD player and a DVD burner. Rent a movie, duplicate it, and again you're in violation.
Granted, the copies in both these cases wouldn't be 100% digital reproductions, but they'd still be violating copyright.
You can do it [i.e. charge for mails sent through webmail services] but that would mean the end of every and all free webmail as we know it
That's sort of the point I was getting at. It'd force the webmail providers (ALL domains that provide e-mail) to create accounting systems to log every single mail transaction. That's not an inexpensive prospect by any stretch of the imagination. For services like Yahoo, Google, AOL, etc. it would require pretty significant investment in more hardware, new software development, etc.
What are they going to do, build up some of those closets that the NSA reportedly has in major US datacenters to tap into all net traffic?
Seriously though, how could you possibly track e-mail without the help of virtually every domain owner? How do you deal with webmail services? If I send an e-mail from a gmail account to a yahoo account then yes it's going over port 25 so it could theoretically be tracked by monitoring systems. But if you send a webmail from one gmail account to another or from one yahoo account to another then the only way you'd know about it is if Google, Yahoo, etc. starts tracking and accounting for all their e-mails.
And then there's the whole issue of spam. Spammers have control of tons of virus/trojan infected PC's that they regularly use to send out their spew. Are end users responsible for paying the taxes on spam sent unknowingly from their PC's? I could see individuals suing the government for knowing about infected PC's and doing nothing about it since those machines are now a source of tax revenue.
And what about personal domains, smaller companies, etc? Unless you force each and every domain owner worldwide to turn over mail logs you'd end up with huge discrepencies in the application of the taxes. Although I don't live in Europe I do own a few of my own domains and run my own mail server. It's used mostly for family accounts. If I lived in the EU then would I be required to keep accounting information and turn it over to the tax authorities? Could I charge them for the time involved in setting this up and regularly turning the logs over to them?
Well that's a small part of it, but the real problem is that the GIF format relies on LZW compression. When Compuserve originally created the GIF format they were unaware that Unisys owned the patent on the LZW algorithm. Unisys finally realized that the GIF format was using LZW in 1994 and they started enforcing their rights, requiring all products that used the GIF format to pay royalties to them. Their patent eventually expired in 2003, but between that and the limitation of 256 colors that you mentioned, formats like JPEG, PNG, etc. have all become much more popular.
One thing that the GIF format still has going for it is that it supports animation. By essentially appending multiple images together (along with some timing information) you can create highly compressed animated images. JPEG doesn't support this. PNG doesn't support this.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't find the link right now but I read a summary of a study just a few weeks back around the use of hand sanitizers, soap, etc. They placed samples of a common stomach virus on the hands of test subjects then had them wash with either a hand sanitizer, soap, or just plain tap water. The hand santizier actually proved worst and plain tap water was best. The sanitizer got rid of only about 1/2 of the virus but the plain tap water got rid of something like 90%.
I wonder if their decision to make this announcement is directly related to their ongoing lawsuit against IBM over linux? I can't believe it's entirely unrelated.
The wikipedia entry for OpenLinux describes it as "now-defunct".
The current linux kernel is version 2.6.x. IIRC, the 2.5 branch was a development branch. Why would anybody want to use a linux distro based on an old developers version of the kernel?
The real basis behind this law was lobbying from the tribal casinos. They don't want people gambling online because they think those gamblers will then, in turn, be more likely to drive over to the casinos to play in person.
And the reason the politcians agreed with this is because by the same logic it means the state collects more taxes. More gambling in the casinos means more income for the casinos which means more taxes levied against those casinos by the state. It's "win-win" for both the casino operators and the state, in theory.
What happens when a bank robber flees to the Dominican Republic? Do we throw up our hands and say 'well, he's just too damn wily for us!'?
No, but in that case it's up to federal law enforcement to deal with it. As soon as they cross outside of the state of WA it becomes a federal offense. Once they cross the US border it becomes an issue for both US and foriegn federal law enforcement officials. It's the federal government that has extradition laws, not each state. Since there's no corresponding federal law on the books there's nothing WA police can do to casino operators in the Dominican Republic. And considering online gambling is apparently legal in the Dominican Republic I also doubt the any extradition treaties we have with them would be valid. Extradition treaties deal with issues that are illegal in both countries (murder, bank robbery, etc), not social issues that may be legal in one country and illegal in the other.
Actually if you RTFA it's more like just discussing child porn (or any illegal activity). Linking to a site about the illegal activity doesn't appear to be necessary. Apparently the WA state law makes it illegal to transmit "gambling information." (nice & vague, ain't it?) The state is interpreting that to mean things like reviews of gambling sites are illegal. Even if the site didn't link to the reviewed gambling site I'd bet they'd just say "well people could easily find the website by searching for it on Google".
Who is this law trying to save?
It's intention is to save tax dollars. Every state in the US collects taxes from any legal casinos, bingo parlors, etc. located within their borders (this includes any casinos on indian reservations). Since these on-line casinos are located outside the US there's no way to collect taxes. That's one of the reasons why the federal government still has laws on the books about this. Ever since early 20th century it's been technically illegal to place any wager by electronic means in which the wager crosses state lines.
So what's next, WA outlawing poker on TV? After all, it's promoting poker electronically. So all WA residents can say "bye-bye" to TV shows like the World Series of Poker, Celebrity Poker Showdown, etc? Then after that there's all the movies that depict gambling in them - from classics like "The Sting" to movies like Casino, Oceans 11, etc.
Maybe this will provide some legal leverage to go after people who spam blogs and forums with adds for online poker, etc?
Don't count on it. WA state laws have no effect on blogs and/or bloggers located in other states, much less the activities of casinos located outside the USA. How could a state law (not even a federal one) have any impact on a casino operator operating in the Dominican Republic?
...any discussion whatsoever of rape, incest, murder, drug use, etc. must also be illegal.
Reminds me of when AOL added the word "breast" to their filters without thinking through the consequences. All the members of a breast cancer group suddenly had to start referring to themselves as survivors of "hooter cancer".
I've successfully run Windows 2000 on any machine which used to run Win98
My parents ran Win98 on an old Gateway with a 386 processor for a number of years. I think it was something like 66MHz. Care to try running Win2K, or Vista on that?
It will be very interesting to see what happens during the 2008 Olympics when a ton of Westerners are getting their internet gimped.
My guess is that they'll set up unfiltered internet cafes in Olympic venues that are only for access by Olympic staff, athletes, and foreign visitors . They'll keep Chinese nationals out of them. It wouldn't be all that difficult for a communist government to restrict access, especially considering the security that Olympic venues typically have.
The entire linux community (and probably Mac as well) is strongly in favor of him remaining!
Given Microsofts track record, and the fact that they've made similar claims with other releases of Windows, I'll wait to see if they speak the truth. Only after Vista has been widely deployed and all the worlds hackers have had plenty of time to bang on it will I believe what Microsoft has to say.
Now all the terrorists, enemies of the US, etc. know where they should target their nukes. One EMP pulse over Oregon will take out Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc. How will the country (and in fact the world) survive without access to their favorite portals, search engines, etc.?
Looks like nothing more than a bunch of pages with Google Ad links in it...
I suppose this isn't technically stealing
Maybe not, but posession of stolen property is a felony. They know that it's stolen property. There's a police report filed regarding the stolen property. T-Mobile is apparently going to shut off the service, which means they're convinced it's stolen property.
If this guy really is an MP then he's putting his military career in jeopardy. This is the sort of thing that could get him booted out of the military, possibly after a trip to the brig, and undoubtedly with a dishonorable discharge.
Seriously though. You don't have to use data mining for that. All you need is a directory.
And where do you think all these portals get the data for their directories from? Not all of them blindly use DMOZ data and nothing else. Most, if not all, use a blend of DMOZ data, data collected from their own web spiders, and data collected from user interaction as I described in my original post. Once again, the data collected from user interaction tends to provide high quality relevancy because its derived from human beings, not from computers running some algorithm.
Not so subtle clue - I used to work for a major search engine, first as a software engineer then as a sysadmin. I know what I'm talking about because I implemented some of these technologies.
You might as well stop using the web altogether then (or at least search engines). When it comes to search engines, tracking users behavior helps them to improve their results significantly. Human-based results are infinitely better than machine-generated results in the vast majority of cases, so tracking how users respond to results is something virtually every mainstream search engine is going to do. A company called Direct Hit Technologies pioneered popularity-based search engine results back around 1995 that were based entirely on the anonymous tracking of users search engine usage. They were eventually bought by Ask.com (still known as Ask Jeeves) in early 2000, before Ask bought Teoma.
There are a number of useful reasons for anonymously tracking user behavior in search engines. For example:
user A issues query Q. They visit website X, then a minute later website Y.
user B issues the same query. They also visit website X followed by website Y.
If this similar pattern occurs multiple times then it implies that the users found website Y better than website X as a result for query Q. The more you see this pattern the more you boost the ranking for website Y.
Another type of example:
user 1 issues the query "used cars" and eventually goes to website W.
user 2 issues the query "antique automobiles" and also eventually goes to website W.
If this pattern is repeated numerous times then the search engine can deduce that "used cars" is a good alternative to "antique automobiles" and vice versa. The search engine can combine the results of these queries to come up with better results and/or provide the queries as alternatives to the end user (if the search engine in question does provide alternative queries to try out).
Slightly more complex:
user C issues the query "auto mechanic". A minute or two later he issues the query "car parts".
user D issues the query "car parts". A minute or two later he issues the query "engine repair".
Again, if these patterns appear again and again over a period of time then the search engine can start equating the query "auto mechanic" with "engine repair". Once again the search engine can suggest one query in lieu of the other, or simply blend the results of the two queries together. If the search engine already knows that both "auto mechanic" and "engine repair" have website R as a search result then they may want to raise the relevency of that website for both queries, and as a result rank it higher in the results.
None of these sorts of ranking scenarios would be possible without minimal tracking of user interaction. It basically turns every user of the search engine into judges to help improve the results of search queries.
Ahh, but over a cable modem?
They didn't exactly consider cable modems when the law was written back in the '30s. However I believe the wording said something fairly generic like "placing wagers by means of electronic communications that cross state lines". Besides, just because your end of the connection is a cable modem doesn't mean that the entire path from you to the server you're placing your bet on is a cable connection. Chances are fairly high that at some point your traffic passes over telco lines.
It dates back to around the 1930's (I think) when organized crime was rampant thanks to things like prohibition. The feds tried to crack down on illegal betting way back then by passing laws that made it illegal to place any sort of wager by phone. Betting parlors, bookies, etc. relied heavily on people placing bets via the phone. (For it to be a federal offense the call actually had to cross state lines.) Needless to say, those laws still remain on the books some 75 years later, and they're now applied to internet wagering as well...
Hell, by that wording they've banned DVD players, TV's, etc.
Buy a TV, hook it up to a DVD burner or VCR (yeah, one of those ancient devices), record a movie broadcast via cable or TV, and voila, you've violated the copyright.
Buy a DVD player and a DVD burner. Rent a movie, duplicate it, and again you're in violation.
Granted, the copies in both these cases wouldn't be 100% digital reproductions, but they'd still be violating copyright.
You can do it [i.e. charge for mails sent through webmail services] but that would mean the end of every and all free webmail as we know it
That's sort of the point I was getting at. It'd force the webmail providers (ALL domains that provide e-mail) to create accounting systems to log every single mail transaction. That's not an inexpensive prospect by any stretch of the imagination. For services like Yahoo, Google, AOL, etc. it would require pretty significant investment in more hardware, new software development, etc.
What are they going to do, build up some of those closets that the NSA reportedly has in major US datacenters to tap into all net traffic?
Seriously though, how could you possibly track e-mail without the help of virtually every domain owner? How do you deal with webmail services? If I send an e-mail from a gmail account to a yahoo account then yes it's going over port 25 so it could theoretically be tracked by monitoring systems. But if you send a webmail from one gmail account to another or from one yahoo account to another then the only way you'd know about it is if Google, Yahoo, etc. starts tracking and accounting for all their e-mails.
And then there's the whole issue of spam. Spammers have control of tons of virus/trojan infected PC's that they regularly use to send out their spew. Are end users responsible for paying the taxes on spam sent unknowingly from their PC's? I could see individuals suing the government for knowing about infected PC's and doing nothing about it since those machines are now a source of tax revenue.
And what about personal domains, smaller companies, etc? Unless you force each and every domain owner worldwide to turn over mail logs you'd end up with huge discrepencies in the application of the taxes. Although I don't live in Europe I do own a few of my own domains and run my own mail server. It's used mostly for family accounts. If I lived in the EU then would I be required to keep accounting information and turn it over to the tax authorities? Could I charge them for the time involved in setting this up and regularly turning the logs over to them?
So it's not because GIF only supports 256 colors?
Well that's a small part of it, but the real problem is that the GIF format relies on LZW compression. When Compuserve originally created the GIF format they were unaware that Unisys owned the patent on the LZW algorithm. Unisys finally realized that the GIF format was using LZW in 1994 and they started enforcing their rights, requiring all products that used the GIF format to pay royalties to them. Their patent eventually expired in 2003, but between that and the limitation of 256 colors that you mentioned, formats like JPEG, PNG, etc. have all become much more popular.
One thing that the GIF format still has going for it is that it supports animation. By essentially appending multiple images together (along with some timing information) you can create highly compressed animated images. JPEG doesn't support this. PNG doesn't support this.