Sorry, I meant to say... I just followed the link given in the article, and I just get an instant blank page. It looks like Network Solutions have just pulled the service until they get it sorted.
BT are only rolling out ADSL because they are being forced to, and the £40 is only the start.
Prices have yet to be finalised, but they are talking about £40/month for a 512kbit downlink from an ISP to your home, and higher prices for faster links. The link is a virtual circuit over their ATM network with the last leg being ADSL.
The crucial point is that you don't buy this from BT. You pay your ISP for Internet access, and they pay BT to install the ADSL link.
So you don't pay £40 per month. You pay the ISP quite a bit more, and then you add VAT (our version of sales tax) on at 17.5%. Estimates suggest that a decent Internet service won't leave you much change out of £100 per month. And if you want the line to go to a business instead of your home then you will pay even more. The same service starts at £150 per month then.
So why are they selling a service at a price point that even they admit won't generate much demand? Well BT makes an awful lot of money out of its leased line business, and doesn't want to canibalise it. However Oftel (UK telecoms regulator) will demand that BT allow competitors access to their local copper loops in (IIRC) 2002, and cable modems are coming up behind.
Meanwhile I note that US West is offering ADSL with Internet access for a stunning $30 per month.
The BBC does indeed have a humongous site. It spends 10% of its revenues (£120? per year tax on anyone owning one or more TV sets) on that web site.
But this guy does not work for the BBC. He works for an independent contractor called "World of Wonder" who presumably do documentaries to order. Most of these people are in fact ex-BBC people who went independent during the downsizing and now act as jobbing film makers, mostly for their former employer, but also for anyone else who needs their skills. This makes the whole broadcasting industry more flexible, and is generally a Good Thing.
As for World of Wonder's email server, it might go down, or they might pick up their email from their ISP.
Paul.
Does the WTO know about this?
on
CALEA update
·
· Score: 2
This sounds like a subsidy to Nortel, plus laws which close off the market for router equipment to non-US vendors.
As an employee of a comms equipment manufacturer in the UK, this is a matter of concern to me. How are we supposed to sell into US markets? Is this protectionism in disguise?
How does one go about giving the World Trade Organisation a heads-up about this? Does the WTO in fact cover this issue?
Paul.
Similar proposals in the UK - Demon ISP response
on
CALEA update
·
· Score: 1
Over here in the UK the Home Office is talking about similar requirements. Demon Internet, the first consumer ISP over here, has replied to the consultation paper.
They object that it will be expensive and impractical to provide the required level of access, and in any case the average PC Plod will need a lot of education in using the intercepts, which Demon don't have the time to give.
The Economist has carried stories on the University of Iowa site in the past. It seems that this game just skirts US laws about betting on elections.
The idea is to make people put their money where their mouth is. That way you get a more honest and thoughtful opinion than just stopping random people in the street. The fact that the game players are not a random sample matters less because they reflect all the available evidence rather than just their own views.
IIRC, the idea is that you buy a future contract which will pay off according to the share of the next vote. So the current market value of these contracts reflects the (hopefully) rational expectations of the traders.
See this current Forbes editorial for an excellent counterpoint to trendy fascists like Thurow.
If I saw that article on Slashdot I'd have wanted to moderate it down as flamebait. It dismisses four economists as "mice" and their writings as "mouse dung". Yeah, real intelligent debate.
I think Thurow is probably correct in his evaluation of self-regulation, except that it can also be backed up by the big stick of effective minority protest (e.g. NC17 films in the USA).
In particular he is correct in saying that it won't work on the Net, which is why we should be supporting efforts to promote self-regulation instead of government regulation: it won't work, and we will be at status quo. Meantime our rulers will have time to get a clue about how the net works.
Palm need to get out of the hardware business. The real money is to be made by licensing the OS and letting lots of independent hardware vendors compete to see who can shave a bit more off their margins. This is what made Microsoft what it is today, and also what gave us the $500 PC.
According to the ABC news stories this baby uses PalmOS and modified versions of the standard Palm apps. Does that make it completely Palm-compatible?
Around here lots of people have got Palm IIIs. I'm was planning on getting one soon, but with the Visor out I'm not so sure. Compatibility is very important. I need to be able to synchronise diaries and exchange applications with other people. If the Visor can't do that 100% then I'm afraid its back down to Palm.
while other boys were learning to perfect the art of sucking up, lying and trying to get girls, some of us were reading about astronomy or programming a Texas Instrument.
If you approach social relations as a system and social behaviours as the laws by which the system can be affected, then succeeding in that system is similar to understanding physical forces in a system of masses.
The point is that most people don't actually need to learn this stuff, only practice. Its like learning language. During your first few years of life you soak it up from your environment and become totally fluent without trying. When you learn a language as an adult it is a major struggle.
Most people aquire social skills in the same way they aquire language. Autistics don't. They have to learn it consciously as a set of rules, just like an adult learning a foreign language.
Someone earlier mentioned Lt. Cmdr Data. I'd love to meet him, because I know I could explain things to him. The people around him can't explain social rules to him because they don't consciously know them. But I've had to figure out the rules for myself, and as a result I know what they are.
"Differently abled" is a patronising PC euphamism for "disabled", and was probably never more than a joke. But people with Asperger's Syndrome really do fit the label.
I have a mild case of Asperger's, along with mild ADHD (at least I think so: its never been formally diagnosed). I learned to read at about 3 or 4, encouraged by my mother. In my first year at primary school my parents were told by the headmaster that I was mentally subnormal and should go to a "special" school.
I've since met another young man with a severe case of Aspergers. He spends hours fiddling with broken video recorders and things, and can talk about nothing else. But he has got to University and his parents are very proud of him.
The thing is that all of these pros and cons come as part of a package. Its not "normal" (in the sense of "usual"), but its not pathalogical either. The trick is to recognise both the pros and the cons, and then play to your own strengths.
1) Lets say mondex is a company (probably sponsored by a bank). You go with your mondex card, and want to put, say, $100 on it. The company takes your $100, and puts a figure representing $100 on the card. Simple enough.
Not quite. This ignores where the "figure representing $100" comes from. A central feature of the Mondex scheme is that the bank cannot just create Mondex value out of nowhere. The total amount on all the cards is fixed (modulo accidental losses when someone destroys a card).
Mondex value would be counted as part of the National cash supply, and regulated in exactly the same way. In order to "mint" new Mondex value the bank (a consortium including HSBC in the case of Mondex) must get permission from the national authority for the relevant currency.
Lets say you don't use the card for a week. In that time, the company would probably have put that $100 you paid for a profitable motive (investments as part of the money reserve).
But they also have $100 less Mondex value to do the same thing with. The two things balance. Thats the whole point.
Bear in mind that the bank has no way of keeping track of how and when I use that $5 on my card, any more than they can if they hand me a newly printed $5 note. This is the advantage of electronic cash schemes such as Mondex: the bits stored on the card are not a key to the bank account where the cash is held, they are the cash itself. If I transfered the $5 to you, and you paid it back into the bank, the bank would have absolutely no way to relate the two transactions.
Try taking out a $5 note and looking at it (or equivalent if you are outside the US). Its a piece of paper with ink on it. Its value is not in the paper and ink, it is in the knowledge that the US Mint has authorised its creation, and can be trusted to enforce a limited supply in the future. Mondex works in exactly the same way.
Consider the history of paper money. Originally the US Mint only produced coins, and those coins were "backed" by the precious metal they were made of. In effect the limited supply of the coins was guaranteed by the difficulty of obtaining more metal.
But coins are difficult to use in large amounts, so banks, as a service to their customers, started taking the coins on deposit and issuing paper notes in return. These notes were similar to today's Bearer Bonds, except that the denominations were smaller. This is where the phrase "I promise to pay the bearer..." comes from. You could give the note to someone as a proxy for the cash, and they could be sure that they could reclaim the cash by taking the note to the bank. As long as the rest of the town trusted the bank you could circulate the note indefinitely and the coins never needed to leave the bank.
Unfortunately a mixture of poor security, a confusing multiplicity of obscure banknote designs, and occasional bank frauds and failures made this system expensive to run. Governments took over the job of printing bank notes, and bank notes became part of the national currency. Eventually they realised that digging lots of gold out of the ground just to store in vaults as "backing" for paper was a waste of time and they dropped that part of the system.
Now Mondex comes on to the scene. You can take your paper notes to the bank and get back an equivalent amount on your Mondex card. In effect the card says "I , promise to pay the bearer of this card the sum held in its registers on demand". Note the similarity to the way bank notes originally worked. One way to implement this would indeed be to have the Mondex value backed by physically holding your bank notes and coins in a vault somewhere. But its much simpler for the treasury to just authorise the creation of the Mondex value as part of the national money supply, along with all the bank notes.
Incidentally, those who think that lumps of metal in a bank vault can magically solve economic ills should consider the stagflation suffered by Spain when it suddenly imported lots of gold from the Americas.
That might be the case for small scale trials, but for real use in a national roll-out the situation would be different. When you put cash onto your Mondex card the bank does not "keep the money", it transfers it onto your card.
The Amex system seems to be an "electronic cheque" system: your card creates a signed docucument instructing Amex to transfer money from your account to the person you are paying.
Mondex, in contrast, is an electronic cash system. The total value in all Mondex chips in circulation (including those held by the bank) is kept constant. When you move money from one chip to another the system is designed so that one chip has to be debited before the other can be credited. The system is enforced by digital signatures and certificates signed by the bank: in order to persuade a Mondex card that it can accept money from you, you have to produce a digital certificate signed by its issuing bank.
Your objection is akin to saying that if you give the bank five pound coins and get a five pound note, then the bank is keeping your money and giving you a paper token in return.
This thing is a grossly graphics intensive site gives the user a very small amount of information per byte downloaded.
The key insight is the one that Katz identified: know your readership. Slashdotters are a different audience to Yankee fans (although I suppose there might be some overlap:-). And as for bandwidth, I recall the days when the modern Slashdot would have been considered a bandwidth hog. All those graphic elements scattered around...
Every book I've ever read about how to write effectively starts by saying that you should know what your audience is, and then write the things they need to know in a style they can read. This is the core skill for any writer.
This principle applies even more to the web. But in addition to the style of the writing, there is also the style of the site. We are starting to see conventions emerge for navigating information, like the button bar at the top of the page, that a significant proportion of the population know how to use. A designer who is familiar with these conventions and the way different people relate to them can use them to pitch a site at a target audience.
Possibly the first example of this way of thinking was the (IIRC) '96 Olympics web site, in which an explicit design constraint required that no piece of information be more than three clicks away form the home page.
Hemos and Cmdr. Taco also obviously understand this principle. Slashdot is a hackers site: highly configurable, high information density, rewards long-term use (Karma), not afraid of complicated stuff like the raw HTML I'm typing now. These are the characteristics of things that hackers like to use, but they would sink like a stone with any other audience.
but makes the files 10 times bigger, because you don't do inter-frame compression...
Bigger yes, but not ten times bigger. I've done some experiments. A 600x400 image compresses down to 15k with some minor artifacts, and 24k with some almost-invisible artifacts. Reduce that to 300x200 and you are looking at 8 or 9k. My experience of watching compressed video is that the motion reduces the visual impact of the artifacts because they keep changing randomly, while the eye tends to track the image. So you should be able to get away with some 15k per frame. Maybe slightly less because these figures include picture headers that would be factored out of MJPEG.
At 15k per frame and 25 fps that is 375k/sec, or 1.35Gb/hour, which is about twice MPEG-1. Plus sound of course. But radio quality sound only needs about 8k/sec, so we can ignore that for now.
Has anyone tried doing this in real-time? It strikes me that we might have a DIY version of the TiVO here.
For example, "Intel Inside" was heralded as this marketing marvel, yet I see it and think: "Ok. Great. Thanks."
The reason that "Intel Inside" is a marketing marvel is not the cheesy logo and four electronic twonk noises, its the way that OEMs are pushed into including it.
Intel provide a cashback deal (essentially large discounts) to OEMs who include the Intel Inside logo in their advertising. Part of this is that Intel get to review and approve the adverts before they go out. This lets them place the logo, but it also makes sure that the voiceover says "and its got a 400MHz Intel Celeron processor" as if that were a major selling point.
Viewers think that they are being sold a computer, so they discount what they see about the computer. But the fact that the computer company seemed to think that a Celeron is a major selling point sticks in their heads, and makes them more likely to pick a Celeron-based PC no matter which brand they buy.
It also lets Intel play fast and loose with the anti-monopoly laws. If you offer AMD processors as well, you might suddenly find all your ads being rejected by Intel, and having to pay the full list price for your Intel CPUs.
So why don't you use the Freedom of Information Act to find out if the letter exists? If it turns up then great, you have solid evidence of a government attempt to restrict our rights (including mine: I'm in the UK where we can't appeal to the 1st Ammendment). OTOH if it doesn't turn up then either it was never sent or the government has effectively denied its existence and you have won a minor victory.
You're saying that, without "process" (which to me means lots of bureaucratic forms, trainings, meetings, and other time wasters),
Not all process is bad. To be sure, there are Dilbertian employers who have old processes that get in the way. But most processes actually help.
that company employees lose all track of reality and common sense, such that they don't check whether requirements are correct, and don't test for bugs?
Funny, after you roundly condemn process you then list a couple of things that go in to the process. Yes, its amazing how often projects forget to do these things. Maybe it didn't seem important, or everyone thought that someone else had done it, or nobody could be bothered to do the actual work instead of getting on with exciting stuff like actual coding.
Anyway, just how do you check the requirements, or do the testing? You might think it obvious, but walk around any software department and talk to people, and you will find lots of different opinions. Some of them will be seriously wrong-headed. The solution to this is to get your best people together and tell them to write down the way it is done. Then distribute this around the company so that everyone does it right. And thats how you institute process improvement.
What Godfrey has won so far is a pre-trial judgement that Demon's defence has no merit in law. This defence was essentialy that Demon were not knowingly publishing the defamatory posting. The judge ruled that once Godfrey had notified them of the posting and asked them to delete it they were indeed publishing it.
The judge also noted that Godfrey has a long history of trolling on nation-related newsgroups, and that as a result the damages that would be awarded would likely be very small. The interesting question will be who pays the costs of the case.
As long as you haven't got anything very sensitive I'd say it's it's OK to "cause interference"
Well, as long as I don't throw anything poisenous I might as well chuck crisp packets and other litter around. But of course, I know nothing about the environment.
What does the High Court expect ISPs to do, sniff all their traffic and not let it pass through the routers before it hits the net, if it was deemed libelous?
No, not quite that bad. The ISP only becomes liable after being informed of the post in question. Up until that time it has the "innocent dissemination" defence.
The problem, of course, is that if I see something on the Net I don't like, I can demand that the ISPs remove it. In theory the ISPs could determine that it is not libelous, and hence refuse to remove it. In practice they have no way of making this decision, and no motive to try. Their only real course of action in these circumstances is to remove the posting.
The biggest problem is going to be postings which are damaging to reputation, but nevertheless are still true. The defence of truth to a charge of libel is a very important one, but it is the one that an ISP is least well placed to check.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks, Slashdot. This has given me the chance to look good in front of some pretty senior people here.
Paul.
Paul.
Paul.
Prices have yet to be finalised, but they are talking about £40/month for a 512kbit downlink from an ISP to your home, and higher prices for faster links. The link is a virtual circuit over their ATM network with the last leg being ADSL.
The crucial point is that you don't buy this from BT. You pay your ISP for Internet access, and they pay BT to install the ADSL link.
So you don't pay £40 per month. You pay the ISP quite a bit more, and then you add VAT (our version of sales tax) on at 17.5%. Estimates suggest that a decent Internet service won't leave you much change out of £100 per month. And if you want the line to go to a business instead of your home then you will pay even more. The same service starts at £150 per month then.
So why are they selling a service at a price point that even they admit won't generate much demand? Well BT makes an awful lot of money out of its leased line business, and doesn't want to canibalise it. However Oftel (UK telecoms regulator) will demand that BT allow competitors access to their local copper loops in (IIRC) 2002, and cable modems are coming up behind.
Meanwhile I note that US West is offering ADSL with Internet access for a stunning $30 per month.
BT sucks!
Paul.
But this guy does not work for the BBC. He works for an independent contractor called "World of Wonder" who presumably do documentaries to order. Most of these people are in fact ex-BBC people who went independent during the downsizing and now act as jobbing film makers, mostly for their former employer, but also for anyone else who needs their skills. This makes the whole broadcasting industry more flexible, and is generally a Good Thing.
As for World of Wonder's email server, it might go down, or they might pick up their email from their ISP.
Paul.
As an employee of a comms equipment manufacturer in the UK, this is a matter of concern to me. How are we supposed to sell into US markets? Is this protectionism in disguise?
How does one go about giving the World Trade Organisation a heads-up about this? Does the WTO in fact cover this issue?
Paul.
They object that it will be expensive and impractical to provide the required level of access, and in any case the average PC Plod will need a lot of education in using the intercepts, which Demon don't have the time to give.
Paul.
Does this make dishonest politicians difficult to sell?
Paul.
The idea is to make people put their money where their mouth is. That way you get a more honest and thoughtful opinion than just stopping random people in the street. The fact that the game players are not a random sample matters less because they reflect all the available evidence rather than just their own views.
IIRC, the idea is that you buy a future contract which will pay off according to the share of the next vote. So the current market value of these contracts reflects the (hopefully) rational expectations of the traders.
Paul.
If I saw that article on Slashdot I'd have wanted to moderate it down as flamebait. It dismisses four economists as "mice" and their writings as "mouse dung". Yeah, real intelligent debate.
I think Thurow is probably correct in his evaluation of self-regulation, except that it can also be backed up by the big stick of effective minority protest (e.g. NC17 films in the USA).
In particular he is correct in saying that it won't work on the Net, which is why we should be supporting efforts to promote self-regulation instead of government regulation: it won't work, and we will be at status quo. Meantime our rulers will have time to get a clue about how the net works.
Paul.
Paul.
Around here lots of people have got Palm IIIs. I'm was planning on getting one soon, but with the Visor out I'm not so sure. Compatibility is very important. I need to be able to synchronise diaries and exchange applications with other people. If the Visor can't do that 100% then I'm afraid its back down to Palm.
Paul.
If you approach social relations as a system and social behaviours as the laws by which the system can be affected, then succeeding in that system is similar to understanding physical forces in a system of masses.
The point is that most people don't actually need to learn this stuff, only practice. Its like learning language. During your first few years of life you soak it up from your environment and become totally fluent without trying. When you learn a language as an adult it is a major struggle.
Most people aquire social skills in the same way they aquire language. Autistics don't. They have to learn it consciously as a set of rules, just like an adult learning a foreign language.
Someone earlier mentioned Lt. Cmdr Data. I'd love to meet him, because I know I could explain things to him. The people around him can't explain social rules to him because they don't consciously know them. But I've had to figure out the rules for myself, and as a result I know what they are.
Paul.
I have a mild case of Asperger's, along with mild ADHD (at least I think so: its never been formally diagnosed). I learned to read at about 3 or 4, encouraged by my mother. In my first year at primary school my parents were told by the headmaster that I was mentally subnormal and should go to a "special" school.
I've since met another young man with a severe case of Aspergers. He spends hours fiddling with broken video recorders and things, and can talk about nothing else. But he has got to University and his parents are very proud of him.
The thing is that all of these pros and cons come as part of a package. Its not "normal" (in the sense of "usual"), but its not pathalogical either. The trick is to recognise both the pros and the cons, and then play to your own strengths.
Geek Pride!
Paul.
Not quite. This ignores where the "figure representing $100" comes from. A central feature of the Mondex scheme is that the bank cannot just create Mondex value out of nowhere. The total amount on all the cards is fixed (modulo accidental losses when someone destroys a card).
Mondex value would be counted as part of the National cash supply, and regulated in exactly the same way. In order to "mint" new Mondex value the bank (a consortium including HSBC in the case of Mondex) must get permission from the national authority for the relevant currency.
Lets say you don't use the card for a week. In that time, the company would probably have put that $100 you paid for a profitable motive (investments as part of the money reserve).
But they also have $100 less Mondex value to do the same thing with. The two things balance. Thats the whole point.
Bear in mind that the bank has no way of keeping track of how and when I use that $5 on my card, any more than they can if they hand me a newly printed $5 note. This is the advantage of electronic cash schemes such as Mondex: the bits stored on the card are not a key to the bank account where the cash is held, they are the cash itself. If I transfered the $5 to you, and you paid it back into the bank, the bank would have absolutely no way to relate the two transactions.
Try taking out a $5 note and looking at it (or equivalent if you are outside the US). Its a piece of paper with ink on it. Its value is not in the paper and ink, it is in the knowledge that the US Mint has authorised its creation, and can be trusted to enforce a limited supply in the future. Mondex works in exactly the same way.
Consider the history of paper money. Originally the US Mint only produced coins, and those coins were "backed" by the precious metal they were made of. In effect the limited supply of the coins was guaranteed by the difficulty of obtaining more metal.
But coins are difficult to use in large amounts, so banks, as a service to their customers, started taking the coins on deposit and issuing paper notes in return. These notes were similar to today's Bearer Bonds, except that the denominations were smaller. This is where the phrase "I promise to pay the bearer..." comes from. You could give the note to someone as a proxy for the cash, and they could be sure that they could reclaim the cash by taking the note to the bank. As long as the rest of the town trusted the bank you could circulate the note indefinitely and the coins never needed to leave the bank.
Unfortunately a mixture of poor security, a confusing multiplicity of obscure banknote designs, and occasional bank frauds and failures made this system expensive to run. Governments took over the job of printing bank notes, and bank notes became part of the national currency. Eventually they realised that digging lots of gold out of the ground just to store in vaults as "backing" for paper was a waste of time and they dropped that part of the system.
Now Mondex comes on to the scene. You can take your paper notes to the bank and get back an equivalent amount on your Mondex card. In effect the card says "I , promise to pay the bearer of this card the sum held in its registers on demand". Note the similarity to the way bank notes originally worked. One way to implement this would indeed be to have the Mondex value backed by physically holding your bank notes and coins in a vault somewhere. But its much simpler for the treasury to just authorise the creation of the Mondex value as part of the national money supply, along with all the bank notes.
Incidentally, those who think that lumps of metal in a bank vault can magically solve economic ills should consider the stagflation suffered by Spain when it suddenly imported lots of gold from the Americas.
Paul.
Paul.
The Amex system seems to be an "electronic cheque" system: your card creates a signed docucument instructing Amex to transfer money from your account to the person you are paying.
Mondex, in contrast, is an electronic cash system. The total value in all Mondex chips in circulation (including those held by the bank) is kept constant. When you move money from one chip to another the system is designed so that one chip has to be debited before the other can be credited. The system is enforced by digital signatures and certificates signed by the bank: in order to persuade a Mondex card that it can accept money from you, you have to produce a digital certificate signed by its issuing bank.
Your objection is akin to saying that if you give the bank five pound coins and get a five pound note, then the bank is keeping your money and giving you a paper token in return.
Paul
The key insight is the one that Katz identified: know your readership. Slashdotters are a different audience to Yankee fans (although I suppose there might be some overlap :-). And as for bandwidth, I recall the days when the modern Slashdot would have been considered a bandwidth hog. All those graphic elements scattered around...
Every book I've ever read about how to write effectively starts by saying that you should know what your audience is, and then write the things they need to know in a style they can read. This is the core skill for any writer.
This principle applies even more to the web. But in addition to the style of the writing, there is also the style of the site. We are starting to see conventions emerge for navigating information, like the button bar at the top of the page, that a significant proportion of the population know how to use. A designer who is familiar with these conventions and the way different people relate to them can use them to pitch a site at a target audience.
Possibly the first example of this way of thinking was the (IIRC) '96 Olympics web site, in which an explicit design constraint required that no piece of information be more than three clicks away form the home page.
Hemos and Cmdr. Taco also obviously understand this principle. Slashdot is a hackers site: highly configurable, high information density, rewards long-term use (Karma), not afraid of complicated stuff like the raw HTML I'm typing now. These are the characteristics of things that hackers like to use, but they would sink like a stone with any other audience.
Paul.
Bigger yes, but not ten times bigger. I've done some experiments. A 600x400 image compresses down to 15k with some minor artifacts, and 24k with some almost-invisible artifacts. Reduce that to 300x200 and you are looking at 8 or 9k. My experience of watching compressed video is that the motion reduces the visual impact of the artifacts because they keep changing randomly, while the eye tends to track the image. So you should be able to get away with some 15k per frame. Maybe slightly less because these figures include picture headers that would be factored out of MJPEG.
At 15k per frame and 25 fps that is 375k/sec, or 1.35Gb/hour, which is about twice MPEG-1. Plus sound of course. But radio quality sound only needs about 8k/sec, so we can ignore that for now.
Has anyone tried doing this in real-time? It strikes me that we might have a DIY version of the TiVO here.
Paul.
The reason that "Intel Inside" is a marketing marvel is not the cheesy logo and four electronic twonk noises, its the way that OEMs are pushed into including it.
Intel provide a cashback deal (essentially large discounts) to OEMs who include the Intel Inside logo in their advertising. Part of this is that Intel get to review and approve the adverts before they go out. This lets them place the logo, but it also makes sure that the voiceover says "and its got a 400MHz Intel Celeron processor" as if that were a major selling point.
Viewers think that they are being sold a computer, so they discount what they see about the computer. But the fact that the computer company seemed to think that a Celeron is a major selling point sticks in their heads, and makes them more likely to pick a Celeron-based PC no matter which brand they buy.
It also lets Intel play fast and loose with the anti-monopoly laws. If you offer AMD processors as well, you might suddenly find all your ads being rejected by Intel, and having to pay the full list price for your Intel CPUs.
Paul.
So why don't you use the Freedom of Information Act to find out if the letter exists? If it turns up then great, you have solid evidence of a government attempt to restrict our rights (including mine: I'm in the UK where we can't appeal to the 1st Ammendment). OTOH if it doesn't turn up then either it was never sent or the government has effectively denied its existence and you have won a minor victory.
Paul.
Not all process is bad. To be sure, there are Dilbertian employers who have old processes that get in the way. But most processes actually help.
that company employees lose all track of reality and common sense, such that they don't check whether requirements are correct, and don't test for bugs?
Funny, after you roundly condemn process you then list a couple of things that go in to the process. Yes, its amazing how often projects forget to do these things. Maybe it didn't seem important, or everyone thought that someone else had done it, or nobody could be bothered to do the actual work instead of getting on with exciting stuff like actual coding.
Anyway, just how do you check the requirements, or do the testing? You might think it obvious, but walk around any software department and talk to people, and you will find lots of different opinions. Some of them will be seriously wrong-headed. The solution to this is to get your best people together and tell them to write down the way it is done. Then distribute this around the company so that everyone does it right. And thats how you institute process improvement.
Paul.
What Godfrey has won so far is a pre-trial judgement that Demon's defence has no merit in law. This defence was essentialy that Demon were not knowingly publishing the defamatory posting. The judge ruled that once Godfrey had notified them of the posting and asked them to delete it they were indeed publishing it.
The judge also noted that Godfrey has a long history of trolling on nation-related newsgroups, and that as a result the damages that would be awarded would likely be very small. The interesting question will be who pays the costs of the case.
Paul.
Well, as long as I don't throw anything poisenous I might as well chuck crisp packets and other litter around. But of course, I know nothing about the environment.
Paul.
No, not quite that bad. The ISP only becomes liable after being informed of the post in question. Up until that time it has the "innocent dissemination" defence.
The problem, of course, is that if I see something on the Net I don't like, I can demand that the ISPs remove it. In theory the ISPs could determine that it is not libelous, and hence refuse to remove it. In practice they have no way of making this decision, and no motive to try. Their only real course of action in these circumstances is to remove the posting.
The biggest problem is going to be postings which are damaging to reputation, but nevertheless are still true. The defence of truth to a charge of libel is a very important one, but it is the one that an ISP is least well placed to check.
Paul.