Boycotting Adobe Acrobat would be one way to protest. I suspect though that the crimninal cracker fraternity will prefer distributing crack programs that break the Adobe eBook protection software.
It is somewhat interesting that the first ammendment allows the Anti-Abortion fanatics to run a site advocating the murder of their opponents with a hit list annotated with home addresses while the same first ammendment does not appear to protect someone who is merely reporting the poor security technique of a corporation.
Cox's action strikes me as posturing, however it may be posturing with a point. The Felten case against the DMCA censorship clauses is going ahead, Cox is underlining the fact that we are back to the point where giving crypto papers in the US is to risk jail.
The Bush Administration and Katherine Harris burried "We The People" in Florida, anyone who thought that the first ammendment was safe in their hands is a fool.
Ashcroft is a racist bigott and anti-gay bigott. He lost his Senate seat because he failed to conceal the fact sufficiently. However the circumstances of his appointment make it hard for him to discriminate against either group. Going after Russian hackers probably looks like a good substitute, a minority that can easily be made the subject of widespread public hatred and fear.
Not an uninteresting idea, but, don't hold your breath. The main point of the conference is to make money after all. Less money will be made outside of the U.S. Less folks will go, it will be more expensive
It may suprise you to learn that there are plenty of successful conferences not held in the US. Also US hotel rates have over the past five years gone from being relatively cheap to much more expensive than other countries. Even Vegas is no longer cheap, these days there are plenty of casinos arround the US and the cheap hotel rooms are no longer cheap.
As for a smaller conference, that would probably be a good idea anyway. DefCON has become a flabby media whore event where most of the audience are wannabe script kiddies.
I believe the story is that Sealand was claimed before the limit was 12 miles. As an existing country, they weren't annexed when Great Britain increased their territorial waters, any more than England would be annexed if France increased its territorial waters to 200 Km.
The court case that the Sealand folk have trumpeted did not involve recognition but the jurisdiction of the English courts. Just because the English courts rule that the platform was outside their jurisdiction does not mean that the platform was considered 'sovereign'. Under the British Constitution that is reserved exclusively to the Crown in Parliament which effectively means the government of the day.
Man made structures are not considered to have sovereign status under UK law or indeed under any national law I am aware of. The North Sea is peppered with oil rigs. The occupation of which has no territorial consequence. Each oil rig is registered as a ship would be and national law applied accordingly.
As for the situation with France several of the Channel Islands that are under the British Crown are part of the Dutchy of Normandy and there is an Anglo/French dispute over their status since there is a large oil field in the English Channel.
I said nothing of the sort. I said that increasing the minimum wage increases unemployment, which has been born out by every study ever conducted other than a couple of discredited cranks.
Cite a single study that is not from a right wing propaganda outfit.
You have a lot of opinions about what economics professors think. It is a pity you don't appear to ever have listened to one.
Clearly there is a level at which a higher minimum wage will create unemployment, just as there is a level at which higher taxes will reduce the total tax revenues. The evidence suggests that none of the Western economies are currently anywhere near either situation, with the possible exception of some of the Nordic countries.
Nonsense. A person's politics and normative economics have absolutely nothing to do with the validity of their positive economics,
A pretty naive view. Economics is not value blind as some proponents claim. Before you can evaluate economic outcomes you have to define what your economic goals are. That is an intrinsically political process and anyone who claims otherwise is either a fool or a liar.
The quote was "Nobody needs more than 640 K of RAM."
And like all the best quotes Gates never said it.
What he did say was that 640K would be enough for most people using the original IBM PC, which had a 16 bit microprocessor running at 8 MHz, no memory management and a hard limit of 1Mb of addressable memory. 640K of RAM cost several times the price of the machine at that time.
Given that the 286 was comming down the pipe and that at the time nobody knew that Intel was going to screw up the memory management it was not a ridiculous design choice which was made by IBM in any case.
Sorry, I have to nit-pick. The more in-demand something is the higher the price will be; it's a simple supply/demand curve
Only if the supply is fixed, which is not the case. The principal cost of any high tech gadget is the technology. The more buyers those costs are spread over the lower the cost per item. Competition will drive prices down to the cost of production.
Perhaps US schools should stop teaching economics altogether since a little learning appears to be more dangerous than none. Or maybe economists should stop calling their theories 'laws' as if they were doing physics rather than soft science.
THere were a *lot* of other things going on a that time. Attributing a
causal relation with a one-time change at that point in history is
just plain reckless . . .
Actually it was you who asserted that raising the minimum wage would inevitably lead to unemployment. I was merely pointing out that the facts disprove your assertion, a causal connection was superfluous.
As for what the right wing argument is, I have not heard the 'investment' theory of trickle down hald as often as the consumption theory. But in any case the investment theory is pretty hard to sustain. Capital is not a scarce resource. Up until 6 months ago it was possible to get pretty much unlimited funds for any Internet related project.
The availability of investment funds is set by the relative level of interest rates, that is why no serious economist would endorse the trickle down 'investment' theory.
If the folk claiming that raising the minimum wage hurts the poor were notable champions of the poor on other issues their argument might be more credible. However the fact is that the folk that make the claim are the same ones who claim that tax cuts for the rich are more important than tax cuts for anyone else.
Given the choice between 4% growth and no tax cut or a 4% tax cut and no growth I will take the growth every time.
Give the man a cigar. He just figured out the economics of a minimum wage increase, which works precisely this way.
Actually the experience of the UK and France when minimum wage laws were introduced was that unemployment fell.
The mechanism is direct and acknowledged by the right when the subject of the argument are the super-rich. The super rich (aka the 'wealth creators') the argument goes will respond to tax cuts by working harder, earning more money. The increasingly enriched pleutocracy will then spend more money creating demand for 'stuff'. It is called the trickle down theory, to improve the lot of those at the bootm of society you have to give more gravy to those at the top and let it trickle down to the poor.
The flaw in the trickle down theory is that for folk in my income bracket expenditure is a very weak function of after their after tax income. If I make double what I made the year before I do not double my expenditure, or anything like it. I spend less than 10% of my income.
Poor folk save very little, if they get more money they spend it. And that expands the economy.
Re:Soon to be an instrument of corporate evil
on
Books on Demand
·
· Score: 2
The only thing that I can think of that would make sense is that when a book does not earn its advance the publisher can write off the remainder of the advance when it goes out of print.
However the return of rights for out of print books if it exists would be a recent innovation. Some publishing contracts have explicit reversion clauses but that is certainly not the normal case.
All the guy has is a machine that binds and trims the output from a copier. My guess is that the patent has to cover the idea of trimming the book to a specific size since copiers that did automatic binding have been arround for 20+ years.
That brings me to the second point, I don't think that there is a requirement for books on demand in custom sizes. First off the triming process is inherently wastefull. If you want a B5 book start with B5 paper stock. Secondly I think that made to order books will be written for the medium.
The most obvious buyer of such a machine would be Amazon.com. They can then offer the ultimate in vanity publishing, for a trivial amount you could self publish. They already have something of this sort going. If they printed the books to order they could avoid the warehousing costs and reduce the delivery costs (print at the plant it is cheapest to deliver from).
I think that for that particular market though the demand will be for hardback books, clothbound with saddle-stiched pages. This is not very hard to do at all, just hook up a high speed laser printer printing on very wide paper to a standard binding machine. The machine would have to print 16 or 32 pages at a time.
I can well imagine that there would be a lot of demand for such a service, essentially a high end kinkos, except that anyone can buy the result. It would be ideal for conference proceedings and a lot of academic journals which typicaly retail in the $150+ range. It would also be ideal for a lot of business publications, like user manuals. It would even be cost effective for some folk to send out copies of their poetry etc. to their friends.
With a machine like that the number of bogus academic institutes publishing polemics masquerading as reasearch will only increase. We can expect the next books from the Institute for Holocaust Revision and the Creation Scientologists to look like the real thing. It will also mean that left wing 'think tanks' will be able to compete on a level playing field with the 15 odd right wing think tanks funded by Melon Scaife. So instead of reading The Bell Curve's rehashed 1930s eugenic theorising we will see equally loony leftie tombes.
The other inevitable effect will be that every PhD student is going to try to self publish and sell their stupid thesis. Perhaps not such a bad idea since the thing about theses is that you are extreemly lucky if anyone outside your reading committee ever reads it. In fact you are lucky if anyone other than your advisor reads the whole thing.
First off, those bashing on ICANN need to understand that new.net are not in the business of live and let live. What they really want to happen is for ICANN to include their TLDs into the ICANN managed root.
Do we want new.net to be the sole registrar for 30 pretty desirable TLDs just because they have a lot of venture capital from Idealab! to spend?
What ICANN is doing is stating up front that they are not going to recognise this type of tactic as legitimate.
People have always been able to set up their own roots, I do it myself on my home machine where I root the.test TLD for systems I don't want to register in the external Internet space.
Setting up your own TLD is a bit like setting up your own internal telephone area codes however. It is not a good thing if there are two competing companies handing out 1-800 numbers.
This leads to an important security issue, multiple DNS roots leaves companies open to the risk of having their DNS names hijacked. If I buy the name xyz.kids from the ICANN appointed registrar some smart alex could register xyz.kids at new.net and steal some of my trafic.
In the worst case there is no authoratative root and the site a domain name will resolve to will differ randomly depending on the ISP you select. To be frank the people who claim this is a good idea either have no idea what they are talking about or are paid shills of some alternate registrar looking to muscle in and make some quick cash.
If DNS addresses or IP addresses cease to have the uniqueness properties relied upon in the IP protocol then we no longer have an Internet, all we have is a patchwork of partially interoperable networks.
The nature of the program is that it will prioritize itself down if other programs are in use.
I would not rely on that as a defence argument. There are many academic programs that run in background mode to snarf up otherwise spare cycles. Physicists have lattice gauge calculations, Geant simulations, meteorology, there are lots of biologists with gene sequence data to crunch.
Unfortunately most of those programs are also designed to have minimal impact on the other users of the machine. Just because a program is at a low machine priority does not mean it is not important to someone. The crack program will take cycles from other distributed applications.
Probably the best approach is to turn the question arround and assert that running batch jobs in spare CPU cycles is a standard academic practice and that a competent sysadmin should have the knowledge and experience to run such programs on their system.
Yeah like you can fit the entire history of China in one Slashdot post.
You are also somewhat selective. The US 'Open Door' policy began in the nineteenth century under Teddy Roosevelt. The name is misleading, the policy essentially meant that the US would demand the 'right' to trade on its own terms and back the demand with guns.
Your dates for the Japaneese occupation are misleading. Japan had reduced large areas of china to subordinate status long before. US sources prefer to present the overthrow of the puppet regime as a major event since it co-incides with the rise of the rivalry between the US and Japan.
Looking at the US/China relationship from the China side is very different from that popular amongst right wing kooks in the US.
There are plenty of sucessful British engineers. Silicon valey is full of them, as is the area arround Cambridge. Fewer Brits go into mechanical engineering than they once did, but that is simply because there is much more happening in other fields.
The only really cutting edge areas for mechanical engineering are manufacture of ICs and Formula One racing. Perhaps the ignorant fool has not noticed but the British Formula One industry is a multi-billion dollar concern. Also Ford may have closed the plant making the Ford Fiesta (budget hatchback) in Halewood, but they replaced it with the plant making the Jaguar X-Type.
I had a Meccano set growing up, a number 6 set with several extras. The box must have weighed about 30 or 40 lb. At the time the same set new would have cost several hundred pounds. Today it would probably cost over a thousand.
I also had lego and from an earlier age. Most kids can't start with lego until they are 9, they don't have the strength to do the bolts. You can start with the duplo lego at 3 and on the real stuff by 6.
When technical lego first came out it was very much a competitor for Meccano. As time has gone on though they seem to have dumbed it down. Most sets have at least one unique piece so that to build it you have to buy the set.
Unfortunately the comp-sci version of Meccano has yet to be written. When I grew up with the Commodore PET and the ZX-80 personal computers were pretty simple and well within the understanding of a 12 year old. Today the PC is beyond anyone's understanding.
It is completely off topic but the answer is that in the UK surgeons use the prefix 'Mr'. The historical reason for this is that in the old days the surgeons were barbers who would come in to chop off surplus limbs.
The reason the tradition still holds is that in a hospital there are doctors all over the place, the title does not have that much status. There are very few people who are called Mr and the chance of confusion is not great.
China does not get on too well with Japan following the Japaneese invasion of China. Nor is China too impressed with the US since the US helped the Japaneese with their occupation. One of those little facts that the US would throw a hissy fit over every now and then if the facts were the other way and it was the Chineese who left them out of the schoolbooks.
China was also unimpressed by the British who fought the opium wars against China to keep the opium trade going... The Brits do mention the Opium wars in their schoolbooks, mainly because they won them.
Taiwan is a much more complex situation that the US press gives credit for. Not only does mainland China claim sovereignty over Taiwan, Taiwan claims sovereignty over mainland China! That is why they used to call themselves the Republic of China.
The US is upset about China for the simple reason that at current rates of growth China will be the largest world economy by about 2015.
Stoping them from getting playstations is not going to keep the US in place as world superpower. In fact if the US govt had any brains they would give the Chineese as many playstations as they want. The more time they spend playing games the less time they will have to outbuild the US economy.
Unfortunately the costs may be justifiable. The term bandwidth is often used in the parallel processing community to refer to processor 'bandwidth' and not merely the network bandwidth folk are discussing. I could well imagine that with several hundred (thousand?) processors the costs could approach $0.59 per second.
The problem with the 'background task' argument is that breaking RC5 is not necessarily the best use to which those cycles can be put.
The issue of authorization is the weak point in the State case. Running a codebreaking program falls pretty squarely within the normal run of academic persuits. The fact that a prize is offered does not necessarily mean that the enterprise is 'for profit'. All sorts of prizes are offered for academic research. In the case of the RSA cryptography challenge prises they were started by Ron Rivest so that he did not have to spend half an hour reading each day about the latest factoring scheme people had thought up. Peter Trei later suggested to Jim Bizdos that there might be other challenges that would be somewhat more fun and relevant.
Best chance of getting the case thrown out is likely to be demonstrating a that running a crack program is considered acceptable academic behaviour at most universities.
I don't see the terms of service giving the prosecution much help. They are so broad that they could be read to permit or prohibit practically any behavior. The defence get the benefit of the ambiguity, not as some slashdotters appear to believe the prosecution. Nobody is disputing that the guy was authorized to use the equipment, the issue is whether the specific use made was authorized. That is a very subjective question, hardly one that should be at the center of a criminal prosecution.
The reason we had to start putting up the terms of service notices was that without them the courts would not even allow prosecutions of people who broke into computer systems to abuse them in the most malicious ways you can think of.
Still the guy has only himself to blame, you go to live and work in a mickey mouse state that only gave up the swastika (oops sorry symbol of the slavers side in the civil war) on its state flag with great reluctance, you expect the type of legal system portrayed in Stir Crazy and My Cousin Vinny.
That's because the circumstances of the law defend the company. Ever hear of an AUP or TOS?
More opinionated nonsense that is wrong:
Neither is my cable box, but the company that is renting it to me says it is. They are the only ones who matter.
No bubba, we live in a society of laws and those bind Telocity and for that matter the cable company. The courts are the ones that matter, not your cable company!
Under the terms of service Telocity demanded a $99 up front fee. My bet is that anyone who had their service terminated peremptorily could probably get away with hanging onto their gateway until Telocity returned the $99 startup fee and the balance of any pre-paid use fees.
Looking over the alleged contract I note that it has a whole rack of clauses that are likely to invalidate it in several jurisdictions. It also lacks a severability clause. Like corporate lawyer school 101.
The contract does not contain any language that permits Telocity to terminate service. Thus Telocity are themselves in breach of the contract.
The point about notice still stands. It does not appear to me that Telocity achieved constructive notice or actual notice of the alleged terms of service.
People have rights, if more corporate lawyers understood that simple fact perhaps they would not draft ridiculous contracts and maybe juries would not return equally ridiculous damages awards in return given the chance.
It is strange how some people seem to take the side of the company regardless of the circumstances or the law. I seriously doubt that telocity can enforce a claim for $500 in a court. Depending on the circumstances the following arguments may be relevant:
The gateway is almost certainly not worth $500
The company does not appear to have given actual notice or even constructive notice of the return requirement
The company unilaterally terminated the service contract
The company waited to long to request the return of the gateway
The other somewhat odd argument concerns billing of credit cards. If the company does attempt to bill for the gateways the chances are that there will be a large number of complaints, each of which costs the merchant approx $50 and if the number of complaints rises above about 3% is likely to lead to the termination of the merchant agreement.
I don't see any reason to keep the gateway, but if it had already been lost, thrown out, turned into a linux box etc. I would certainly not be planning to pay $500 as a result.
Best plan of attack is to send a registered letter to the CEO of Telocity at his home address (from the SEC documents) setting out the circumstances. Don't forget to mention that you will bring suit against him personally should the company trouble you again.
Sure this will stop them from charging you, but it won't stop them from reporting you to a credit bureau!!! I'm sure the last thing any of you want is to mess up your credit rating
The information the beureaus put out is so inaccurate that there is little point in bothering. You have a 1 in ten chance of having you credit rating screwed through no fault of your own.
I find it amazing how many 'guberment is evil' types let Equifax run their lives.
A much better solution is to never give a credit card number for a recurring account. I had to cancel my Citibank card after Bell South Wireless Data (now Cingular) billed $350 in fraudulent charges.
... some folk come out with a device that can do the whole job in a day.
It must be a bit like climbing mount Everest the hard way and while you are sitting at the top eating your Kendal Mint Cake, someone rides up the access road on a bicycle.
So what was the point of spending several hundred million doing the job the hard way? Oh they filled a gazillion patents on the sequences the read out. And there I thought you had to invent something to get a patent.
SOAP transfer data by text over any connection. Thats fine as long as you run over SSL between any two servers, but the whole idea of.NET is a point to point network of servers stepping between corporation bounds and countries. Thus, instintively I think: "how much thought to security have they given". Being unwilling to accept the propaganda, for this reason alone I've adopted a "wait and see" approach.
Microsoft have been working with VeriSign and IBM to produce the security infrastructure. There is already a W3C note that describes use of XML Signature to sign SOAP messages, the XML Encryption group only holds its first meeting next week so it is hardly suprising that there is no 'encrypting SOAP messages' draft.
The dotNET PKI story is XML Key Management Specification developed by Microsoft, VeriSign and WebMethods and now supported by most of the security industry. The W3C is holding a workshop on XKMS the day before the XML Encryption workshop. It is not a PKI in the conventional sense, it allows the application to attach to any underlying PKI - X.509, PGP, SPKI or a new one yet to be designed. XKMS is layered on top of Web Services.
Slashdot Mirror
It is somewhat interesting that the first ammendment allows the Anti-Abortion fanatics to run a site advocating the murder of their opponents with a hit list annotated with home addresses while the same first ammendment does not appear to protect someone who is merely reporting the poor security technique of a corporation.
Guns don't kill people, bullets kill people
The Bush Administration and Katherine Harris burried "We The People" in Florida, anyone who thought that the first ammendment was safe in their hands is a fool.
Ashcroft is a racist bigott and anti-gay bigott. He lost his Senate seat because he failed to conceal the fact sufficiently. However the circumstances of his appointment make it hard for him to discriminate against either group. Going after Russian hackers probably looks like a good substitute, a minority that can easily be made the subject of widespread public hatred and fear.
Guns don't kill people, bullets kill people
It may suprise you to learn that there are plenty of successful conferences not held in the US. Also US hotel rates have over the past five years gone from being relatively cheap to much more expensive than other countries. Even Vegas is no longer cheap, these days there are plenty of casinos arround the US and the cheap hotel rooms are no longer cheap.
As for a smaller conference, that would probably be a good idea anyway. DefCON has become a flabby media whore event where most of the audience are wannabe script kiddies.
The court case that the Sealand folk have trumpeted did not involve recognition but the jurisdiction of the English courts. Just because the English courts rule that the platform was outside their jurisdiction does not mean that the platform was considered 'sovereign'. Under the British Constitution that is reserved exclusively to the Crown in Parliament which effectively means the government of the day.
Man made structures are not considered to have sovereign status under UK law or indeed under any national law I am aware of. The North Sea is peppered with oil rigs. The occupation of which has no territorial consequence. Each oil rig is registered as a ship would be and national law applied accordingly.
As for the situation with France several of the Channel Islands that are under the British Crown are part of the Dutchy of Normandy and there is an Anglo/French dispute over their status since there is a large oil field in the English Channel.
Cite a single study that is not from a right wing propaganda outfit.
You have a lot of opinions about what economics professors think. It is a pity you don't appear to ever have listened to one.
Clearly there is a level at which a higher minimum wage will create unemployment, just as there is a level at which higher taxes will reduce the total tax revenues. The evidence suggests that none of the Western economies are currently anywhere near either situation, with the possible exception of some of the Nordic countries.
Nonsense. A person's politics and normative economics have absolutely nothing to do with the validity of their positive economics,
A pretty naive view. Economics is not value blind as some proponents claim. Before you can evaluate economic outcomes you have to define what your economic goals are. That is an intrinsically political process and anyone who claims otherwise is either a fool or a liar.
And like all the best quotes Gates never said it.
What he did say was that 640K would be enough for most people using the original IBM PC, which had a 16 bit microprocessor running at 8 MHz, no memory management and a hard limit of 1Mb of addressable memory. 640K of RAM cost several times the price of the machine at that time.
Given that the 286 was comming down the pipe and that at the time nobody knew that Intel was going to screw up the memory management it was not a ridiculous design choice which was made by IBM in any case.
Only if the supply is fixed, which is not the case. The principal cost of any high tech gadget is the technology. The more buyers those costs are spread over the lower the cost per item. Competition will drive prices down to the cost of production.
Perhaps US schools should stop teaching economics altogether since a little learning appears to be more dangerous than none. Or maybe economists should stop calling their theories 'laws' as if they were doing physics rather than soft science.
Actually it was you who asserted that raising the minimum wage would inevitably lead to unemployment. I was merely pointing out that the facts disprove your assertion, a causal connection was superfluous.
As for what the right wing argument is, I have not heard the 'investment' theory of trickle down hald as often as the consumption theory. But in any case the investment theory is pretty hard to sustain. Capital is not a scarce resource. Up until 6 months ago it was possible to get pretty much unlimited funds for any Internet related project.
The availability of investment funds is set by the relative level of interest rates, that is why no serious economist would endorse the trickle down 'investment' theory.
If the folk claiming that raising the minimum wage hurts the poor were notable champions of the poor on other issues their argument might be more credible. However the fact is that the folk that make the claim are the same ones who claim that tax cuts for the rich are more important than tax cuts for anyone else.
Given the choice between 4% growth and no tax cut or a 4% tax cut and no growth I will take the growth every time.
Actually the experience of the UK and France when minimum wage laws were introduced was that unemployment fell.
The mechanism is direct and acknowledged by the right when the subject of the argument are the super-rich. The super rich (aka the 'wealth creators') the argument goes will respond to tax cuts by working harder, earning more money. The increasingly enriched pleutocracy will then spend more money creating demand for 'stuff'. It is called the trickle down theory, to improve the lot of those at the bootm of society you have to give more gravy to those at the top and let it trickle down to the poor.
The flaw in the trickle down theory is that for folk in my income bracket expenditure is a very weak function of after their after tax income. If I make double what I made the year before I do not double my expenditure, or anything like it. I spend less than 10% of my income.
Poor folk save very little, if they get more money they spend it. And that expands the economy.
However the return of rights for out of print books if it exists would be a recent innovation. Some publishing contracts have explicit reversion clauses but that is certainly not the normal case.
That brings me to the second point, I don't think that there is a requirement for books on demand in custom sizes. First off the triming process is inherently wastefull. If you want a B5 book start with B5 paper stock. Secondly I think that made to order books will be written for the medium.
The most obvious buyer of such a machine would be Amazon.com. They can then offer the ultimate in vanity publishing, for a trivial amount you could self publish. They already have something of this sort going. If they printed the books to order they could avoid the warehousing costs and reduce the delivery costs (print at the plant it is cheapest to deliver from).
I think that for that particular market though the demand will be for hardback books, clothbound with saddle-stiched pages. This is not very hard to do at all, just hook up a high speed laser printer printing on very wide paper to a standard binding machine. The machine would have to print 16 or 32 pages at a time.
I can well imagine that there would be a lot of demand for such a service, essentially a high end kinkos, except that anyone can buy the result. It would be ideal for conference proceedings and a lot of academic journals which typicaly retail in the $150+ range. It would also be ideal for a lot of business publications, like user manuals. It would even be cost effective for some folk to send out copies of their poetry etc. to their friends.
With a machine like that the number of bogus academic institutes publishing polemics masquerading as reasearch will only increase. We can expect the next books from the Institute for Holocaust Revision and the Creation Scientologists to look like the real thing. It will also mean that left wing 'think tanks' will be able to compete on a level playing field with the 15 odd right wing think tanks funded by Melon Scaife. So instead of reading The Bell Curve's rehashed 1930s eugenic theorising we will see equally loony leftie tombes.
The other inevitable effect will be that every PhD student is going to try to self publish and sell their stupid thesis. Perhaps not such a bad idea since the thing about theses is that you are extreemly lucky if anyone outside your reading committee ever reads it. In fact you are lucky if anyone other than your advisor reads the whole thing.
Do we want new.net to be the sole registrar for 30 pretty desirable TLDs just because they have a lot of venture capital from Idealab! to spend?
What ICANN is doing is stating up front that they are not going to recognise this type of tactic as legitimate.
People have always been able to set up their own roots, I do it myself on my home machine where I root the .test TLD for systems I don't want to register in the external Internet space.
Setting up your own TLD is a bit like setting up your own internal telephone area codes however. It is not a good thing if there are two competing companies handing out 1-800 numbers.
This leads to an important security issue, multiple DNS roots leaves companies open to the risk of having their DNS names hijacked. If I buy the name xyz.kids from the ICANN appointed registrar some smart alex could register xyz.kids at new.net and steal some of my trafic.
In the worst case there is no authoratative root and the site a domain name will resolve to will differ randomly depending on the ISP you select. To be frank the people who claim this is a good idea either have no idea what they are talking about or are paid shills of some alternate registrar looking to muscle in and make some quick cash.
If DNS addresses or IP addresses cease to have the uniqueness properties relied upon in the IP protocol then we no longer have an Internet, all we have is a patchwork of partially interoperable networks.
I would not rely on that as a defence argument. There are many academic programs that run in background mode to snarf up otherwise spare cycles. Physicists have lattice gauge calculations, Geant simulations, meteorology, there are lots of biologists with gene sequence data to crunch.
Unfortunately most of those programs are also designed to have minimal impact on the other users of the machine. Just because a program is at a low machine priority does not mean it is not important to someone. The crack program will take cycles from other distributed applications.
Probably the best approach is to turn the question arround and assert that running batch jobs in spare CPU cycles is a standard academic practice and that a competent sysadmin should have the knowledge and experience to run such programs on their system.
Sure, just get the attribution right, that would be Barbara Bush.
Feel free to send a copy to my parole officer.
Yeah like you can fit the entire history of China in one Slashdot post.
You are also somewhat selective. The US 'Open Door' policy began in the nineteenth century under Teddy Roosevelt. The name is misleading, the policy essentially meant that the US would demand the 'right' to trade on its own terms and back the demand with guns.
Your dates for the Japaneese occupation are misleading. Japan had reduced large areas of china to subordinate status long before. US sources prefer to present the overthrow of the puppet regime as a major event since it co-incides with the rise of the rivalry between the US and Japan.
Looking at the US/China relationship from the China side is very different from that popular amongst right wing kooks in the US.
The only really cutting edge areas for mechanical engineering are manufacture of ICs and Formula One racing. Perhaps the ignorant fool has not noticed but the British Formula One industry is a multi-billion dollar concern. Also Ford may have closed the plant making the Ford Fiesta (budget hatchback) in Halewood, but they replaced it with the plant making the Jaguar X-Type.
I had a Meccano set growing up, a number 6 set with several extras. The box must have weighed about 30 or 40 lb. At the time the same set new would have cost several hundred pounds. Today it would probably cost over a thousand.
I also had lego and from an earlier age. Most kids can't start with lego until they are 9, they don't have the strength to do the bolts. You can start with the duplo lego at 3 and on the real stuff by 6.
When technical lego first came out it was very much a competitor for Meccano. As time has gone on though they seem to have dumbed it down. Most sets have at least one unique piece so that to build it you have to buy the set.
Unfortunately the comp-sci version of Meccano has yet to be written. When I grew up with the Commodore PET and the ZX-80 personal computers were pretty simple and well within the understanding of a 12 year old. Today the PC is beyond anyone's understanding.
The reason the tradition still holds is that in a hospital there are doctors all over the place, the title does not have that much status. There are very few people who are called Mr and the chance of confusion is not great.
China was also unimpressed by the British who fought the opium wars against China to keep the opium trade going... The Brits do mention the Opium wars in their schoolbooks, mainly because they won them.
Taiwan is a much more complex situation that the US press gives credit for. Not only does mainland China claim sovereignty over Taiwan, Taiwan claims sovereignty over mainland China! That is why they used to call themselves the Republic of China.
The US is upset about China for the simple reason that at current rates of growth China will be the largest world economy by about 2015.
Stoping them from getting playstations is not going to keep the US in place as world superpower. In fact if the US govt had any brains they would give the Chineese as many playstations as they want. The more time they spend playing games the less time they will have to outbuild the US economy.
The problem with the 'background task' argument is that breaking RC5 is not necessarily the best use to which those cycles can be put.
The issue of authorization is the weak point in the State case. Running a codebreaking program falls pretty squarely within the normal run of academic persuits. The fact that a prize is offered does not necessarily mean that the enterprise is 'for profit'. All sorts of prizes are offered for academic research. In the case of the RSA cryptography challenge prises they were started by Ron Rivest so that he did not have to spend half an hour reading each day about the latest factoring scheme people had thought up. Peter Trei later suggested to Jim Bizdos that there might be other challenges that would be somewhat more fun and relevant.
Best chance of getting the case thrown out is likely to be demonstrating a that running a crack program is considered acceptable academic behaviour at most universities.
I don't see the terms of service giving the prosecution much help. They are so broad that they could be read to permit or prohibit practically any behavior. The defence get the benefit of the ambiguity, not as some slashdotters appear to believe the prosecution. Nobody is disputing that the guy was authorized to use the equipment, the issue is whether the specific use made was authorized. That is a very subjective question, hardly one that should be at the center of a criminal prosecution.
The reason we had to start putting up the terms of service notices was that without them the courts would not even allow prosecutions of people who broke into computer systems to abuse them in the most malicious ways you can think of.
Still the guy has only himself to blame, you go to live and work in a mickey mouse state that only gave up the swastika (oops sorry symbol of the slavers side in the civil war) on its state flag with great reluctance, you expect the type of legal system portrayed in Stir Crazy and My Cousin Vinny.
More opinionated nonsense that is wrong:
Neither is my cable box, but the company that is renting it to me says it is. They are the only ones who matter.
No bubba, we live in a society of laws and those bind Telocity and for that matter the cable company. The courts are the ones that matter, not your cable company!
Under the terms of service Telocity demanded a $99 up front fee. My bet is that anyone who had their service terminated peremptorily could probably get away with hanging onto their gateway until Telocity returned the $99 startup fee and the balance of any pre-paid use fees.
Looking over the alleged contract I note that it has a whole rack of clauses that are likely to invalidate it in several jurisdictions. It also lacks a severability clause. Like corporate lawyer school 101.
The contract does not contain any language that permits Telocity to terminate service. Thus Telocity are themselves in breach of the contract.
The point about notice still stands. It does not appear to me that Telocity achieved constructive notice or actual notice of the alleged terms of service.
People have rights, if more corporate lawyers understood that simple fact perhaps they would not draft ridiculous contracts and maybe juries would not return equally ridiculous damages awards in return given the chance.
- The gateway is almost certainly not worth $500
- The company does not appear to have given actual notice or even constructive notice of the return requirement
- The company unilaterally terminated the service contract
- The company waited to long to request the return of the gateway
The other somewhat odd argument concerns billing of credit cards. If the company does attempt to bill for the gateways the chances are that there will be a large number of complaints, each of which costs the merchant approx $50 and if the number of complaints rises above about 3% is likely to lead to the termination of the merchant agreement.I don't see any reason to keep the gateway, but if it had already been lost, thrown out, turned into a linux box etc. I would certainly not be planning to pay $500 as a result.
Best plan of attack is to send a registered letter to the CEO of Telocity at his home address (from the SEC documents) setting out the circumstances. Don't forget to mention that you will bring suit against him personally should the company trouble you again.
The information the beureaus put out is so inaccurate that there is little point in bothering. You have a 1 in ten chance of having you credit rating screwed through no fault of your own.
I find it amazing how many 'guberment is evil' types let Equifax run their lives.
A much better solution is to never give a credit card number for a recurring account. I had to cancel my Citibank card after Bell South Wireless Data (now Cingular) billed $350 in fraudulent charges.
It must be a bit like climbing mount Everest the hard way and while you are sitting at the top eating your Kendal Mint Cake, someone rides up the access road on a bicycle.
So what was the point of spending several hundred million doing the job the hard way? Oh they filled a gazillion patents on the sequences the read out. And there I thought you had to invent something to get a patent.
Point of information, SOAP is non-blocking. It is possible to write RPC calls in SOAP but they are not the only messages supported.
Microsoft have been working with VeriSign and IBM to produce the security infrastructure. There is already a W3C note that describes use of XML Signature to sign SOAP messages, the XML Encryption group only holds its first meeting next week so it is hardly suprising that there is no 'encrypting SOAP messages' draft.
The dotNET PKI story is XML Key Management Specification developed by Microsoft, VeriSign and WebMethods and now supported by most of the security industry. The W3C is holding a workshop on XKMS the day before the XML Encryption workshop. It is not a PKI in the conventional sense, it allows the application to attach to any underlying PKI - X.509, PGP, SPKI or a new one yet to be designed. XKMS is layered on top of Web Services.
Details on XKMS can be found at www.xmltrustcenter.org