If you participate in that kind of infantile behavoir, telemarketers will put you down as 'not home' and you'll be called again and again and again until you bother to act like an adult.
It's infantile to make funny noises when the telemarketer interrupts your life, but it's not infantile to keep calling back where you know you're not wanted?
Earn your living any way you like, but please don't get all high and mighty when you're going out of your way to annoy people who won't buy your product anyway.
We geeks tend to be facinated by "the newest thing", and rush to try it, and then preach it's merits to anyone who will listen. I know I'm generalizing, and there are people still happily running 2.0 kernels, but look at the general trend. We don't mind using version 0.0.7b6 of products that are cool without thinking twice about it.
Speak for yourself, dude.
Much of the usefulness of Linux and other free software comes from the age of the underlying concepts. Just as "we" rightly condemn Microsoft for its false claims of "innovation", "we" tend to prefer the stable, consistent, and eminently useful tools and APIs of classic Unix over their gratuitiously changing Microsoft equivalents.
"We" like new stuff if it does something genuinely new and if it's either useful or fun. But in my experience the free software community abhors the idea of changing software just for the hell of it. It's unharmonious and wasteful.
Michael Godfrey, a University of Waterloo scientist, is equally hesitant but still finds the Lehman approach useful. In 2000, Godfrey and a fellow Waterloo researcher, Qiang Tu, released a study showing that several open-source software programs,
including the Linux kernel and fetchmail, were growing at geometric rates, breaking the inverse squared barrier constraining most traditionally built programs.
Is
fetchmail
complex enough that it needs to be growing geometrically? I mean yeah, fetchmail does a lot, and I do know what "geometric" means. Still, I doubt the world of email is changing fast enough that you'd want to choose that as your example of out-of-control software maintenance.
What do you want to bet that Doofus Digital is somewhere that UCITA has passed. (I.E. Virginia, and one other state...)
Maryland.
That basically exempts the manufacturer from liability in situations just like this.
No it doesn't. UCITA doesn't have anything to do with third-party liability.
If I sell you software in a UCITA state, my EULA which disclaims all liability is binding... on you. Not anyone else.
Think about normal life. You buy a high-performance sports car, the manufacturer makes you sign a waiver or has a EULA-equivalent that says they're not responsible if you hurt yourself with it, some defect in the car that the manufacturer should have known about causes you to plow into pedestrians on the sidewalk. You might be without a case, but the pedestrians aren't party to the EULA and can sue whoever they want, and likely win.
I am not a lawyer, yadda yadda, do not take this as legal advice, etc.
If the networks don't want to move over to HDTV, fine, but then they should lose their rights to the additional bandwidth. Of course even that isn't really a possibility, because consumers have already bought $5000 TVs to use those HDTV broadcasts.
I personally don't know anyone who has a HDTV set, but then again most of my neighbors live in $40,000 houses.
I agree with your "should." If the networks aren't making reasonable use of the bandwidth, let them return it to the public.
What solution would you propose? Should we just let the networks take up the HDTV and the NTSC spectra? Or should we try to free up the NTSC spectra for other uses, such as digital IP multicasting?
Obviously, the electromagnetic spectrum doesn't belong to anyone so it should be managed as a public resource, like air and the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River. If an unbiased FCC (heh) thinks it's better used for some other application, fine with me. Twisting arms and telling people what they can and can't buy isn't the way to solve a problem that belongs strictly to the broadcasters and their customers, not us.
I know for a fact that some rather large companies (car mostly) would not sign renewals with their current advertising agency unless a %age of the content was high definition
All right then. So let the advertisers pay for what they want. If the market is willing to produce more HDTV shows and willing to price HDTV receivers cheaply enough in exchange for all that advertising revenue, super, everybody's happy. If the market is not willing to do that, who is Congress to intervene? Isn't this a solution in search of a problem? Why the mandate?
Let me get this straight. "Consumers" aren't buying HDTV gear, advertisers aren't supporting HDTV broadcasts, and networks aren't putting all their shows on HDTV. It seems that nobody cares enough about HDTV to pay for the change from analog.
I'm really to see the compelling state interest here. Hasn't the market spoken? How did this become a federal issue? What exactly is the problem the FCC is trying to solve?
I think I heard somewhere that this is almost always true for countries that derive their wealth from natural resources. So, paradoxicly [sic], striking oil can actually be bad news for the economy.
It's no paradox.
Since every bit of that country is owned by someone (in
this case IIRC the Saudi royal family), the "someones"
control all the wealth in the country. Others, common people, live
there only on the sufferance of the owners.
How can you really make a living if the wealthy people in your
country can make you come and go as they please?
Without equal access to resources, there is no free market.
With no free market, the poor have no way to improve their lives.
True here, true everywhere.
With a good lawyer, such protection is better than nothing, but not much. You have to pay a lawyer, and then you are taking your chance in court. At best you have even odds of proving that you invented something.
Maybe so, but what you have is still nothing like having a patent. You might possibly prove you created the invention, but that's not at all the same thing as patenting it.
So you're right, it is an urban legend, but you didn't go far enough dissing it.
It's kind of a Catch22, isn't it? By helping to punish Microsoft, RedHat and other competitors are actually doing the same thing that they accuse Bill & Co. of doing - gaining un-fair advantage by means other than technical superiority and value to the consumer.
Nonsense.
When one side has acted illegally (which the courts have already ruled) and the other side is using the courts to get some relief from those illegal acts, how is that the same thing?
Anyway, what Microsoft is doing with Kerberos is perfectly legal and allowed by the standard. Sure it might hurt Red Hat -- so what? Red Hat is a competitor of Microsoft!!
Once again.
You are limited in your actions even if they might otherwise be legal if you do them to maintain your monopoly.
It's not clear what Red Hat really wants from this case. Would they be happy with anything less than Microsoft going open source, releasing all their intellectual property, and a government guarantee of X% market share for Linux? If so, they are dreaming and I have little sympathy for them.
Straw man.
The nine states are seeking enforcement of good old standard antitrust law that has said essentially the same thing for nearly a hundred years now. If Red Hat asks for anything beyond the scope of the law be assured that the judge (you know, someone who has actually made a career out of studying this stuff) will surely show them the door.
It's not as though antitrust law was dreamed up in the last few years just to "get" Microsoft.
U.S. corporations including Bank of America, eBay and Wells Fargo have fallen victim to junk mailers taking free rides on their names.
Ebay? A victim of spam? It is to laugh.
This is just one example of the marketing spew Ebay sends to former customers and innocent bystanders... even after you beg them to stop.
Just hit Google Groups for "ebay spam" and sort by relevance. You'll find all the examples you need. Either hundreds of independent observers are forging spam that came right from Ebay's servers, or Ebay is one of the biggest spammers of all.
...because it's only an RFC, so you don't have to follow it.
That's not what RFC means, even though I know you're thinking "Request For Comments."
See the Status of this Memo section at the top of each RFC to determine whether it's an "Internet Standard" or "Internet standards track protocol" or "Experimental Standard" or "Historic" or some other category.
RFC 793 is "only an RFC" but your packets won't be routed if you don't follow it.
If we go round this cycle often enough, Governments (plural) are going to get pissed off, and the functions will either be put into the hands of the ITU [itu.int] or a new, intergovermental (or UN) body will be set up to take over.
I fail to grasp how this would be a Bad Thing. At least ITU has an established scope and clear lines of authority. ICANN, well, who died and made them God? Oh wait, you answered that--
It's a shame Jon Postel [postel.org] went and died on us; we moaned enough about him during his lifetime, but he died this job far better than ICANN have.
Hear, hear.
Still, someone explain to me why it would be so bad for an existing international standards body to take over the past work of IANA.
It's a wonder he even got the position with an attitude like this...
Try to keep up. Karl was elected by the "at large" ICANN membership in.us and.ca. (This was stated at the very beginning of the linked news article.) You got to be an "at large" member if you applied for membership during a short time window in 1999 or 2000 and jumped through some paperwork hoops.
So Karl wasn't chosen by ICANN management. He was chosen by a somewhat reasonably clued subset of Internet users in North America.
Not surprisingly, ICANN is now strongly considering doing away with seats for elected directors.
The problem with this government is that it lacks the one branch of government that most others have-- a judiciary.
No, the problem is that ICANN is taking on way more authority than is required to do its job--which is to perform the minimum level of coordination of "Assigned Names and Numbers."
ICANN shouldn't be making any decisions that would ever require the interpretation of a judiciary or the enforcement of an executive. If that kind of "government" is necessary then let the real government take care of it.
Oh? You say there's no worldwide government? Oh well. That's no excuse for making a special little ad hoc pseudo-government to run the Internet.
As long as we're not stepping on each other's IP addresses, and as long as there's more-or-less-general agreement on which root nameservers are considered authoritative, what more do we need?
Specifically, international trademark and other intellectual property law belongs in the appropriate existing judicial fora. There's no need for a separate legal entity for that.
I still cant see how ICANN really needs all the funding they claim to need in order to do their job.
It worked before, with less funds and less fancy meetings.
I'm just repeating what someone else posted in a comment to a previous ICANN-related story--but isn't it strange that it costs ICANN millions of dollars a year to do what Jon Postel used to do in his spare time on his personal workstation?
All the centralization the Internet really needs is someone to dole out IP addresses and suggest where to look for root nameservers. Okay, well-known port assignments too. (E.g., tcp/25 is for SMTP, tcp/80 is for HTTP, etc.)
Anything else that ICANN does is superfluous to the actual need, and much of it is dangerous.
I wish Jon Postel had appointed a Benevolent Dictator Heir-Apparent before he passed away a few years ago.
I'm a little surprised the article didn't mention the greatest email bust of all. In 1987, the questionable para-military funding activities of USMC"Lt.Col.OliverNorth were uncovered partly by an investigation of messages that he thought he'd deleted from the White House's internal email system.
North hadn't counted on the "deleted" messages showing on backup tapes.
Partly because of this smoking-gun evidence, North
was convicted in 1989
of aiding in the obstruction of Congress, accepting illegal gratuities, and destroying documents.
North's conviction was later overturned (with great irony considering his status as a law-and-order conservative icon) on a legal technicality.
Slashdot Mirror
Well yeah, and Windows is only however-many-bucks per desktop if your time is of no value.
Unless you mean that you never have to mess with Windows to get it to do what you want.
Uh, if that's what happened, California was conned.
It's infantile to make funny noises when the telemarketer interrupts your life, but it's not infantile to keep calling back where you know you're not wanted?
Earn your living any way you like, but please don't get all high and mighty when you're going out of your way to annoy people who won't buy your product anyway.
Speak for yourself, dude.
Much of the usefulness of Linux and other free software comes from the age of the underlying concepts. Just as "we" rightly condemn Microsoft for its false claims of "innovation", "we" tend to prefer the stable, consistent, and eminently useful tools and APIs of classic Unix over their gratuitiously changing Microsoft equivalents.
"We" like new stuff if it does something genuinely new and if it's either useful or fun. But in my experience the free software community abhors the idea of changing software just for the hell of it. It's unharmonious and wasteful.
From the article:
Is fetchmail complex enough that it needs to be growing geometrically? I mean yeah, fetchmail does a lot, and I do know what "geometric" means. Still, I doubt the world of email is changing fast enough that you'd want to choose that as your example of out-of-control software maintenance.
[Insert obligatory ESR goading.]
Maryland.
No it doesn't. UCITA doesn't have anything to do with third-party liability.
If I sell you software in a UCITA state, my EULA which disclaims all liability is binding... on you. Not anyone else.
Think about normal life. You buy a high-performance sports car, the manufacturer makes you sign a waiver or has a EULA-equivalent that says they're not responsible if you hurt yourself with it, some defect in the car that the manufacturer should have known about causes you to plow into pedestrians on the sidewalk. You might be without a case, but the pedestrians aren't party to the EULA and can sue whoever they want, and likely win.
I am not a lawyer, yadda yadda, do not take this as legal advice, etc.
I personally don't know anyone who has a HDTV set, but then again most of my neighbors live in $40,000 houses.
I agree with your "should." If the networks aren't making reasonable use of the bandwidth, let them return it to the public.
Obviously, the electromagnetic spectrum doesn't belong to anyone so it should be managed as a public resource, like air and the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River. If an unbiased FCC (heh) thinks it's better used for some other application, fine with me. Twisting arms and telling people what they can and can't buy isn't the way to solve a problem that belongs strictly to the broadcasters and their customers, not us.
All right then. So let the advertisers pay for what they want. If the market is willing to produce more HDTV shows and willing to price HDTV receivers cheaply enough in exchange for all that advertising revenue, super, everybody's happy. If the market is not willing to do that, who is Congress to intervene? Isn't this a solution in search of a problem? Why the mandate?
Let me get this straight. "Consumers" aren't buying HDTV gear, advertisers aren't supporting HDTV broadcasts, and networks aren't putting all their shows on HDTV. It seems that nobody cares enough about HDTV to pay for the change from analog.
I'm really to see the compelling state interest here. Hasn't the market spoken? How did this become a federal issue? What exactly is the problem the FCC is trying to solve?
Utter balderdash.
The word "monopoly" doesn't mean what you seem to think it means.
Maybe so, but what you have is still nothing like having a patent. You might possibly prove you created the invention, but that's not at all the same thing as patenting it.
So you're right, it is an urban legend, but you didn't go far enough dissing it.
Your job depends on spamming?
Oh, you mean it doesn't? So tell me again what Canter and Siegel did for "commerce"?
The answer is yes.
Nonsense.
When one side has acted illegally (which the courts have already ruled) and the other side is using the courts to get some relief from those illegal acts, how is that the same thing?
Once again.
You are limited in your actions even if they might otherwise be legal if you do them to maintain your monopoly.
Straw man.
The nine states are seeking enforcement of good old standard antitrust law that has said essentially the same thing for nearly a hundred years now. If Red Hat asks for anything beyond the scope of the law be assured that the judge (you know, someone who has actually made a career out of studying this stuff) will surely show them the door.
It's not as though antitrust law was dreamed up in the last few years just to "get" Microsoft.
From the article:
Ebay? A victim of spam? It is to laugh.
This is just one example of the marketing spew Ebay sends to former customers and innocent bystanders... even after you beg them to stop.
Just hit Google Groups for "ebay spam" and sort by relevance. You'll find all the examples you need. Either hundreds of independent observers are forging spam that came right from Ebay's servers, or Ebay is one of the biggest spammers of all.
Which story do you believe?
Sure. I was just reminding the poster of the story that "RFC" doesn't mean what some people seem to think it means.
That's not what RFC means, even though I know you're thinking "Request For Comments."
See the Status of this Memo section at the top of each RFC to determine whether it's an "Internet Standard" or "Internet standards track protocol" or "Experimental Standard" or "Historic" or some other category.
RFC 793 is "only an RFC" but your packets won't be routed if you don't follow it.
I fail to grasp how this would be a Bad Thing. At least ITU has an established scope and clear lines of authority. ICANN, well, who died and made them God? Oh wait, you answered that--
Hear, hear.
Still, someone explain to me why it would be so bad for an existing international standards body to take over the past work of IANA.
Try to keep up. Karl was elected by the "at large" ICANN membership in .us and .ca. (This was stated at the very beginning of the linked news article.) You got to be an "at large" member if you applied for membership during a short time window in 1999 or 2000 and jumped through some paperwork hoops.
So Karl wasn't chosen by ICANN management. He was chosen by a somewhat reasonably clued subset of Internet users in North America.
Not surprisingly, ICANN is now strongly considering doing away with seats for elected directors.
No, the problem is that ICANN is taking on way more authority than is required to do its job--which is to perform the minimum level of coordination of "Assigned Names and Numbers."
ICANN shouldn't be making any decisions that would ever require the interpretation of a judiciary or the enforcement of an executive. If that kind of "government" is necessary then let the real government take care of it.
Oh? You say there's no worldwide government? Oh well. That's no excuse for making a special little ad hoc pseudo-government to run the Internet.
As long as we're not stepping on each other's IP addresses, and as long as there's more-or-less-general agreement on which root nameservers are considered authoritative, what more do we need?
Specifically, international trademark and other intellectual property law belongs in the appropriate existing judicial fora. There's no need for a separate legal entity for that.
I'm just repeating what someone else posted in a comment to a previous ICANN-related story--but isn't it strange that it costs ICANN millions of dollars a year to do what Jon Postel used to do in his spare time on his personal workstation?
All the centralization the Internet really needs is someone to dole out IP addresses and suggest where to look for root nameservers. Okay, well-known port assignments too. (E.g., tcp/25 is for SMTP, tcp/80 is for HTTP, etc.)
Anything else that ICANN does is superfluous to the actual need, and much of it is dangerous.
I wish Jon Postel had appointed a Benevolent Dictator Heir-Apparent before he passed away a few years ago.
Betcha Google starts devaluing links from free sites then. Unless they've done it already.
Google's real value is in intelligently adapting to bombing strategies. They'll adjust just fine.
I'm a little surprised the article didn't mention the greatest email bust of all. In 1987, the questionable para-military funding activities of USMC"Lt.Col.OliverNorth were uncovered partly by an investigation of messages that he thought he'd deleted from the White House's internal email system.
North hadn't counted on the "deleted" messages showing on backup tapes.
Partly because of this smoking-gun evidence, North was convicted in 1989 of aiding in the obstruction of Congress, accepting illegal gratuities, and destroying documents.
North's conviction was later overturned (with great irony considering his status as a law-and-order conservative icon) on a legal technicality.