I like the idea, but information isn't as hierarchical as code. In code, you can have the networking maintainer, the encryption maintainer, the sound maintainer, etc. Sure, they sometimes have to work together where these sections touch.
But who would "own" the Taiwan page: the politics maintainer or the geography maintainer? Who would "own" Intelligent Design: science or religion?
I'm not asking this to shoot down the idea, because I like the idea. I'm trying to figure out a structure for choosing maintainers that would make it work.
Seems that intellectual property and copyright laws are something that Linspire still doesn't seem to have a firm grasp of.
Do you mean that Linspire doesn't have a firm grasp of intellectual property and of copyright laws, of that they don't have a firm grasp of intellectual property laws and copyright laws?
If you meant the latter, there's no such thing as intellectual property laws. If you meant the former, then what do you mean by "intellectual property", and how is that different from copyright? After all, you did list them as two distinct things.
This has been your words-to-avoid public service announcement. We now return you to your regularly scheduled program.
I'm not disputing what you say, just asking the question. All I know about the issue is what I've read from Mark Cuban, in the article I quoted, and a few other cable execs who agreed with the characterization.
Is Cuban just wrong? Or is he perhaps strategically unaware of the reality? He seems to be in a position to know the answers to this. And what he said seems to fit the observed behavior.
The agency's move to allow encryption-like protection for digital shows takes away one more excuse from the broadcasters to delay the rollout of high-definition TV. When the next West Wing won't be ripped off Napster-style, producers will likely air more HDTV programs.
"... excuse.. likely... " There was already a ruling that broadcasters were required to broadcast in HDTV. Their only real excuse, though you won't hear it discussed publicly from members of their little club, is that it's all about syndication.
NBC, for example, owns decades of older programs that they either re-run themselves or sell into syndication. Most of this library was not shot in HDTV. NBC believes that viewers of new HDTV programs will not want to watch the older, lower-resolution shows.
None of the networks want to upset the syndication applecart by switching entirely to HDTV. See here for a cable honcho's take.
Q: Why have the over-the-air networks been so slow to buy in?
A: It's expensive, plus a lot of the vertically integrated companies such as ABC and NBC have content stored on a videotape medium specially made for television that can't be converted to high-definition formats. Also, Wall Street isn't rewarding people for moving into the new technology because it doesn't have immediate returns.
I've been tracking email spam trends for a while, my personal accounts are going from 3-6 spams daily in 2001 to about 30 spams daily at present. I filter this with SpamAssassin?, so the inbox impact is pretty slight, but the traffic is becoming significant, and the trend (doubling in four months) is downright troubling.
I'm not looking at the terms of the EULA to confirm this, but I've read that MS Service Packs are cumulative, in that when you install SP4 you are agreeing to install SP3 (along with its EULA). If true, this means that by installing SP4 you are agreeing to the terms of SP3.
... to impose the burden on corporations, organization, or individuals to find out if any patent covers what they're doing would be undue and, ineed,
impossible to meet.
I'll agree with you there.
Unreasonable burdens cannot be imposed.
Oh, but they are.
... why the fuck
should they have to pay...
My emphasis.
Coders, inventors, and scientists
should be coding, inventing, and researching...
My emphasis again...
... patents
should have no weight over you...
... and again...
Patent holders who have issues
shouldn't be able to go into stealth mode...
... and again.
The entire modern patent-system is completely corrupt and obfuscated.
Well there's the problem! And I completely agree with you. But that is the current system. Lawyers don't generally get to argue what the system "should" be, unless they make it to the Supreme Court. It's highly unlikely this case will go that far, so the current "completely corrupt and obfuscated" system is in no immanent danger of reform.
It is the responsibility of copyright holders to find violations and defend their own hold on ideas.
Nope. It is the responsibility of copyright holders to find violations and defend infringement of the particular expression protected. Patents cover ideas, copyright covers expression. Copyright must be defended or it becomes void, patents can be enforced at any time. (With some exceptions.) And since patents are registered and publicly available, it is the responsibility of the author to ensure it doesn't violate existing patents.
When SCO says there are line-for-line copies of their code, they are referring to copyright violation (and possibly also patent violation). When they claim that anything that does the same type of thing as their code is a violation, they seem to be talking about patent violation.
Of course their answer to this has been that they're really talking about violation of a license agreement, which purportedly governed use of the copyright- and/or patent-protected code they showed IBM, even though they may not have held those patents or copyrights themselves.
So while SCO seems to have been intentionally vague, it still helps to know there is a difference between patent and copyright.
What the terms say is that by posting it you, the end user, are claiming to have certain rights, and that you grant those rights to AOL. If it turns out you did not have those rights, then you are the one in breach of contract.
If you notice my sig, I saw the article over a week before/. carried it. Unfortunately like you said, if you didn't see it until/. posted it and waited until you read it to post, you wouldn't even be noticed.
In almost every web browser other than Internet Explorer, innovation is alive and well -- we have popup blocking, ad blocking, tabbed browsing, fine grained scripting control, and nonlinear history traversal, all of which are genuinely valuable innovations that Internet Explorer would do well to adopt.
I agree with you that these are great features. I use them myself. But innovative?
Popup blocking -- allows you to instruct the browser not to do something
Ad blocking -- allows you to instruct the browser not to do something
Fine grained scripting control -- allows you to instruct the browser not to do something
Nonlinear history traversal -- if you mean jumping back more than one page at a time, that's been a feature since Netscape 4.0 at least. Or do you mean something else?
Tabbed browsing -- truly innovative when it happened. But Opera has had this for how long? Was it before Internet Explorer reached 70% market share? If so this agrees with the assertion.
In short, what genuninely new, innovative functionality (not disability) has premiered since Internet Explorer hit 70% market share?
I notice there are quite a few posts dismissing this article. But many of them seem to have been posted within 30 minutes of the link going up on the front page. I suspect there are very few people who could read the whole thing with any degree of comprehension in that time. And of the ones who could, how many took the time to follow the supporting links?
Like he said at the top, everything in there is based on "real trends well known in the industry". I haven't seen any criticisms yet that contradict this.
The shuttle was to be nothing more than that--a space truck to lug things back and forth to orbit. The craft itself would have no scientific function.
...
NASA believed this system would be economical to operate, but would cost $10 billion to build. The Office of Management and Budget balked. Ten billion, it gasped--out of the question!
What could you do, OMB asked, for $5 billion? Design of the horse was referred to committee, where a compromise was found. A partially reusable shuttle was conceived.
...
Estimating a cost of $5 billion to $6 billion, NASA got its launch-commit for this design in 1972. The agency explained that having a crew of pilots aboard would add "flexibility" and "new dimensions" to space flight, but otherwise NASA wasn't terribly specific about what the astronauts would do. It was assumed that with the horse under construction some carriage maker would build something for it to pull--a space mission only a shuttle could handle.
...
The 65,000-pound payload is being quietly dropped, too. "We'll be lucky if we hit 30,000 due-east," says Kaplan. Columbia and Challenger, the second shuttle, are turning out to weigh much more than planned.
...
Discovery and Atlantis, the third and fourth shuttles, are slated to have stronger tiles and lighter components. They may be able to lift 65,000 pounds. Meanwhile, remember the Titan III, lifting 29,000 pounds for about $50 million? "Getting only a 30,000 payload from the shuttle is a giant step backward, compared to the Titan," says Albert Cameron. "But it's a moot point now to argue about the practical virtues of the rocket. NASA has eliminated it. You have no choice but to launch on the shuttle, do you?"
In short, the scientists never wanted an orbiter. They wanted a shuttle, to get people and equipment into space, and the people back to the ground. Once the politicians and bean counters got involved the proposed scope creeped so far beyond original intention that it was no longer good for it's supposed original mission. The Titan III is still a more economical way to get payload into space, and balistic-entry capsules are still safer for the crew.
I'll close with the author's conclusions:
There is something noteworthy a rocket can do that the shuttle cannot. A rocket can be permitted to fail. What if a billion dollar spaceship wipes out on a "routine" mission "commuting" to space with some puny little satellite? Cooper fears it might drive a stake through the heart of the manned space program. Would the public stand to lose a quarter of the fleet in a single day? Would it fork over another billion dollars to build a replacement? Would it stand for spending millions to train astronauts to be truck drivers, only to lose truck and drivers both? The prospect makes the old rockets seem kind of nice. One of the old throw-away jobs could go haywire, and spiral down into the ocean off the Bahamas, and everybody would feel miserable and millions would be wasted and everybody would go back to work. Lost it, dammit--but then nobody ever expected it back.
The new spacecraft's primary function will be to ferry crews to and from the International Space Station (ISS) and serve as a lifeboat if the station has to be evacuated.
It only took 14 lives, several decades and tens of billions, if not trillions, of dollars to prove that they should have stuck with the original plan to begin with.
"We've really extended the time that we service our products," Thompson said, because when Microsoft ships a server product, customers may use it for up to ten years. So-called volume, or mainstream, service lasts seven years, but the company has constantly evolved the way it supplies updates and fixes over time.
So if I call Microsoft and ask for help with an NT4 bug they'll help me with it? Gee, I got the impression they'd just tell me to upgrade to the next version. Because that is the official fix for it. And let's not get into the fact that they're trying very hard to move to an all-subscription model with built-in forced upgrades.
And a moment of silence was observed
on
Goodbye, Dolly
·
· Score: 1
As of 12:30 pm EST the offending site http://Dow-Chemical.com now points to http://www.dow.com/homepage/index.html anyway. So apparently there is nothing to worry about. Satiric criticism is erased by domain hijacking and no-one has to be the wiser.
I think you are assuming that the only things MS wants is "control", while the aim is profit: control is only a mean to it.
I'm not so sure about that. In the long term they are threatened by the emergence of new competition. It is in their best interest to prevent that emergence, so I think in any given decision control is viewed as a higher priority than profit.
Whether the ultimate goal is profit is, I think, immaterial when the result is that every decision is made to favor control above all else.
Imagine if everyone felt they had the right to take the law into their own hands and dispense justice as they saw fit our legal system would become unbalanced. Individuals would place differing penalties based on their own moral judgments, not based on a standard of law.
Check out the background a little bit. From the original article:
It's an operation still very much in business, despite last month's much-hyped settlement of a lawsuit against Ralsky by Verizon Internet Services. The suit used Virginia's tough anti-spam laws to get Ralsky to promise to stop using Verizon servers and pay an undisclosed fee for sending out millions of unsolicited e-mails to its customers.
So it seems Ralsky is the one who has engaged in illegal activity. Further:
In 1992, while in the insurance business, he served a 50-day jail term for a charge arising out of the sale of unregistered securities. And in 1994, he was convicted of falsifying documents that defrauded financial institutions in Michigan and Ohio and ordered to pay $74,000 in restitution.
So he also has a history of fraudulent business practices in multiple other businesses before coming to SPAM.
Now from you:
Indeed, not a short month or so ago the RIAA was proposing congress pass legislation which would enable them to hunt down and possibly destroy or disable a system they believe to be involved with infringing intellectual property.
This example is of a company trying to get a law changed to make it legal for them, and only them, to hack into other people's computer systems. The people who signed Ralsky up for all this junk mail did not enter his home or his systems, did not illegally release any information that was not pulicly available, and did not violate -- nor attempt to have changed -- any laws preventing what they did.
BankDirect's web site has a different privacy policy, which reassuringly states 'We restrict access to nonpublic personal information about you to those employees who need to know that information to provide products or services to you.' Hmmm..."
Wow. That seems like a glaring contradiction to me. How could they send out the e-mail you included above when their privacy policy is much more conservative? That seems like a lawsuit in the making...
No contradiction at all. Note the words "employees who need to know that information to provide products or services to you". They are telling you that if they want to try to sell you more products or services, they will give your information to the sales department. They don't say anything about giving it only to those people who need it to service your existing accounts.
Ralsky, meanwhile, is looking at new technology. Recently he's been talking to two computer programmers in Romania who have developed what could be called stealth spam.
It is intricate computer software, said Ralsky, that can detect computers that are online and then be programmed to flash them a pop-up ad, much like the kind that display whenever a particular Web site is opened.
"This is even better," he said. "You don't have to be on a Web site at all. You can just have your computer on, connected to the Internet, reading e-mail or just idling and, bam, this program detects your presence and up pops the message on your screen, past firewalls, past anti-spam programs, past anything.
"Isn't technology great?"
First of all no, this is not great. Second, as soon as he talks about intentionally bypassing a firewall, I start thinking that that sounds suspiciously like "circumventing an access control" which, I believe, is no longer legal.
Slashdot Mirror
Got any info on franchising?
I like the idea, but information isn't as hierarchical as code. In code, you can have the networking maintainer, the encryption maintainer, the sound maintainer, etc. Sure, they sometimes have to work together where these sections touch.
But who would "own" the Taiwan page: the politics maintainer or the geography maintainer? Who would "own" Intelligent Design: science or religion?
I'm not asking this to shoot down the idea, because I like the idea. I'm trying to figure out a structure for choosing maintainers that would make it work.
If you meant the latter, there's no such thing as intellectual property laws. If you meant the former, then what do you mean by "intellectual property", and how is that different from copyright? After all, you did list them as two distinct things.
This has been your words-to-avoid public service announcement. We now return you to your regularly scheduled program.
That's how they targetted Elcomsoft for breaking Adobe's encryption. They described the "software device".
I'm not disputing what you say, just asking the question. All I know about the issue is what I've read from Mark Cuban, in the article I quoted, and a few other cable execs who agreed with the characterization.
Is Cuban just wrong? Or is he perhaps strategically unaware of the reality? He seems to be in a position to know the answers to this. And what he said seems to fit the observed behavior.
"
NBC, for example, owns decades of older programs that they either re-run themselves or sell into syndication. Most of this library was not shot in HDTV. NBC believes that viewers of new HDTV programs will not want to watch the older, lower-resolution shows.
None of the networks want to upset the syndication applecart by switching entirely to HDTV. See here for a cable honcho's take.
Google for "mark cuban hdtv" for more.
Graphs, methodology, links to more stats.
I'm not looking at the terms of the EULA to confirm this, but I've read that MS Service Packs are cumulative, in that when you install SP4 you are agreeing to install SP3 (along with its EULA). If true, this means that by installing SP4 you are agreeing to the terms of SP3.
I'll agree with you there.
Oh, but they are.
My emphasis.
My emphasis again
... and again
... and again.
Well there's the problem! And I completely agree with you. But that is the current system. Lawyers don't generally get to argue what the system "should" be, unless they make it to the Supreme Court. It's highly unlikely this case will go that far, so the current "completely corrupt and obfuscated" system is in no immanent danger of reform.
Nope. It is the responsibility of copyright holders to find violations and defend infringement of the particular expression protected. Patents cover ideas, copyright covers expression. Copyright must be defended or it becomes void, patents can be enforced at any time. (With some exceptions.) And since patents are registered and publicly available, it is the responsibility of the author to ensure it doesn't violate existing patents.
When SCO says there are line-for-line copies of their code, they are referring to copyright violation (and possibly also patent violation). When they claim that anything that does the same type of thing as their code is a violation, they seem to be talking about patent violation.
Of course their answer to this has been that they're really talking about violation of a license agreement, which purportedly governed use of the copyright- and/or patent-protected code they showed IBM, even though they may not have held those patents or copyrights themselves.
So while SCO seems to have been intentionally vague, it still helps to know there is a difference between patent and copyright.
What the terms say is that by posting it you, the end user, are claiming to have certain rights, and that you grant those rights to AOL. If it turns out you did not have those rights, then you are the one in breach of contract.
If you notice my sig, I saw the article over a week before /. carried it. Unfortunately like you said, if you didn't see it until /. posted it and waited until you read it to post, you wouldn't even be noticed.
Popup blocking -- allows you to instruct the browser not to do something
Ad blocking -- allows you to instruct the browser not to do something
Fine grained scripting control -- allows you to instruct the browser not to do something
Nonlinear history traversal -- if you mean jumping back more than one page at a time, that's been a feature since Netscape 4.0 at least. Or do you mean something else?
Tabbed browsing -- truly innovative when it happened. But Opera has had this for how long? Was it before Internet Explorer reached 70% market share? If so this agrees with the assertion.
In short, what genuninely new, innovative functionality (not disability) has premiered since Internet Explorer hit 70% market share?
I notice there are quite a few posts dismissing this article. But many of them seem to have been posted within 30 minutes of the link going up on the front page. I suspect there are very few people who could read the whole thing with any degree of comprehension in that time. And of the ones who could, how many took the time to follow the supporting links?
Like he said at the top, everything in there is based on "real trends well known in the industry". I haven't seen any criticisms yet that contradict this.
I'll close with the author's conclusions:
So if I call Microsoft and ask for help with an NT4 bug they'll help me with it? Gee, I got the impression they'd just tell me to upgrade to the next version. Because that is the official fix for it. And let's not get into the fact that they're trying very hard to move to an all-subscription model with built-in forced upgrades.
Throughout New Zealand, Wales and West Virginia.
As of 12:30 pm EST the offending site http://Dow-Chemical.com now points to http://www.dow.com/homepage/index.html anyway. So apparently there is nothing to worry about. Satiric criticism is erased by domain hijacking and no-one has to be the wiser.
Because I don't have mod points
I'm not so sure about that. In the long term they are threatened by the emergence of new competition. It is in their best interest to prevent that emergence, so I think in any given decision control is viewed as a higher priority than profit.
Whether the ultimate goal is profit is, I think, immaterial when the result is that every decision is made to favor control above all else.
Check out the background a little bit. From the original article:
So it seems Ralsky is the one who has engaged in illegal activity. Further:
So he also has a history of fraudulent business practices in multiple other businesses before coming to SPAM.
Now from you:
This example is of a company trying to get a law changed to make it legal for them, and only them, to hack into other people's computer systems. The people who signed Ralsky up for all this junk mail did not enter his home or his systems, did not illegally release any information that was not pulicly available, and did not violate -- nor attempt to have changed -- any laws preventing what they did.
How exactly is this the same?
No contradiction at all. Note the words "employees who need to know that information to provide products or services to you". They are telling you that if they want to try to sell you more products or services, they will give your information to the sales department. They don't say anything about giving it only to those people who need it to service your existing accounts.
First of all no, this is not great. Second, as soon as he talks about intentionally bypassing a firewall, I start thinking that that sounds suspiciously like "circumventing an access control" which, I believe, is no longer legal.