Actually, with CSS you can specify 6pt (or whatever size) fonts and it should be readable on almost everybody's browser window. The browser should scale the text size appropriately for the user's display. The problems like you're describing occur when specific pixel values are specified for font sizes in CSS.
The root problem is that the tag was bodged. We spent several months working through the issues raised by embedded images and the right way to do it. Then an undergrad decided he would bodge them in and gave 18 hours notice before he released his new code.
That is why IMG sizes are measured in pixels rather than something useful like Knuth's em and ex measures which scale with the font sizes. As it is someone with a 300dpi LCD display (yes they do exist) would see a 'full screen' 640x480 gif in a 2 by 1.5 inch rectangle.
Afterwards the undergrad spent his time telling reporters that everyone else opposed images altogether and did not understand their importance. And he wonders why we helped Microsoft wreck his start up.
Netscape invented the Blink tag, it was not an official tag included in the w3c reccomendation for what ever HTML version.
Actually Eric Binna and Lou Montoulli invented the Blink tag at Netscape. It was an easter egg, it was never documented by Netscape, they just used it a couple of times on their Web site. It was actually meant as a joke.
To answer the original question, Web designers should be taught to use as little active code as is necessary. I am fed up with sites that collapse in a mess of poorly debugged Javascript. At least these days Javascript rarely causes the browser to crash, but you can still go to a major site and hit a Jscript bug with a major browser release.
The main design point I think Web Designers need to be taught is allowing the user to decide how to view the site. I really get fed up with sites where the main purpose is to satisfy the Web Designer's ego.
My absolute hate is sites that start to mess arround with the controls on my browser. Especially those that try to disable the back button or fix the window size. At home I have a large LCD display, only i spend a lot of time looking at sites that insist on folding themselves up to a postage stamp size in one corner with 6pt fonts.
Don't ever put 'best viewed in 640x480 on your site, or anything like it. The whole design of HTML was to make that type of thing unnecessary.
IE now allows you to enable javascript on a per site basis. since turning off Jscript by default and only enabling it when necessary the quality of my browsing has improved greatly. A major side benefit is that popup ads no longer work. Now if we can only persuade MSFT to allow Macromedia to be disabled on a site by site basis or provide a button that says 'Never download this application it is a crappy piece of crap whose sole purpose is to bombard me with crappy adverts i don't want to see'.
Then Vint is lying. I respect his technical accomplishments, but that's a political statement.
Al took the initiative to get the bill through, it is a matter of record. Calling Vint Cerf a liar because he says something inconvenient only shows the depths to which you stoop.
As evidenced by their campaign expenses filling, the GOP pays people minimum wage to troll for their cause on bulletin board, perhaps you should apply for November, must be easier than flipping burgers.
Everything we do is either run, controled, engineered by our governments. DNS used to be run be voluteers, later by the big ISP's. Wouldn't companies/organisations like AlterNIC have more followers when people's freedom was on the line (ie: when DNS was run/dictated by governments).
The problem is that it is not only governments who can abuse power. Individuals and corporations show they can do that just as effectively all the time.
The ITU (part of the UN) has overseen plenty of critical registration processes without abusing their power. I would rather have them in charge than a wholy owned subsidiary of Enron (e.g. the US Congress).
Randy is right that ICANN could be done cheaper, there is no need to hold every meeting in somewhere like Ghana. The UN does just fine holding most meetings in NYC or Geneva. ICANN holds almost every meeting in a place with third tier air connections.
Randy is wrong (as he often is) in believing that the DNS root can remain an amateur effort. It is now critical infrastructure and needs to be supported as such. At the moment we get by because we don't need 13 way fault tolerance. The level of infrastructure attacks against the root is rising and at some time we will need at least five high reliability nodes on ultra fat pipes (multiple OC48)
Randy is also wrong about the prospects for funds comming from governments. It is not unlikely that the EU and Japan can be persuaded to tip in some cash. But ICANN has to look like a government agency in its spending habits, not like a dotcom startup.
Remember back during the Bush (Sr.) campaign when everybody was surprised he did not know what a supermarket check-out scanner was?
You probably think that Al Gore claimed to invent the Internet as well. It is another case of media reporting media rather than the facts
Bush was not surprised by the check out scanner. The supermarket owner was proudly describing the extent of the back end integration with the supply chain, inventory management etc. and Bush expressed polite admiration for the feat of technology as was expected.
I have had extensive interaction at that level of politics. Gore and Gingrich were both quite capable of carrying on a conversation on Slashdot.
With the obvious exception of Govenor W. Bush, pinheads in high political office are the exception not the rule. Do not ascribe to stupidity that which is clearly due to corruption and malice.
'Computer and video-device companies need to sit at the table with the movie industry. Together, in good-faith talks,
The problem for the MPAA is that they cannot understand that as far as the economy goes they are not all that important. The computer industry is an order of magnitude larger. The not very hard to spot plan here is to bribe enough congressmen to push through their scheme. that is a pretty hopeless approach if the computer industry has more money.
I have done the DRM bit. I have even gone to an SDMI conference. My conclusion is that the MPAA and RIAA are Cheap, Greedy and Stupid.
First off, as every vendor that has attempted to get into the DRM space knows, the content owners want all the work done for free, or as near to it as makes no difference. One leading content provider had the idea that a complete DRM system should cost no more than $0.50 per device with the option of buying it out for $100K, this for a bespoke product that would cost several million to develop and would save the customer several hundred million a year.
Secondly the content 'owners' are greedy. Look at the little scheme they had in the DMCA (now repealed) to steal the 'returned rights' of artists by retrospectively designating them 'works for hire'. The scheme that is planned for insertion into the Hollings bill at the last minute will redefine publication through the Web to be a 'mechanical right' and not a 'Performance right'. This will allow them to steal the copyrights currently controlled by the composers.
Thirdly the content owners are stupid. They seize upon every piece of cryptographic snakeoil that comes to the market. The demands that the computer industry save their ass for them sound remarkably like the demands made by the likes of Louis Freeh over key escrow 'we do not believe that it cannot be done, your denial clearly means you must be lying'.
what we need to do is make congress aware of the abuses these people are already engaged in. The DVD zone system has one purpose, to allow the price of DVDs to be set by the amount individual markets will bear. This is illegal under EU law and they will get their just deserts in the end. But why should people like this have the benefit of niche laws to protect their interests if they don't obey the law themselves?
Hah! Ever since a Nigerian businessman dumped $38 million in my bank account and we split the proceeds 50:50 I have never bought porn or printer cartidges any other way
Then they announced that they didn't want to employ Tim Berners-Lee anymore or continue development of standards, the cern http server, or the line-mode browser.
They did no such thing. First off Tim was practically unsackable. Tim left because he wanted to go, not because he was forced.
Second the CERN management only ever announced that they were wholehartedly supporting the Web even as the bastards were stabbing us in the back.
The historical claim of the US govt. to 'ownership' of the DNS infrastructure sounds to me exectly like the type of irridentist lunacy that leads to conflict. We got here first, you therefore have no rights, any rights you do have are ours to withdraw as we please.
Having seen this type of argument lead to the point where people get killed I think it is time to recognise that it is fundamentally fascist.
Governments do not acrue rights through abstract history, they derive power through the consent of the governed. Anything else is tyranny and tends to be swept away in due course.
This is EXACTLY why I've avoided buying an HDTV. They are expensive, nobody is broadcasting in HDTV yet, and political stuggles over format were bound to happen. I wouldn't go so far as proclaiming the death of DVRs. People like them. And, as long as there is a a demand some one will come up with a supply.
At this point I have no doubt that a HDTV that does not support PVR use is unsaleable. The people who are early adopters for HDTV are precisely the people who are buying PVR.
At this point the main reason to buy HDTV is to use it with a DVD player. There is no HDTV broadcast content worth speaking of. So people are buying a widescreen TV to watch movies.
I don't think that the format that broadcast TV uses is very important at this point. Who wants to watch a film ruined with numerous adverts? People who care about HDTV will be watching on HBO or the like. Just what content do NBC, CBS and the like that is in the least bit interesting?
Best way to watch the Olympics was via Canadian satelite.
The proposal is not new and it is pretty much what the DoT civil servants have been plotting for several decades albeit in slightly different form
The underlying politics here are that in the UK all taxes go into a central pool. The Treasury has always opposed 'hypothecated' revenues - that is taxes that are tied to specific purposes.
So the reason why the DoT is calling for new taxes on transport is first, middle and last a scheme to raise taxes in a form that the DoT think they could keep for their own ends. The Treasury meanwhile is happy to allow the DoT to believe in this dellusion up to the point where a new tax is created for them to grab, which they will.
If you think about it, a fuel tax is in effect a toll on road use that is indexed to the fuel efficiency of the vehicle and very cheap to collect.
I suspect that the so called government adviser is not going to be one for very long. An adviser's job is to inform policy making, it is not to make it on the minister's behalf. Attempting to bounce the government into a particular policy through the media is a sure way to find yourself out of a job.
The problem with the proposal is that the costs of deploying the necessary infrastructure are vast. Each car would require a certified GPS system that could not possibly be installed for less than #200. The system would have to be certified regularly or people would soon start finding ways to circumvent them.
The other problem is the threat to civil liberties which is taken rather more seriously in the UK than the US. In the US there is often the belief that it is not necessary to block legislative attacks on civil liberties because the constitution will provide protection. In the UK the checks and balances are in the parliamentary process alone. It might well be possible to impose the scheme on heavy goods vehicles since they pay far less than their share of taxes and people are willing to support any proposals that will reduce tailgating by them. Meanwhile the government has not forgotten nor forgiven the antics of the lorry drivers who tried to hold the country to ransom with blockades. A GPS system in the cab would discourage attempts to repeat.
The UK government is not going to be allowed to install spies in private cars any more than the US government is going to be allowed to confiscate all firearms.
There is a similar process at work behind the regular proposals to introduce identity cards. The police don't want them, the social security dept does not believe they will reduce fraud. The home office attempts to corner each new Home Secretary into proposing them, usually in response to some terrorist attrocity.
In each case the 'decision' is announced in the press as a fait acompli, it is going to happen and MPs and their constituents have no ability to affect the process. In each case the proposal is squashed in cabinet before legislation is presented. Typically the last home secretary or transport secretary squashes the scheme. If not representations from the back benches cause the plan to be swiftly forgotten.
Actually, they function as a clearing house. While I don't know if that distinction is enough to prevent them from legally being in the domain of bank-hood, it is a distinction nonetheless.
I don't think they are a clearing house. A clearing house is typically an association of banks and transfers money from one bank to another.
The problem with PayPal is that the transfers are not imediate. PayPal effectively takes deposits from consumers.
Not a debit card or checking account. If they screw you over with an unwarranted credit card charge, your can call your credit card company and stop payment on it. If they pulled money out of your checking account (either directly or through a debit card), you're pretty much screwed (good luck trying to get your bank to do anything about it).
Your rights are the same in both cases and in fact you are dealing with a bank in both cases. The main difference is that with a credit card the dispute only affects your credit limit, if you are disputing a $500 charge your $2000 credit limit will be $1,500 until the dispute is respolved. If on the other hand you used a debit card you have $500 in your current account that you cannot use and is efectively deducted from your account for the duration of the dispute.
I had a recent dispute with a hotel that had illegally charged for a late cancellation despite having agreeed to a 6pm cancellation (Sunnyvale Hilton had changed to a Sheraton). First time round AMEX corporate sent me back a letter saying they had invsetigated the dispute and the hotel had provided the 'enclosed information' that proved their case - absolutely nothing in the letter. I then sent a snotty letter telling them that 1) I am also a Platinum customer so don't mess with me, 2) a photocopy of the booking agreement made by telephone through through an AMEX travel agent and 3) required them to send a copy of a signed charge voucher as required by regulation E.
The charge was refunded in full within a week.
Citibank on the other hand in similar circumstances sent me a sequence of nasty letters, made harrassing telephone calls to the home etc. until they sold the alleged debt to a collection agency. Unlike Citibank whose customer service was dreadful the collection agency was actually helpfull and gave me a fax number to which I served a cease and desist disputing the charge a few hours later and never heard any more. They even took note of the clause in the cease and desist where I stated that any communication to a third party (read credit agency) allegeing that a debt existed would be considered libelous.
One of the things I find frustrating about living in the US is that so many people are cowards who won't defend their rights against Equifax
You have a problem, even if it is their fault they might not fix it. Wait more than 30 days to complain that they stole your money and guess what? The money is gone forever, you will never get it back. They will not allow you to file a complaint about their rape of your checking account if you wait more than a few weeks.
Paypal may claim that to be the case, but Federal banking laws are against them.
I have spent many years working on payments systems. I don't think it is possible to do what Paypal does profitably and comply with the banking regulations. I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, but I have spent very large sums on such over the years and my papers have been published in ABA journals (where B stands for either Banking or Bar).
Like it or not, banking is a very highly regulated business. It really does not matter what Ayn Rand the Libertarian Party, Paypal or slashweenies think about whether that is right, Regulation E is the law.
Paypal has been successful attracting merchants by transfering the risk that under Regulation E. rests with either the merchant or the bank to the consumer.
The terms stated in the legal notices written by the Paypal lawyers are almost certainly irrelevant. The first recourse a customer has is to their bank, all credit cards are issued by banks, Visa and Mastercard are merely payment transfer associations (AMEX cards are issued by 'Centurion Bank').
If a bank recieves a complaint from a customer that funds were withdrawn from their account without authorization a very specific and federally regulated complaint procedure begins. The consumer is protected against fraudulent charges over a $50 deductable if a signature is involved or in any amount otherwise.
I very much doubt that the Paypal agreement is at all relevant to the issue. The alleged agreement has no effect on the federaly regulated relationship between the consumer and the bank. The bank can and will effectively reverse transactions that are alleged to be fraudulent, whether they take place by credit card or ACH.
The specific case that the class action refers to appears to center on funds held in escrow for customers. The odd thing here is that it is difficult to see how Paypal can do this without functioning as a bank and being subject to regulation. The lack of FDIC insurance is irrelevant, FDIC insurance is not necessary to be accredited as a bank.
Equally it is hard to see how the class action can possibly be successful. If Paypal loses the court case it is unlikely they will be in a position to continue operations.
Microsoft's argument for a long time was that Java's security model was overly complicated. ASP, by contrast, had a simplified security model. Either an ASP executes scripts locally, or it doesn't. Thus ASP does have a simple security model.
I am at Rsa2002, Microsoft just presented a security model that is much richer than than Java's.
Basically they combine the fine grained permissions model of VMS (also seen in Java) with a policy engine layer similar to that of Matt Blaze's Policymaker (not surprising given the people involved).
The problem with the java model is that it is too complex for people to use. It increases the permissions complexity without providing user interface sophistication to match.
PS: contrary to the FUD spread by Gosling the other week it is clear that the security model was built into the design of.NET and was not an afterthought.
Y'know, this guy is a preeminent capitalist. He made his billions (mostly without any moral ambiguities) and has gone on to change the world in positive ways. His generosity and nobility are prime examples of why the "society benefits from selfishness" is such a load of crapola. Soros did it for himself, now he's doing it for others. *That* is a capitalist, my friends.
Actually he is far from an uncritical fan of capitalism. His latest books include 'the crisis of global capitalism'.
Soros was a student of Karl Popper. The Open Society institute is kind of a memorial to his tutor whose most important book was 'The Open Society and its Enemies', these were Plato, Hegel and Marx.
Above all what Soros is opposed to is any group of idealogues who believe they have absolute truth. So having made a fortune from capitalism he goes on to explain the many ways in which it falls short. It is pretty hard not to take notice of his critique of Randian 'free market mania' that infects the GOP. Soros has demonstrated empirically that he understands how markets work and how they fail.
It is also notable that Soros has scored his biggest market coups betting against right wing governments. In particular betting against John Majors attempt to keep the pound overvalued in the ERM.
The problem is that the scientific litterature has become more of a performance index for academics than a useful information resource. To get tenure you have to achieve a certain number of publication units in prestigeous journals. To get grants you need the same, publication rates are used by most government bodies to measure research output.
Problem is that number of publications says nothing about quality.
I have not read a journal publication in the journal for at least five years. I generally read articles as pre-publication preprints or from the author's web site. If the only publication is in dead tree form it might as well not exist in my field.
The problem that online journals have faced is that it takes some time for an online journal to establish prestige and hence attract the type of publication that generates prestige.
Another problem has been that the HTML browser folk were never interested in implementing the HTML math markup which has left scientific publication to pdf form which is pretty useless as a dialogue medium. I can't cut and paste and equation from pdf to mathematica as MathML would allow.
What I would like to see is the rise of different modes of academic publishing that take advantage of the electronic mode. I would like to see enterprises that are structured in the manner of a dictionary or encyclopeadia, providing a systematic and structured description of the state of the art in a particular field as a whole.
Harry Potter book rights are owned by AOL-Time Warner. I'd bet they will do one of the following:
Bzzzztt! Wrong!
AOL/TW owns the film rights for the first five movies and presumably a certain interest in film derrived merchandising.
J.K. Rowling owns the book rights for all the unplublished titles. Her agent is currently looking to cut a much more lucrative deal with Scholastic than the existing deal. That will probably involve a much higher royaly rate. If Scholastic don't pay up she can go to another publisher.
The idea that HP is going to appear as an e-book is simply spin from the e-book world. There have been attempts to sell the story in the UK press for about six months now. Every indication points to HP appearing in book form, if an ebook appears it will be an addition and not a replacement.
People making comparisons to the Matrix and DVD or the Beatles and CD should note that DVD anc CD had both been established as the replacement for VHS and vinyl respectively before the legitimising publication. Also the Matrix appeared in the movie theatres long before the DVD.
It is possible but not very likely that an ebook edition of HP will appear in parallel with the paperback editions. HP is almost uniquely ill-suited to the e-book format. The main target audience is young children, a large proportion of the books are bought as gifts. an eBook version would be guaranteed to underperform traditional print.
The absolute deal killer is that there is no e-book publisher that can sign an advance on sales of $10 million or so while a traditional publisher would have no difficulty at all raising that sum to obtain the rights to HP5. It is likely that HP5 will gross in the region of $200 million in the first year of publication in hardback.
Face it, J.K. Rowling could if she wished buy every one of the futzy e-book startup publishers out of petty cash. HP sales still register as an insane proportion of the sales of all books. Our local CostCo still orders HP by the pallet-full.
And you will of course let other people freely benefit from your bandwidth / CPU power / etc., will you ? No, I didn't think so either.
That is the exact argument that was made against the Internet when it was first proposed, back in pre Arpa net days. The only thing that made it happen was the mandate of the Pentagon.
I don't know about pentagon mandates but I think there are serious problems with the proposal. I have heard the similar proposals about every 6 months over the past 10 years.
The biggest problem is that accessing lots of random CPUs introduces a huge number of security problems:
Is the code downloaded from the central server trustworthy? i.e. is it infected with a virus or other malicious code?
Is the computer that is running the code trustworthy? i.e. is there a risk of a confidentiality or integrity attack? It would be pretty bad if someone could corrupt a couple of critical steps in a huge simulation problem.
The scheme depends on a scalable and deployable version of micropayments.
Various SETI type problems, what if the owner of the computer system is not the person who loaded the code
The applicability of the scheme is limited to problems that show trivial parallelism and can be reduced to a large number of independent tasks. This is not the general case.
One of the notable features of the many proposals is that they all get pretty excited about free markets, like Enron did. I tend to think that the market aspect is kinda the point of the scheme rather than a feature. The objective is really to build the Ayn Rand memorial Internet rather than solve real problems.
There have been a number of attempts to actually build systems of this type. Some of the Napster clones reserve the right to rip you off downloading for profit programs onto your machine, I have never seen one get too far.
As I see it the cost overhead of managing the scheme is simply too great for the benefit. There is no real shortage of high power computing capability for bona-fide researchers. SETI took the internet route for the sole reason that there was no other way they would get the CPU they wanted. I don't think the same constraint applies to biology or particle physics. I could always find someone with a high end machine or twenty to lend.
Setting up the control system for that type of scheme would cost millions. You have to write lots of software and once you introduce money and profit you have to deal with all sorts of scummy fraudulent types. In return you get access to perhaps a few tens of thousand mid to low end PCS for half their time.
For the same money you could build a dedicated rack for approx $1-2K per processor. So a million dollars gets you 1000 processors full time, no compromises. You have full control over the hardware and software environment, no security hassles. I know which way I would go.
Retinal scanning is old hat. In the first place the retina changes shape over time (thats why people get myopic), particularly during pregnancy. Also it is a genetically determined pattern, the left and right retinas are mirror images. The killer is that people don't want to have their retina scanned with a laser, no matter how weak.
The iris on the other hand can be scanned without special illumination and has even greater variation than the retina. The iris pattern is unique for each individual (different even for identical twins) and the left and right eye have completely independent patterns. The iris also moves of its own accord due to a reflex action
Iris-scan, the company that holds the patents claim to have cross over error rates of 1 in a million (i.e. false positive = false negative).
I suspect it is much more likely that this is what the phone is doing than retinal scanning.
Just out of interest, do you consider the other two terrestrial channels low quality, or have you just overlooked them? You are aware that we get 5 channels in the UK?
I don't consider the 3 commercial channels relevant to the argument since they could in theory engage in the same type of predatory practices as the US networks. Although I doubt that they would since they are regulated up the wazoo.
Sure, you can build a custom PVR system, but where are you going to get the data from to run it?
My Tivo's value is in the service, not in the device.
I have a PVR built into my satelite receiver, no service is required. I have no intention of telling Tivo what I view in any case.
What I really want is a PVR that is built the same way a VCR is, with an eject button for the recording medium. I want to be able to pop out the hard drive when it gets full and pop in a fresh one. Given that I can get a 320 hour hard drive for $300 the cost is comparable to VHS - particularly when you take into account the reduced shelving cost.
Once recorded I can lend my copy to someone else just like I can a VHS tape.
If the PVR manufacturers think about it they can exactly duplicate the VHS situation from a legal standpoint. While I think the various opinions extending the Betamax opinion to Napster were pure B/S there can be no doubt that the supreme court would reafirm the outcome of the Betamax case if it came up again today.
And we, the viewers, have no right to free television.
I pay $700 a year for my TV viewing. I think I have the right to determine how I view it.
In the UK I can get three channels of high quality programming ad-free for $150 a year, much better value.
If I had been in the UK during the 2000 olympics I could have watched them on three channels, two of them ad-free. In the US I could not watch them at all because NBC bought the rights and did everything they could to ruin them. Instead of actually showing an event NBC would show two cretins sitting in a studio discussing the event that they were not going to show more than 10 minutes of.
This time I got an extra satelite dish and pointed it at the Canadian broadcast feed. Problem solved.
The problem with the content providers is that they are getting far too greedy. At one time they only got the ad revenue. Then they got cable broadcast fees as well. Now they want to charge for pay per view and still foist ads on the viewer by inserting them into the background of sporting events.
Slashdot Mirror
At least you are not an Enron employee:
401K - Unauthorized - you are not authorized to withdraw your pension until the executives have sold their shares
The root problem is that the tag was bodged. We spent several months working through the issues raised by embedded images and the right way to do it. Then an undergrad decided he would bodge them in and gave 18 hours notice before he released his new code.
That is why IMG sizes are measured in pixels rather than something useful like Knuth's em and ex measures which scale with the font sizes. As it is someone with a 300dpi LCD display (yes they do exist) would see a 'full screen' 640x480 gif in a 2 by 1.5 inch rectangle.
Afterwards the undergrad spent his time telling reporters that everyone else opposed images altogether and did not understand their importance. And he wonders why we helped Microsoft wreck his start up.
Actually Eric Binna and Lou Montoulli invented the Blink tag at Netscape. It was an easter egg, it was never documented by Netscape, they just used it a couple of times on their Web site. It was actually meant as a joke.
To answer the original question, Web designers should be taught to use as little active code as is necessary. I am fed up with sites that collapse in a mess of poorly debugged Javascript. At least these days Javascript rarely causes the browser to crash, but you can still go to a major site and hit a Jscript bug with a major browser release.
The main design point I think Web Designers need to be taught is allowing the user to decide how to view the site. I really get fed up with sites where the main purpose is to satisfy the Web Designer's ego.
My absolute hate is sites that start to mess arround with the controls on my browser. Especially those that try to disable the back button or fix the window size. At home I have a large LCD display, only i spend a lot of time looking at sites that insist on folding themselves up to a postage stamp size in one corner with 6pt fonts.
Don't ever put 'best viewed in 640x480 on your site, or anything like it. The whole design of HTML was to make that type of thing unnecessary.
IE now allows you to enable javascript on a per site basis. since turning off Jscript by default and only enabling it when necessary the quality of my browsing has improved greatly. A major side benefit is that popup ads no longer work. Now if we can only persuade MSFT to allow Macromedia to be disabled on a site by site basis or provide a button that says 'Never download this application it is a crappy piece of crap whose sole purpose is to bombard me with crappy adverts i don't want to see'.
Al took the initiative to get the bill through, it is a matter of record. Calling Vint Cerf a liar because he says something inconvenient only shows the depths to which you stoop.
As evidenced by their campaign expenses filling, the GOP pays people minimum wage to troll for their cause on bulletin board, perhaps you should apply for November, must be easier than flipping burgers.
As Vint Cerf has said on many occasions, Al got us the money.
The problem is that it is not only governments who can abuse power. Individuals and corporations show they can do that just as effectively all the time. The ITU (part of the UN) has overseen plenty of critical registration processes without abusing their power. I would rather have them in charge than a wholy owned subsidiary of Enron (e.g. the US Congress).
Randy is right that ICANN could be done cheaper, there is no need to hold every meeting in somewhere like Ghana. The UN does just fine holding most meetings in NYC or Geneva. ICANN holds almost every meeting in a place with third tier air connections.
Randy is wrong (as he often is) in believing that the DNS root can remain an amateur effort. It is now critical infrastructure and needs to be supported as such. At the moment we get by because we don't need 13 way fault tolerance. The level of infrastructure attacks against the root is rising and at some time we will need at least five high reliability nodes on ultra fat pipes (multiple OC48)
Randy is also wrong about the prospects for funds comming from governments. It is not unlikely that the EU and Japan can be persuaded to tip in some cash. But ICANN has to look like a government agency in its spending habits, not like a dotcom startup.
You probably think that Al Gore claimed to invent the Internet as well. It is another case of media reporting media rather than the facts
Bush was not surprised by the check out scanner. The supermarket owner was proudly describing the extent of the back end integration with the supply chain, inventory management etc. and Bush expressed polite admiration for the feat of technology as was expected.
I have had extensive interaction at that level of politics. Gore and Gingrich were both quite capable of carrying on a conversation on Slashdot.
With the obvious exception of Govenor W. Bush, pinheads in high political office are the exception not the rule. Do not ascribe to stupidity that which is clearly due to corruption and malice.
The problem for the MPAA is that they cannot understand that as far as the economy goes they are not all that important. The computer industry is an order of magnitude larger. The not very hard to spot plan here is to bribe enough congressmen to push through their scheme. that is a pretty hopeless approach if the computer industry has more money.
I have done the DRM bit. I have even gone to an SDMI conference. My conclusion is that the MPAA and RIAA are Cheap, Greedy and Stupid.
First off, as every vendor that has attempted to get into the DRM space knows, the content owners want all the work done for free, or as near to it as makes no difference. One leading content provider had the idea that a complete DRM system should cost no more than $0.50 per device with the option of buying it out for $100K, this for a bespoke product that would cost several million to develop and would save the customer several hundred million a year.
Secondly the content 'owners' are greedy. Look at the little scheme they had in the DMCA (now repealed) to steal the 'returned rights' of artists by retrospectively designating them 'works for hire'. The scheme that is planned for insertion into the Hollings bill at the last minute will redefine publication through the Web to be a 'mechanical right' and not a 'Performance right'. This will allow them to steal the copyrights currently controlled by the composers.
Thirdly the content owners are stupid. They seize upon every piece of cryptographic snakeoil that comes to the market. The demands that the computer industry save their ass for them sound remarkably like the demands made by the likes of Louis Freeh over key escrow 'we do not believe that it cannot be done, your denial clearly means you must be lying'.
what we need to do is make congress aware of the abuses these people are already engaged in. The DVD zone system has one purpose, to allow the price of DVDs to be set by the amount individual markets will bear. This is illegal under EU law and they will get their just deserts in the end. But why should people like this have the benefit of niche laws to protect their interests if they don't obey the law themselves?
Hah! Ever since a Nigerian businessman dumped $38 million in my bank account and we split the proceeds 50:50 I have never bought porn or printer cartidges any other way
They did no such thing. First off Tim was practically unsackable. Tim left because he wanted to go, not because he was forced.
Second the CERN management only ever announced that they were wholehartedly supporting the Web even as the bastards were stabbing us in the back.
The historical claim of the US govt. to 'ownership' of the DNS infrastructure sounds to me exectly like the type of irridentist lunacy that leads to conflict. We got here first, you therefore have no rights, any rights you do have are ours to withdraw as we please.
Having seen this type of argument lead to the point where people get killed I think it is time to recognise that it is fundamentally fascist.
Governments do not acrue rights through abstract history, they derive power through the consent of the governed. Anything else is tyranny and tends to be swept away in due course.
At this point I have no doubt that a HDTV that does not support PVR use is unsaleable. The people who are early adopters for HDTV are precisely the people who are buying PVR.
At this point the main reason to buy HDTV is to use it with a DVD player. There is no HDTV broadcast content worth speaking of. So people are buying a widescreen TV to watch movies.
I don't think that the format that broadcast TV uses is very important at this point. Who wants to watch a film ruined with numerous adverts? People who care about HDTV will be watching on HBO or the like. Just what content do NBC, CBS and the like that is in the least bit interesting?
Best way to watch the Olympics was via Canadian satelite.
The underlying politics here are that in the UK all taxes go into a central pool. The Treasury has always opposed 'hypothecated' revenues - that is taxes that are tied to specific purposes.
So the reason why the DoT is calling for new taxes on transport is first, middle and last a scheme to raise taxes in a form that the DoT think they could keep for their own ends. The Treasury meanwhile is happy to allow the DoT to believe in this dellusion up to the point where a new tax is created for them to grab, which they will.
If you think about it, a fuel tax is in effect a toll on road use that is indexed to the fuel efficiency of the vehicle and very cheap to collect.
I suspect that the so called government adviser is not going to be one for very long. An adviser's job is to inform policy making, it is not to make it on the minister's behalf. Attempting to bounce the government into a particular policy through the media is a sure way to find yourself out of a job.
The problem with the proposal is that the costs of deploying the necessary infrastructure are vast. Each car would require a certified GPS system that could not possibly be installed for less than #200. The system would have to be certified regularly or people would soon start finding ways to circumvent them.
The other problem is the threat to civil liberties which is taken rather more seriously in the UK than the US. In the US there is often the belief that it is not necessary to block legislative attacks on civil liberties because the constitution will provide protection. In the UK the checks and balances are in the parliamentary process alone. It might well be possible to impose the scheme on heavy goods vehicles since they pay far less than their share of taxes and people are willing to support any proposals that will reduce tailgating by them. Meanwhile the government has not forgotten nor forgiven the antics of the lorry drivers who tried to hold the country to ransom with blockades. A GPS system in the cab would discourage attempts to repeat.
The UK government is not going to be allowed to install spies in private cars any more than the US government is going to be allowed to confiscate all firearms.
There is a similar process at work behind the regular proposals to introduce identity cards. The police don't want them, the social security dept does not believe they will reduce fraud. The home office attempts to corner each new Home Secretary into proposing them, usually in response to some terrorist attrocity.
In each case the 'decision' is announced in the press as a fait acompli, it is going to happen and MPs and their constituents have no ability to affect the process. In each case the proposal is squashed in cabinet before legislation is presented. Typically the last home secretary or transport secretary squashes the scheme. If not representations from the back benches cause the plan to be swiftly forgotten.
I don't think they are a clearing house. A clearing house is typically an association of banks and transfers money from one bank to another.
The problem with PayPal is that the transfers are not imediate. PayPal effectively takes deposits from consumers.
Your rights are the same in both cases and in fact you are dealing with a bank in both cases. The main difference is that with a credit card the dispute only affects your credit limit, if you are disputing a $500 charge your $2000 credit limit will be $1,500 until the dispute is respolved. If on the other hand you used a debit card you have $500 in your current account that you cannot use and is efectively deducted from your account for the duration of the dispute.
I had a recent dispute with a hotel that had illegally charged for a late cancellation despite having agreeed to a 6pm cancellation (Sunnyvale Hilton had changed to a Sheraton). First time round AMEX corporate sent me back a letter saying they had invsetigated the dispute and the hotel had provided the 'enclosed information' that proved their case - absolutely nothing in the letter. I then sent a snotty letter telling them that 1) I am also a Platinum customer so don't mess with me, 2) a photocopy of the booking agreement made by telephone through through an AMEX travel agent and 3) required them to send a copy of a signed charge voucher as required by regulation E.
The charge was refunded in full within a week.
Citibank on the other hand in similar circumstances sent me a sequence of nasty letters, made harrassing telephone calls to the home etc. until they sold the alleged debt to a collection agency. Unlike Citibank whose customer service was dreadful the collection agency was actually helpfull and gave me a fax number to which I served a cease and desist disputing the charge a few hours later and never heard any more. They even took note of the clause in the cease and desist where I stated that any communication to a third party (read credit agency) allegeing that a debt existed would be considered libelous.
One of the things I find frustrating about living in the US is that so many people are cowards who won't defend their rights against Equifax
Paypal may claim that to be the case, but Federal banking laws are against them.
I have spent many years working on payments systems. I don't think it is possible to do what Paypal does profitably and comply with the banking regulations. I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, but I have spent very large sums on such over the years and my papers have been published in ABA journals (where B stands for either Banking or Bar).
Like it or not, banking is a very highly regulated business. It really does not matter what Ayn Rand the Libertarian Party, Paypal or slashweenies think about whether that is right, Regulation E is the law.
Paypal has been successful attracting merchants by transfering the risk that under Regulation E. rests with either the merchant or the bank to the consumer.
The terms stated in the legal notices written by the Paypal lawyers are almost certainly irrelevant. The first recourse a customer has is to their bank, all credit cards are issued by banks, Visa and Mastercard are merely payment transfer associations (AMEX cards are issued by 'Centurion Bank').
If a bank recieves a complaint from a customer that funds were withdrawn from their account without authorization a very specific and federally regulated complaint procedure begins. The consumer is protected against fraudulent charges over a $50 deductable if a signature is involved or in any amount otherwise.
I very much doubt that the Paypal agreement is at all relevant to the issue. The alleged agreement has no effect on the federaly regulated relationship between the consumer and the bank. The bank can and will effectively reverse transactions that are alleged to be fraudulent, whether they take place by credit card or ACH.
The specific case that the class action refers to appears to center on funds held in escrow for customers. The odd thing here is that it is difficult to see how Paypal can do this without functioning as a bank and being subject to regulation. The lack of FDIC insurance is irrelevant, FDIC insurance is not necessary to be accredited as a bank.
Equally it is hard to see how the class action can possibly be successful. If Paypal loses the court case it is unlikely they will be in a position to continue operations.
I am at Rsa2002, Microsoft just presented a security model that is much richer than than Java's.
Basically they combine the fine grained permissions model of VMS (also seen in Java) with a policy engine layer similar to that of Matt Blaze's Policymaker (not surprising given the people involved).
The problem with the java model is that it is too complex for people to use. It increases the permissions complexity without providing user interface sophistication to match.
PS: contrary to the FUD spread by Gosling the other week it is clear that the security model was built into the design of .NET and was not an afterthought.
Actually he is far from an uncritical fan of capitalism. His latest books include 'the crisis of global capitalism'.
Soros was a student of Karl Popper. The Open Society institute is kind of a memorial to his tutor whose most important book was 'The Open Society and its Enemies', these were Plato, Hegel and Marx.
Above all what Soros is opposed to is any group of idealogues who believe they have absolute truth. So having made a fortune from capitalism he goes on to explain the many ways in which it falls short. It is pretty hard not to take notice of his critique of Randian 'free market mania' that infects the GOP. Soros has demonstrated empirically that he understands how markets work and how they fail.
It is also notable that Soros has scored his biggest market coups betting against right wing governments. In particular betting against John Majors attempt to keep the pound overvalued in the ERM.
Problem is that number of publications says nothing about quality.
I have not read a journal publication in the journal for at least five years. I generally read articles as pre-publication preprints or from the author's web site. If the only publication is in dead tree form it might as well not exist in my field.
The problem that online journals have faced is that it takes some time for an online journal to establish prestige and hence attract the type of publication that generates prestige.
Another problem has been that the HTML browser folk were never interested in implementing the HTML math markup which has left scientific publication to pdf form which is pretty useless as a dialogue medium. I can't cut and paste and equation from pdf to mathematica as MathML would allow.
What I would like to see is the rise of different modes of academic publishing that take advantage of the electronic mode. I would like to see enterprises that are structured in the manner of a dictionary or encyclopeadia, providing a systematic and structured description of the state of the art in a particular field as a whole.
Bzzzztt! Wrong!
AOL/TW owns the film rights for the first five movies and presumably a certain interest in film derrived merchandising.
J.K. Rowling owns the book rights for all the unplublished titles. Her agent is currently looking to cut a much more lucrative deal with Scholastic than the existing deal. That will probably involve a much higher royaly rate. If Scholastic don't pay up she can go to another publisher.
The idea that HP is going to appear as an e-book is simply spin from the e-book world. There have been attempts to sell the story in the UK press for about six months now. Every indication points to HP appearing in book form, if an ebook appears it will be an addition and not a replacement.
People making comparisons to the Matrix and DVD or the Beatles and CD should note that DVD anc CD had both been established as the replacement for VHS and vinyl respectively before the legitimising publication. Also the Matrix appeared in the movie theatres long before the DVD.
It is possible but not very likely that an ebook edition of HP will appear in parallel with the paperback editions. HP is almost uniquely ill-suited to the e-book format. The main target audience is young children, a large proportion of the books are bought as gifts. an eBook version would be guaranteed to underperform traditional print.
The absolute deal killer is that there is no e-book publisher that can sign an advance on sales of $10 million or so while a traditional publisher would have no difficulty at all raising that sum to obtain the rights to HP5. It is likely that HP5 will gross in the region of $200 million in the first year of publication in hardback.
Face it, J.K. Rowling could if she wished buy every one of the futzy e-book startup publishers out of petty cash. HP sales still register as an insane proportion of the sales of all books. Our local CostCo still orders HP by the pallet-full.
That is the exact argument that was made against the Internet when it was first proposed, back in pre Arpa net days. The only thing that made it happen was the mandate of the Pentagon.
I don't know about pentagon mandates but I think there are serious problems with the proposal. I have heard the similar proposals about every 6 months over the past 10 years.
The biggest problem is that accessing lots of random CPUs introduces a huge number of security problems:
One of the notable features of the many proposals is that they all get pretty excited about free markets, like Enron did. I tend to think that the market aspect is kinda the point of the scheme rather than a feature. The objective is really to build the Ayn Rand memorial Internet rather than solve real problems.
There have been a number of attempts to actually build systems of this type. Some of the Napster clones reserve the right to rip you off downloading for profit programs onto your machine, I have never seen one get too far.
As I see it the cost overhead of managing the scheme is simply too great for the benefit. There is no real shortage of high power computing capability for bona-fide researchers. SETI took the internet route for the sole reason that there was no other way they would get the CPU they wanted. I don't think the same constraint applies to biology or particle physics. I could always find someone with a high end machine or twenty to lend.
Setting up the control system for that type of scheme would cost millions. You have to write lots of software and once you introduce money and profit you have to deal with all sorts of scummy fraudulent types. In return you get access to perhaps a few tens of thousand mid to low end PCS for half their time.
For the same money you could build a dedicated rack for approx $1-2K per processor. So a million dollars gets you 1000 processors full time, no compromises. You have full control over the hardware and software environment, no security hassles. I know which way I would go.
Akk, wrong way round, this is not retinal scan this is retinal projection!
The iris on the other hand can be scanned without special illumination and has even greater variation than the retina. The iris pattern is unique for each individual (different even for identical twins) and the left and right eye have completely independent patterns. The iris also moves of its own accord due to a reflex action
Iris-scan, the company that holds the patents claim to have cross over error rates of 1 in a million (i.e. false positive = false negative).
I suspect it is much more likely that this is what the phone is doing than retinal scanning.
I don't consider the 3 commercial channels relevant to the argument since they could in theory engage in the same type of predatory practices as the US networks. Although I doubt that they would since they are regulated up the wazoo.
I have a PVR built into my satelite receiver, no service is required. I have no intention of telling Tivo what I view in any case.
What I really want is a PVR that is built the same way a VCR is, with an eject button for the recording medium. I want to be able to pop out the hard drive when it gets full and pop in a fresh one. Given that I can get a 320 hour hard drive for $300 the cost is comparable to VHS - particularly when you take into account the reduced shelving cost.
Once recorded I can lend my copy to someone else just like I can a VHS tape.
If the PVR manufacturers think about it they can exactly duplicate the VHS situation from a legal standpoint. While I think the various opinions extending the Betamax opinion to Napster were pure B/S there can be no doubt that the supreme court would reafirm the outcome of the Betamax case if it came up again today.
I pay $700 a year for my TV viewing. I think I have the right to determine how I view it.
In the UK I can get three channels of high quality programming ad-free for $150 a year, much better value.
If I had been in the UK during the 2000 olympics I could have watched them on three channels, two of them ad-free. In the US I could not watch them at all because NBC bought the rights and did everything they could to ruin them. Instead of actually showing an event NBC would show two cretins sitting in a studio discussing the event that they were not going to show more than 10 minutes of.
This time I got an extra satelite dish and pointed it at the Canadian broadcast feed. Problem solved.
The problem with the content providers is that they are getting far too greedy. At one time they only got the ad revenue. Then they got cable broadcast fees as well. Now they want to charge for pay per view and still foist ads on the viewer by inserting them into the background of sporting events.