is using monopoly power to maintain that monopoly illegal? I don't know.
Companies in other industries certainly have run into trouble for doing this. For example, Phillip Morris offers incentives to convience stores if they only allow countertop display ads for their brands. So does R.J. Reynolds. And since neither has a monopoly on the cigarette market, they are free to do this. Stores evaluate who is offering them better incentives and either exclusively promote PM or RJR products.
On the other hand, in "smokeless" tobacco, the U.S. Tobacco company essentially has a monopoly. They control about the same percentage of the chew/snuff market as Microsoft controls of the desktop OS market. UST, too, offers retailers incentives to deny display ads to their rivals. They're doing the exact same thing PM and RJR do with cigarrettes, but they're in court defending themselves against an anti-trust lawsuit because they're a monopoly and the cigarette manufacturers are not.
Don't forget, the "unwritten rules" of the Internet as a non-commercial venue included the Web(!) at first; there were always "dot-com" addresses, but outright advertising was seriously frowned upon
They weren't unwritten rules intially. When the NSF was still funding part costs of the backbone (through '94 or so IIRC), the feds required you to sign an "Acceptible Use Policy" to get a feed from an ISP. This AUP applied to all users, even on.com domains. It prohibited any sort of commercial solicitations. The only commerical activity allowed was things like distribution of subscription content. You could fulfill subscriptions on the Internet, but you couldn't solicit them.
As I recall, the ISPs were in charge of enforcing the AUP. In those days there were fewer of them around, so the threat of losing one's feed from any one ISP might mean having no other option to reconnect, so the threat was taken seriously.
So have they stopped blocking ports 25 and 80 in your neighborhood?
This doesn't make sense to me. If they were really blocking your outbound traffic on port 80, you wouldn't even be able to send http requests from a browser. Are they forcing you to use their proxy server?
The DOJ of a Republican administration is implying they'd like to impose stiffer penalties (nudge, nudge, wink, wink) if only the DOJ of a previous Democratic administration had done a better job arguing their case in earlier phases of the trial.
In these states where the consent of both parties is needed for a wiretap, what do statutory law and case law say about police listening to answering machine messages with the consent of the recipient but without the consent of the person who recorded them? I would think that's a real-world analogy that applies better here than wiretapping a phone call.
Americans are protected against "unreasonable searches."
Our "fundamental rights" are outlined in the Constitution, and the fourth amendment to the Constitution reads as follows:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
If the government were to try to observe what you were doing in your home (without a warrant), that would be a violation of the fourth amendment. But the Constitution does not prohibit the government from observing what you do in a public place.
Re:We need technical measures, not laws, for spam
on
FTC Goes After Spammers
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I think these senators don't comprehend the reality with spam
I think there's a glass houses problem here. Someone who makes no effort to understand how government works has no room to say others "don't comprehend the reality...."
Neither senators nor new laws are mentioned in this article. This article is about the FTC -- an agency within the executive branch -- applying existing law to spammers.
The FTC is applying the same laws that prohibit mail fraud and phone fraud to email fraud. They're not prosecuting spammers, they're prosecuting people who engage in false or deceptive trade practices, regarless of the medium of communication they use.
From the article: "But voting poses a unique problem: elections require that the voter's identity, once verified, be stripped away to ensure anonymity."
This is probably the toughest nut to crack. Not only must identity be stripped away, but it must be stripped away in a way that's transparent to the voter.
When I vote in my local precinct here in Virginia, I go to one set of poll workers to identify myself. When they're satisified that I'm who I say I am, and that I'm a registered voter, they hand me a little index card that acts as a chit which allows me to vote.
I then hand the chit to the voting booth attendant. The voting booth attendant knows I'm permitted to vote, but doesn't know anything else about me. Consequently there's no way to tie my identity to my ballot. Furthermore, it's plain to me as I go throught the process that there's no way to tie my identity to my ballot.
Online systems could use a similar chit system to insure voter anonymity, but this would not be in plain view of the voter. The voter would have no way of knowing that his identifying information is not being stored along with his ballot.
Until that problem is solved, I personally have no interest in casting my ballot online.
That's because it's not true. This is way off topic, but here goes:
While it's true that private toll roads and bridges do exist in the U.S. (the amazing Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel is one example), they're rare.
The construction of limited-access highways is very, very expensive. In most cases, the federal government picks up the majority of the costs, but even so the state's share can run into the billions on a major project. Since most U.S. state governments cannot run deficit budgets, and since highways involve a large up-front cost for a long-term benefit, states tend to fund their share of the roads by floating bonds (or creating a publicly-owned "authority" which floats the bonds).
Once the road is built, the states need to find a way to pay off the bonds. In most states, bond payments are made out of the state's general fund and are, therefore, funded by taxes. Some states, though, prefer to make the users of the road pay directly.
This makes the most sense in states with a lot of just-passing-through traffic. Toll roads don't make a lot of sense in a huge state like Texas, where most of the highway users are Texas residents who pay Texas taxes. But Delaware, a small state bisected by I-95, doesn't collect taxes from the New Jersey, Pennsylania, Maryland, etc. residents who pass through their state for only 15 minutes. So Delaware charges a toll on I-95.
This distinction expains why you see a lot of turnpikes in the northeast, but few in the west and south.
Once the bonds are paid off, some states will continue to collect tolls to maintain and upgrade the highway -- or just fatten general fund. Sometimes the states drop the tolls when the bonds are paid off.
In either case the roads are financed over decades, which is part of the reason you don't see many private toll roads. Investors have to be very, very patient to see a return on their investment. The state of Virginia just had to bail out and take over a private turnpike because toll revenues the first couple of years did not meet expections. The flop of the "Dulles Greenway" probably means Virginia won't see another private toll road.
Re:Great OS, but Palm's platforms are lagging...
on
Palm OS 5.0 Preview
·
· Score: 2
They mean a "full range" of ARM processors (i.e., ARM processors from Intel, from Motorola, from TI, etc.). Palm has been saying for a year that OS 5 would be developed only for ARM.
Re:Great OS, but Palm's platforms are lagging...
on
Palm OS 5.0 Preview
·
· Score: 5, Informative
The OS is flashable, so I expect I'll upgrade to 5.0 when the time comes
OS 5.x will only run on ARM processors. The Dragonball handhelds will be stuck at OS 4.x forever.
This week's issue of Business Week has build-your-own-PVR instructions.
When a meme leaps from the pages of Popular Mechanics and Wired to the pages of Business Week and the Boston Globe, it's probably time for the networks and studios to pay attention and figure out how they're going to deal with this technology.
Looks like they recently changed their stock symbol
That's because they got kicked off the NYSE. Only NYSE stocks have ticker symbols of 3 or fewer characters. As an OTC stock, they had to pick a new symbol.
My technology skills are too soft to contribute as a developer to an open-source project, but I'm an experienced editor who'd love to have the opportunity to copy edit for a project or two.
I wouldn't know where to start to find a match for my time and skills. Are there resources that list projects like the one above looking for editorial assistance? If not, should there be one?
Would you vote for a landscaper whose campaign speeches were treatises on the merits of hardwood mulch over pine bark mulch? Or an auto mechanic who promised to improve the performance of the city's vehicle fleet by switching to synthetic motor oil?
I know I wouldn't.
If you're running for city council, stick to the top issues in municipal government: schools, taxes, crime, etc.
At most you might say something like "as information technology becomes increasingly important to the successful managment of any business or government, our city council would benefit by having a member who understands how to apply IT tools to improve the function of city government." But leave it at that.
Power density. Which weighs more and consumes more space: A 12-15 gallon gasoline tank or enough lead-acid batteries to provide the same amount of propulsion?
Just think about how much weight and size of the average cell phone or PDA is taken up with batteries. Now imagine replacing that with a fountain-pen-cartridge-sized fuel ampule.
But hobbyists back then knew nothing of Unix. So 50 lines meant that he had 50 386s!
It depends on the software he was using. By about 1990 or so, there were several BBS apps that used Desqview to run multiple instances of the BBS on one box, and others that supported DigiBoards with 16 COM ports. TBBS, which was written in assembler to be amazingly frugal with system resources, supported "intelligent" DigiBoards and could accomodate up to 64 lines on one Intel box. I know because we had a 48 lines hooked up to a 386SX TBBS host -- which we later upgraded to a 64-line 486.
Carburetors were amazingly elegant little mechanical devices, but they were anything but precise. Computerization of cars has permitted hundred-fold reductions in CO2 and NOx emissions (and less dramatic improvements in fuel economy). Safety advances like anti-lock brakes and active suspensions also wouldn't be possible without computerization.
In an industry that had seen very few true innovations for 70 years (disc brakes being just about the only automotive hardware invented since the 30s), computers have completely revolutionized just about every system in an autombile. As a result, cars are cleaner, more efficient, more reliable, more comfortable and safer than would have been possible with entirely mechanical systems.
You seem to argue there are fewer people customizing their cars. I think there are just fewer shade-tree mechanics doing what's now unnecessary maintenance: Replacing points and distributors that don't exist anymore, spark plugs that now last 100k miles, adjusting timing that's automatically adjusted, etc.
What about the hot-rodders who customized their cars? I'd argue there are just as many of them as there ever were. The modifications just require a different skill set than they used to, and the cars are Civics and Integras instead of Novas and Mustangs.
If you want to get into customizing your car, there's plenty you can still do from high-tech "superchips" to good old-fashioned intake & exhaust mods. Just pull your head out of that 20-year-old Chilton's manual if you want to get serious about souping up a late-model car.
In a way you answered your own question by listing the Rio Volt CD player as an option. If you burn all your MP3s onto CD, this isn't an issue. Of course, if a machine doesn't have a CD burner on it you won't be able pull music off of it.
Before you buy a Volt, make sure you listen to one. I bought the cheapie SP90 version for my car. There is an audible chirp/hiss in the audio output. In the car, it's not a major issue, because the hiss is competing with road noise, wind noise and engine noise. But it's definitely not hi-fi enough for headphones or a home system.
According to a review I saw somewhere (I think it was CNet), the Volt 250 has this same problem, so caveat emptor.
I heard somewhere that Carnegie used to do the same thing...
There is at least one big difference here. Carnegie didn't build libraries to settle an anti-trust lawsuit. No judge compelled him to be a philanthropist. And it was Carnegie personally giving money for the libraries, not the steel trust.
No matter what you may think of Carnegie and they way he acquired his wealth, you must acknowledge that he gave away almost all his money before he died, and that he did it because he thought it was the right thing to do.
And I'm not saying Gates hasn't begun philanthropy on the same scale. It's a bit too early to judge that.
Let's just make sure we don't confuse Gates' (and Ballmer's and Allen's, etc.) own personal philanthropy with Microsoft Inc.'s brazen attempt to disguise a marketing ploy as a philanthropic endeavor.
Slashdot Mirror
is using monopoly power to maintain that monopoly illegal? I don't know.
Companies in other industries certainly have run into trouble for doing this. For example, Phillip Morris offers incentives to convience stores if they only allow countertop display ads for their brands. So does R.J. Reynolds. And since neither has a monopoly on the cigarette market, they are free to do this. Stores evaluate who is offering them better incentives and either exclusively promote PM or RJR products.
On the other hand, in "smokeless" tobacco, the U.S. Tobacco company essentially has a monopoly. They control about the same percentage of the chew/snuff market as Microsoft controls of the desktop OS market. UST, too, offers retailers incentives to deny display ads to their rivals. They're doing the exact same thing PM and RJR do with cigarrettes, but they're in court defending themselves against an anti-trust lawsuit because they're a monopoly and the cigarette manufacturers are not.
Don't forget, the "unwritten rules" of the Internet as a non-commercial venue included the Web(!) at first; there were always "dot-com" addresses, but outright advertising was seriously frowned upon
.com domains. It prohibited any sort of commercial solicitations. The only commerical activity allowed was things like distribution of subscription content. You could fulfill subscriptions on the Internet, but you couldn't solicit them.
They weren't unwritten rules intially. When the NSF was still funding part costs of the backbone (through '94 or so IIRC), the feds required you to sign an "Acceptible Use Policy" to get a feed from an ISP. This AUP applied to all users, even on
As I recall, the ISPs were in charge of enforcing the AUP. In those days there were fewer of them around, so the threat of losing one's feed from any one ISP might mean having no other option to reconnect, so the threat was taken seriously.
Okay, if they're blocking inbound traffic on port 80, how are they not screening out responses from Web servers when you're browsing?
So have they stopped blocking ports 25 and 80 in your neighborhood?
This doesn't make sense to me. If they were really blocking your outbound traffic on port 80, you wouldn't even be able to send http requests from a browser. Are they forcing you to use their proxy server?
There's an interesting political subtext here.
The DOJ of a Republican administration is implying they'd like to impose stiffer penalties (nudge, nudge, wink, wink) if only the DOJ of a previous Democratic administration had done a better job arguing their case in earlier phases of the trial.
That's some fancy political jujitsu.
Um, OK, but email is de facto recorded.
In these states where the consent of both parties is needed for a wiretap, what do statutory law and case law say about police listening to answering machine messages with the consent of the recipient but without the consent of the person who recorded them? I would think that's a real-world analogy that applies better here than wiretapping a phone call.
It appears that one of the five representative comments in favor of the settlement is from Ayn Rand whackos.
Americans are protected against "unreasonable searches."
Our "fundamental rights" are outlined in the Constitution, and the fourth amendment to the Constitution reads as follows:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
If the government were to try to observe what you were doing in your home (without a warrant), that would be a violation of the fourth amendment. But the Constitution does not prohibit the government from observing what you do in a public place.
I think these senators don't comprehend the reality with spam
...."
I think there's a glass houses problem here. Someone who makes no effort to understand how government works has no room to say others "don't comprehend the reality
Neither senators nor new laws are mentioned in this article. This article is about the FTC -- an agency within the executive branch -- applying existing law to spammers.
The FTC is applying the same laws that prohibit mail fraud and phone fraud to email fraud. They're not prosecuting spammers, they're prosecuting people who engage in false or deceptive trade practices, regarless of the medium of communication they use.
From the article: "But voting poses a unique problem: elections require that the voter's identity, once verified, be stripped away to ensure anonymity."
This is probably the toughest nut to crack. Not only must identity be stripped away, but it must be stripped away in a way that's transparent to the voter.
When I vote in my local precinct here in Virginia, I go to one set of poll workers to identify myself. When they're satisified that I'm who I say I am, and that I'm a registered voter, they hand me a little index card that acts as a chit which allows me to vote.
I then hand the chit to the voting booth attendant. The voting booth attendant knows I'm permitted to vote, but doesn't know anything else about me. Consequently there's no way to tie my identity to my ballot. Furthermore, it's plain to me as I go throught the process that there's no way to tie my identity to my ballot.
Online systems could use a similar chit system to insure voter anonymity, but this would not be in plain view of the voter. The voter would have no way of knowing that his identifying information is not being stored along with his ballot.
Until that problem is solved, I personally have no interest in casting my ballot online.
Interesting... I did not know that.
That's because it's not true. This is way off topic, but here goes:
While it's true that private toll roads and bridges do exist in the U.S. (the amazing Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel is one example), they're rare.
The construction of limited-access highways is very, very expensive. In most cases, the federal government picks up the majority of the costs, but even so the state's share can run into the billions on a major project. Since most U.S. state governments cannot run deficit budgets, and since highways involve a large up-front cost for a long-term benefit, states tend to fund their share of the roads by floating bonds (or creating a publicly-owned "authority" which floats the bonds).
Once the road is built, the states need to find a way to pay off the bonds. In most states, bond payments are made out of the state's general fund and are, therefore, funded by taxes. Some states, though, prefer to make the users of the road pay directly.
This makes the most sense in states with a lot of just-passing-through traffic. Toll roads don't make a lot of sense in a huge state like Texas, where most of the highway users are Texas residents who pay Texas taxes. But Delaware, a small state bisected by I-95, doesn't collect taxes from the New Jersey, Pennsylania, Maryland, etc. residents who pass through their state for only 15 minutes. So Delaware charges a toll on I-95.
This distinction expains why you see a lot of turnpikes in the northeast, but few in the west and south.
Once the bonds are paid off, some states will continue to collect tolls to maintain and upgrade the highway -- or just fatten general fund. Sometimes the states drop the tolls when the bonds are paid off.
In either case the roads are financed over decades, which is part of the reason you don't see many private toll roads. Investors have to be very, very patient to see a return on their investment. The state of Virginia just had to bail out and take over a private turnpike because toll revenues the first couple of years did not meet expections. The flop of the "Dulles Greenway" probably means Virginia won't see another private toll road.
They mean a "full range" of ARM processors (i.e., ARM processors from Intel, from Motorola, from TI, etc.). Palm has been saying for a year that OS 5 would be developed only for ARM.
The OS is flashable, so I expect I'll upgrade to 5.0 when the time comes
OS 5.x will only run on ARM processors. The Dragonball handhelds will be stuck at OS 4.x forever.
This week's issue of Business Week has build-your-own-PVR instructions.
When a meme leaps from the pages of Popular Mechanics and Wired to the pages of Business Week and the Boston Globe, it's probably time for the networks and studios to pay attention and figure out how they're going to deal with this technology.
Looks like they recently changed their stock symbol
That's because they got kicked off the NYSE. Only NYSE stocks have ticker symbols of 3 or fewer characters. As an OTC stock, they had to pick a new symbol.
... in at least two places: here in medium resolution and here in high resolution.
I will, thanks.
My technology skills are too soft to contribute as a developer to an open-source project, but I'm an experienced editor who'd love to have the opportunity to copy edit for a project or two.
I wouldn't know where to start to find a match for my time and skills. Are there resources that list projects like the one above looking for editorial assistance? If not, should there be one?
Would you vote for a landscaper whose campaign speeches were treatises on the merits of hardwood mulch over pine bark mulch? Or an auto mechanic who promised to improve the performance of the city's vehicle fleet by switching to synthetic motor oil?
I know I wouldn't.
If you're running for city council, stick to the top issues in municipal government: schools, taxes, crime, etc.
At most you might say something like "as information technology becomes increasingly important to the successful managment of any business or government, our city council would benefit by having a member who understands how to apply IT tools to improve the function of city government." But leave it at that.
Why would refueling be preferable to recharging?
Power density. Which weighs more and consumes more space: A 12-15 gallon gasoline tank or enough lead-acid batteries to provide the same amount of propulsion?
Just think about how much weight and size of the average cell phone or PDA is taken up with batteries. Now imagine replacing that with a fountain-pen-cartridge-sized fuel ampule.
But hobbyists back then knew nothing of Unix. So 50 lines meant that he had 50 386s!
It depends on the software he was using. By about 1990 or so, there were several BBS apps that used Desqview to run multiple instances of the BBS on one box, and others that supported DigiBoards with 16 COM ports. TBBS, which was written in assembler to be amazingly frugal with system resources, supported "intelligent" DigiBoards and could accomodate up to 64 lines on one Intel box. I know because we had a 48 lines hooked up to a 386SX TBBS host -- which we later upgraded to a 64-line 486.
If your car is too complicated to customize, maybe you should consider souping-up some other things around the house.
Carburetors were amazingly elegant little mechanical devices, but they were anything but precise. Computerization of cars has permitted hundred-fold reductions in CO2 and NOx emissions (and less dramatic improvements in fuel economy). Safety advances like anti-lock brakes and active suspensions also wouldn't be possible without computerization.
In an industry that had seen very few true innovations for 70 years (disc brakes being just about the only automotive hardware invented since the 30s), computers have completely revolutionized just about every system in an autombile. As a result, cars are cleaner, more efficient, more reliable, more comfortable and safer than would have been possible with entirely mechanical systems.
You seem to argue there are fewer people customizing their cars. I think there are just fewer shade-tree mechanics doing what's now unnecessary maintenance: Replacing points and distributors that don't exist anymore, spark plugs that now last 100k miles, adjusting timing that's automatically adjusted, etc.
What about the hot-rodders who customized their cars? I'd argue there are just as many of them as there ever were. The modifications just require a different skill set than they used to, and the cars are Civics and Integras instead of Novas and Mustangs.
If you want to get into customizing your car, there's plenty you can still do from high-tech "superchips" to good old-fashioned intake & exhaust mods. Just pull your head out of that 20-year-old Chilton's manual if you want to get serious about souping up a late-model car.
In a way you answered your own question by listing the Rio Volt CD player as an option. If you burn all your MP3s onto CD, this isn't an issue. Of course, if a machine doesn't have a CD burner on it you won't be able pull music off of it.
Before you buy a Volt, make sure you listen to one. I bought the cheapie SP90 version for my car. There is an audible chirp/hiss in the audio output. In the car, it's not a major issue, because the hiss is competing with road noise, wind noise and engine noise. But it's definitely not hi-fi enough for headphones or a home system.
According to a review I saw somewhere (I think it was CNet), the Volt 250 has this same problem, so caveat emptor.
I heard somewhere that Carnegie used to do the same thing ...
There is at least one big difference here. Carnegie didn't build libraries to settle an anti-trust lawsuit. No judge compelled him to be a philanthropist. And it was Carnegie personally giving money for the libraries, not the steel trust.
No matter what you may think of Carnegie and they way he acquired his wealth, you must acknowledge that he gave away almost all his money before he died, and that he did it because he thought it was the right thing to do.
And I'm not saying Gates hasn't begun philanthropy on the same scale. It's a bit too early to judge that.
Let's just make sure we don't confuse Gates' (and Ballmer's and Allen's, etc.) own personal philanthropy with Microsoft Inc.'s brazen attempt to disguise a marketing ploy as a philanthropic endeavor.