No, Hardware Application Layer is a MS-proprietary alternative to the old-fashioned Hardware Abstraction Layer. I can't give out the exact details of what makes it tick, but I can tell you it involves XML, NetBurst technology, and cannot function without Internet Explorer 5.1.
Of course, if this law is found to be in substantial violation of the First amendment (rather than the fourteenth), you have to perform a completely different calculus. The courts have shown this to us time and again.
Why must children in public libraries be able to view every piece of filth availible?
If you accept the thesis that this 'filth' is destroying our nation's youth, you sure have a good point. I must point out that in many European countries-- where sexual taboos aren't so strong and 'filth' is showcased nightly on the TV-- have lower rates of teen pregnancy, juvenile violence, sexually transmitted disease. One might draw the conclusion that the problem here is not the filth, it's us.
When you show me an administration or congress that truly cares about children-- rebuilds our school system, provides daycare, eases the burden on working families-- then we can talk. But passing these COPA/CIPA bills and pretending that we're saving America's youth (for the bargain price of our first-amendment freedom)... Please.
The Sealand website states that the day before Britain expanded its territorial waters to 12 miles, Sealand did the same. If you accept the thesis that Sealand is a sovereign nation, then they have a right to those waters (otherwise they would have no right of access.) Also, note that the expansion of territorial waters does not make an existing sovereign nation the "property" of the expander. There's a lot more on the site about British court decisions placing Sealand outside of UK jurisdiction.
it makes a difference whether or not your company ALSO signed the contract. Otherwise, it's just a document that states what your views were, and isn't an agreement since nobody representing your company signed it.
This is a really good point. I guess we just assume every time a company hands us something to sign, they're implicitly agreeing to be bound by their own terms. A bad assumption.
What I would like to know is: what rights does the law give employers in this regard, assuming there is no contract (or a limited one) between the parties? Naturally, as the creator of a work for hire, you can't do anything with the code you write for a company, but absent a contract, is there some sort of implicit 'anti-competition' agreement between employer and employee that prevents employees from doing independent work in a similar space?
In any case, if this is at all indicative of how software fares on W2K when moved from NT4, then they should be printing a warning on their box that NT 4 software could run as slow as half speed on their newfangled OS.
And perversely, they'd probably sell a lot more software as a result.
The PHB's and People In Charge will be unaffected anyway, since they'll just go ahead with whatever "Solution" Microsoft forces on them, regardless of merit or test results.
Not necessarily. MS doesn't own this market-- there's a lot of competition, and the Win2K release has been something of a failure. I know plenty of People In Charge who are dubious about Win2K because on their personal machines it runs like a pig, and that doesn't inspire confidence from even the densest boss.
You don't understand. The merchant has not choice in the matter. The way the credit card authorization works is exactly how the previous poster describes and there is NO way around it other than finding a company that actually has proper authorization.
Read the article. The issue here has nothing to do with the credit card authorizers, which are contacted directly by the server. The issue discussed in the article is much simpler, and involves clients twiddling the HTML on the merchant's pages, which stupidly include the price as part of the "Add To Cart" link. The poorly designed shopping card code then trusts the price submitted by the user's browser, without even double checking against the database. Once your code has made that mistake, it doesn't matter whether your CC authorizer is reliable or not, nor does it matter whether they return the total charged to your card (what are you going to compare it to-- you've already computed the wrong total.
This isn't anything like "price tag switching" - this is more like "not having price tags at all, and having the cashier ask the customer how much the sign said."
Generally this sort of design-by-idiocy approach is the result of merchants using those "build your own store" systems. In these cases, a hosting service provides the shopping cart and credit card authorization, and you can build your site just to point into it. Since there's obviously no database shared between you and the shopping cart system, passing prices (in the clear or some munged form) is necessary. Then you take your chances. Hopefully if you're too cheap to build a real site, you're not selling anything too expensive. Hopefully.
The thing here is that any payment gateway worth it's salt (Like Authorize.net or iTransact.com) will return, along with a status code about the transaction, a field containing the amount the buyers card was debited for, so they can then compare it to their records and see of the correct price was paid.
Which doesn't do the merchant any good if they're still assuming that the shopper gave them the correct price when they hit "Buy". Of course, any intelligent software designer would never have trusted the user with the price in the first place-- it would have have been grabbed out of the DB and totalled by the server just before passing it to the credit card authorizer.
Does this mean we're going back to Klingons and Romulans? Does this series mean that we'll be stuck with 22nd century tech?
If you think about it, we never really knew a whole lot about 22nd century tech. It was all Christmas tree lights and warbling noises. It'd be nice to see those things fleshed out a little more. I would also venture to say that less tech might make the series a lot more interesting.
I'd be tempted to say that it always has been illegal, due to the fact that the original author has copyright
I'm not sure about this, but I had thought that copyright violation was mostly handled in civil proceedings. This law is interesting in that it would put some serious criminal penalties (five years or $60,000) behind it.
but those lame jokes and chain-letters that everyone forwards never have copyright notices
According to this law, every email that gets sent is copyrighted by default, regardless of whether there's a copyright notice on it. So, technically... whoever's sending out those lame jokes and chain-letters really has a lot of people by the balls. I don't think you'll see a whole lot of lawsuits over this week's Survivor humor, though.
You aren't banned from forwarding mail; but if you knowingly forward something that the author didn't want forwarded, then you could be sued for copyright infringement
Read that again and I think you'll see the problem. Determining whether the author would want something forwarded would ostensibly involve either explicit consent on each email, or some sort of mind reading. The problem here is not the few lawsuits that will spring up, but simply the massive legal exposure for corporations and individuals which has been instantaneously created by this law. It's a case of law not imitating life. I would hate to see the contortions corporations are going to go through regarding their employees' email over the next few months (assuming somebody doesn't wake up and vaporize this thing.)
Now, a good example of law meeting reality would have been to declare some sort of explicit granting of rights whenever you send out an email. Perhaps forwarders could be required to leave the original sender's name in the message body. Any law that miraculously turns a common, accepted activity into a crime is going to cause a lot of trouble.
Ultimately, their goal will be to make money not by selling bandwidth to consumers, it will be the access to those consumers that they give to those same media producers and advertisers.
The "private garden" approach has been considered, even attempted by companies like AT&T. Nobody's very sure if it's going to work out very well-- so far precedent has closed ISPs like AOL opening up more and more to the rest of the internet.
This is an open access issue. Pushing the ownership limits from 40% to 60% is right on schedule for ATT's recent acquisitions...
Yes, they have been pushing these issues, but don't forget that AT&T's in the process of imploding right now. And they're the biggest cable company-- even TW isn't that big.
Why would AOL/Time Warner want you to be able to compete with them?
Good point. But if that's true, then it was a bad miscalculation on the part of the cable companies. AOLTW isn't the only service provider offering DOCSIS compliant cable-modem service. There are others, and not all of them offer internet content. It seems odd that cable-modem providers would deliberately hamstring themselves with this decision when the designs were being considered, knowing full well that this would seriously weaken them in the business market. Meanwhile many DSL services offer relatively fat uplinks (and last I heard DSL was outpacing cable-modems in deployment.)
It seems reasonably likely that most US cable companies just figured that 400kbps would be plenty for your average person, back several years ago when they first started deploying networks. Given it to do all over again, they might think differently...?
They probably avoided being a content company because it didn't make business sence, strikingly this is the exact same thing some analysts have been saying about AOL-TW. Content is invairably a risky business and consequently can bring great rewards, on the other hand telecomunications is for the most part a pretty safe bet
Maybe. But have you looked at AT&T's stock lately?
It seems that the biggest guarantee in business these days is end-to-end control. Look at the wireless phone companies; they control distribution of phones, service, data content, etc. Same with ISPs like AOL; the only ISP who's really making money is the one that provides most of the services. These could both be bad examples, but it strikes me that any company with such broad control of copyrighted content and distribution channels is going to be at a major advantage over other content-only or distribution-only competitors. Apparently the FTC and FCC have felt the same way, as prior to this decision they have placed a lot of restrictions on these businesses.
It strikes me that the real damage is done not by removing the cable-system ownership caps, but by the portion of the ruling that allows cable companies to broadcast more of their own programming. This is obviously V-day for AOLTW; now they have a green light to pursue their full strategy of owning everything from camera to TV (or computer, radio, print, etc.) With a single gesture, the courts have severely endangered producers of independent programming, as well as internet content-producers (ironically, the people who were once thought to be the antidote to big-media domination.)
I could really care less whether we have dozens of independent cable companies, as these companies don't actually compete against each other. But it seems to me that this decision opens the way for a few companies to exert even greater control over what we see, read and hear. AT&T seems to have been much more sensitive about this, perhaps due to their previous run-ins with the law. They have thus far specifically avoided becoming a content company to avoid conflict (which may have been a disastrous decision, considering this ruling.) But they, along with the other major media and content providers will now begin looking to consolidate. Within a few years, we're going to have a very different competitive landscape.
Then the government can break them up into little MaPaSuxes
This assumes that the government is ever going to be willing to break anything up again. With the current state of Antitrust litigation in our country, I'd get used to monopolies for the better part of the next couple of decades.
Cable modems have a shared uplink of about 400Kbps (bits, not bytes). Even if @Home weren't limiting you (and they might not be, there might just be a lot of Napster on your local loop), you'd still be pretty tightly limited on uplink. This is the achilles heel of cable modem service. When the service was designed, people looked at high-bandwidth as almost purely a downlink solution. I think this was a big mistake, and unless new systems can be put together (quickly) that use a wider frequency range for the uplink, DSL is going to have a huge advantage.
Well, most areas have cable monopolies anyway. Whether there are 3 cable companies or 8, for the most part they don't compete (except in a very few markets.) The only thing that's going to control their prices is competition from the phone companies or government regulation. The government seems to be getting out of that market, and it's not clear that the phone companies have any interest in keeping prices down. Not being able to afford my crappy HBO wouldn't be so bad, but it's pretty clear that we're going to rely on these information services for more and more as time goes by.
there are alternatives to use instead of Time Warner
I live in an apartment in the city, as do most people here. I'm sure some do it, but I can't imagine that my landlord is going to let me put a dish-- even a little one-- out my window. So Time Warner it is. Plus, how many satellite services are there going to be? At most a couple, and what's to stop the cable monoliths from buying them up when they hit hard times (with this ruling as precedent?)
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No, Hardware Application Layer is a MS-proprietary alternative to the old-fashioned Hardware Abstraction Layer. I can't give out the exact details of what makes it tick, but I can tell you it involves XML, NetBurst technology, and cannot function without Internet Explorer 5.1.
Only problem is... the FBI will immediately decide you're deranged and possibly a dangerous criminal and open a file on you.
Of course, if this law is found to be in substantial violation of the First amendment (rather than the fourteenth), you have to perform a completely different calculus. The courts have shown this to us time and again.
If you accept the thesis that this 'filth' is destroying our nation's youth, you sure have a good point. I must point out that in many European countries-- where sexual taboos aren't so strong and 'filth' is showcased nightly on the TV-- have lower rates of teen pregnancy, juvenile violence, sexually transmitted disease. One might draw the conclusion that the problem here is not the filth, it's us.
When you show me an administration or congress that truly cares about children-- rebuilds our school system, provides daycare, eases the burden on working families-- then we can talk. But passing these COPA/CIPA bills and pretending that we're saving America's youth (for the bargain price of our first-amendment freedom)... Please.
The Sealand website states that the day before Britain expanded its territorial waters to 12 miles, Sealand did the same. If you accept the thesis that Sealand is a sovereign nation, then they have a right to those waters (otherwise they would have no right of access.) Also, note that the expansion of territorial waters does not make an existing sovereign nation the "property" of the expander. There's a lot more on the site about British court decisions placing Sealand outside of UK jurisdiction.
Is that so? I didn't realize that anyone who wrote applications that ran on the Linux operating system was required to open-source their code...!
This is a really good point. I guess we just assume every time a company hands us something to sign, they're implicitly agreeing to be bound by their own terms. A bad assumption.
What I would like to know is: what rights does the law give employers in this regard, assuming there is no contract (or a limited one) between the parties? Naturally, as the creator of a work for hire, you can't do anything with the code you write for a company, but absent a contract, is there some sort of implicit 'anti-competition' agreement between employer and employee that prevents employees from doing independent work in a similar space?
How much enforcement of the GPL have you seen?
And perversely, they'd probably sell a lot more software as a result.
Not necessarily. MS doesn't own this market-- there's a lot of competition, and the Win2K release has been something of a failure. I know plenty of People In Charge who are dubious about Win2K because on their personal machines it runs like a pig, and that doesn't inspire confidence from even the densest boss.
Read the article. The issue here has nothing to do with the credit card authorizers, which are contacted directly by the server. The issue discussed in the article is much simpler, and involves clients twiddling the HTML on the merchant's pages, which stupidly include the price as part of the "Add To Cart" link. The poorly designed shopping card code then trusts the price submitted by the user's browser, without even double checking against the database. Once your code has made that mistake, it doesn't matter whether your CC authorizer is reliable or not, nor does it matter whether they return the total charged to your card (what are you going to compare it to-- you've already computed the wrong total.
Generally this sort of design-by-idiocy approach is the result of merchants using those "build your own store" systems. In these cases, a hosting service provides the shopping cart and credit card authorization, and you can build your site just to point into it. Since there's obviously no database shared between you and the shopping cart system, passing prices (in the clear or some munged form) is necessary. Then you take your chances. Hopefully if you're too cheap to build a real site, you're not selling anything too expensive. Hopefully.
Which doesn't do the merchant any good if they're still assuming that the shopper gave them the correct price when they hit "Buy". Of course, any intelligent software designer would never have trusted the user with the price in the first place-- it would have have been grabbed out of the DB and totalled by the server just before passing it to the credit card authorizer.
If you think about it, we never really knew a whole lot about 22nd century tech. It was all Christmas tree lights and warbling noises. It'd be nice to see those things fleshed out a little more. I would also venture to say that less tech might make the series a lot more interesting.
I'm not sure about this, but I had thought that copyright violation was mostly handled in civil proceedings. This law is interesting in that it would put some serious criminal penalties (five years or $60,000) behind it.
According to this law, every email that gets sent is copyrighted by default, regardless of whether there's a copyright notice on it. So, technically... whoever's sending out those lame jokes and chain-letters really has a lot of people by the balls. I don't think you'll see a whole lot of lawsuits over this week's Survivor humor, though.
Read that again and I think you'll see the problem. Determining whether the author would want something forwarded would ostensibly involve either explicit consent on each email, or some sort of mind reading. The problem here is not the few lawsuits that will spring up, but simply the massive legal exposure for corporations and individuals which has been instantaneously created by this law. It's a case of law not imitating life. I would hate to see the contortions corporations are going to go through regarding their employees' email over the next few months (assuming somebody doesn't wake up and vaporize this thing.)
Now, a good example of law meeting reality would have been to declare some sort of explicit granting of rights whenever you send out an email. Perhaps forwarders could be required to leave the original sender's name in the message body. Any law that miraculously turns a common, accepted activity into a crime is going to cause a lot of trouble.
The "private garden" approach has been considered, even attempted by companies like AT&T. Nobody's very sure if it's going to work out very well-- so far precedent has closed ISPs like AOL opening up more and more to the rest of the internet.
This is an open access issue. Pushing the ownership limits from 40% to 60% is right on schedule for ATT's recent acquisitions...
Yes, they have been pushing these issues, but don't forget that AT&T's in the process of imploding right now. And they're the biggest cable company-- even TW isn't that big.
Good point. But if that's true, then it was a bad miscalculation on the part of the cable companies. AOLTW isn't the only service provider offering DOCSIS compliant cable-modem service. There are others, and not all of them offer internet content. It seems odd that cable-modem providers would deliberately hamstring themselves with this decision when the designs were being considered, knowing full well that this would seriously weaken them in the business market. Meanwhile many DSL services offer relatively fat uplinks (and last I heard DSL was outpacing cable-modems in deployment.)
It seems reasonably likely that most US cable companies just figured that 400kbps would be plenty for your average person, back several years ago when they first started deploying networks. Given it to do all over again, they might think differently...?
Maybe. But have you looked at AT&T's stock lately?
It seems that the biggest guarantee in business these days is end-to-end control. Look at the wireless phone companies; they control distribution of phones, service, data content, etc. Same with ISPs like AOL; the only ISP who's really making money is the one that provides most of the services. These could both be bad examples, but it strikes me that any company with such broad control of copyrighted content and distribution channels is going to be at a major advantage over other content-only or distribution-only competitors. Apparently the FTC and FCC have felt the same way, as prior to this decision they have placed a lot of restrictions on these businesses.
I could really care less whether we have dozens of independent cable companies, as these companies don't actually compete against each other. But it seems to me that this decision opens the way for a few companies to exert even greater control over what we see, read and hear. AT&T seems to have been much more sensitive about this, perhaps due to their previous run-ins with the law. They have thus far specifically avoided becoming a content company to avoid conflict (which may have been a disastrous decision, considering this ruling.) But they, along with the other major media and content providers will now begin looking to consolidate. Within a few years, we're going to have a very different competitive landscape.
This assumes that the government is ever going to be willing to break anything up again. With the current state of Antitrust litigation in our country, I'd get used to monopolies for the better part of the next couple of decades.
Cable modems have a shared uplink of about 400Kbps (bits, not bytes). Even if @Home weren't limiting you (and they might not be, there might just be a lot of Napster on your local loop), you'd still be pretty tightly limited on uplink. This is the achilles heel of cable modem service. When the service was designed, people looked at high-bandwidth as almost purely a downlink solution. I think this was a big mistake, and unless new systems can be put together (quickly) that use a wider frequency range for the uplink, DSL is going to have a huge advantage.
Well, most areas have cable monopolies anyway. Whether there are 3 cable companies or 8, for the most part they don't compete (except in a very few markets.) The only thing that's going to control their prices is competition from the phone companies or government regulation. The government seems to be getting out of that market, and it's not clear that the phone companies have any interest in keeping prices down. Not being able to afford my crappy HBO wouldn't be so bad, but it's pretty clear that we're going to rely on these information services for more and more as time goes by.
I live in an apartment in the city, as do most people here. I'm sure some do it, but I can't imagine that my landlord is going to let me put a dish-- even a little one-- out my window. So Time Warner it is. Plus, how many satellite services are there going to be? At most a couple, and what's to stop the cable monoliths from buying them up when they hit hard times (with this ruling as precedent?)