I get more than a little fed up when Microsofts competitors complain about competition and using tactics they use themselves.
Netscape whined about Microsoft pushing them out of the browser business by giving away free software. But that is exactly the way the Netscape pushed Spyglass out of the same market. Netscape claimed to be charging for the browser but gave away as many copies as they could to seed the market.
Complaints about dotnet and hailstorm have to be considered in the same light. Sun made an attempt to gain a stranglehold over the development of computing languages. Java is the only 'standard' I know of where one manufacturer has a veto over the languages development.
All in all it reminds me of the Republicans complaints about Clinton's bribe taking while all the time taking even bigger bribes themselves from the tobacco lobby, etc. etc. etc etc.
Here in the UK interested parties can object to the patent office about a patent before it is granted. I have no idea quite what happens if someone does challenge
I have known of challenges that have succeeded but they are fairly rare. The fact that a patent filing costs serious money and is certain to be challenged by competitors makes filers much more carefull to avoid the frivolous and outright fraudulent claims typical in the US.
Re:Everybody's not above average!
on
IT Unions?
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· Score: 2
Think Stephen Hawking in an IRC channel. Suddenly everyone except him is below average.
Well I take your point but Steve would probably not score that well on IQ tests given that the MND would slow his responses down to the point where his score would depend entirely on the amount of time given to respond. Give anyone in the upper 10% on math puzzles unlimited time on an IQ test and they can score 100%.
Fact is that IQ tests are bogus as heck. Stephen Jay Gould gives the (largely racist) history of them in The Mismeasure of Man.
IQ scores above 130 are actually pretty rare and the correlation to actual ability is completely lost. Stephen got where he did because he had the imagination to think of potting one half of a virtual matter/anti-matter pair into a black hole. He did not get to be Lucasian Prof by getting high scores on brainteasers.
Look at it another way, the ability to paint a house fast does not mean that one is up to painting the Sistine chapel ceiling.
What this comes down to is that statistically most people are above average in at least one skill. Stephen Hawking scores above average in figuring out Hausdorfian Manifolds with Lipschit signatures, put him in a table tennis tournament and he will score way below par however.
Now statistically there are also folk with absolutely no redeeming features just as there are people who get perfect grade score averages, excel at athletics and make money on the side winning beauty pagents. However we scientists have a term for such statistical anomalies of both types, freaks.
You can exercise, and then have your broker shortsell on the exercise date to recover your costs.
At which point you have performed a 'constructive sale' and are liable for tax as if you had sold the shares.
If you talk to a high level broker they have legal scams that wont get you into jail. Only catch is they won't speak to you unless you have at least $5 million to invest.
Trying to find an adviser that understands the AMT system is next to impossible. The idiots at H&R block are not going to be taught the stuff on their 15 minute 'training video'. Basically once you have paid a big AMT bill on stock that dropped you can get the money back but it sorta involves exercising more stock that does not crash.
I heard that Rambus only opens their board of directors to racketeering charges if they appeal.
RICO is a law that trebble damages if a criminal act is performed in a particular manner. First however there has to be a criminal act. An appeal would not affect the criminality of Rambus behavior.
The criminal behavior alleged would be fraudulent claims made in the procurement of the patents or the threats of legal action.
In addition, this particular case only involved four Rambus patents, and Rambus claims to have over a dozen patents which affect SDRAM manufacture
The other patents are the foreign versions of the ones in the US suit. Having lost in the US the chance of wining elsewhere on the same patent claims is very small.
Rambus failled to get the case to trial. That is significant and places them in a very bad position for an appeal. Rambus can only appeal on a point of law. The district court is generally given defference to on matters of fact - unless as with Judge Penfold Jackass the judge insults the appeals court and labels 'conclusory statements' as 'findings of fact'.
The Micron and Hyundai cases are certain to fail if Infineon fails since they all concern the design of the same product.
Nothing. Samsung et al still have to pay up. I'm sure the settlement agreement states that they can't sue again for some considerable period of time.
Not a bit of it. The Samsung settlement falls if the patent falls. Samsung and co thought that RAMBUS were full of it. However they did not want to fight the case in a US court which might well be as rigged as the US customs system which allows US companies to have arbitrary fines imposed on competitors on the basis of flim flam accusations of 'dumping' - read the foreign plant is more efficient.
Rambus had to settle some of the cases to generate the cash to fight the others so they cut a deal. Samsung agreed to pay royalties but they can revoke the license at will.
John Markoff wrote the book about Kevin Mitnick, which helped the govt to build all the stupid accusations against him and to throw him in jail for years together.
Fact The FBI were looking for Mitnick long before Markoff wrote about him and long long before the book came out.
Fact Mitnick was wanted as a parole violator after release from jail after his second conviction for hacking
Fact While on the run Mitnick broke into Shimomura's home computer system and stole code that converted a cell phone into a scanner.
Mitnick wanted to be caught and wanted to go to jail. It is the only rational explanation for his behavior. The sentence he got was mild compared to what a third time thief would have recieved.
The allegations made against Mitnick by the cracker community are simply sour grapes from folk who don't understand that breaking into computer systems is evil and that people who do it should go to jail for a very long time.
Back in the early '80s I was writting video games. At that point the machines were capable of practically nothing in comparison to today. 8 bit processors, 16Kb (KILO) or RAM. But many of the games are still more fun than some modern efforts.
The game business has many similarities to the film business. A few people make ungodly amounts of money. Most are paid ridiculously low wages. The power in the industry lies with the distributors and control the finances.
I don't do video games any more. When I was in the business we were on royalties and did pretty well. Today it sounds like a games programmer gets paid half or a third of what he could make elsewhere and since video game companies are only as good as their last hit the stock options are likely to be so far underwater you will need a snorkel and flippers to find them.
Today with tools like Java it should be possible to construct playable clones of 1980s arcade games in a few hours or days - we used to write them in weeks or months in assembler using cassette tapes as storage.
I would get my kicks writing a couple of games that way, perhaps releasing them as open source on a web site or whatever.
Then having got that out of your system go find yourself a nice dotcom startup and concentrate on the real problem of separating the great american public from their retirement investments in the shortest possible time by convincing them that your startup is going to be the next Microsoft like the rest of us do.
Does anybody have any idea whether the JDEC agreement has any teeth?
Oh yes. One of the major PC manufacturers played similar games with the PC bus in the EISA consortium. The patents were invalidated by the judge because of that. The legal term is 'abuse'.
Infineon have a strong defense if they can show that the RAMBUS patents were abused in that way.
The fact that the judge has struck out most of the claims during the trial is very bad for RAMBUS. An earlier poster pointed out that lawyer tactics are to throw out as many claims as they can in case one sticks. However the downside of that strategy is that after the judge has found 94% of your case to be unsubstantiated you have a big credibility problem.
Rambus have to win the case to justify their market cap. If they lose the incentive to license RDRAM technology will be pretty small and royalty rates will collapse from the hundreds of millions expected to the hundreds of thousands the idea is actually worth.
Incidentally, neither Netscape nor Microsoft ever pulled a stunt remotely approaching the RAMBUS one at W3C (or for that matter anywhere else thaty I know of). The closest Netscape came is with the SSL patent that they gave a royalty free license to within a few weeks of it being granted. Netscape did practice 'drive by submissions' where the proposal to the W3C started rolling off the fax only minutes before the new navigator version went for download. Microsoft has never pulled a stunt at W3C that I know of.
Actually no, the other companies deals fall if Rambus loses. This is not usually the case, once you sign a license you are bound by the license. In this case however I have seen reports that the license is terminated if the patents are invalidated.
Introducing any sort of rule introduces costs if it is to be enforced. As it happens it is impossible to determine if an MX record for a mailer is in use or not without monitoring traffic to the mailer.
60 days is a ridiculously short time since many commercial enterprises plan major marketing campaigns months or years in advance. If I am spending $100K on canvasing opinions of six potential product names I think I am doing enough to justify registration in any sane system. However I am not about to go and prove it.
Any system that relies on human judgement is going to end in lawsuits or the rule being ignored. Or most likely as has happened in several country TLDs lawsuits being filled and the rules being dropped.
It is simply not economic for registrars to work for $35 per name under the rules proposed. I don't think people want to pay $200+ for initial registration.
maybe Coke will pay ICANN and Verisign to reserve coke.tld in all namespaces in the future (even coke.book or coke.museum or whatever silly TLDs are released) whatever their Trademark covers).
VeriSign will be happy to do just that. They own ID names, a company that specializes in DNS name management. They know the rules for registration in every single TLD, wether qualification is required, forms of payment etc.
They typically handle large accounts and manage all the domain names for a company through a single point of contact. That makes sure that a name does not get dropped because nobody remembered to pay the bill and the email address of the technical contact is bouncing.
In addition they will even email you the minute a new TLD is created (rare) or (more common) an existing TLD changes its rules so that qualifications are no longer required before registration. The trend has been for regulations to be relaxed since checking rules takes time and costs money.
The per domain charge is low. But the number of tlds is getting on for 200 and many compaines have multiple brands. There is also a trend toward registering xyzsucks.com, xyzreallysucks.com xyzarenazis etc. Its like buying floor tiles, the charge per tile can be small but when you buy a room full you end up signing a big check.
In the sex.com litigation, a federal judge ruled that domain names are not property like a trademark or copyright. Rather they are a service, like a phone number
Actually that was not the rulling. A Domain name is not property for one part of the case but is for another.
The reason a domain name is not property is that it has no tangible representation. It is not like cash that can be deposited in the court. It is not even like cash in a bank account which is a representation that can be escrowed.
Of course a domain name is a valuable property the way a UK license plate number can be. (A1 resold for over a million dollars a while back). So damages were assesed on that basis.
I agree however that there should be a statute of limitations. Anyone who has not picked up a dot com yet for their trademark should lose the right to grab it from someone who did. That is not where domain name disputes are these days however, there are plenty of secondary names which arguably infringe trademarks (FordTruck.com for example).
Equally a lot of the petty name disputes (gwbush.com) could be solved by simply setting up name spaces that were policed in a reasonable fashion. For example the US government could assign.candidate.gov as a hierarchy for federal election candidates. To register in the hierarchy a person would have to meet certain legitimacy criteria (be standing as a candidate, use their original name or one they have been known by for a certain number of years, etc.).
The point is that there has to be a balance. First come first served does not solve every problem. Johnnie come lately grabs good domain with over priced, under ethical lawyers creates more problems than it solves.
Interesting how one can get a score of 5 these days for suggesting national TLDs (like.uk has not existed for years) as a solution.
Fact is that the national TLDs are more of a problem than a solution. Most companies have global aspirations. That is why nobody wanted the OSI names that started C=US, what does a company like Nokia put there? Many companies do not want to introduce parochial national issues into their names.
I buy a burger from McDonalds, not McDonalds.US. Even products that are linked to very specific countries such as sports cars are global brands. Everyone knows that no Jaguar is ever going to be built outside the UK and no Ferrari is ever going to be built outside Italy (except for certain F1 machines:-). Even so Ferrari and Jaguar are world brands, not national brands and are managed accordingly.
There is certainly a case for a new directory infrastructure. Folk who want to rip up DNS to build it need to take some reality pills though. Fact is that DNS is the ASCII of the Internet, you might like to change it but you ain't going to.
New directory systems are going to come along. Names and keywords in those systems may well become valuable as the DNS names have. However they will be supplemental, not replacements.
Lots of companies have started directory schemes, most fail. Even the companies 'selling' names into spurious DNS spaces only they and about six other people resolve through have seen revenues shrivel.
To establish a new name space a company is likely to have to meet the following criteria.
Be a significant Internet player (we are talking Microsoft, VeriSign, Cisco level here, large positive cash flow, millions of customers not CMGI or Idealab! startups).
The names must be useable by hundreds of millions of users.
Offer names on a uniform, non discriminatory basis. This means that the registrar does not cherry pick the best names and sell them at vast rents.
Names must be offered on a freehold basis. Many directories try to rent names. So I spend $20 million to advertise a name and you raise the price on me...
Names must be usefull to the end user. Yahoo is no longer any use to me, I no longer find what I want, I find an idiot advertiser that paid Yahoo. If I type in Microsoft it has to take me to Microsoft, not a MSFT hate site. If I type in About Microsoft I get those.
On the TLD side proper, one solution is to simply go to a flat structure. There is no technical reason why the root could not have ten million names in it. The dotcom zone already has that number of entries and works just fine. The engineering required to make it work just fine is non-trivial. But if the world wants to type in www.cnn. or www.google. and have it work there is no technical reason. VeriSign would just love to run it for $6 per name the same price as dotcom.
If all this means is that MSN will run the Quest modem pools and the price plan is unaffected then it means no more than MSN and Quest pool their POPs. Under the Quest long distance plan you got free ISP if you spent over $50 a month in long distance, catch is that with Quest charging 5 cents a minute or less that is pretty hard.
I don't think takeover by MSN is anywhere near as scary as being taken over by AOL. MSN gives clean IP dialtone, AOL locks you into their own private prison and bombards you with pop up ads. There may be an MSN for morons to compete with AOL these days, but at least you get the choice.
What I am worried about is if my AT&T cable modem goes AOL. I can't get DSL at the moment in my neighbourhood - otherwise I would have hooked that up and got a static IP address. I guess that if I get AOL'ed I will simply have to pay for a T1 and see if I can rent my basement space out to folk who want to co-loc.
Fortunately for Napster, the Judge has let them off easy with a deal where they stop contributing to copyright infringement by filtering based on a list provided by the RIAA.
No she hasn't. In the first place the 'deal' waxs imposed by the appeals court. Secondly this is merely squabbling over the preliminary injunction.
The original injunction would have killed Napster before the case went to trial. Napster still faces the likelihood that Patel will find for the plaintifs at trial and impose a fine that Napster cannot pay or raise a bond for to file an appeal.
Are you kidding? You could criticize that flea-ridden, Communist, hippie, bum RMS all day long on/. and get away with it. Not everyone supports Free software here.
And many of those who do have actually met RMS.
Strictly speaking I think he is an anarchist rather than a communist. He does not believe in common ownership, he believes in no ownership at all.
And because they run the server and listen to everything that goes on it to make sure that no unauthorized cover songs are posted, RIAA/ASCAP/BMI won't attack them.
That sounds unnecessary and probably ineffective. Under DMCA they merely need to remove the content after being notified of infringement.
If they do that dilligently (and that does not mean what Napster are up to) the chances of the RIAA attacking are small.
From what I understand of the ruling, the RIAA needs to provide proof of Copyright and the specific filename for each infringement before Napster has the duty to remove access to the infringing file.
That is what Napster is claiming. What actually happened in the case is that Judge Patel sent a question to the Appeals court to ask if this level of compliance was adequate under their previous order.
What this means is that Patel has clued up and worked out a way to pre-empt a Napster appeal to the appelate level a second time.
The other point people seem to have overlooked is that the preliminary injunction is only a part of the case. There is also the much more important issue of the damages litigation itself. Since there are no issues of fact in dispute, only questions of law and damages are likely statutory the chances are that this is a bench trial.
All the file name manipulation stuff overlooks the fact that if Napster runs out of momey they have to close just like any other business. So far they have lost money quicker than WebVan and got entangled in a nasty lawsuit in which damages are likely to be arrond $5 billion if they lose (based on the number of tracks stated in the original complaint, reconning damages as the retail price alone).
If Kozmo can't make a businsess out of delivering a candy bar and a Jolt cola to my door I don't see that Napster has a chance of survival.
U.S. copyright law did not protect sound recordings until 1972, if I remember correctly.
Answer, you don't. US law has protected sound recordings since the 1908(?) when the copyright act was modified to include copyright on player piano rolls.
The Beatles recordings are all fully in copyright and always have been.
The design of Fortran, C, C++, Pascal, Eiffel and LISP were done behind closed doors
They were all developed the same way Linux was, someone put out a basic version, the community commented back and the lead developer may or may not accept the patch.
What you are talking about appears to be not 'open source' but 'design by committee'. That only works in one circumstance in my experience, when a single individual does most of the design work.
You are right. The good news is: the formal definition exists; it is about 90 pages long
Not a good sign, get it down to 5 pages and the language might have a chance of being implementable.
The bad news is: it's boring, it's incomplete, and it's based on a pre indentation-sensitive version
The indentation syntax has nothing to do with the semantics.
Slashdot Mirror
You can fault ICANN for many reasons but telling the .web and .biz squatters to take a long walk off a short pier is not one of them.
The wildcat squatters were told when they began that they would not be recognized.
Should the new.net folk be allowed the fifty odd plum domains they have started selling just because they were the pushiest?
Yet another example of heavy handed authoritarianism on the part of ICANN
Netscape whined about Microsoft pushing them out of the browser business by giving away free software. But that is exactly the way the Netscape pushed Spyglass out of the same market. Netscape claimed to be charging for the browser but gave away as many copies as they could to seed the market.
Complaints about dotnet and hailstorm have to be considered in the same light. Sun made an attempt to gain a stranglehold over the development of computing languages. Java is the only 'standard' I know of where one manufacturer has a veto over the languages development.
All in all it reminds me of the Republicans complaints about Clinton's bribe taking while all the time taking even bigger bribes themselves from the tobacco lobby, etc. etc. etc etc.
I have known of challenges that have succeeded but they are fairly rare. The fact that a patent filing costs serious money and is certain to be challenged by competitors makes filers much more carefull to avoid the frivolous and outright fraudulent claims typical in the US.
Well I take your point but Steve would probably not score that well on IQ tests given that the MND would slow his responses down to the point where his score would depend entirely on the amount of time given to respond. Give anyone in the upper 10% on math puzzles unlimited time on an IQ test and they can score 100%.
Fact is that IQ tests are bogus as heck. Stephen Jay Gould gives the (largely racist) history of them in The Mismeasure of Man.
IQ scores above 130 are actually pretty rare and the correlation to actual ability is completely lost. Stephen got where he did because he had the imagination to think of potting one half of a virtual matter/anti-matter pair into a black hole. He did not get to be Lucasian Prof by getting high scores on brainteasers.
Look at it another way, the ability to paint a house fast does not mean that one is up to painting the Sistine chapel ceiling.
What this comes down to is that statistically most people are above average in at least one skill. Stephen Hawking scores above average in figuring out Hausdorfian Manifolds with Lipschit signatures, put him in a table tennis tournament and he will score way below par however.
Now statistically there are also folk with absolutely no redeeming features just as there are people who get perfect grade score averages, excel at athletics and make money on the side winning beauty pagents. However we scientists have a term for such statistical anomalies of both types, freaks.
At which point you have performed a 'constructive sale' and are liable for tax as if you had sold the shares.
If you talk to a high level broker they have legal scams that wont get you into jail. Only catch is they won't speak to you unless you have at least $5 million to invest.
Trying to find an adviser that understands the AMT system is next to impossible. The idiots at H&R block are not going to be taught the stuff on their 15 minute 'training video'. Basically once you have paid a big AMT bill on stock that dropped you can get the money back but it sorta involves exercising more stock that does not crash.
RICO is a law that trebble damages if a criminal act is performed in a particular manner. First however there has to be a criminal act. An appeal would not affect the criminality of Rambus behavior.
The criminal behavior alleged would be fraudulent claims made in the procurement of the patents or the threats of legal action.
The other patents are the foreign versions of the ones in the US suit. Having lost in the US the chance of wining elsewhere on the same patent claims is very small.
Rambus failled to get the case to trial. That is significant and places them in a very bad position for an appeal. Rambus can only appeal on a point of law. The district court is generally given defference to on matters of fact - unless as with Judge Penfold Jackass the judge insults the appeals court and labels 'conclusory statements' as 'findings of fact'.
The Micron and Hyundai cases are certain to fail if Infineon fails since they all concern the design of the same product.
Not a bit of it. The Samsung settlement falls if the patent falls. Samsung and co thought that RAMBUS were full of it. However they did not want to fight the case in a US court which might well be as rigged as the US customs system which allows US companies to have arbitrary fines imposed on competitors on the basis of flim flam accusations of 'dumping' - read the foreign plant is more efficient.
Rambus had to settle some of the cases to generate the cash to fight the others so they cut a deal. Samsung agreed to pay royalties but they can revoke the license at will.
Fact The FBI were looking for Mitnick long before Markoff wrote about him and long long before the book came out.
Fact Mitnick was wanted as a parole violator after release from jail after his second conviction for hacking
Fact While on the run Mitnick broke into Shimomura's home computer system and stole code that converted a cell phone into a scanner.
Mitnick wanted to be caught and wanted to go to jail. It is the only rational explanation for his behavior. The sentence he got was mild compared to what a third time thief would have recieved.
The allegations made against Mitnick by the cracker community are simply sour grapes from folk who don't understand that breaking into computer systems is evil and that people who do it should go to jail for a very long time.
The game business has many similarities to the film business. A few people make ungodly amounts of money. Most are paid ridiculously low wages. The power in the industry lies with the distributors and control the finances.
I don't do video games any more. When I was in the business we were on royalties and did pretty well. Today it sounds like a games programmer gets paid half or a third of what he could make elsewhere and since video game companies are only as good as their last hit the stock options are likely to be so far underwater you will need a snorkel and flippers to find them.
Today with tools like Java it should be possible to construct playable clones of 1980s arcade games in a few hours or days - we used to write them in weeks or months in assembler using cassette tapes as storage.
I would get my kicks writing a couple of games that way, perhaps releasing them as open source on a web site or whatever.
Then having got that out of your system go find yourself a nice dotcom startup and concentrate on the real problem of separating the great american public from their retirement investments in the shortest possible time by convincing them that your startup is going to be the next Microsoft like the rest of us do.
Oh yes. One of the major PC manufacturers played similar games with the PC bus in the EISA consortium. The patents were invalidated by the judge because of that. The legal term is 'abuse'.
Infineon have a strong defense if they can show that the RAMBUS patents were abused in that way.
The fact that the judge has struck out most of the claims during the trial is very bad for RAMBUS. An earlier poster pointed out that lawyer tactics are to throw out as many claims as they can in case one sticks. However the downside of that strategy is that after the judge has found 94% of your case to be unsubstantiated you have a big credibility problem.
Rambus have to win the case to justify their market cap. If they lose the incentive to license RDRAM technology will be pretty small and royalty rates will collapse from the hundreds of millions expected to the hundreds of thousands the idea is actually worth.
Incidentally, neither Netscape nor Microsoft ever pulled a stunt remotely approaching the RAMBUS one at W3C (or for that matter anywhere else thaty I know of). The closest Netscape came is with the SSL patent that they gave a royalty free license to within a few weeks of it being granted. Netscape did practice 'drive by submissions' where the proposal to the W3C started rolling off the fax only minutes before the new navigator version went for download. Microsoft has never pulled a stunt at W3C that I know of.
Actually no, the other companies deals fall if Rambus loses. This is not usually the case, once you sign a license you are bound by the license. In this case however I have seen reports that the license is terminated if the patents are invalidated.
Untrue, I am not a US citizen and have no plans to become one. I have lived in four countries so far.
The problems you describe are not what the DNS is designed to solve. DNS is not a yellow pages.
60 days is a ridiculously short time since many commercial enterprises plan major marketing campaigns months or years in advance. If I am spending $100K on canvasing opinions of six potential product names I think I am doing enough to justify registration in any sane system. However I am not about to go and prove it.
Any system that relies on human judgement is going to end in lawsuits or the rule being ignored. Or most likely as has happened in several country TLDs lawsuits being filled and the rules being dropped.
It is simply not economic for registrars to work for $35 per name under the rules proposed. I don't think people want to pay $200+ for initial registration.
VeriSign will be happy to do just that. They own ID names, a company that specializes in DNS name management. They know the rules for registration in every single TLD, wether qualification is required, forms of payment etc.
They typically handle large accounts and manage all the domain names for a company through a single point of contact. That makes sure that a name does not get dropped because nobody remembered to pay the bill and the email address of the technical contact is bouncing.
In addition they will even email you the minute a new TLD is created (rare) or (more common) an existing TLD changes its rules so that qualifications are no longer required before registration. The trend has been for regulations to be relaxed since checking rules takes time and costs money.
The per domain charge is low. But the number of tlds is getting on for 200 and many compaines have multiple brands. There is also a trend toward registering xyzsucks.com, xyzreallysucks.com xyzarenazis etc. Its like buying floor tiles, the charge per tile can be small but when you buy a room full you end up signing a big check.
Actually that was not the rulling. A Domain name is not property for one part of the case but is for another.
The reason a domain name is not property is that it has no tangible representation. It is not like cash that can be deposited in the court. It is not even like cash in a bank account which is a representation that can be escrowed.
Of course a domain name is a valuable property the way a UK license plate number can be. (A1 resold for over a million dollars a while back). So damages were assesed on that basis.
I agree however that there should be a statute of limitations. Anyone who has not picked up a dot com yet for their trademark should lose the right to grab it from someone who did. That is not where domain name disputes are these days however, there are plenty of secondary names which arguably infringe trademarks (FordTruck.com for example).
Equally a lot of the petty name disputes (gwbush.com) could be solved by simply setting up name spaces that were policed in a reasonable fashion. For example the US government could assign .candidate.gov as a hierarchy for federal election candidates. To register in the hierarchy a person would have to meet certain legitimacy criteria (be standing as a candidate, use their original name or one they have been known by for a certain number of years, etc.).
The point is that there has to be a balance. First come first served does not solve every problem. Johnnie come lately grabs good domain with over priced, under ethical lawyers creates more problems than it solves.
Fact is that the national TLDs are more of a problem than a solution. Most companies have global aspirations. That is why nobody wanted the OSI names that started C=US, what does a company like Nokia put there? Many companies do not want to introduce parochial national issues into their names.
I buy a burger from McDonalds, not McDonalds.US. Even products that are linked to very specific countries such as sports cars are global brands. Everyone knows that no Jaguar is ever going to be built outside the UK and no Ferrari is ever going to be built outside Italy (except for certain F1 machines :-). Even so Ferrari and Jaguar are world brands, not national brands and are managed accordingly.
There is certainly a case for a new directory infrastructure. Folk who want to rip up DNS to build it need to take some reality pills though. Fact is that DNS is the ASCII of the Internet, you might like to change it but you ain't going to.
New directory systems are going to come along. Names and keywords in those systems may well become valuable as the DNS names have. However they will be supplemental, not replacements.
Lots of companies have started directory schemes, most fail. Even the companies 'selling' names into spurious DNS spaces only they and about six other people resolve through have seen revenues shrivel.
To establish a new name space a company is likely to have to meet the following criteria.
Be a significant Internet player (we are talking Microsoft, VeriSign, Cisco level here, large positive cash flow, millions of customers not CMGI or Idealab! startups).
The names must be useable by hundreds of millions of users.
Offer names on a uniform, non discriminatory basis. This means that the registrar does not cherry pick the best names and sell them at vast rents.
Names must be offered on a freehold basis. Many directories try to rent names. So I spend $20 million to advertise a name and you raise the price on me...
Names must be usefull to the end user. Yahoo is no longer any use to me, I no longer find what I want, I find an idiot advertiser that paid Yahoo. If I type in Microsoft it has to take me to Microsoft, not a MSFT hate site. If I type in About Microsoft I get those.
On the TLD side proper, one solution is to simply go to a flat structure. There is no technical reason why the root could not have ten million names in it. The dotcom zone already has that number of entries and works just fine. The engineering required to make it work just fine is non-trivial. But if the world wants to type in www.cnn. or www.google. and have it work there is no technical reason. VeriSign would just love to run it for $6 per name the same price as dotcom.
I don't think takeover by MSN is anywhere near as scary as being taken over by AOL. MSN gives clean IP dialtone, AOL locks you into their own private prison and bombards you with pop up ads. There may be an MSN for morons to compete with AOL these days, but at least you get the choice.
What I am worried about is if my AT&T cable modem goes AOL. I can't get DSL at the moment in my neighbourhood - otherwise I would have hooked that up and got a static IP address. I guess that if I get AOL'ed I will simply have to pay for a T1 and see if I can rent my basement space out to folk who want to co-loc.
No she hasn't. In the first place the 'deal' waxs imposed by the appeals court. Secondly this is merely squabbling over the preliminary injunction.
The original injunction would have killed Napster before the case went to trial. Napster still faces the likelihood that Patel will find for the plaintifs at trial and impose a fine that Napster cannot pay or raise a bond for to file an appeal.
And many of those who do have actually met RMS.
Strictly speaking I think he is an anarchist rather than a communist. He does not believe in common ownership, he believes in no ownership at all.
That sounds unnecessary and probably ineffective. Under DMCA they merely need to remove the content after being notified of infringement.
If they do that dilligently (and that does not mean what Napster are up to) the chances of the RIAA attacking are small.
That is what Napster is claiming. What actually happened in the case is that Judge Patel sent a question to the Appeals court to ask if this level of compliance was adequate under their previous order.
What this means is that Patel has clued up and worked out a way to pre-empt a Napster appeal to the appelate level a second time.
The other point people seem to have overlooked is that the preliminary injunction is only a part of the case. There is also the much more important issue of the damages litigation itself. Since there are no issues of fact in dispute, only questions of law and damages are likely statutory the chances are that this is a bench trial.
All the file name manipulation stuff overlooks the fact that if Napster runs out of momey they have to close just like any other business. So far they have lost money quicker than WebVan and got entangled in a nasty lawsuit in which damages are likely to be arrond $5 billion if they lose (based on the number of tracks stated in the original complaint, reconning damages as the retail price alone).
If Kozmo can't make a businsess out of delivering a candy bar and a Jolt cola to my door I don't see that Napster has a chance of survival.
Answer, you don't. US law has protected sound recordings since the 1908(?) when the copyright act was modified to include copyright on player piano rolls.
The Beatles recordings are all fully in copyright and always have been.
The design of Fortran, C, C++, Pascal, Eiffel and LISP were done behind closed doors
They were all developed the same way Linux was, someone put out a basic version, the community commented back and the lead developer may or may not accept the patch.
What you are talking about appears to be not 'open source' but 'design by committee'. That only works in one circumstance in my experience, when a single individual does most of the design work.
You are right. The good news is: the formal definition exists; it is about 90 pages long
Not a good sign, get it down to 5 pages and the language might have a chance of being implementable.
The bad news is: it's boring, it's incomplete, and it's based on a pre indentation-sensitive version
The indentation syntax has nothing to do with the semantics.