The scariest thing about it is the advertisments. A picture of a women ( close to naked ) riding a huge donkey with a subtitle saying "She's got Bawls!"
Reminds me of a comment from a review of Maxim -- The "Playboy Principle" says that if you run cutting-edge journalism and intellectual articles, you can print pictures of naked women and not be sleazy. Now, we discover the "Maxim Corrolary": If you stop short of showing a nipple, you don't need any of that egghead stuff. /.
If, as I suspect, they intended to merely protect their right to add banner ads, watermarks, and the like to sites when serving them (as per the usual tradeoff for free web space), they'll need to correct the screwup PDQ.
They have two options:
1. Pay their lawyers however many hundreds of dollars an hour they charge to redraft the TOS, or
2. Look for a copy of a rational free-site TOS on somebody's GeoCities Web page, and copy it under their current TOS. /.
IP here is an abbreviation for Intellectual Property.
Barring evidence to the contrary, I assume that this is simply a pointy-haired screwup, and they merely intended to cover the standard trade-offs for free web space (i.e. adding some ads when the site is displayed). The problem is that the language as written appears to authorize them to do just about anything (e.g. put your content on a "Best of GeoCities" CD and sell it). /.
This is meaningless. They've disclaimed something that they never claimed to begin with (ownership of your IP) but kept the clause that caused the problem (the asserted license to use your IP more or less as they see fit). /.
Why are there all these war droids in the first movie, but all these storm troopers in the latter ones? (You could also ask it like "Why are all the storm troopers the same height and have the same voice?") I thought this one was a no-brainer... but all my non-geek friends don't seem to have gotten it.
As far as effectiveness goes, the difference between battledroids and stormtroopers is that you have to feed stormtroopers. /.
The correct solution is simply to introduce legislation that requires e-mail advertisements to be accompanied by a return-address at which mail is read and handled by a real person. That's all we need.
That's too easy to evade -- spammers can just set up a non-functional address and, if legal action is taken against them, whine that they really truly did try to follow th law, but anti-commerce computer hippie hackers (I swear, I am taking this purple prose verbatim from spammer self-justifications) screwed up their mail. /.
Well, yes, the fact that we/.ers want to ban theft and do not want to ban free speech tells us that we are smarter and more moral than 95% of the political class. /.
Unfortunately, about the only sure-fire way to kill spam (or at least serious reduce the amount sent) is to go to a pay-for-delivery system.
Experience simply does not support this claim. We've managed to kill junk faxing without imposing extra costs on legitimate faxers by making it a civil offense for which the target has useful recourse.
People are simply not going to accept the notion that they should shoulder extra cost and inconvenience because a few crooks abuse the system -- the proof of this is left as an excersize for any/. thread concerning anti-piracy measures.
I fully expect that the Internet will become pay-as-you-go in the relatively near future (say 5 years at the outside). The only major impediment is the infrastructure to support micro-payments and billing isn't in place yet, though there is no technical reason it couldn't be.
Again, experience points in the opposite direction -- ISPs have tended to go to flat pricing because the market just won't bear metered pricing. Providing a technical capability to do something nobody wants to do anyway is irrelevant.
You can't outlaw Spam without seriously infringing upon other liberties (as it's impossible to exactly define what Spam is).
What part of the phrase "unsolicited bulk e-mail" is unclear? (The fact that "bulk" is a relative term is not a problem -- "noisy" is a relative term, and yet we manage to have laws against blasting a sound truck down residential streets at 2 AM without prohibiting ordinary conversation on the sidewalk).
Transferring the costs back to the spammer will allow for legitimate direct-email marketing
No, it won't, because your system does not transfer all costs (e.g. my incoming bandwidth and storage) to the spammer. /.
Interesting how they were able to use a processor 4 YEARS before it was released.
Simple -- you just hook one of those alien technology "Mr. Fusion" units to your DeLorean and go on a shopping expedition five years in the future.... /.
My SETI@home screensaver suddenly quit displaying the usual pretty pictures, and started spitting out the following message in a text crawl:
THIS REALLY WORKS!!
Send 10^30 deuterium atoms to each of the five planets on this list. Then, remove the entry at the #1 position of this list, move all the other entries one level up the list, and enter the name of your planet at the #5 position. Within 50 planetary revolutions, you will be supplied with enough deuterium to power an entire industrial civilization!
Act NOW and receive a free Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator!!
Remember, this plan depends on your honesty to work! /.
Of course, the rational thing to do would be to have flat taxes for everything and abolish all sales taxes.
Certainly, expecting small-scale Internet retailers to keep track of every state and local tax system is preposterous on its face.
Prediction: If you dig, you'll find that much of the support for this notion comes from established Big Business interests, up to the old trick of using government regulations to squash competition. (Regulations favor large businesses because the relative cost of compliance is smaller for them -- and the more complex the regulations the bigger the advantage for someone who can afford to hire specialists to wade through the red tape.) /.
Well, it's not as if UPS doesn't use Federal interstates and air traffic control systems and fossil fuels made cheap by the US military
And it's not as if UPS doesn't pay taxes for these services (airport fees, fuel taxes) and doesn't pass them along to the shipper (who in turn passes them along to guess who).
buy.com doesn't use big chunks of Internet funded by the government
Ancient history -- the bulk of Internet bandwidth is commercial these days.
The main advantage is that you could lower taxes on other things (not that this would necessarily happen).
That's an understatement! "Raise tax X so that the government can lower tax Y" has so little credibility that it makes "The check's in the mail", "I gave at the office", and "I'll still respect you in the morning" look like eternal verities. /.
I think the point is not that your email can't be read along the way (of course it can, and anyone who thinks differently is going to get a serious wake-up call one day!), but that it *shouldn't* be.
That's part of it. Another part is that the "reasonable expectation of privacy" standard is simply not as sensitive to privacy-breaching capabilities as some of the other responses on this thread imply.
Yes, anyone with some hacking skills can read other people's e-mail, just as anyone with a strong light or a bottle of rubbing alcohol can read paper mail inside an envelope. This certainly does not negate the reasonable expectation of privacy in the latter case, and there is no evident reason why it should do so in the former. /.
I'd rather that they be able to do a bit of policing in the computer world than that they be constantly stumped by encoded documents.
There are still plenty of ways for them to proceed against legitimate targets. They can plant bugs to intercept communications outside the crypto envelope (i.e. before encryption going out and after decryption coming in) or to discover the target's passphrase. They can use van Eck monitoring to read the target's communications outside the crypto envelope from a distance. They can plant a Trojan Horse in the target's computer so that they'll have exactly the kind of "back door" they want -- but only for that target, not for everybody.
I can only think of two disadvantages to these approaches, from the Fed point of view:
1. It's more work than using a built-in back door.
2. It doesn't scale. Using these technlogies, the Feds can only monitor a relatively small number (on the order of a few thousand, given their current resources) of specific targets. Attempting to use these technologies against the population generally is prohibitively expensive, and makes it nearly certain that the Feds will be caught red-handed breaking the law.
As I said, these are the disadvantages from the Feds' POV. As far as I'm concerned, the former is irrelevant (if you want to sit in an air-conditioned office all day, maybe police work just isn't for you) and the latter is a positive benefit. /.
Over the internet you have no reasonable expectation of privacy. The 4th amendment doesn't apply here.
You need to be more specific that "over the Internet". Obviously, there is no reasonable expectation of privacy for Usenet postings or Web pages, since those are broadcast to any and all who care to read them. On the other hand, communications sent to a specific individual over the Internet (e.g. e-mail) do carry such an expectation (in the absence of specific agreements to the contrary, such as are often found in employee Internet-use policies). /.
Mindcraft may be violating copyright law by posting these letters on their web site.
IANAL, but searching the Web has turned up what seems to be a fairly clear answer: Mindcraft did violate copyright law, but the victims don't have much recourse other than to demand that they cease and desist forthwith.
Signatures would merely link the spam to a particular account. Spammers would simply get a new throwaway account (with a new signature) for each spam. /.
Everything that you stated either happened over 20 years ago
At the risk of invoking Godwin's Law, is there some sort of statue of limitations beyond which government misconduct is not to be criticised?
is not proven or is just plain wrong (waco)
Huh? I can't find anything wrong with Kano's description of Waco. (Specifically, the ATF and/or FBI, I forget which, concocted a story about a methamphetemine lab in Davidians' village in order to invoke a "drug exception" to the Posse Comitatus Act.)
Illegally obtained evidence cannot be allowed in court
There are plenty of things corrupt government agencies can do with illegal wiretaps that don't involve any court -- recall for example the story of Martin Luther King's personal indiscretions being taped by J. Edgar Hoover's men.
the government doesn't care one bit about the email you send
Well, then, why are Louis Freeh's shorts in a knot because he won't be able to read it any more? He'll still be able to monitor the few hundred or so suspects who are legally targeted by search warrants using alternative technologies (planting old-fashioned bugs, Trojan Horsing the suspect's computer, reading van Eck emissions, etc).
This law is a big step in the right direction.
True, though as some others have pointed out there is some potential for abusing certain clauses.
I have travelled and lived in most industrialized countries, and we definatly have the best government of all.
Not as bad as the others, but I still see that particular glass as half empty. /.
On the other hand it would be great if they found filtering software that didn't block out things like Wicca.
You seem to be taking an idealized view of the government: they're trying to Do Good[tm], but sometimes it doesn't work out quite right because there are bugs in the system that haven't yet been fixed.
I just don't see this as realistic. Just look at the mindless feeding frenzy going on in Congress right now. If the tools were in place, how many of them would vote to marginalize Net resources like the Jon Katz articles here, so that the post-Littleton "debate" could be more easily confined to On The Left: Protect Our Children From The NRA versus On The Right: Protect Our Children From Hollywood? /.
This "we only use 5%" (or 10%, or whatever figure has become attached to the story at the moment) is a fallacy based on measurements of electrical activity -- only a small minority of neurons are firing at any given moment.
There are some people who sometimes have a considerably larger-than-usual percentage of neurons firing at once. This is technically known as "a grand mal epileptic seizure". /.
What good is 5 1/2 hours of music if battery life is only 4 hours?
Er, because changing the batteries is easier than loading in a new playlist?
I suspect however, the answer is to keep a bunch of RAM on the unit (16 or 32mb), and only fire up the drive every once in a while. Keep the current track in memory, and maybe the first 30 seconds of every track on the disk (so you can instantly switch tracks while the rest gets loaded in the background).
Sounds like a good idea.
Maybe I'm wrong the microdrive uses almost no juice. Anyone have more info on this issue?
It's designed for use with battery-operated devices, but I don't know how good a job they did on that point. /.
Slashdot Mirror
Reminds me of a comment from a review of Maxim -- The "Playboy Principle" says that if you run cutting-edge journalism and intellectual articles, you can print pictures of naked women and not be sleazy. Now, we discover the "Maxim Corrolary": If you stop short of showing a nipple, you don't need any of that egghead stuff.
/.
They have two options:
1. Pay their lawyers however many hundreds of dollars an hour they charge to redraft the TOS, or
2. Look for a copy of a rational free-site TOS on somebody's GeoCities Web page, and copy it under their current TOS.
/.
Barring evidence to the contrary, I assume that this is simply a pointy-haired screwup, and they merely intended to cover the standard trade-offs for free web space (i.e. adding some ads when the site is displayed). The problem is that the language as written appears to authorize them to do just about anything (e.g. put your content on a "Best of GeoCities" CD and sell it).
/.
This is meaningless. They've disclaimed something that they never claimed to begin with (ownership of your IP) but kept the clause that caused the problem (the asserted license to use your IP more or less as they see fit).
/.
As far as effectiveness goes, the difference between battledroids and stormtroopers is that you have to feed stormtroopers.
/.
That's too easy to evade -- spammers can just set up a non-functional address and, if legal action is taken against them, whine that they really truly did try to follow th law, but anti-commerce computer hippie hackers (I swear, I am taking this purple prose verbatim from spammer self-justifications) screwed up their mail.
/.
Obviously, the law needs to be written so that the only way to obey it is to [drum roll .wav] not send any spam.
In that case, who cares how much or how little respect the (former) spammer gets?
/.
Well, yes, the fact that we /.ers want to ban theft and do not want to ban free speech tells us that we are smarter and more moral than 95% of the political class.
/.
Experience simply does not support this claim. We've managed to kill junk faxing without imposing extra costs on legitimate faxers by making it a civil offense for which the target has useful recourse.
People are simply not going to accept the notion that they should shoulder extra cost and inconvenience because a few crooks abuse the system -- the proof of this is left as an excersize for any /. thread concerning anti-piracy measures.
I fully expect that the Internet will become pay-as-you-go in the relatively near future (say 5 years at the outside). The only major impediment is the infrastructure to support micro-payments and billing isn't in place yet, though there is no technical reason it couldn't be.
Again, experience points in the opposite direction -- ISPs have tended to go to flat pricing because the market just won't bear metered pricing. Providing a technical capability to do something nobody wants to do anyway is irrelevant.
You can't outlaw Spam without seriously infringing upon other liberties (as it's impossible to exactly define what Spam is).
What part of the phrase "unsolicited bulk e-mail" is unclear? (The fact that "bulk" is a relative term is not a problem -- "noisy" is a relative term, and yet we manage to have laws against blasting a sound truck down residential streets at 2 AM without prohibiting ordinary conversation on the sidewalk).
Transferring the costs back to the spammer will allow for legitimate direct-email marketing
No, it won't, because your system does not transfer all costs (e.g. my incoming bandwidth and storage) to the spammer.
/.
Then you need to call the Inca Monkey God back to translate.
/.
Simple -- you just hook one of those alien technology "Mr. Fusion" units to your DeLorean and go on a shopping expedition five years in the future....
/.
THIS REALLY WORKS!!
Send 10^30 deuterium atoms to each of the five planets on this list. Then, remove the entry at the #1 position of this list, move all the other entries one level up the list, and enter the name of your planet at the #5 position. Within 50 planetary revolutions, you will be supplied with enough deuterium to power an entire industrial civilization!
Act NOW and receive a free Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator!!
Remember, this plan depends on your honesty to work!
/.
Certainly, expecting small-scale Internet retailers to keep track of every state and local tax system is preposterous on its face.
Prediction: If you dig, you'll find that much of the support for this notion comes from established Big Business interests, up to the old trick of using government regulations to squash competition. (Regulations favor large businesses because the relative cost of compliance is smaller for them -- and the more complex the regulations the bigger the advantage for someone who can afford to hire specialists to wade through the red tape.)
/.
And it's not as if UPS doesn't pay taxes for these services (airport fees, fuel taxes) and doesn't pass them along to the shipper (who in turn passes them along to guess who).
buy.com doesn't use big chunks of Internet funded by the government
Ancient history -- the bulk of Internet bandwidth is commercial these days.
The main advantage is that you could lower taxes on other things (not that this would necessarily happen).
That's an understatement! "Raise tax X so that the government can lower tax Y" has so little credibility that it makes "The check's in the mail", "I gave at the office", and "I'll still respect you in the morning" look like eternal verities.
/.
That's part of it. Another part is that the "reasonable expectation of privacy" standard is simply not as sensitive to privacy-breaching capabilities as some of the other responses on this thread imply.
Yes, anyone with some hacking skills can read other people's e-mail, just as anyone with a strong light or a bottle of rubbing alcohol can read paper mail inside an envelope. This certainly does not negate the reasonable expectation of privacy in the latter case, and there is no evident reason why it should do so in the former.
/.
There are still plenty of ways for them to proceed against legitimate targets. They can plant bugs to intercept communications outside the crypto envelope (i.e. before encryption going out and after decryption coming in) or to discover the target's passphrase. They can use van Eck monitoring to read the target's communications outside the crypto envelope from a distance. They can plant a Trojan Horse in the target's computer so that they'll have exactly the kind of "back door" they want -- but only for that target, not for everybody.
I can only think of two disadvantages to these approaches, from the Fed point of view:
1. It's more work than using a built-in back door.
2. It doesn't scale. Using these technlogies, the Feds can only monitor a relatively small number (on the order of a few thousand, given their current resources) of specific targets. Attempting to use these technologies against the population generally is prohibitively expensive, and makes it nearly certain that the Feds will be caught red-handed breaking the law.
As I said, these are the disadvantages from the Feds' POV. As far as I'm concerned, the former is irrelevant (if you want to sit in an air-conditioned office all day, maybe police work just isn't for you) and the latter is a positive benefit.
/.
You need to be more specific that "over the Internet". Obviously, there is no reasonable expectation of privacy for Usenet postings or Web pages, since those are broadcast to any and all who care to read them. On the other hand, communications sent to a specific individual over the Internet (e.g. e-mail) do carry such an expectation (in the absence of specific agreements to the contrary, such as are often found in employee Internet-use policies).
/.
Huh? Are you seriously asserting that the Founding Fathers routinely had other people read their mail (that being the relevant privacy issue here)?
/.
IANAL, but searching the Web has turned up what seems to be a fairly clear answer: Mindcraft did violate copyright law, but the victims don't have much recourse other than to demand that they cease and desist forthwith.
More details can be found at Terrence J. Carroll's Copyright FAQ, Part 3 and Brad Templeton's 10 Big Myths about copyright explained.
/.
Look on the bright side -- this sort of mail is evidence that Linux has become so user-friendly that even Beavis and Butt-head can use it.
/.
Signatures would merely link the spam to a particular account. Spammers would simply get a new throwaway account (with a new signature) for each spam.
/.
At the risk of invoking Godwin's Law, is there some sort of statue of limitations beyond which government misconduct is not to be criticised?
is not proven or is just plain wrong (waco)
Huh? I can't find anything wrong with Kano's description of Waco. (Specifically, the ATF and/or FBI, I forget which, concocted a story about a methamphetemine lab in Davidians' village in order to invoke a "drug exception" to the Posse Comitatus Act.)
Illegally obtained evidence cannot be allowed in court
There are plenty of things corrupt government agencies can do with illegal wiretaps that don't involve any court -- recall for example the story of Martin Luther King's personal indiscretions being taped by J. Edgar Hoover's men.
the government doesn't care one bit about the email you send
Well, then, why are Louis Freeh's shorts in a knot because he won't be able to read it any more? He'll still be able to monitor the few hundred or so suspects who are legally targeted by search warrants using alternative technologies (planting old-fashioned bugs, Trojan Horsing the suspect's computer, reading van Eck emissions, etc).
This law is a big step in the right direction.
True, though as some others have pointed out there is some potential for abusing certain clauses.
I have travelled and lived in most industrialized countries, and we definatly have the best government of all.
Not as bad as the others, but I still see that particular glass as half empty.
/.
You seem to be taking an idealized view of the government: they're trying to Do Good[tm], but sometimes it doesn't work out quite right because there are bugs in the system that haven't yet been fixed.
I just don't see this as realistic. Just look at the mindless feeding frenzy going on in Congress right now. If the tools were in place, how many of them would vote to marginalize Net resources like the Jon Katz articles here, so that the post-Littleton "debate" could be more easily confined to On The Left: Protect Our Children From The NRA versus On The Right: Protect Our Children From Hollywood?
/.
There are some people who sometimes have a considerably larger-than-usual percentage of neurons firing at once. This is technically known as "a grand mal epileptic seizure".
/.
Er, because changing the batteries is easier than loading in a new playlist?
I suspect however, the answer is to keep a bunch of RAM on the unit (16 or 32mb), and only fire up the drive every once in a while. Keep the current track in memory, and maybe the first 30 seconds of every track on the disk (so you can instantly switch tracks while the rest gets loaded in the background).
Sounds like a good idea.
Maybe I'm wrong the microdrive uses almost no juice. Anyone have more info on this issue?
It's designed for use with battery-operated devices, but I don't know how good a job they did on that point.
/.