Companies fake competitors' spam for their benefit
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Gnutella Vs. SPAM
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· Score: 2
Loads of people have commented along the lines of "well nobody in their right mind buys something because of a spam advert, so surely spamming will die off?".
They're missing the point.
Spam is frequently used by companies who put their COMPETITOR'S names and products on the spam adverts. Thereby their competitors get all the abuse and the original company looks holier-than-thou.
For some people, the bad customer reaction to spam is the whole damn point of spam. Bad press for your competitors is good press for yourself. If you can wind your competitor up in trouble by faking some spam- particularly if the originator is difficult to trace as per gnutella- then you win.
How many people have we got on here extolling the virtues of Gnutella? Far too many. Of which actually get usable service out of Gnutella? Far too few.
Unless you and all your immediate Gnutella neighbours are on cable-like bandwidths you'll be getting 1-3kbytes/sec at best. With Napster you'd be going pretty much full pelt. Where does that extra bandwidth go? You loose it proxying other people's requests and searches.
Gnutella and other decentralised filesharing systems are a great idea, but in practice trying to do large scale filesharing on limited bandwidth without a central index is a non-starter.
When The Man finally shuts down Napster, OpenNap and all the other Napigator servers, then that's it, game over until we all get megabandwidth into every home.
So all you spods out there, stop telling us how Gnutella is going to save the world, 'cos it isn't. Wise up.
Reasons why an IP address is nothing like a telephone number...
Okay, the reason this isn't doable as you described is because your telephone is, in the main, a switched connection and the Internet is a packet connection.
Internet connections get split up into little segments called packets which are then routed by the best means available at that time. The exact route can vary from day to day (or minute to minute!). Ergo it is important to have the IP number visible to everybody, otherwise nobody knows where to send the replies back to.
Telephone connections (well in theory anyway) are not split up into packets. They exist as a static single connection from end to end (okay purists at the back stop squabbling, yes modern exchanges do use packets, but they also reassemble them to reform the single logical connection). Ergo you can safely hide your telephone number because the connection is already tied down at both ends and, most importantly, doesn't disconnect until the call is over (unlike an Internet connection which is lots of little brief connections and disconnections as packets arrive).
With a telephone, you don't need to know the callers' number, because remote end just replies to whichever line is connected. This wouldn't work with the internet, because the remote end could be receiving packets from thousands of different hosts in a very short time- there is no concept of a one-to-one static connection (not at the transport layer anyway).
And like you said, caller ID is only withheld to the person you're calling. You can be damn sure your telephone company know your number, who you called, and when! Then all the police or GCHQ or whoever have to do is ask your company for a copy of the logfiles.
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Heart: mapped in the 1600s. Transplants in 1900s.
on
Frankenstein Time
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· Score: 2
Yeah right, the whole world's gonna change and it's gonna be a brave new world.
And we're all going to live on the moon by the end of the 1980's.
...get a grip.
Surgeons mapped the heart in the 1600s. It wasn't until the 1900s that we had transplants.
Just because we have a map telling us gene sequences, that doesn't mean we have the technology to start doing anything revoluntionary with them. At best, we'll be speeding up what farmers have been doing for years - selective breeding / genetic engineering.
We've got a map of the stars too. I don't know of anyone taking holidays on Tau Ceti, do you?
One of the biggest news is that the Windows version of MySQL is now also distributed under the GPL license.
Finally, the Win32 version of MySQL is completely free. This makes it the only free (as in both) industrial-strength database on the Windoze platform AFAIK.
So I now have even more ammo to get my boss to ban Microsoft Access and SQL Server from our office!
Does anyone know how to use this from Active Server Pages (ASP)? ODBC driver I guess, right?
Don't you find this all rather comforting? I mean, isn't it rather nice to find out that rather than employing a bunch of perfect heartless humanoid clones, that the CIA actually employ regular blokes like you and me, who make mistakes?
The CIA/NSA/GCHQ aren't perfect. They're human. They are little people who have desk jobs just like you and me. They go home at the end of the day and they play bad music too loud and they go to crap parties and they go to the movies and they spill popcorn all down their t-shirt just like you and me.
...and search for phrases such as "eyes only", "classified secret" etc...
My pal from GCHQ (I live near Cheltenham, it's difficult to live around Cheltenham without having friends in GCHQ) laughed and laughed when he tried this. Then he searched for some other phrase that he wouldn't tell me, then he stopped laughing, then he went kind of quiet, and then he said "I think I need to have a few words with some people on Monday"...
Several police forces already use a Drunk Driver Simulator for "re-educating" people who failed a breath test.
DIY/Home Improvement sims already exist at an infant/kindergarten level; here in the UK we have TV ads for a game that features a children's activity set which overlays a PC keyboard where they can hammer, saw etc (ideally using the plastic toy hammer and plastic toy saw provided, I suppose, but for stress relief I'd use the real thing).
I remember that SimElection games went through a brief period of popularity in the 1980's as text based statistics games in the same vein as Football/Soccer Manager games. And isn't there a certain element of this already present in the tax raising subroutines of SimCity?
Professional Painter... well I definitely recall playing a a Commodore 64 game where you were a poster paster (probably called "Poster Paster" I guess) who had to put up advertising hoardings, that's pretty damn close.
As for Ruthless Revenge or The World's Oldest Profession, well don't Dungeon Master and Leisure Suit Larry already contain these elements?
Now if you want *really* tasteless, who can remember "CAN OF WORMS", a ZX81 compilation including "ROYAL FLUSH", where you had to unblock the drains of Buckingham Palace without disturbing the Queen on the, er, throne, as it were? Was advertised in every single damn issue of the UK's "Popular Computing Weekly" magazine ever published IIRC.
The one I use is the Jenoptic JD11 (aka Praktica D500).
Pros:
Dirt cheap- £80/$120
640x480 resolution fine for web work
Picture quality fine in sunlight
Flash works well provided subject is within 3 metres (9 feet).
2xAA batteries last forever
Takes standard compact flash memory cards- 28 JPGs in 2Mb
Quick transfer to Win95 via serial cable
Dead simple to use; point and shoot button, delete last picture button, mode button (timer, exposure), on/off switch, macro switch, that's about it.
Very small, compact size, surprisingly well built, comes with belt case.
Cons:
No LCD viewer
No zoom
640x480 resolution to small for printing
Picture quality poor in low light
Flash results poor if subject more than 3 metres (9 ft) away.
No Mac/Linux drivers (to my knowledge, I'm after Linux drivers please)
For the price it is a superb camera, although it can't compete with models costing more than twice it's price. It's a case of knowing what it can do, and staying within it's limitations, then you get good results.
I agree the law of libel is an ass. But it is still the law. If you knowingly carry libelous messages on a Usenet server you run, you are open to libel claims.
We can all argue until the cows come home about whether this is good or bad, but that won't change the definition of libel.
If you want to make up a new law called "murmer's new law" or whatever then feel free. But what you're talking about isn't libel, it's something else.
Kabloie wrote: A 12-year old kid plops 'LG sux ballz' on the USENET. You are trying to tell me that he is now an author, with thousands of publishers (ISPs) around the world?
(being 12 years old is too young to be done for libel, in the UK anyway).
Getting published is a big deal
You may think so, but English/Welsh law disagrees (and US law I suspect). You may think that the law is an ass, but that doesn't change the law.
According to the law, handing out a photocopied flyer counts as publishing, and that makes authoring web pages or usenet messages positively complex by comparison.
boojum_uc wrote: Demon publishes nothing "knowingly" on its Usenet servers.
Normally, that is the case. Normally, you would be correct. Normally, an ISP serves out thousands of messages from its Usenet servers every day and has no idea about the content of virtually any of those messages.
But in this particular instance, Godfrey told Demon several times about the offending post.
And it was on this point that the case hinged, and that is why Demon knew they'd never win in court.
Demon knowingly published libellous material on its Usenet servers.
Under English/Welsh law you can't just sue someone for libel out of the blue. You have to give the person a chance to withdraw/correct the offending message first. It's all about being "reasonable" (the word "reasonable" actually appears all the time in English/Welsh legislation). Because gor blimey gov, us Englishmen/Welshmen are very reasonable chaps, and suing someone for libel without giving them a chance to back down just wouldn't be cricket, eh Jeeves? Crikey, that wouldn't be fair play at all, gawd bless the Queen Mum.
Godfrey gave Demon plenty of warning and plenty of chances. Demon stedfastly refused despite all those warnings and the message being obviously libellous (it wasn't a a borderline comment, there was no "ISP playing judge and jury" here, it was a clear cut libellous message).
Demon didn't so much drop the ball, as drop it, have it offered back to them several times, and refused to take the ball back on each occasion.
Anatoli wrote: Imagine that you have a video camera that looks down the street. It records everything it sees 24/7. You publish all the records. Now suppose somebody said something defamatory in front of this camera. Are you liable? Should you stop publishing this piece?
Of course you're liable. You're the publisher.
Which bit of "publishing" do you not understand?
Libel isn't a free speech issue. It's about taking responsibility for your actions. If you publish lies knowingly (remember: Demon were warned several times) you should expect to get done for it.
If you just take a whole bunch of unfiltered stuff (webcam output, letters, usenet messages, whatever) and publish them, that makes you responsible for them. FFS what is the problem here?
Jeez, it's about time the Internet GREW UP!
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How do I change Nscape6 to look like Windows/KDE?
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Suck On Skins And UI
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· Score: 3
All I want is a consistent user interface. If people want to skin and customise their browser, more power to their elbow. But what I happen to want right now, more than anything in the world, is for Netscape 6 to have standard Windows menus and buttons (or standard KDE menus and buttons if I'm at my Linux box).
Sure, if I had not grown out of my penchant for late 80's Pop Will Eat Itself album covers, I'm sure I'd love the "new" Netscape 6 interface (well, I would if it wasn't as slow as a bucket of sick, that is- on my P500 I drag my mouse across the menus and they all momentarily open at once forming a horrid Java-like mess).
As it happens, I want to be able to sit down with new software and use it straight away with no nasty surprises. If I learn how to use Notepad, I'm 99% of the way there to learning Paint Shop Pro or any one of thousands of Win95 applications. With Netscape 6 it's like learning a whole new GUI OS all over again.
If someone REALLY wants to force a skin down my throat by, AT THE VERY LEAST I WANT THE ABILITY TO TURN IT OFF AND GO BACK TO THE DEFAULT GUI/OS SKIN.
Yay, open source rules! But so do standards. Nescape/Mozilla chrome sucks!
Oh, and it would help if Netscape 6's cascading style sheets actually worked properly (try changing the colours of A:LINK.FOOBAR and see what I mean).
Artists say they can't make money from teeshirts and touring, and if sales of their CD drop on the auto-indexer, the label says goodbye
The answer, of course, is for artists to ditch the label first and then ALL the money from their tours/t-shirts go directly to the artists, instead of 99% of the revenue ending up in some record boss' pocket.
With the record company out of the picture, the artist would also be free to sell CDs at a low price - ie. $5-$10 - which would make piracy irrelevent (fans will pay for original copies with proper artwork providing the price is low enough).
Not that I'm saying record companies operate a pricing cartel or anything, of course:-) In the UK we pay $20-$25 for a CD album. Often it is cheaper to buy British bands' albums from the USA and have them imported. Go figure.
I could understand the outcry about cookie tracking if this data was being used to spam me or send me junk mail. But I've been regularly purchasing online since 1996 and it is blatantly obvious that it isn't being used for spam (some of us might even welcome some relevant spam; all I seem to get is kiddie porn ads and adverts for American cable channels- hmm my nearest US cable dealer is 5,000km away- actually, no, scratch that; all spam sucks). But this data isn't being used for spam or junk mail. It is just plain old MARKET RESEARCH. Market research is good. They find out what we like and offer us more of it. They find out what we think sucks and kill it off. This is A Good Thing, provided they don't spam/junkmail me, which they don't. Instead of adverts for irrelevent products, I get adverts for things I might be interested in. Is this evil? FFS no! Heck half the time I count those interesting adverts as NEWS not annoyances! Okay so I'm sensible and I always put in nospam email and postal addresses, unless I'm actually buying something. But it doesn't take a genius to take those kinds of steps, and you certainly don't need to download yet more taskbar lint to tie up the already unstable Win32 platform. Cookie tracking is NOT a threat. So you loose a bit of privacy. So what? You think regular high street shops don't track your visa card number? You wanna go back to a cash based society? Get real.
Grond wrote: Your argument is logically flawed. Just because 'damn prudes and far-right christian arseholes' disapproved of coed dorms does not mean that they are automatically wrong about anything else.
My argument didn't say that prudes/xtians were 'wrong about anything else', it said that they were wrong about two specific things: single sex dorms and internet censorship, and I went on to justify why they were wrong for each of those two cases, gave examples for each reasons, and discussed how the two cases are linked.
If that isn't a logical argument then obviously your idea of a logical argument is limited to only those that you agree with.
Is this the five minute argument or the full half hour?
The only thing really, really banned at my college is, believe it or not, single sex halls of residence. You are not allowed to have a corridor of all girls bedrooms. There has to be at least one boy in the corridor. This is enforced more strictly than any other rule bar none; drugs, theft, you name it... no crime is worse than living in a single sex hall.
Unsurprisingly females outnumbered males 6 to 1 when I was there (now down to 2:1)- dunno why girls tend to like teaching and art, but they do.
This attracted local pervs like you would not believe. Prowlers, stalkers, even, I'm sorry to say, two rapists. You see, they could guarantee that certain buildings were inhabited only by girls. Easy pickings. Force open a window, any window, it doesn't matter... there'd be a girl there.
The problem was solved overnight by banning single sex corridors in halls of residence. Apparently prowlers, stalkers and rapists tend to go away if they suspect they're going to bump into the male rugby football captain instead of some female arts student.
The policy is amazingly successful. It literally got rid of the problem overnight. There hasn't been one single case of prowlers since (like 8 years ago), let alone stalkers or rapists.
Why is this relevant to Slashdot? Because it was the same damn prudes and far-right christian arseholes who were against single sex dorms then, who are are against uncensored internet access now.
Sex and sexual activity is a fact of life (heck without it there wouldn't be ANY life). Trying to censor it or segregate it out of existence is a waste of time. And more importantly, trying to do so is counter-productive.
I could understand censorship if we were talking about primary (kindergarten) schools, but we're talking about high school, sixth form (7th grade) and universities here!
The age of consent is 16 for heaven's sake... just bolt a few condom dispensers to the back of the toilet doors and let them get on with what consenting adults are legally entitled to do!
As for MP3s, well, that's just a bandwidth issue, not a freedom of speech or censorship issue. As such it is a fair point in my opinion.
To me, newspapers are just souvenirs. If something that I think is special happens, I'll buy a newspaper and store it away in my drawers or attic somewhere. Often I won't even bother reading past the front page. I'll have probably read the story a dozen times from a bunch of different sources already.
Even our local newspaper has a website now. I just don't see the point in newspapers as news. Even the classifieds are online. Newspapers are ornaments.
Newspapers are like any original physical media- software, films, albums, whatever- I only buy the originals when I want to celebrate ownership of an original item. For instance, if there's some commercial software I really like (Paint Shop Pro springs to mind), I'll buy the original as an ornament on my shelf (usually I actually install the warez version anyway). I buy original CDs of bands I really, really like, but tend to listen to the MP3s. I'll buy videos of films that really move me (Aliens, Bladerunner etc), even though I might prefer a different foreign/censored/director's cut that I've taped from somebody else.
And then there is the media which is mediocre, which is okay for a while, which does a job that doesn't need repeating. The stuff I wouldn't endorse if I were a celebrity, but hey, it fills a need, until something better comes along. One hit wonder bands. This morning's news on another dull day. Some software which crashes a lot or isn't really as flexible as I want it to be. An okay film that my wife might want to watch later. These are destined to spend their lifetime in my collection of MP3s, websites, warez and VHS tapes.
How to sell more newspapers? See Neal Stephenson's "The Diamond Age".
AC: Do you have a working TV perched on a non-working TV?
Sort of. I have an old 1980's Sony RGB computer monitor plugged into my VCR instead of a TV, and I have a barely functional old black and white TV sitting under my dusty Atari ST monitor.
Does the bed of your truck bed four?
I'm British. We have smaller cars. I own a Daihatsu Terios 4x4. It beds two- me and my wife, both 190cm.
Are you humming a song at this moment about someone doin' someone else wrong?
Does Nine Inch Nails "Starfuckers" count?
Are there also Oakies, hillbillies and rubes in the sticks? Are there even sticks?
I used the word "redneck" 'cos I was writing to an American audience. I would normally have said "yokels" as in "local yokels".
Single sex dormatories are banned there. We found that single sex dorms attracted unwanted attention from various local perverts. I'm sorry to say there were two rapes on-site.
Rapists and perverts, we discovered, are much less likely to prowl around dormatories if they have a 50/50 chance of coming up against a bloke. Imediately after the second rape we went even further, and put members of the men's rugby team on the ground floor (UK rugby = US football without padding, very agressive game).
Obviously we don't have mixed sex rooms (not officially anyway!:-)- but it is official college policy that a corridor of entirely girls' rooms is Not Allowed. Typically rooms are single or twin bed, no more, with 8-16 rooms to a corridor. Most bathrooms are en-suite to protect students' modesty, but there are a few remaining shared bathrooms; we found all students were quite happy wandering about in dressing gowns in mixed sex groups. Some buildings are organised into sets of 4-bedroom appartments with two appartments per floor; in which case there must be males present in the ground floor apartment.
This policy has been in effect for 8 years now. There have been no further rapes and the prowlers disappeared after one month, never to return.
Oh, and thanks to the mandatory condom dispensers we didn't have any unwanted pregnancies either.
This is just the first phase. GPRS is scalable so you can add more bandwidth. Question is, at what price?
Then there's IMT which will do 2mbs, alledgedly, but requires significant hardware upgrade at the transmitter sites (unlike GPRS which is just "GSM Plus", slot a new board into the existing basestation box'o'tricks, plug in the fibre and yer done, mate).
If you're talking about http://www.iinet.net.au/products/netw ork.html, then the only wireless service they offer is "Wireless links to the QV.1 tower" which I very much suspect is a microwave job.
Wolverhampton University (home of the classic WITCH 1948 historic computer) has had a similar microwave Internet connection since the early 1980's.
Yarn wrote: This is BT we're talking about. I'd guess the price will be of the order of 5 pence a minute+connection.
Whilst I agree that BT will probably take every opportunity to shaft me over, the fact is that they can't charge per minute for this service.
GPRS is always on.
It's always there, permanently. There is no dialling, no placing a call, no handshaking... it's a permanent connection.
Now the question is, will they charge by the byte? Initially, I suspect so- and through the nose, no doubt.
But I live outside the reach of ADSL, cable and ISDN, so frankly I don't care! I'll get a better paid job if that's what it takes to get some bandwidth out here in the Cotswolds!
Slashdot Mirror
Loads of people have commented along the lines of "well nobody in their right mind buys something because of a spam advert, so surely spamming will die off?".
They're missing the point.
Spam is frequently used by companies who put their COMPETITOR'S names and products on the spam adverts. Thereby their competitors get all the abuse and the original company looks holier-than-thou.
For some people, the bad customer reaction to spam is the whole damn point of spam. Bad press for your competitors is good press for yourself. If you can wind your competitor up in trouble by faking some spam- particularly if the originator is difficult to trace as per gnutella- then you win.
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How many people have we got on here extolling the virtues of Gnutella? Far too many. Of which actually get usable service out of Gnutella? Far too few.
Unless you and all your immediate Gnutella neighbours are on cable-like bandwidths you'll be getting 1-3kbytes/sec at best. With Napster you'd be going pretty much full pelt. Where does that extra bandwidth go? You loose it proxying other people's requests and searches.
Gnutella and other decentralised filesharing systems are a great idea, but in practice trying to do large scale filesharing on limited bandwidth without a central index is a non-starter.
When The Man finally shuts down Napster, OpenNap and all the other Napigator servers, then that's it, game over until we all get megabandwidth into every home.
So all you spods out there, stop telling us how Gnutella is going to save the world, 'cos it isn't. Wise up.
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caller ID vs. IP numbers
Reasons why an IP address is nothing like a telephone number...
Okay, the reason this isn't doable as you described is because your telephone is, in the main, a switched connection and the Internet is a packet connection.
Internet connections get split up into little segments called packets which are then routed by the best means available at that time. The exact route can vary from day to day (or minute to minute!). Ergo it is important to have the IP number visible to everybody, otherwise nobody knows where to send the replies back to.
Telephone connections (well in theory anyway) are not split up into packets. They exist as a static single connection from end to end (okay purists at the back stop squabbling, yes modern exchanges do use packets, but they also reassemble them to reform the single logical connection). Ergo you can safely hide your telephone number because the connection is already tied down at both ends and, most importantly, doesn't disconnect until the call is over (unlike an Internet connection which is lots of little brief connections and disconnections as packets arrive).
With a telephone, you don't need to know the callers' number, because remote end just replies to whichever line is connected. This wouldn't work with the internet, because the remote end could be receiving packets from thousands of different hosts in a very short time- there is no concept of a one-to-one static connection (not at the transport layer anyway).
And like you said, caller ID is only withheld to the person you're calling. You can be damn sure your telephone company know your number, who you called, and when! Then all the police or GCHQ or whoever have to do is ask your company for a copy of the logfiles.
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Yeah right, the whole world's gonna change and it's gonna be a brave new world.
And we're all going to live on the moon by the end of the 1980's.
Surgeons mapped the heart in the 1600s. It wasn't until the 1900s that we had transplants.
Just because we have a map telling us gene sequences, that doesn't mean we have the technology to start doing anything revoluntionary with them. At best, we'll be speeding up what farmers have been doing for years - selective breeding / genetic engineering.
We've got a map of the stars too. I don't know of anyone taking holidays on Tau Ceti, do you?
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www.chilisoft.com
ASP under UNIX. Ho yuss.
The Plan:
I mean, I love PERL. And I kinda see how I ought to get into PHP. But ASP is a lot easier to pick up.
Also, speaking as a manager, ASP programmers are a lot cheaper (you can even train up dirt cheap Visual Basic programmers who are a penny a dozen).
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web.mysql.com/news/article-22.html
One of the biggest news is that the Windows version of MySQL is now also distributed under the GPL license.
Finally, the Win32 version of MySQL is completely free. This makes it the only free (as in both) industrial-strength database on the Windoze platform AFAIK.
So I now have even more ammo to get my boss to ban Microsoft Access and SQL Server from our office!
Does anyone know how to use this from Active Server Pages (ASP)? ODBC driver I guess, right?
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Don't you find this all rather comforting? I mean, isn't it rather nice to find out that rather than employing a bunch of perfect heartless humanoid clones, that the CIA actually employ regular blokes like you and me, who make mistakes?
The CIA/NSA/GCHQ aren't perfect. They're human. They are little people who have desk jobs just like you and me. They go home at the end of the day and they play bad music too loud and they go to crap parties and they go to the movies and they spill popcorn all down their t-shirt just like you and me.
While you're at it, you might want to go to:
www.open.gov.uk/search/search.htm
My pal from GCHQ (I live near Cheltenham, it's difficult to live around Cheltenham without having friends in GCHQ) laughed and laughed when he tried this. Then he searched for some other phrase that he wouldn't tell me, then he stopped laughing, then he went kind of quiet, and then he said "I think I need to have a few words with some people on Monday"...
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Several police forces already use a Drunk Driver Simulator for "re-educating" people who failed a breath test.
DIY/Home Improvement sims already exist at an infant/kindergarten level; here in the UK we have TV ads for a game that features a children's activity set which overlays a PC keyboard where they can hammer, saw etc (ideally using the plastic toy hammer and plastic toy saw provided, I suppose, but for stress relief I'd use the real thing).
I remember that SimElection games went through a brief period of popularity in the 1980's as text based statistics games in the same vein as Football/Soccer Manager games. And isn't there a certain element of this already present in the tax raising subroutines of SimCity?
Professional Painter... well I definitely recall playing a a Commodore 64 game where you were a poster paster (probably called "Poster Paster" I guess) who had to put up advertising hoardings, that's pretty damn close.
As for Ruthless Revenge or The World's Oldest Profession, well don't Dungeon Master and Leisure Suit Larry already contain these elements?
Now if you want *really* tasteless, who can remember "CAN OF WORMS", a ZX81 compilation including "ROYAL FLUSH", where you had to unblock the drains of Buckingham Palace without disturbing the Queen on the, er, throne, as it were? Was advertised in every single damn issue of the UK's "Popular Computing Weekly" magazine ever published IIRC.
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The one I use is the Jenoptic JD11 (aka Praktica D500).
Pros:
Cons:
For the price it is a superb camera, although it can't compete with models costing more than twice it's price. It's a case of knowing what it can do, and staying within it's limitations, then you get good results.
Samples: www.custodian.com/album
Manufacturer's page: www.jenoptik-camera. com/english/products/jd11/main.html
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Legally, they ARE! The UK newsagent chains "WH Smiths" and "Sperrings" were sued for libel for stocking the satirical magazine "Private Eye".
http://www.bond.edu.au/law/mootco mp/Goldsmith.htm
I agree the law of libel is an ass. But it is still the law. If you knowingly carry libelous messages on a Usenet server you run, you are open to libel claims.
We can all argue until the cows come home about whether this is good or bad, but that won't change the definition of libel.
If you want to make up a new law called "murmer's new law" or whatever then feel free. But what you're talking about isn't libel, it's something else.
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(being 12 years old is too young to be done for libel, in the UK anyway).
Getting published is a big deal
You may think so, but English/Welsh law disagrees (and US law I suspect). You may think that the law is an ass, but that doesn't change the law.
According to the law, handing out a photocopied flyer counts as publishing, and that makes authoring web pages or usenet messages positively complex by comparison.
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Normally, that is the case. Normally, you would be correct. Normally, an ISP serves out thousands of messages from its Usenet servers every day and has no idea about the content of virtually any of those messages.
But in this particular instance, Godfrey told Demon several times about the offending post.
And it was on this point that the case hinged, and that is why Demon knew they'd never win in court.
Demon knowingly published libellous material on its Usenet servers.
Under English/Welsh law you can't just sue someone for libel out of the blue. You have to give the person a chance to withdraw/correct the offending message first. It's all about being "reasonable" (the word "reasonable" actually appears all the time in English/Welsh legislation). Because gor blimey gov, us Englishmen/Welshmen are very reasonable chaps, and suing someone for libel without giving them a chance to back down just wouldn't be cricket, eh Jeeves? Crikey, that wouldn't be fair play at all, gawd bless the Queen Mum.
Godfrey gave Demon plenty of warning and plenty of chances. Demon stedfastly refused despite all those warnings and the message being obviously libellous (it wasn't a a borderline comment, there was no "ISP playing judge and jury" here, it was a clear cut libellous message).
Demon didn't so much drop the ball, as drop it, have it offered back to them several times, and refused to take the ball back on each occasion.
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Of course you're liable. You're the publisher.
Which bit of "publishing" do you not understand?
Libel isn't a free speech issue. It's about taking responsibility for your actions. If you publish lies knowingly (remember: Demon were warned several times) you should expect to get done for it.
If you just take a whole bunch of unfiltered stuff (webcam output, letters, usenet messages, whatever) and publish them, that makes you responsible for them. FFS what is the problem here?
Jeez, it's about time the Internet GREW UP!
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All I want is a consistent user interface. If people want to skin and customise their browser, more power to their elbow. But what I happen to want right now, more than anything in the world, is for Netscape 6 to have standard Windows menus and buttons (or standard KDE menus and buttons if I'm at my Linux box).
Sure, if I had not grown out of my penchant for late 80's Pop Will Eat Itself album covers, I'm sure I'd love the "new" Netscape 6 interface (well, I would if it wasn't as slow as a bucket of sick, that is- on my P500 I drag my mouse across the menus and they all momentarily open at once forming a horrid Java-like mess).
As it happens, I want to be able to sit down with new software and use it straight away with no nasty surprises. If I learn how to use Notepad, I'm 99% of the way there to learning Paint Shop Pro or any one of thousands of Win95 applications. With Netscape 6 it's like learning a whole new GUI OS all over again.
If someone REALLY wants to force a skin down my throat by, AT THE VERY LEAST I WANT THE ABILITY TO TURN IT OFF AND GO BACK TO THE DEFAULT GUI/OS SKIN.
Yay, open source rules! But so do standards. Nescape/Mozilla chrome sucks!
Oh, and it would help if Netscape 6's cascading style sheets actually worked properly (try changing the colours of A:LINK.FOOBAR and see what I mean).
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The answer, of course, is for artists to ditch the label first and then ALL the money from their tours/t-shirts go directly to the artists, instead of 99% of the revenue ending up in some record boss' pocket.
With the record company out of the picture, the artist would also be free to sell CDs at a low price - ie. $5-$10 - which would make piracy irrelevent (fans will pay for original copies with proper artwork providing the price is low enough).
Not that I'm saying record companies operate a pricing cartel or anything, of course :-) In the UK we pay $20-$25 for a CD album. Often it is cheaper to buy British bands' albums from the USA and have them imported. Go figure.
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My argument didn't say that prudes/xtians were 'wrong about anything else', it said that they were wrong about two specific things: single sex dorms and internet censorship, and I went on to justify why they were wrong for each of those two cases, gave examples for each reasons, and discussed how the two cases are linked.
If that isn't a logical argument then obviously your idea of a logical argument is limited to only those that you agree with.
Is this the five minute argument or the full half hour?
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The only thing really, really banned at my college is, believe it or not, single sex halls of residence. You are not allowed to have a corridor of all girls bedrooms. There has to be at least one boy in the corridor. This is enforced more strictly than any other rule bar none; drugs, theft, you name it... no crime is worse than living in a single sex hall.
I went to Cheltenham and Gloucester College in the UK, a small degree college specialising in teaching, computing and art.
Unsurprisingly females outnumbered males 6 to 1 when I was there (now down to 2:1)- dunno why girls tend to like teaching and art, but they do.
This attracted local pervs like you would not believe. Prowlers, stalkers, even, I'm sorry to say, two rapists. You see, they could guarantee that certain buildings were inhabited only by girls. Easy pickings. Force open a window, any window, it doesn't matter... there'd be a girl there.
The problem was solved overnight by banning single sex corridors in halls of residence. Apparently prowlers, stalkers and rapists tend to go away if they suspect they're going to bump into the male rugby football captain instead of some female arts student.
The policy is amazingly successful. It literally got rid of the problem overnight. There hasn't been one single case of prowlers since (like 8 years ago), let alone stalkers or rapists.
Why is this relevant to Slashdot? Because it was the same damn prudes and far-right christian arseholes who were against single sex dorms then, who are are against uncensored internet access now.
Sex and sexual activity is a fact of life (heck without it there wouldn't be ANY life). Trying to censor it or segregate it out of existence is a waste of time. And more importantly, trying to do so is counter-productive.
I could understand censorship if we were talking about primary (kindergarten) schools, but we're talking about high school, sixth form (7th grade) and universities here!
The age of consent is 16 for heaven's sake... just bolt a few condom dispensers to the back of the toilet doors and let them get on with what consenting adults are legally entitled to do!
As for MP3s, well, that's just a bandwidth issue, not a freedom of speech or censorship issue. As such it is a fair point in my opinion.
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To me, newspapers are just souvenirs. If something that I think is special happens, I'll buy a newspaper and store it away in my drawers or attic somewhere. Often I won't even bother reading past the front page. I'll have probably read the story a dozen times from a bunch of different sources already.
Even our local newspaper has a website now. I just don't see the point in newspapers as news. Even the classifieds are online. Newspapers are ornaments.
Newspapers are like any original physical media- software, films, albums, whatever- I only buy the originals when I want to celebrate ownership of an original item. For instance, if there's some commercial software I really like (Paint Shop Pro springs to mind), I'll buy the original as an ornament on my shelf (usually I actually install the warez version anyway). I buy original CDs of bands I really, really like, but tend to listen to the MP3s. I'll buy videos of films that really move me (Aliens, Bladerunner etc), even though I might prefer a different foreign/censored/director's cut that I've taped from somebody else.
And then there is the media which is mediocre, which is okay for a while, which does a job that doesn't need repeating. The stuff I wouldn't endorse if I were a celebrity, but hey, it fills a need, until something better comes along. One hit wonder bands. This morning's news on another dull day. Some software which crashes a lot or isn't really as flexible as I want it to be. An okay film that my wife might want to watch later. These are destined to spend their lifetime in my collection of MP3s, websites, warez and VHS tapes.
How to sell more newspapers? See Neal Stephenson's "The Diamond Age".
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Sort of. I have an old 1980's Sony RGB computer monitor plugged into my VCR instead of a TV, and I have a barely functional old black and white TV sitting under my dusty Atari ST monitor.
Does the bed of your truck bed four?
I'm British. We have smaller cars. I own a Daihatsu Terios 4x4. It beds two- me and my wife, both 190cm.
Are you humming a song at this moment about someone doin' someone else wrong?
Does Nine Inch Nails "Starfuckers" count?
Are there also Oakies, hillbillies and rubes in the sticks? Are there even sticks?
I used the word "redneck" 'cos I was writing to an American audience. I would normally have said "yokels" as in "local yokels".
But oh yes, there are sticks.
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Single sex dormatories are banned there. We found that single sex dorms attracted unwanted attention from various local perverts. I'm sorry to say there were two rapes on-site.
Rapists and perverts, we discovered, are much less likely to prowl around dormatories if they have a 50/50 chance of coming up against a bloke. Imediately after the second rape we went even further, and put members of the men's rugby team on the ground floor (UK rugby = US football without padding, very agressive game).
Obviously we don't have mixed sex rooms (not officially anyway! :-)- but it is official college policy that a corridor of entirely girls' rooms is Not Allowed. Typically rooms are single or twin bed, no more, with 8-16 rooms to a corridor. Most bathrooms are en-suite to protect students' modesty, but there are a few remaining shared bathrooms; we found all students were quite happy wandering about in dressing gowns in mixed sex groups. Some buildings are organised into sets of 4-bedroom appartments with two appartments per floor; in which case there must be males present in the ground floor apartment.
This policy has been in effect for 8 years now. There have been no further rapes and the prowlers disappeared after one month, never to return.
Oh, and thanks to the mandatory condom dispensers we didn't have any unwanted pregnancies either.
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Second paragraph in: http://www.gsmdata.com/paprysavy.htm
This is just the first phase. GPRS is scalable so you can add more bandwidth. Question is, at what price?
Then there's IMT which will do 2mbs, alledgedly, but requires significant hardware upgrade at the transmitter sites (unlike GPRS which is just "GSM Plus", slot a new board into the existing basestation box'o'tricks, plug in the fibre and yer done, mate).
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Close. Gloucestershire.
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Wolverhampton University (home of the classic WITCH 1948 historic computer) has had a similar microwave Internet connection since the early 1980's.
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Whilst I agree that BT will probably take every opportunity to shaft me over, the fact is that they can't charge per minute for this service.
GPRS is always on.
It's always there, permanently. There is no dialling, no placing a call, no handshaking... it's a permanent connection.
Now the question is, will they charge by the byte? Initially, I suspect so- and through the nose, no doubt.
But I live outside the reach of ADSL, cable and ISDN, so frankly I don't care! I'll get a better paid job if that's what it takes to get some bandwidth out here in the Cotswolds!
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