Spidey had a
short-lived live-action series in the 1970's.
Overall it tunk, but it had its points. In the series his spider-sense was more developed: he could actually envision the bad goings on (which he saw in a cheesy but somehow effective negative camera image). Sometimes the shots of him on the ceiling actually looked quite realistic. However, most of the shots of him wall-crawling were horrible: you could plainly see that they put a wall prop on the floor and he attempted to crawl across it on his fingers and toes. The weight distribution clearly looked wrong to the eye. It also suffered from the mask thing: when you put a mask on an actor, the actor has to hold his/her head all weird to see. This was clearly apparent in the series. I'm happy to notice that it doesn't appear in the movie trailers.
But hey, I was a fifth grader. I caught every episode.
Whoa! The ads in the LA Times page are as obnoxious as I've seen. Did anybody else get the ads with Little Mermaid characters flying across the page? Ugly ugly.
One company I worked at had the problem that employees perceived sick leave just like you said: it's just vacation with a different name. The CEO had to hold a meeting to explain that sick leave is for "things that have to be taken care of now". If I wanted to take off an afternoon for a movie, I might use vacation, I might arrange to make it up, I wouldn't use sick leave.
My experience is that the high tech industry is pretty laid back about time off. I'm confident that if I wanted to take the afternoon off for something I considered important that I could simply do so and promise to make the time up. Even more likely, I probably already put in extra hours the night before. I certainly wouldn't feel any need to lie about it. How easy would it be for you?
I think the DMCA is crap too, and I hope Tom wins this case. However, as the law stands, I think the plaintiffs (if they do choose to go forward) will have a solid case. It's not enough that embed was created for personal use by the author for a legitimate purpose. In fact, as far as I can see, they aren't complaining about Tom writing the program, they're complaining about him distributing it. Now, the sole purpose of the program is to disable security features. The fact that it should only be used with permission of the owner isn't germane: DMCA specifically prohibits tools of that nature.
Again, I hate the DMCA and hope Tom wins. Indeed, I just sent him $5 bucks to help out (check your AOL account, Tom), but I don't think he'll win using the argument that he didn't violate the DMCA.
(IANAL) One of the problems so far with deep-linking complaints is that the plaintiffs always fail to mitigate the problem. In English, that means that even though they could have done something to make the alleged-problem less of a problem, they declined to do so. Failure to mitigate is an accepted argument against lawsuits. I hope the defendent in this case allows a webmaster to testify in his favor that discouraging deep linking is a simple technical solution that can be easily implemented if there's a real need. I'll do it if he wants, but I probably don't have the alphabet soup after my name that would impress jurists.
I also notice that the Dallas Morning News has no robots.txt. That guarantees that search engines will deep link to their site. Again, the plaintiff failed to mitigate.
Rep. Boucher will hold a town meeting at the Blacksburg town hall on Sat June 15, 9:30am. I'll be there to make sure he's aware of MS' habit of extorting our schools with audit threats. Feel free to join in.
I had a brainstorm this morning about OpenOffice. I'd be interested to hear what/.er's think.
The problem:: One of the big complaints about moving to OSS is that people insist that they need to be able to exchange MS Word documents with other people around the country. Now, I hate sending or receiving Word docs when typing the text in the email would work just as well, but some people seem to only communicate by sending Word docs as attachments. Of course, OpenOffice can read from and write to Word format, but natively it writes to its own open format, and its a hassle to constantly save-as just to send a document as an attachment.
Solution: develop a mail server module that uses OpenOffice. When a mail going out of the network has an OpenOffice word processing document attached, the module automatically creates a version of the document converted to MS Word and adds it as an attachment. Conversely, mail coming into the network automatically converts Word->OpenOffice adds the attachments. By default, documents sent internally in the network (for some flexible definition of "internally") are not converted. A nice added touch would be to allow users to have their own settings on when conversions should be done. They could set users or entire domains who don't get conversions, choose to have documents substituted instead of added, etc.
It's darn nice of Microsoft to admit that it's not stealing if someone gives it to you. What they and the BSA are still dancing around is that open source is one of the very best solutions to piracy. An organization that uses only open source won't have to waste its time and money maintaining license compliance. Of course, this doesn't help software sellers, but in the spirit of the very capitalism they claim to support: that's their problem. The companies who make money in some way besides selling software (i.e. most of us) aren't obliged to provide welfare to Microsoft.
"You have been added to our subscription list, please send an opt-out notice to our address to remove yourself, otherwise a charge of $21.99 will be billed to your credit card company as payment for services rendered".
(IANAL) I agree with your feelings on the matter, but there is a distinction, at least insofar as will be perceived by our lawmakers.
(Miko goes into lecture mode, pretending to be the guy in "Paper Chase") A contract requires a specific offer and a pro-active acceptance. A contract also requires consideration on all sides, i.e. everyone involved must get something theoretically of value. (That's why you hear about all those contracts in which someone gets one dollar. That one stinking dollar is the "consideration" received by one of the parties.) The scenario you describe wouldn't be a contract, because you did nothing to initiate the magazine subscription. However, an ISP can currently sell your name and other information and you aren't a party to that contract. You may feel like you're paying something out (your privacy) but that isn't currently recognized as something of consideration.
Furthermore, you can already establish a contract in which the ISP cannot sell your name and number. The problem is that most people don't know/care to do that and the contracts never mention the issue. Even if you tried to do so, most ISPs would simply look at you funny and keep smacking their gum. Ergo, in most real-world situations, the ISP has the right to sell your name because nothing in the contract said they couldn't. However, contracts are not entirely governed by their content. No contract in the world covers every possibility (Clause 182,383,282: Alien Invasions). That's why we have something called the Uniform Commercial Code. The UCC, among other things, sets the defaults for how contracts are interpreted. For example, if you offer to sell someone your car at a specific price (you have to set a specific price) but you don't tell them how long the offer is good, then they have a "reasonable" amount of time to accept. If you're wondering what's "reasonable", so have a lot of judges. One day is definitely reasonable. One year isn't. Now, back to the Hollings bill. What the Hollings bill does (theoretically) is establish some of those clauses that aren't explicitly covered in your contract with the ISP. The bill says, in effect, that unless the contract says otherwise, the ISP can sell your information, but if you tell them not to, they can't. Also, the ISP has to make it clear to you that if they intend to sell your info.
Who says the law ain't fun? Why, this stuff is almost as good as OOP.
The way to deal with bullies is to go on the offensive. Sue back. Perhaps the most promising avenue in that direction would be to sue the BSA consituents for distributing software they know is insecure, yet laid claims to it being secure. There's a hundred years of rulings on health claims for food and other consumables that show that you're not allowed to claim something is healthful, even if you later state in fine print that it isn't. Those should make some good precedents. Be sure to quote the security specialist from Microsoft who quit recently and publicly sounded off that he couldn't understand why Microsoft still has buffer-overflow vulnerabilities. You might be able to use the precedent from some of the automotive cases in which manufacturers were proved to have released faulty products. If it can be shown that Microsoft knowingly releases a faulty product, you could turn the tables. Another point to bring up could be that Windows allows pretty much anybody with a floppy disk to install software. To me, that's faulty. Drum it into the head of everyone who will listen that insecure software opened you to unauthorized software installations.
Next, claim that the insecure software violates the DMCA by assisting in the distribution of copyrighted material... I'm sure you can find one installation of Back Orifice on your campus to back up your claim. Sound ridiculous? It's not as ridiculous as having to submit to warrantless search.
Be sure not to go on the offensive against law enforcement... on the contrary, get law enforcement angry at the BSA for wasting their time hurting the sweet little local colleges. Make sure everyone is clear that the agents could have been out fighting drug dealers. That sort of tactic worked for the tobacco lobby who convinced the California legislature that it was a waste of taxpayer money to run anti-smoking ads when the money could be put towards birth-defect research. There's always something more worthy out there.
Lobby your congresspeople. If applicable, mention that the people who would profit from the search are from out of state. Remember, pork runs congress, and it's not pork if it gets diverted out of your congressperson's district. You may win this through lobbying.
They're not being nice to you, don't be nice to them.
Motor oil is a perfect example of why pay-for-disposal doesn't work. If you have to pay to throw away the oil properly, people will just dunmp it in the sewer and let it get into everyone's ground water. I'd prefer a system where you pay a deposit when you buy the oil, then get it back when you dispose of it properly.
I like the concept: you put down a deposit on each computer. You get it back when you turn it in. The difficulty is in verification: you have to turn in the computer that went with a deposit. That in turn requires an expensive verification system (for example, checking serial numbers on motherboards). Overall, though, it might work.
Great idea! The Linux-to-the-Rescue Program could install LTSP thin clients and servers. The systems come complete with cabling and power strips. The school system can arange for payment over several years... structure the payments so that right away the savings over MS are apparent.
The strike force would consist of three zquads: installation, configuration, and translation. The installation team has the easiest task: spec out what machines are needed, move in, and installation them. The configuration team is in charge of determining who in the system needs permission to what. I.e., the configuration team creates the user accounts. Finally, the translation team has the task of moving over legacy systems. That would be the most challenging, possibly even impossible in a panic environment. Most MS Office documents could be moved right over, but apps written in VB and other Windoze-ish environments would be a pain-in-the-behind.
Open source has mostly been the domain of programmers and has only recently become known to less-technical people.
At this point I can only refer you to your local College of Business, Department of Marketing. The people who use a product and the people who are the influencers in the purchase decision are frequently not the same people. When WordPerfect and Lotus came to Marriott Corporate HQ to sell us their software they didn't go around to every office worker, secretary and janitor to pitch their wares... they came to the IT department and we made a decision on behalf of the everyone else. Right or wrond, that's how it usually works in IT. Influencers are consumers and the consumers are revolting against software that controls them too much. It's not a complicated concept.
I'm a big fan of "Why Use Open Source", enough so that I printed the whole thing, had it bound, and gave it to Congressman Rick Boucher when I met with him. IMHO it's the single best paper adovocating OSS.
Of course, like any good work of art, it's not done. There are a few things I wish he'd change. The top of my wish list is that he should just start calling it "open source" and be done with it. "OSS/FS" just is too confusing a term, and the abbreviation is almost as bad. Ys, I respect the concept of "Free Software" and the people who prefer that term, but "open source" sells the stuff much better. Next, I wish he'd break it up into separate pages instead of all one page. If the problem is that he wants a single printable page without having two texts to maintain, that could be worked out with a little Perl. David, if you're listening, I'll be happy to help out with that Perl.
PS. Open source seems a programmer revolt to me. Most consumers do not even know what source code is, let alone contribute.
Programmers are consumers... that's an important point that you and many others seem to miss. The person in an organization who has to deal with crashed operating systems is going to be the person who cares most about the stability of the OS. In marketing terms that person is known as an "influencer" and those influencers are the people who are making open source happen.
First of all, welcome back from Mars. I guess they haven't heard of open source out there, so let me tell you about it, and why it's a consumer revolt.
In marketing we look at who actually makes the decisions regarding any acquisition decision. The people who use are not necessarily the people who decide. This is particularly true in the computer industry: system administrators have always been the major influencers regarding how a computer system is designed.
Open source is wildly popular among computer administors because it gives them control over their systems instead of handing over control to Redmond, Washington.
Bill pulls out the usual anti-open-source red herrings in his speech. He's trying to get everybody to forget that open source is actually a capitalist, consumer-driven phenomenon. He tries to characterize OSS as charity. OSS is in fact the biggest consumer revolt of all time: it's consumers deciding that they want something better and going out and making it happen.
Weirdly enough, he then moves on the characterize the BSD license as somehow less charitable and more business-like. The BSD license is the total-give-away license: you get the code and you have no obligation to provide anything in return. GPL, however, is the value-added license: if you change the code and if you distribute it, then your derived work is still part of the original work. I know this will start a heated debate, but if my tax dollars are paying for something, I want it issused so that some value comes back, not just a welfare-like giveaway. It seems that Bill now wants to move on the being a welfare recipient. Weird.
Slashdot Mirror
But hey, I was a fifth grader. I caught every episode.
Whoa! The ads in the LA Times page are as obnoxious as I've seen. Did anybody else get the ads with Little Mermaid characters flying across the page? Ugly ugly.
One company I worked at had the problem that employees perceived sick leave just like you said: it's just vacation with a different name. The CEO had to hold a meeting to explain that sick leave is for "things that have to be taken care of now". If I wanted to take off an afternoon for a movie, I might use vacation, I might arrange to make it up, I wouldn't use sick leave.
My experience is that the high tech industry is pretty laid back about time off. I'm confident that if I wanted to take the afternoon off for something I considered important that I could simply do so and promise to make the time up. Even more likely, I probably already put in extra hours the night before. I certainly wouldn't feel any need to lie about it. How easy would it be for you?
Again, I hate the DMCA and hope Tom wins. Indeed, I just sent him $5 bucks to help out (check your AOL account, Tom), but I don't think he'll win using the argument that he didn't violate the DMCA.
I also notice that the Dallas Morning News has no robots.txt. That guarantees that search engines will deep link to their site. Again, the plaintiff failed to mitigate.
Rep. Boucher will hold a town meeting at the Blacksburg town hall on Sat June 15, 9:30am. I'll be there to make sure he's aware of MS' habit of extorting our schools with audit threats. Feel free to join in.
See, for example, TOM Conversion Service seems to get the most linkage.
A quick search reveals that my biggest Word document is... 11 megs, but I don't do a lot of Word. Hmmm, you may be on to something. :-)
The problem:: One of the big complaints about moving to OSS is that people insist that they need to be able to exchange MS Word documents with other people around the country. Now, I hate sending or receiving Word docs when typing the text in the email would work just as well, but some people seem to only communicate by sending Word docs as attachments. Of course, OpenOffice can read from and write to Word format, but natively it writes to its own open format, and its a hassle to constantly save-as just to send a document as an attachment.
Solution: develop a mail server module that uses OpenOffice. When a mail going out of the network has an OpenOffice word processing document attached, the module automatically creates a version of the document converted to MS Word and adds it as an attachment. Conversely, mail coming into the network automatically converts Word->OpenOffice adds the attachments. By default, documents sent internally in the network (for some flexible definition of "internally") are not converted. A nice added touch would be to allow users to have their own settings on when conversions should be done. They could set users or entire domains who don't get conversions, choose to have documents substituted instead of added, etc.
It's darn nice of Microsoft to admit that it's not stealing if someone gives it to you. What they and the BSA are still dancing around is that open source is one of the very best solutions to piracy. An organization that uses only open source won't have to waste its time and money maintaining license compliance. Of course, this doesn't help software sellers, but in the spirit of the very capitalism they claim to support: that's their problem. The companies who make money in some way besides selling software (i.e. most of us) aren't obliged to provide welfare to Microsoft.
... buy a backbone. Last I checked they only cost around $625 million.
(IANAL) I agree with your feelings on the matter, but there is a distinction, at least insofar as will be perceived by our lawmakers.
(Miko goes into lecture mode, pretending to be the guy in "Paper Chase") A contract requires a specific offer and a pro-active acceptance. A contract also requires consideration on all sides, i.e. everyone involved must get something theoretically of value. (That's why you hear about all those contracts in which someone gets one dollar. That one stinking dollar is the "consideration" received by one of the parties.) The scenario you describe wouldn't be a contract, because you did nothing to initiate the magazine subscription. However, an ISP can currently sell your name and other information and you aren't a party to that contract. You may feel like you're paying something out (your privacy) but that isn't currently recognized as something of consideration.
Furthermore, you can already establish a contract in which the ISP cannot sell your name and number. The problem is that most people don't know/care to do that and the contracts never mention the issue. Even if you tried to do so, most ISPs would simply look at you funny and keep smacking their gum. Ergo, in most real-world situations, the ISP has the right to sell your name because nothing in the contract said they couldn't. However, contracts are not entirely governed by their content. No contract in the world covers every possibility (Clause 182,383,282: Alien Invasions). That's why we have something called the Uniform Commercial Code. The UCC, among other things, sets the defaults for how contracts are interpreted. For example, if you offer to sell someone your car at a specific price (you have to set a specific price) but you don't tell them how long the offer is good, then they have a "reasonable" amount of time to accept. If you're wondering what's "reasonable", so have a lot of judges. One day is definitely reasonable. One year isn't. Now, back to the Hollings bill. What the Hollings bill does (theoretically) is establish some of those clauses that aren't explicitly covered in your contract with the ISP. The bill says, in effect, that unless the contract says otherwise, the ISP can sell your information, but if you tell them not to, they can't. Also, the ISP has to make it clear to you that if they intend to sell your info.
Who says the law ain't fun? Why, this stuff is almost as good as OOP.
The way to deal with bullies is to go on the offensive. Sue back. Perhaps the most promising avenue in that direction would be to sue the BSA consituents for distributing software they know is insecure, yet laid claims to it being secure. There's a hundred years of rulings on health claims for food and other consumables that show that you're not allowed to claim something is healthful, even if you later state in fine print that it isn't. Those should make some good precedents. Be sure to quote the security specialist from Microsoft who quit recently and publicly sounded off that he couldn't understand why Microsoft still has buffer-overflow vulnerabilities. You might be able to use the precedent from some of the automotive cases in which manufacturers were proved to have released faulty products. If it can be shown that Microsoft knowingly releases a faulty product, you could turn the tables. Another point to bring up could be that Windows allows pretty much anybody with a floppy disk to install software. To me, that's faulty. Drum it into the head of everyone who will listen that insecure software opened you to unauthorized software installations.
Next, claim that the insecure software violates the DMCA by assisting in the distribution of copyrighted material... I'm sure you can find one installation of Back Orifice on your campus to back up your claim. Sound ridiculous? It's not as ridiculous as having to submit to warrantless search.
Be sure not to go on the offensive against law enforcement... on the contrary, get law enforcement angry at the BSA for wasting their time hurting the sweet little local colleges. Make sure everyone is clear that the agents could have been out fighting drug dealers. That sort of tactic worked for the tobacco lobby who convinced the California legislature that it was a waste of taxpayer money to run anti-smoking ads when the money could be put towards birth-defect research. There's always something more worthy out there.
Lobby your congresspeople. If applicable, mention that the people who would profit from the search are from out of state. Remember, pork runs congress, and it's not pork if it gets diverted out of your congressperson's district. You may win this through lobbying.
They're not being nice to you, don't be nice to them.
... please let's not call it the "Geek Lobby". Even if we use the term amongst ourselves, it just won't fly for the general public.
Motor oil is a perfect example of why pay-for-disposal doesn't work. If you have to pay to throw away the oil properly, people will just dunmp it in the sewer and let it get into everyone's ground water. I'd prefer a system where you pay a deposit when you buy the oil, then get it back when you dispose of it properly.
I like the concept: you put down a deposit on each computer. You get it back when you turn it in. The difficulty is in verification: you have to turn in the computer that went with a deposit. That in turn requires an expensive verification system (for example, checking serial numbers on motherboards). Overall, though, it might work.
The strike force would consist of three zquads: installation, configuration, and translation. The installation team has the easiest task: spec out what machines are needed, move in, and installation them. The configuration team is in charge of determining who in the system needs permission to what. I.e., the configuration team creates the user accounts. Finally, the translation team has the task of moving over legacy systems. That would be the most challenging, possibly even impossible in a panic environment. Most MS Office documents could be moved right over, but apps written in VB and other Windoze-ish environments would be a pain-in-the-behind.
At this point I can only refer you to your local College of Business, Department of Marketing. The people who use a product and the people who are the influencers in the purchase decision are frequently not the same people. When WordPerfect and Lotus came to Marriott Corporate HQ to sell us their software they didn't go around to every office worker, secretary and janitor to pitch their wares... they came to the IT department and we made a decision on behalf of the everyone else. Right or wrond, that's how it usually works in IT. Influencers are consumers and the consumers are revolting against software that controls them too much. It's not a complicated concept.
Of course, like any good work of art, it's not done. There are a few things I wish he'd change. The top of my wish list is that he should just start calling it "open source" and be done with it. "OSS/FS" just is too confusing a term, and the abbreviation is almost as bad. Ys, I respect the concept of "Free Software" and the people who prefer that term, but "open source" sells the stuff much better. Next, I wish he'd break it up into separate pages instead of all one page. If the problem is that he wants a single printable page without having two texts to maintain, that could be worked out with a little Perl. David, if you're listening, I'll be happy to help out with that Perl.
Programmers are consumers... that's an important point that you and many others seem to miss. The person in an organization who has to deal with crashed operating systems is going to be the person who cares most about the stability of the OS. In marketing terms that person is known as an "influencer" and those influencers are the people who are making open source happen.
I can't deny the accuracy of that. A lot of PHB's make wacko computer decisions. I think the good ones are more and more interested in OSS, IMHO.
First of all, welcome back from Mars. I guess they haven't heard of open source out there, so let me tell you about it, and why it's a consumer revolt.
In marketing we look at who actually makes the decisions regarding any acquisition decision. The people who use are not necessarily the people who decide. This is particularly true in the computer industry: system administrators have always been the major influencers regarding how a computer system is designed.
Open source is wildly popular among computer administors because it gives them control over their systems instead of handing over control to Redmond, Washington.
Weirdly enough, he then moves on the characterize the BSD license as somehow less charitable and more business-like. The BSD license is the total-give-away license: you get the code and you have no obligation to provide anything in return. GPL, however, is the value-added license: if you change the code and if you distribute it, then your derived work is still part of the original work. I know this will start a heated debate, but if my tax dollars are paying for something, I want it issused so that some value comes back, not just a welfare-like giveaway. It seems that Bill now wants to move on the being a welfare recipient. Weird.