My sympathies. I know they can be total bastards if the email under which the domain was registered ever goes extinct. It does seem like it would be easier to steal the domain back rather than retain ownership through proper channels.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
You really miss the point. Latin (and Greek) are taught because they expose students to fundamental ideas, without which it is impossible to truly understand modern English or any modern European language.
The fundamental concepts of computer science can be very challenging, plumbing to the core of modern mathematics, only students are less likely to get time to learn them if they are worrying about when brackets are required and when they are optional.
But why worry about the challenge of creating a proper analogy when cheap shots are so easy;-)
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Credit card companies have fairly sophisticated fraud detection, as these things go, but never underestimate the ingenuity of criminals. It can be easy, but it usually isn't.
Real organized crime can sell the credit card numbers to trusted parties, who won't get caught spending, and they can get numbers from trusted sources. Put the two in a blender and you've got several apparently unconnected spates of fraud - with some common victims. Everything has been delivered to mail drops, it's pretty hard to chase, and much easier for the credit card companies to pass the "savings" along to you, the customer.
I've heard of many many people becoming the victims of card fraud. I've heard of relatively few - even scanning police blotters - who got caught for the same crimes. In between is a full percentage point above prime rate.
The number of people willing and able to exploit - and profit from - man-in-the-middle attacks is considerably fewer.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
The conception that they can block because it is *their* property goes against thousands of years of social and legal tradition in most cultures.
For one thing, they don't own the wires. For another, as soon as data is being routed *through* you on its way from one place not yours to another place not yours, you essentially become a public thoroughfare, paid or not. In order to guarantee the general public trust and public welfare, not to mention the stability of the society that depends on these roads, you give up certain controls over the traffic passing through your domain, and must allow passage freely unless the rule of the greater society dictates blocking passage to certain parties. Your concerns about certain controls over the traffic that passes through must be arbitrated through the larger society you have willing chosen to become a part of. There is an alternative; parts of Africa today, many distant precincts of China, certain zones of the former Soviet Union, and most of Europe through the dark ages exemplify the right of local authorities to do whatever they fucking please - the rest of you be damned. I am not sure that you really intend to promote barbarism and savagery, but you are.
AboveNet may have the right - for now - to arbitrarily victimize innocent third parties, but thousands of years of human history show that either they will lose this right, or the Internet itself is in danger of falling into non-functioning anarchy. Having the "right" by "owning" a route across the Internet as you claim (and that's a pretty thin example of "ownership"), does nothing to justify the arbitrary excercise of power by AboveNet, nor does this make it ethical or fair. It may yet be legal, but it's still medieval. No one forces AboveNet to participate in the Internet. If they really hate spammers so badly that they are willing to destroy the freedom of others, perhaps they should disconnect themselves entirely, or at least give up routing traffic anywhere but to and from their own customers, who have at least some choice about whether or not to bow to these savage chieftans.
Put another way, far simpler; what is different from their policies and China blocking 'net traffic they consider to be harmful?
It's worth noting that I don't use AboveNet, I do use MAPS filters in Sendmail, I don't know these guys personally, and I don't know - or care - to detail their actual motives or character. I do care about the effect of their behavior on the Internet as a whole.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
As the article says, the threat of litigation is enough to scare would-be hardware and software and content providers away.
I'm not so sure. The economics of Music and the Internet make it such that you have to pay through the asshole to Real Media, Microsoft, Apple, or Fraunhofer under the current scheme. It makes it impossible to make a profit, especially when you really need at least two of these to not suck; I've done the numbers many times. But iCast realized that for a much smaller investment, they could leave this Gang of Four behind. These four each have their carrotstick to get you in line; market share, platform, monopoly power, free beer. In order to get a carrot of their own, iCast understood that they had to use the only one really left; free speech, free to use, free to go.
You might find this article at
The Standard interesting. Any one of the companies mentioned in it - or the alliance they are creating - could find Ogg a useful starting point. What's more, they have the power to do it. And the motive; saving megabucks in licensing to the Gang of Four is a good motive to tell Thomson where to stick it and commit legal resources to it.
"This is what hardball is like" is what their representative said. Essentially, it's plutocracy as normal.
Exactly. Let's emulate corrupt third world economies because it sounds macho! We can pretend to be free marketeers and no one will notice that we could care less, as long as the powerful win and keep making us money!
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
I do hate them because of their customer service. It's appalling. It makes me wish I was stuck in an airport during a snowstorm, or stuck at the DMV all day.
Your first point is correct - but it's apparently one you are trying to make seem absurd.
Your second point is supposed to make the first seem absurd, but I don't recall anyone ranting at NSI about cybersquatting; more at cybersquatters themselves, and NSI for favoring corporations with deep pockets over individuals with a legitimate claim to a domain. At least "first come, first serve" is a rule that can be understood.
And the third point is just silly. It is fair to hold domains for a period before re-releasing them to effect this; in every other arena of business, this is the way it would be done. If you fail to re-negotiate a rental contract at its expiration, you don't get thrown out that second; there are time periods and resolution procedures for these things. What is more, the rules apply the same to everyone.
What DOES suck is that they are playing games with the rules, changing them midstream, and refusing to disclose procedures and follow them. That's the behavior of corruption. They have no legal, moral, or ethical right to keep valuable domains back from the market simply because they feel like it. They should be castigated, denounced, and thrashed in a public court of law.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
You can still transfer it that way. I've transferred all my domains away from them in the past few months. It takes a couple weeks, but any decent registrar should be able to handle this transfer for you.
But waiting for it to expire is some weird kind of brinksmanship I don't understand. I guess it's the same kind of people who don't call to turn off cable service, figuring they'll just turn it off after non-payment. Duh. Love to see these guys credit ratings.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
I sincerely doubt that this would have happened were iCast not closing it's doors. I hope the Vorbis project has the good sense to get whatever paperwork was done by the iCast folks. This is an act of pure evil.
<RANT>
I just decided never to buy an MP3 player now, and never to use an mp3 that hasn't been liberated from the digital prison. Ogg files, on the other hand, will only be used legitimately in my world - to space-shift music I already own. If this isn't just a lawyer blowing some hot air to try to scare other companies off picking up the Vorbis flag, then this is a declaration of war. If it is just hot air, then it's pure gangsterism. Go to China, commie bastards!
Thompson, Fraunhofer, Bertelsmann, the Thule Society, whatever, it's all part of a Nazi plot to take over the information industry. Ever wonder why Bertelsmann is making kissy face with Napster? So they can bite the face off with their alien fangs!
</RANT>
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
But Marilyn Manson should be slammed for blatant Alice Cooper ripoff.
On the other hand, you are correct that the people who think everything they don't like should be filtered and banned are enemies of the human species.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Maybe they dress to the left. But how gay-friendly do you really think the censorware companies are? They only gay employees they are likely to have are closeted and self-loathing.
Like you, you nasty little troll.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
I hate that "previous URL" bug too... Didn't see anything about it in the list of changes (looked in khtml, too). What creeps me out is that it actually sends fully malformed requests to the wrong server - meaning that the administrator of the domain at the stuck URL sees what page you were looking for somewhere else!
There is a workaround; delete and retype the last character, hit enter. Works for me.
I'm looking forward to increasing stability; even when I'm using WindowMaker in general, Konqueror has become my browser of choice.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Yeah, someone else has it worse, so we should all just shut up and take it up the ass. If we all listened to you, we'd still be living in caves, because after all, some people still have to sleep in a tree.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
So much for the view that Americans are the only ignorant people.
Actually, the rights of atheists are quite well protected. With the notable exception of "In god we trust" on our currency, and the tendency to take oaths on bibles, religious expression in the context of the state is a big no-no in America. Though it pisses off a number of ignorant rednecks, the courts have consistently found that our laws do not permit promotion of religion via public property.
I'll ignore for a moment that atheism is based on beliefs without proof, and therefore qualifies as a religion, and that the guarantees of religious freedom are not in the Consitution, but in the Bill of Rights.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
What you are saying is just an infantile rant, mostly, but also untrue. ISPs do NOT have the legal right to do "whatever they want" any more than you have a right to starve your dog or beat your children; if you are so concerned about freedom, why only the freedom of businesses and not that of individuals?
In fact, by aggressively removing content without regard to its legality, they are taking on the role of content police, which means they are therefore invalidating the common carrier exemption that protects them from lawsuits. Their only actual grounds for removing MP3 is the assumption that their customer must be guilty of something. It's really the only plausible reason, since no one is asserting that they have generic file size limits or anything of the sort, just that the file ends in ".mp3". So if they are pro-actively policing content, they expose themselves to legal troubles should you, for example, post kiddie porn and escape their notice.
The ISP should get a new lawyer before they get their asses kicked. And you should study more. Actions of individual entities are meaningless without their societal context. I don't know what the fuck communism has to do with it.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
The whole emphasis on it as being so terribly offensive definitely reflects which side of the Atlantic we're talking about... The word has much less impact in the UK.
Curse words are so culturally bound that the Internet in particular is a bad arena to try to restrict their use. Learn some foreign slang and register that.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Yup, this is true. And then it will become apparent that dot-com has gone through the same long, slow slide into the mud as Usenet. And both will continue to be useful for those who would rather work to filter out the dreck than be spoon-fed.
Unfortunately, the masses prefer to be spoon-fed. Don't think the goal isn't to coax them into pods someday - until Neo comes.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
No, their argument against.kids was that they would be required to come up with a way of regulating content - far nastier than going to various professional organizations and cutting deals.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Because freelance creation of new namespaces without centralized consensus and authority threatens the global uniqueness of the domain name system?
I'm no ICANN advocate, but it's not hard not to see registries of wildcat TLDs as fundamentally different from those guys who sell property on the moon. Hey, guess what, I'll sell.biz, too, won't that be great!
The first signs of a fractured global namespace are already beginning to show; see the recent disputes about registering Chinese character domains... It's not going to be good for anyone.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Ha! That's an understatement, a troll, or more likely, a joke that will be lost on the masses of slashdot.
But in all seriousness, ICANN hasn't made it easy for anyone to figure out how this stuff is going to work. The applications don't contain as much detail as one might hope with regards to resolution procedures. But that's a good reason for going with dot-aero and not dot-web; there are only so many airlines, and they have their namespace well established, whereas dot-web will have thousands of pre-registered suckers looking to chase good money after bad.
The uncertainty over how these things will work is going to ensure that ICANN criticism continues; whether or not that turns out to be deserved is equally uncertain at this time.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Slashdot Mirror
I wish I had points to give but I don't. Though it might be even better if they had three fingers on each of their four hands.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
- You are trolling, therefore you are an asshole.
- Your tired repetition of creationist dogma proves that you, yourself, are sufficiently stupid to be the missing link, and therefore the hole.
Damn, this stupid evolution thread didn't last so long. Why the hell are there so many posts on this story?I also note that you claim there is a clear explanation, but you don't state it. Yeah, you are really scientific. Loser.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
My sympathies. I know they can be total bastards if the email under which the domain was registered ever goes extinct. It does seem like it would be easier to steal the domain back rather than retain ownership through proper channels.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
The fundamental concepts of computer science can be very challenging, plumbing to the core of modern mathematics, only students are less likely to get time to learn them if they are worrying about when brackets are required and when they are optional.
But why worry about the challenge of creating a proper analogy when cheap shots are so easy ;-)
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Credit card companies have fairly sophisticated fraud detection, as these things go, but never underestimate the ingenuity of criminals. It can be easy, but it usually isn't.
Real organized crime can sell the credit card numbers to trusted parties, who won't get caught spending, and they can get numbers from trusted sources. Put the two in a blender and you've got several apparently unconnected spates of fraud - with some common victims. Everything has been delivered to mail drops, it's pretty hard to chase, and much easier for the credit card companies to pass the "savings" along to you, the customer.
I've heard of many many people becoming the victims of card fraud. I've heard of relatively few - even scanning police blotters - who got caught for the same crimes. In between is a full percentage point above prime rate.
The number of people willing and able to exploit - and profit from - man-in-the-middle attacks is considerably fewer.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
For one thing, they don't own the wires. For another, as soon as data is being routed *through* you on its way from one place not yours to another place not yours, you essentially become a public thoroughfare, paid or not. In order to guarantee the general public trust and public welfare, not to mention the stability of the society that depends on these roads, you give up certain controls over the traffic passing through your domain, and must allow passage freely unless the rule of the greater society dictates blocking passage to certain parties. Your concerns about certain controls over the traffic that passes through must be arbitrated through the larger society you have willing chosen to become a part of. There is an alternative; parts of Africa today, many distant precincts of China, certain zones of the former Soviet Union, and most of Europe through the dark ages exemplify the right of local authorities to do whatever they fucking please - the rest of you be damned. I am not sure that you really intend to promote barbarism and savagery, but you are.
AboveNet may have the right - for now - to arbitrarily victimize innocent third parties, but thousands of years of human history show that either they will lose this right, or the Internet itself is in danger of falling into non-functioning anarchy. Having the "right" by "owning" a route across the Internet as you claim (and that's a pretty thin example of "ownership"), does nothing to justify the arbitrary excercise of power by AboveNet, nor does this make it ethical or fair. It may yet be legal, but it's still medieval. No one forces AboveNet to participate in the Internet. If they really hate spammers so badly that they are willing to destroy the freedom of others, perhaps they should disconnect themselves entirely, or at least give up routing traffic anywhere but to and from their own customers, who have at least some choice about whether or not to bow to these savage chieftans.
Put another way, far simpler; what is different from their policies and China blocking 'net traffic they consider to be harmful?
It's worth noting that I don't use AboveNet, I do use MAPS filters in Sendmail, I don't know these guys personally, and I don't know - or care - to detail their actual motives or character. I do care about the effect of their behavior on the Internet as a whole.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
I'm not so sure. The economics of Music and the Internet make it such that you have to pay through the asshole to Real Media, Microsoft, Apple, or Fraunhofer under the current scheme. It makes it impossible to make a profit, especially when you really need at least two of these to not suck; I've done the numbers many times. But iCast realized that for a much smaller investment, they could leave this Gang of Four behind. These four each have their carrotstick to get you in line; market share, platform, monopoly power, free beer. In order to get a carrot of their own, iCast understood that they had to use the only one really left; free speech, free to use, free to go.
You might find this article at The Standard interesting. Any one of the companies mentioned in it - or the alliance they are creating - could find Ogg a useful starting point. What's more, they have the power to do it. And the motive; saving megabucks in licensing to the Gang of Four is a good motive to tell Thomson where to stick it and commit legal resources to it.
Exactly. Let's emulate corrupt third world economies because it sounds macho! We can pretend to be free marketeers and no one will notice that we could care less, as long as the powerful win and keep making us money!
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
I do hate them because of their customer service. It's appalling. It makes me wish I was stuck in an airport during a snowstorm, or stuck at the DMV all day.
What DOES suck is that they are playing games with the rules, changing them midstream, and refusing to disclose procedures and follow them. That's the behavior of corruption. They have no legal, moral, or ethical right to keep valuable domains back from the market simply because they feel like it. They should be castigated, denounced, and thrashed in a public court of law.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
But waiting for it to expire is some weird kind of brinksmanship I don't understand. I guess it's the same kind of people who don't call to turn off cable service, figuring they'll just turn it off after non-payment. Duh. Love to see these guys credit ratings.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
<RANT>
I just decided never to buy an MP3 player now, and never to use an mp3 that hasn't been liberated from the digital prison. Ogg files, on the other hand, will only be used legitimately in my world - to space-shift music I already own. If this isn't just a lawyer blowing some hot air to try to scare other companies off picking up the Vorbis flag, then this is a declaration of war. If it is just hot air, then it's pure gangsterism. Go to China, commie bastards!
Thompson, Fraunhofer, Bertelsmann, the Thule Society, whatever, it's all part of a Nazi plot to take over the information industry. Ever wonder why Bertelsmann is making kissy face with Napster? So they can bite the face off with their alien fangs!
</RANT>
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
On the other hand, you are correct that the people who think everything they don't like should be filtered and banned are enemies of the human species.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Like you, you nasty little troll.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Again, considering how many things it does right that the major browsers make ugly, I'm not complaining.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
There is a workaround; delete and retype the last character, hit enter. Works for me.
I'm looking forward to increasing stability; even when I'm using WindowMaker in general, Konqueror has become my browser of choice.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
You, in assuming that everyone is guilty, are one twisted fucker. I hope you get your wish and live in a prison without walls.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
My firewall often blocks out some 10.x.x.x garbage coming from god-knows-where.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Actually, the rights of atheists are quite well protected. With the notable exception of "In god we trust" on our currency, and the tendency to take oaths on bibles, religious expression in the context of the state is a big no-no in America. Though it pisses off a number of ignorant rednecks, the courts have consistently found that our laws do not permit promotion of religion via public property.
I'll ignore for a moment that atheism is based on beliefs without proof, and therefore qualifies as a religion, and that the guarantees of religious freedom are not in the Consitution, but in the Bill of Rights.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
In fact, by aggressively removing content without regard to its legality, they are taking on the role of content police, which means they are therefore invalidating the common carrier exemption that protects them from lawsuits. Their only actual grounds for removing MP3 is the assumption that their customer must be guilty of something. It's really the only plausible reason, since no one is asserting that they have generic file size limits or anything of the sort, just that the file ends in ".mp3". So if they are pro-actively policing content, they expose themselves to legal troubles should you, for example, post kiddie porn and escape their notice.
The ISP should get a new lawyer before they get their asses kicked. And you should study more. Actions of individual entities are meaningless without their societal context. I don't know what the fuck communism has to do with it.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Curse words are so culturally bound that the Internet in particular is a bad arena to try to restrict their use. Learn some foreign slang and register that.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Unfortunately, the masses prefer to be spoon-fed. Don't think the goal isn't to coax them into pods someday - until Neo comes.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
No, their argument against .kids was that they would be required to come up with a way of regulating content - far nastier than going to various professional organizations and cutting deals.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Because freelance creation of new namespaces without centralized consensus and authority threatens the global uniqueness of the domain name system?
I'm no ICANN advocate, but it's not hard not to see registries of wildcat TLDs as fundamentally different from those guys who sell property on the moon. Hey, guess what, I'll sell .biz, too, won't that be great!
The first signs of a fractured global namespace are already beginning to show; see the recent disputes about registering Chinese character domains... It's not going to be good for anyone.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
But in all seriousness, ICANN hasn't made it easy for anyone to figure out how this stuff is going to work. The applications don't contain as much detail as one might hope with regards to resolution procedures. But that's a good reason for going with dot-aero and not dot-web; there are only so many airlines, and they have their namespace well established, whereas dot-web will have thousands of pre-registered suckers looking to chase good money after bad.
The uncertainty over how these things will work is going to ensure that ICANN criticism continues; whether or not that turns out to be deserved is equally uncertain at this time.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.