Laws on telemarketing lists most likely do not apply here. In a strictly legal sense, Yahoo could be considered an opt-in list since you explicitly and voluntarily signed up for the service. Because of that, they can do with your account on their servers as they wish. On the other hand, laws governing opt-out lists work because you never voluntarily signed up on a telemarketer's calling list.
I would not be surprised if they have a microwave relay backup available.
Heh... A huge dish on the top of the building... I guess it fits in perfectly with the "security through obscurity" model. No one will ever notice that!
If this is the case, that might even easier to take down (if this was the backup), its quite easy to destroy an object outside of a building from the outside.
Just snipping the connection between these machines and the rest of the world would suffice. I hope its more complicated than it sounds, but each of those machines has to plug into something, right? Just find where that something (all 10 zillion fiber cables or what not) exits the building in which it is housed and SNIP! All done!
How long can they get away with screwing over the people who support their products?
For a very long time I would imagine. Microsoft expires peoples' certifications as software goes obsolete, making all the time and money spent on training to take those tests and classes an instant waste of cash. I lost count of how many friends I have who are "certified", only to find out they have to "re-certify" repeatedly. Its a vicious circle, because in order to protect the investment one makes in getting certified, they have to keep pouring more and more money down the drain to maintain that certification. I think the great irony of it all is that so many people got MCSE's that they are now practically worthless. I guess this covers the "you have to pay for expensive experts" problem.:)
The flip side is that this of course is a great money maker for software developers. It saves them money needed to print good documentation (besides, what the hell else is someone who is certified other than a person who has memorized how a program works and can merely regurgitate said knowledge). And on top of that, people pay top dollar to learn this knowledge. Redhat and Apple are both making significant inroads into the certification bandwagon.
The sad truth is that in America, many cities are suing the gun industry for "problems" caused by their "defective products." What a great way to spend taxpayer money. Fortunately, state governments are stepping in to stop this nonsense, but in some cases it is too late, the cities find themselves losing badly in these cases, and the money that could have been spent to hire more police and build more prisons has instead been wasted on litigation.
Do hold car manufacturers responsible for allowing people to operate their cars will intoxicated?
Considering that people sue the cigarette industry for their self-inflicted problems caused by voluntarily smoking, I think it is only a matter of time before we see this BS as well.
However, this same kind of ruling in the Dutch court can happen in the USA as well. VCRs and tape recorders (and most recently, the Diamond Rio) were once "illegal" because of industry objections, however, because it was shown that these devices were shown to have legitimate, non-infringing uses, they could not be banned simply because people would use them for infringing purposes. The problem with Napster was that its creators could not prove its whole raison-d'etre was not for infringing copyrights (that system being tied down to MP3s, along with the central-server architecture contributed big time to this).
In essence then, there is a significant legal precedent in the USA which should keep the developers of P2P software safe for the time being, even if laws were enacted to prevent such things, they would most likely be struck down because of precedent.
Linux will no longer be able to dual boot with Microsoft's OS.
Keep in mind that most people who can set up a dual-boot environment for Linux and Windows are also quite capable of using the BIOS to do the same exact thing, without the need for making any changes whatsoever to the bootloader. Granted, you would have to use 2 separate hard disks to do it this way (IDE-0, IDE-1, etc.), but you would still be able to use both OS's on the same machine.
That is not entirely correct. Microsoft strong-armed Apple into licensing to Microsoft the "look and feel" of its operating system. However, one must examine the context in which this was done. This strong-arming occured back in 1985, when one could say Microsoft was arguably insignificant. Microsoft threatened to stop writing software for Apple if this agreement was not made, Apple gave in, and the rest is history. To add insult to injury, a court ruled that this transaction was entirely legal when Apple tried going after Microsoft for allegedly "stealing" its look and feel.
This odd set of factors, along with the stagnation of Netware in the early 90s, the low cost of PC-compatable hardware, and other such circumstances, in addition to Bill Gates' excellent business skills, all contributed to the rise of Windows. Very rarely do you see someone who is able to exploit such opportunity the way Microsoft has done.
Hmmm... when you say C++, are you referring strictly to the object oriented portions of it (e.g., classes and such), or are you also including the standard containers (e.g., ANSI C++ strings, lists, vectors, maps, etc.). I would think C would give you the kind of control and performance required (at the sacrifice of portability, but if so many major open source apps can compile under Win32 and *nix and be written in C, anything is possible.) C code, encapsulated in C++ classes will give you the benefits of OOP with little gain in overhead. But I think if you were to use the C++ containers and other built in objects and methods, you might take a significant performance hit, even if these tools are optimized in your development environment (e.g., Visual C++ has some super-fast way of implemeenting the string class). I'm not sure if C++, using all of this, is really a fast language.
Of course, it would be faster than Java, but it may not be the fastest, most portable, option out there.
While we are on this subtopic, for anyone using MSVC++ 6.0, can you get <list>s to work? Every time I've used them, I've gotten programs which refuse to run correctly. Of course, g++ does not have such a problem LOL.
I've had the same experience with Comcast. Personally, I don't believe they really have any cable modem customers, nor that they really provide any high speed internet access of any sort, andthat their ads are all just a sham:)
I mean, if it was available, I'd have it now, right? hehe
That is not going to be effective, someone else could just pick up the idea and patent it. And even though there would be prior art, the patent being issued only begs this problem, the original inventor would have to incur significant legal burden to cancel the patent.
However, your idea would work if another spin on the "anti-patent" was taken (I believe this was posted on Slashdot a couple years back). Inventors would go and patent their works, and then allow anyone to use them, provided their original design remained open. This is similar to the GPL for software, except that since there was a patent involved, there was a much less questionable force of law backing the "anti-patent". By the time the patent expired, there would most likely be no economic incentive to keep the idea secret anymore.
Which do people think is a better way of funding this sort of TV - directly from tax revenue or by an imposed licence fee?
Out of curiousity, why was TV in the UK (and Europe, et al.) funded in this manner? Was it always this way from when TV came to these countries? Or did they start out private and were then bought out by the government? When TV was invented in the USA, it was always a private matter, how come when it was implemented in other countries the government got involved with it? (and hence imposed taxes and/or license fees to fund it)
Actually, total federal funding to CPB/PBS is about $250 million, only 12.2% of CPB's total budget (figures from CPB). This is less than 0.0005% of the total federal budget
It is precisely because of that eency-weency amount of federal funding that the previous poster is able to claim what he/she did. With any amount of federal funding, there comes with it all sorts of regulations, requirements, etc. For example, consider the National Endowment for the Arts, every year come budget time they get hammered for supporting anything even remotely controversial. This too comes with the miniscule amount of federal money it gets.
But I have to agree... they really should cut off the funding and let these agencies become privatized and do their own thing. If PBS were to go under, it is not as though anyone would become sick or killed, hence, its not really a needed government service. However, there clearly there is a market for people who want to watch stuff on PBS, and with the rise of numerous cable channels which offer the same kind of programming as you can get on PBS (e.g., TLC, Discovery, History Channel, etc.), it becomes easier to make the assertion that the government should not be subsidizing its own TV network.
What happens if you set a rule to auto-delete anything like this, and then you get a real summons?
Well, it *is* a summons, so you actually have to acknowledge receiving it. Presumably, if you never get the thing because of deleting it, then the plaintiff would have to pursue other means of sending it to you.
How will they confirm the person actually recieved it?
You can send email with a return receipt requested, however, you are typically prompted to send the acknowledgement. Supposedly you may not be looking at the email when this prompt comes up and you might accidentally agree to send one.
Its also conceivable that the sender could look at your mailserver's logs to see if you downloaded the message, but that doesn't necessarily prove that you have read it.
I'm not trying to troll here, but this whole discussion got me thinking, how effective are the current means of blocking spam, such as RBL, blocking out certain countries, etc., if so much spam is getting to people's inboxes? Whenever I read the mail-abuse.org website, they talk about how effective they are, but if so many people are using their product and other products like theirs, why is spam still a problem? Or is this just a case of the people who are not using these products complaining about the spam?
If you are truly a software engineer, then you should embrace time-proven engineering principles and stop hiding behind the "we're just selling a license" cop-out.
Damn right. There is absolutely no reason why software engineers (myself included) cannot take reasonable precautions to make sure their products work right under a given set of circumstances, every other industry does the same friggin' thing already. Perhaps if software companies were held to this higher standard, and were legally horse-whipped if something bad happens in a reasonable circumstance, then people in this industry, along with the industry itself, would finally get some respect.
I use the term "reasonable" because we all know its not possible to test for every possible circumstance (e.g., obscure/unknown hardware platforms/configurations, etc.), but it is perfectly feasable to test against a given, well-defined set of parameters and tell the end-user "It works if you use x, y and z; but it may not work if you use anything else."
You have to realize, laws as ineffective as these (mainly because they do not go after the source of the problem, namely, the illegal content sources, and those are already illegal under existing law) are the product of the same state whose PUC once suggested long-distance fees be charged to ISP customers for their visits to websites.
How can you trust an organization, such as Greenpeace, when its own founder quit the organization because he thought it was hijacked by environmental extremists?
People do realize that for 6 months (during the fall and winter in the northern hemisphere), it is continously daylight in Antartica, right? Of course the ice cap there is going to shrink.
Last summer, when it was dark there, it was reported that the ice cap expanded, so what is the big deal?
I'll bet you in 6 months, Greenpeace will be saying the northern polar ice cap is melting too.
How feasible would it be for someone to take a computer and have it do nothing but pattern-matching through all the source code in a typical Linux distribution...
A pattern matched theoretically could work (you would need some pretty bitchin' patterns though). However, what will definitly work is a meta-compiler which explicity looks for these problems in code. The most straightforward way to implement this is to use some sort of logic programming language (e.g., SML, Prolog, etc.) to act as a code-verifier, to prove (not just test, but actually prove in a mathematical sense). A meta-compiler could check to see that all malloc's are freed, all new's deleted, all bounds checking is enforced, etc. It is a very intensive process though, but because of these of which parsers can be written which convert code into a universally understandable syntax (independent of whitespace, coding style, etc., note that this is done by all compilers), this could be done.
Of course, the most effective way to solve this problem is to ensure that code is reviewed by someone other than the author so that these kinds of problems can be fixed.
You can't really blame Verisign for being a bunch of hard-asses. If a domain was transferred illegally, it could open them up to some very serious legal consequences. Frankly, I think it is a good thing that they require all this information before they will perform such an act.
You are assuming that the information, voice and features the person is trying to find on the first site will be duplicated elsewhere with different technology.
It does not have to be. Let's say the JVM had every single bell and whistle you could ever want and that the Microsoft "equivalent" had none of this. I am asserting that even in this extreme John Q. User, would still opt not to download the JVM simply because of the inconvenience involved, even if they would gain functionality.
You cannot honestly ask any company to ship their competitor's product with their own. That is an absurd idea at best.
Of course you can, when the company in question is a monopoly. The ILECs were (admittedly ineffectively and half-heartedly) forced to open up their monopoly infrastructure to competing service providers.
And the same exact thing will happen to those competitiors if Microsoft is made to include their competitor's products in their own. Seriously, if Microsoft is going to include Netscape, Sun Java, etc., do you think they are going to ensure that they work correctly with the rest of Windows? Heck no. Just as the ILECs screwed over the CLECs... it is all the same.
Slashdot Mirror
Laws on telemarketing lists most likely do not apply here. In a strictly legal sense, Yahoo could be considered an opt-in list since you explicitly and voluntarily signed up for the service. Because of that, they can do with your account on their servers as they wish. On the other hand, laws governing opt-out lists work because you never voluntarily signed up on a telemarketer's calling list.
I would not be surprised if they have a microwave relay backup available.
Heh... A huge dish on the top of the building... I guess it fits in perfectly with the "security through obscurity" model. No one will ever notice that!
If this is the case, that might even easier to take down (if this was the backup), its quite easy to destroy an object outside of a building from the outside.
Just snipping the connection between these machines and the rest of the world would suffice. I hope its more complicated than it sounds, but each of those machines has to plug into something, right? Just find where that something (all 10 zillion fiber cables or what not) exits the building in which it is housed and SNIP! All done!
How long can they get away with screwing over the people who support their products?
For a very long time I would imagine. Microsoft expires peoples' certifications as software goes obsolete, making all the time and money spent on training to take those tests and classes an instant waste of cash. I lost count of how many friends I have who are "certified", only to find out they have to "re-certify" repeatedly. Its a vicious circle, because in order to protect the investment one makes in getting certified, they have to keep pouring more and more money down the drain to maintain that certification. I think the great irony of it all is that so many people got MCSE's that they are now practically worthless. I guess this covers the "you have to pay for expensive experts" problem. :)
The flip side is that this of course is a great money maker for software developers. It saves them money needed to print good documentation (besides, what the hell else is someone who is certified other than a person who has memorized how a program works and can merely regurgitate said knowledge). And on top of that, people pay top dollar to learn this knowledge. Redhat and Apple are both making significant inroads into the certification bandwagon.
Do we charge gun manufacturers with murder?
The sad truth is that in America, many cities are suing the gun industry for "problems" caused by their "defective products." What a great way to spend taxpayer money. Fortunately, state governments are stepping in to stop this nonsense, but in some cases it is too late, the cities find themselves losing badly in these cases, and the money that could have been spent to hire more police and build more prisons has instead been wasted on litigation.
Do hold car manufacturers responsible for allowing people to operate their cars will intoxicated?
Considering that people sue the cigarette industry for their self-inflicted problems caused by voluntarily smoking, I think it is only a matter of time before we see this BS as well.
However, this same kind of ruling in the Dutch court can happen in the USA as well. VCRs and tape recorders (and most recently, the Diamond Rio) were once "illegal" because of industry objections, however, because it was shown that these devices were shown to have legitimate, non-infringing uses, they could not be banned simply because people would use them for infringing purposes. The problem with Napster was that its creators could not prove its whole raison-d'etre was not for infringing copyrights (that system being tied down to MP3s, along with the central-server architecture contributed big time to this).
In essence then, there is a significant legal precedent in the USA which should keep the developers of P2P software safe for the time being, even if laws were enacted to prevent such things, they would most likely be struck down because of precedent.
Linux will no longer be able to dual boot with Microsoft's OS.
Keep in mind that most people who can set up a dual-boot environment for Linux and Windows are also quite capable of using the BIOS to do the same exact thing, without the need for making any changes whatsoever to the bootloader. Granted, you would have to use 2 separate hard disks to do it this way (IDE-0, IDE-1, etc.), but you would still be able to use both OS's on the same machine.
Yes, ms stole windows from apple
That is not entirely correct. Microsoft strong-armed Apple into licensing to Microsoft the "look and feel" of its operating system. However, one must examine the context in which this was done. This strong-arming occured back in 1985, when one could say Microsoft was arguably insignificant. Microsoft threatened to stop writing software for Apple if this agreement was not made, Apple gave in, and the rest is history. To add insult to injury, a court ruled that this transaction was entirely legal when Apple tried going after Microsoft for allegedly "stealing" its look and feel.
This odd set of factors, along with the stagnation of Netware in the early 90s, the low cost of PC-compatable hardware, and other such circumstances, in addition to Bill Gates' excellent business skills, all contributed to the rise of Windows. Very rarely do you see someone who is able to exploit such opportunity the way Microsoft has done.
Hmmm... when you say C++, are you referring strictly to the object oriented portions of it (e.g., classes and such), or are you also including the standard containers (e.g., ANSI C++ strings, lists, vectors, maps, etc.). I would think C would give you the kind of control and performance required (at the sacrifice of portability, but if so many major open source apps can compile under Win32 and *nix and be written in C, anything is possible.) C code, encapsulated in C++ classes will give you the benefits of OOP with little gain in overhead. But I think if you were to use the C++ containers and other built in objects and methods, you might take a significant performance hit, even if these tools are optimized in your development environment (e.g., Visual C++ has some super-fast way of implemeenting the string class). I'm not sure if C++, using all of this, is really a fast language.
Of course, it would be faster than Java, but it may not be the fastest, most portable, option out there.
While we are on this subtopic, for anyone using MSVC++ 6.0, can you get <list>s to work? Every time I've used them, I've gotten programs which refuse to run correctly. Of course, g++ does not have such a problem LOL.
I've had the same experience with Comcast. Personally, I don't believe they really have any cable modem customers, nor that they really provide any high speed internet access of any sort, andthat their ads are all just a sham :)
I mean, if it was available, I'd have it now, right? hehe
Someone should set up an "Anti-Patent" website.
That is not going to be effective, someone else could just pick up the idea and patent it. And even though there would be prior art, the patent being issued only begs this problem, the original inventor would have to incur significant legal burden to cancel the patent.
However, your idea would work if another spin on the "anti-patent" was taken (I believe this was posted on Slashdot a couple years back). Inventors would go and patent their works, and then allow anyone to use them, provided their original design remained open. This is similar to the GPL for software, except that since there was a patent involved, there was a much less questionable force of law backing the "anti-patent". By the time the patent expired, there would most likely be no economic incentive to keep the idea secret anymore.
Which do people think is a better way of funding this sort of TV - directly from tax revenue or by an imposed licence fee?
Out of curiousity, why was TV in the UK (and Europe, et al.) funded in this manner? Was it always this way from when TV came to these countries? Or did they start out private and were then bought out by the government? When TV was invented in the USA, it was always a private matter, how come when it was implemented in other countries the government got involved with it? (and hence imposed taxes and/or license fees to fund it)
Actually, total federal funding to CPB/PBS is about $250 million, only 12.2% of CPB's total budget (figures from CPB). This is less than 0.0005% of the total federal budget
It is precisely because of that eency-weency amount of federal funding that the previous poster is able to claim what he/she did. With any amount of federal funding, there comes with it all sorts of regulations, requirements, etc. For example, consider the National Endowment for the Arts, every year come budget time they get hammered for supporting anything even remotely controversial. This too comes with the miniscule amount of federal money it gets.
But I have to agree... they really should cut off the funding and let these agencies become privatized and do their own thing. If PBS were to go under, it is not as though anyone would become sick or killed, hence, its not really a needed government service. However, there clearly there is a market for people who want to watch stuff on PBS, and with the rise of numerous cable channels which offer the same kind of programming as you can get on PBS (e.g., TLC, Discovery, History Channel, etc.), it becomes easier to make the assertion that the government should not be subsidizing its own TV network.
What happens if you set a rule to auto-delete anything like this, and then you get a real summons?
Well, it *is* a summons, so you actually have to acknowledge receiving it. Presumably, if you never get the thing because of deleting it, then the plaintiff would have to pursue other means of sending it to you.
How will they confirm the person actually recieved it?
You can send email with a return receipt requested, however, you are typically prompted to send the acknowledgement. Supposedly you may not be looking at the email when this prompt comes up and you might accidentally agree to send one.
Its also conceivable that the sender could look at your mailserver's logs to see if you downloaded the message, but that doesn't necessarily prove that you have read it.
I'm not trying to troll here, but this whole discussion got me thinking, how effective are the current means of blocking spam, such as RBL, blocking out certain countries, etc., if so much spam is getting to people's inboxes? Whenever I read the mail-abuse.org website, they talk about how effective they are, but if so many people are using their product and other products like theirs, why is spam still a problem? Or is this just a case of the people who are not using these products complaining about the spam?
If you are truly a software engineer, then you should embrace time-proven engineering principles and stop hiding behind the "we're just selling a license" cop-out.
Damn right. There is absolutely no reason why software engineers (myself included) cannot take reasonable precautions to make sure their products work right under a given set of circumstances, every other industry does the same friggin' thing already. Perhaps if software companies were held to this higher standard, and were legally horse-whipped if something bad happens in a reasonable circumstance, then people in this industry, along with the industry itself, would finally get some respect.
I use the term "reasonable" because we all know its not possible to test for every possible circumstance (e.g., obscure/unknown hardware platforms/configurations, etc.), but it is perfectly feasable to test against a given, well-defined set of parameters and tell the end-user "It works if you use x, y and z; but it may not work if you use anything else."
You have to realize, laws as ineffective as these (mainly because they do not go after the source of the problem, namely, the illegal content sources, and those are already illegal under existing law) are the product of the same state whose PUC once suggested long-distance fees be charged to ISP customers for their visits to websites.
Yes, I know it does not make any sense.
How can you trust an organization, such as Greenpeace, when its own founder quit the organization because he thought it was hijacked by environmental extremists?
People do realize that for 6 months (during the fall and winter in the northern hemisphere), it is continously daylight in Antartica, right? Of course the ice cap there is going to shrink.
Last summer, when it was dark there, it was reported that the ice cap expanded, so what is the big deal?
I'll bet you in 6 months, Greenpeace will be saying the northern polar ice cap is melting too.
So your second option, review/audit is a much better solution.
True, true. Never use a computer to do a human's job :)
How feasible would it be for someone to take a computer and have it do nothing but pattern-matching through all the source code in a typical Linux distribution...
A pattern matched theoretically could work (you would need some pretty bitchin' patterns though). However, what will definitly work is a meta-compiler which explicity looks for these problems in code. The most straightforward way to implement this is to use some sort of logic programming language (e.g., SML, Prolog, etc.) to act as a code-verifier, to prove (not just test, but actually prove in a mathematical sense). A meta-compiler could check to see that all malloc's are freed, all new's deleted, all bounds checking is enforced, etc. It is a very intensive process though, but because of these of which parsers can be written which convert code into a universally understandable syntax (independent of whitespace, coding style, etc., note that this is done by all compilers), this could be done.
Of course, the most effective way to solve this problem is to ensure that code is reviewed by someone other than the author so that these kinds of problems can be fixed.
You can't really blame Verisign for being a bunch of hard-asses. If a domain was transferred illegally, it could open them up to some very serious legal consequences. Frankly, I think it is a good thing that they require all this information before they will perform such an act.
You are assuming that the information, voice and features the person is trying to find on the first site will be duplicated elsewhere with different technology.
It does not have to be. Let's say the JVM had every single bell and whistle you could ever want and that the Microsoft "equivalent" had none of this. I am asserting that even in this extreme John Q. User, would still opt not to download the JVM simply because of the inconvenience involved, even if they would gain functionality.
It's better than Netscape 6
That's not saying much :)
You cannot honestly ask any company to ship their competitor's product with their own. That is an absurd idea at best.
Of course you can, when the company in question is a monopoly. The ILECs were (admittedly ineffectively and half-heartedly) forced to open up their monopoly infrastructure to competing service providers.
And the same exact thing will happen to those competitiors if Microsoft is made to include their competitor's products in their own. Seriously, if Microsoft is going to include Netscape, Sun Java, etc., do you think they are going to ensure that they work correctly with the rest of Windows? Heck no. Just as the ILECs screwed over the CLECs... it is all the same.