I've been using Opera as my main browser on Windows systems for a few months, and I paid the $30 or $35 registration fee to help support the effort.
Early versions of Opera were weak and very skimpy on features like JavaScript and plug-in support, but the current version is great. It is smaller than Navigator and Internet Explorer and much faster to load and render pages. It supports JavaScript, CSS 1 and Netscape plug-ins.
Another thing I like about Opera is that it holds closer to standard HTML than the other browsers. It is less forgiving of bad HTML, so it's useful to have around when you're trying to create standard HTML that would pass the W3C HTML Validator.
Opera also has a button on the browser you can click to render a page in "easy-to-read" format, which helps when the designer has gone nuts with graphical backgrounds and text.
There are a couple of rendering things I don't like about Opera, such as the way it displays lists. For the most part, though, it handles pages as well or better than the other browsers.
Most tech journalists still describe the browser war as being Microsoft vs. Netscape/AOL. Some sites like BrowserWatch are reporting that up to 10 percent of its visitors are using Opera, so we may be reaching a point where it should be taken more seriously as a competitor.
I don't see much reason to kvetch about idiots trying to grab trademarks they have no prayer of keeping. A single credible example of Linux being used prior to the registration date is sufficient to torpedo the proposed trademark. If the guy wants to support the Korean government by paying a non-returnable trademark registration fee, I think that's admirable.;-).
No. Should the driver be held partially responsible for "helping" the car thief steal his car? Yes, as most insurance companies will tell you.
I have no problem with people being held responsible for their actions. That's why I don't think David L. Smith deserves to walk simply because his virus was made possible by poor programming decisions on Microsoft's part. The world's full of security exploits. The idea that people should be able to take advantage of them simply because "they should have known better" is juvenile, script-kiddie thinking, and I pity anyone who buys that argument and acts on it.
I'm just saying that the modern day script kiddie (even though he's like 30...) is in a symbiotic relationship with computer users (and that term is loosely used here).
Thousands of crimes are made possible because of foolish, ill-advised, or insecure behavior by the victims. Should we let a car thief kiddie go because a driver made the decision to leave his keys in the car and the motor running?
Since when is slashdot an organization with as _primary_ goal "making profit"? (the one reason that defines a company as for-profit).
Slashdot is a commercial enterprise. The sale of the site to Andover should remove any doubts about that, I would think, and even before that the publishers never talked about making it a not-for-profit corporation.
If you think the namespace gods should enforce a rule that.org be reserved for non-commercial organizations, Slashdot is one of the domain holders that would be affected.
Personally, I think it's an archaic rule that never will be, and never should be, followed.
If the domain registrant has half a brain, you can't. The cases that end up in court occur because (a) the registrant contacts a trademark holder with the intent to sell it, or (b) the registrant does something with the domain that is deceptively similar to a trademark holder's product.
Besides, those who truly believe in anything, don't sit around and gratify/impress themselves with self-perceived eloquent speeches.
Like, say, yours? I think the mystery has been solved: We now know who inherited Carl Sagan's stash of weed.
Personally, I don't deal with mailbank, just in the same way I would never deal with any other cybersquater (corporate shithead, independentat shithead., venture capital shithead.. it doesn't make a difference, they're still a shithead).
Why is the person who got there first a "shithead"? Do you feel the same way about the people who own all the land in your community? I'm sure a lot of them bought the property for next to nothing, too.
If a person is speculating on the domain name by trying to sell or scam money off of it, then they deserve to have it pulled from them by legitimate copyright holders. Otherwise they should be protected.
Too broad. The only thing that should be restricted is registering a domain strictly for the purpose of selling it to a trademark holder with a similar mark.
For instance, a word like "ivory" appears in dozens of trademarks. A person should have the right to register ivory.com simply because they believe it's a valuable URL.
What they shouldn't be able to do is register ivory.com simply out of hopes that Procter & Gamble, the makers of Ivory soap, will pay big money to get it from them.
A commercial entity with no ties to the network infrastructure has absolutely no business having a.net domain.
This is an archaic rule that has never been applied, and certainly should not be applied now. Thousands of Web sites are published in the.net TLD that are not networks, and thousands of Web sites are published in the.org TLD that are commercial in nature. You're on one now.
As a small-time businessman, I would be extremely frustrated if a domain name speculator decided to hold a domain name containing my trademark hostage to try and extort a few dollars from me.
This ruling does not prevent you from seeking relief if a domain registrant is doing that to you. A person who registers a domain strictly for the purpose of reselling it to a trademark holder can still be sued. The new Senate cybersquatting law imposes penalties up to $100,000, so if the House passes the same law you've got another means of protecting your mark.
What this ruling does is protect the guy who registered a domain similar to your trademark with no knowledge of your company and no desire to traffic on your trademark with his Web site.
To protect against this, I've been reflexually registering domain names left and right which have anything to do with my work. This is annoying, time consuming, and expensive.
This is your decision, not a requirement forced on your business by the domain-name structure. (Besides, how much money are we talking about -- you probably spend more on coffee.)
Your trademark prevents people from operating a similarly named or marked business in the same jurisdiction who are selling the same category of products.
It doesn't prevent anyone else from using the words in your trademark in ways that are unrelated to your business.
You already have legal relief if someone appropriates your trademark and trades on the name of your business in a similar profession. You shouldn't expect similar relief simply because a URL contains the same word (or words) as your mark. It's an inappropriate extension of the trademark law, especially when the worldwide nature of the Internet is considered.
I'm one of the people who suggested Abe Ingersoll as an interview subject on Slashdot. The guy snuck into the unsecured network of the Road Rules producers and used the information he gained to (a) improve his odds of getting on the show, (b) play head games with people on the show, and (c) improve his odds of getting laid while on the show. Millions of TV viewers know the guy as a "computer hacker" or "computer cracker."
Add all of this up, and I think it's worthwhile to see what's rattling around in the guy's head. Besides, he's not much more of an MTV fan than people making comments here, comparing Road Rules to "looking up someone's asshole" in the Salon article.
Some questions:
If you are on probation for the credit card scam, snooping through Bunim-Murray's network could have sent you to jail. Did Bunim-Murray or anyone else make noise about pursuing legal action against you?
What bug reports were you reading when you got the idea to employ Back Orifice on the Bunim-Murray network?
By all appearances, you haven't suffered much in the way of negative consequences for cracking and other misdeeds. Now that you're on the MTV-celebrity lecture tour, are you doing anything to teach the teeming millions that cracking is a bad idea?
Microsoft works. Some think they are evil, some don't.. I don't care personally. Microsoft WORKS.
Define "works". I'm using Windows 98 on a souped-up Dell PC as my workday computer, and several times a day I deal with crashes and lock-ups. Even simple tasks like writing a document in Word are so prone to crashing that I hit File-Save every few minutes as a hedge against my operating system.
They might not be totally uniform (WinNT->95/98/2000). But they are generally 90% compatible and uniform. They allow people to create programs which run everywhere (Windows is closest to everywhere). Write once.. run everywhere.
While that is Microsoft's definition of "write once, run everywhere," it isn't shared by many people outside of the company. A Visual Basic program compiled on Windows 98 isn't going to have much success on a Linux system or a Macintosh. On the other hand, I'm executing the same Perl script on a BSD system and my Windows 98 machine.
The town?s rural, central Florida neighbors remained suspicious and hostile.
I live near Central Florida and have driven by Celebration a few times. Its not far enough away from Orlando to have rural neighbors -- Celebration is part of the city's huge suburban sprawl.
Anyone who is interested in the original plans for EPCOT's city of tomorrow should visit www.waltopia.com.
In 1964, a graduate student cut down the oldest living tree, a bristlecone pine (Pinus longaeva, Pinus aristata) in order to count its rings:
"Late in the year of 1964 a young geographer, Donald R. Currey, a student at this university, who was working toward his doctorate, was in the Southwest searching for evidence of Ice Age glaciers. The Wheeler Peak glacier and related phenomena attracted him. When this student and his associate came upon the bristlecones at the timberline, they began to take core samples from several trees, discovering one to be over 4,000 years old! Needless to say they were excited, and at some point, their only coring tool broke. The end of the field season was nearing. They asked for (and I still can't believe it!) were granted permission by the U.S. Forest Service to cut the tree down. The tree was 'Prometheus'.
"After cutting the trunk at a convenient level, which happened to be more than eight feet above the original base, 4,844 rings were counted. This student had just killed the oldest living thing on earth! Eventually, dendrochronologists determined the tree to be 4,950 years of age."
Suck's whole shtick is cheap cynicism. This article is not a surprise. Nor is it very interesting.
Frankly, I'm disappointed that this is all you have to say on the subject. I hope you're planning a new essay about what happens to a gift culture once Christmas is over, Bob Young got 400 million presents, and hundreds of others didn't even take home a coal-filled stocking.
As those inside know, it's not about money. It's about respect.
I read your first Salon piece, and frankly I don't buy this at all. You got the letter, so you must have contributed something valuable to Linux. In this gift society, didn't your gift already earn you respect?
Why in the world would an open-source developer need the respect of E*TRADE? Online brokerages and the stock market are not about respect, quality or any other admirable goal. They're about money -- a completely amoral barometer of right and wrong.
Your efforts to equate respect with money help to prove the point of Suck's commentary.
Artisan Entertainment spent $15 MILLION marketing the film, according to one of the Time or Newsweek stories that ran recently.
The media (and our resident media whore) seem to have missed this fact. The real genius of the Blair Witch Project occured in Artisan's offices, not with a small group of 20- and 30-somethings with a handheld camera in the woods
C'mon, get with the program here. It's obvious that he wrote those sentences while under the control of the Blair witch. The witch was clouding his mind, and may have been doing it for months without our knowledge.
It's a great movie, but is it worth the cover of both "Time" and "Newsweek?"
Then it isn't......
But it's not a great movie, nor even a particularly frightening one.
And finally, he seems unsure.....
If the "Blair Witch Project" isn't a great movie, it might very well be an influential one
C'mon, get with the program here. It's obvious that he wrote those sentences while under the control of the Blair witch. The witch was clouding his mind, and may have been doing it for months without our knowledge.
It's not what you see and hear that scares you, it's what you don't see and hear.
I'm getting motion sickness from reading this same tired mantra over and over again in defensive of a minimalist plotline.
Imagine yourself reading a very scary reply to your message, kid. Think of all the unknown things I could have spelled out for you in this message, but which I'm leaving to your childlike imagination in honor of a $50K flick that made it big because of $15 million in marketing hype.
If you think cybersquatting is impolite, don't invite any cybersquatters to your parties.
Otherwise, though, it's a bit extreme to support laws that restrict behavior you think is merely "impolite." Lawmaker meddling in the operation of the Internet is almost always a bad thing.
Cry Me a River for the Repressed 8-Year-Old Vidiot
on
Quack!
·
· Score: 1
Children who have no political or other representation are thus subjected to wider restrictions and censorship than would ever be considered for adults...
This is news to you? There's a word for subjecting a child to more restrictions and censorship than an adult, and it's called parenting.
The "media history" recommendation of this pediatricians' group is odious, but there are a lot more pressing concerns than pediatricians stopping kids from watching TV. One is the lack of pediatricians who care enough about my child to know his name, much less his TV habits. (Needless to say, we're in an HMO.)
Besides, television is more than 50 years old. It's no more "new-media technology" than an electric typewriter.
The U.S. cybersquatting law recently passed by the Senate requires that the courts prove you registered a domain "in bad faith."
Bad faith is a tough thing to prove in court.
If you knowingly register a domain because it's the name of a company or a trademark, and route traffic to a competing company or to something like a porn site, you've gone a long way towards proving bad faith.
If you register a domain for the purpose of parody and publish a parody site (as in my own Drudge Retort at http://www.drudge.com), you're on strong legal ground in the U.S. The Senate's cybersquatting law even affirms the use of a domain for the purpose of parody or political comment (such as www.pepsibloodbath.com).
Another way to get yourself in trouble is to register a domain that's identical (or similar) to a company's name or trademark, and contact that company to see if they're interested in buying it. That would look terrible in court -- some domain registrants in the UK lost all of their domains by contacting companies like Virgin to sell domain names they had acquired.
Anyone who is concerned about this legislation in the U.S. should visit the Congress Web site at http://thomas.loc.gov and search for bill number S.1255.RS, the "Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act of 1999." The bill is fairly limited in the kind of domain use that is being prohibited.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been using Opera as my main browser on Windows systems for a few months, and I paid the $30 or $35 registration fee to help support the effort.
Early versions of Opera were weak and very skimpy on features like JavaScript and plug-in support, but the current version is great. It is smaller than Navigator and Internet Explorer and much faster to load and render pages. It supports JavaScript, CSS 1 and Netscape plug-ins.
Another thing I like about Opera is that it holds closer to standard HTML than the other browsers. It is less forgiving of bad HTML, so it's useful to have around when you're trying to create standard HTML that would pass the W3C HTML Validator.
Opera also has a button on the browser you can click to render a page in "easy-to-read" format, which helps when the designer has gone nuts with graphical backgrounds and text.
There are a couple of rendering things I don't like about Opera, such as the way it displays lists. For the most part, though, it handles pages as well or better than the other browsers.
Most tech journalists still describe the browser war as being Microsoft vs. Netscape/AOL. Some sites like BrowserWatch are reporting that up to 10 percent of its visitors are using Opera, so we may be reaching a point where it should be taken more seriously as a competitor.
To download a 30-day version, visit Opera Software.
I don't see much reason to kvetch about idiots trying to grab trademarks they have no prayer of keeping. A single credible example of Linux being used prior to the registration date is sufficient to torpedo the proposed trademark. If the guy wants to support the Korean government by paying a non-returnable trademark registration fee, I think that's admirable. ;-).
No. Should the driver be held partially responsible for "helping" the car thief steal his car? Yes, as most insurance companies will tell you.
I have no problem with people being held responsible for their actions. That's why I don't think David L. Smith deserves to walk simply because his virus was made possible by poor programming decisions on Microsoft's part. The world's full of security exploits. The idea that people should be able to take advantage of them simply because "they should have known better" is juvenile, script-kiddie thinking, and I pity anyone who buys that argument and acts on it.
I'm just saying that the modern day script kiddie (even though he's like 30...) is in a symbiotic relationship with computer users (and that term is loosely used here).
Thousands of crimes are made possible because of foolish, ill-advised, or insecure behavior by the victims. Should we let a car thief kiddie go because a driver made the decision to leave his keys in the car and the motor running?
Since when is slashdot an organization with as _primary_ goal "making profit"? (the one reason that defines a company as for-profit).
Slashdot is a commercial enterprise. The sale of the site to Andover should remove any doubts about that, I would think, and even before that the publishers never talked about making it a not-for-profit corporation.
If you think the namespace gods should enforce a rule that .org be reserved for non-commercial organizations, Slashdot is one of the domain holders that would be affected.
Personally, I think it's an archaic rule that never will be, and never should be, followed.
Hehehe, and just how do you prove an intent?
If the domain registrant has half a brain, you can't. The cases that end up in court occur because (a) the registrant contacts a trademark holder with the intent to sell it, or (b) the registrant does something with the domain that is deceptively similar to a trademark holder's product.
Besides, those who truly believe in anything, don't sit around and gratify/impress themselves with self-perceived eloquent speeches.
Like, say, yours? I think the mystery has been solved: We now know who inherited Carl Sagan's stash of weed.
Personally, I don't deal with mailbank, just in the same way I would never deal with any other cybersquater (corporate shithead, independentat shithead., venture capital shithead.. it doesn't make a difference, they're still a shithead).
Why is the person who got there first a "shithead"? Do you feel the same way about the people who own all the land in your community? I'm sure a lot of them bought the property for next to nothing, too.
If a person is speculating on the domain name by trying to sell or scam money off of it, then they deserve to have it pulled from them by legitimate copyright holders. Otherwise they should be protected.
Too broad. The only thing that should be restricted is registering a domain strictly for the purpose of selling it to a trademark holder with a similar mark.
For instance, a word like "ivory" appears in dozens of trademarks. A person should have the right to register ivory.com simply because they believe it's a valuable URL.
What they shouldn't be able to do is register ivory.com simply out of hopes that Procter & Gamble, the makers of Ivory soap, will pay big money to get it from them.
A commercial entity with no ties to the network infrastructure has absolutely no business having a .net domain.
This is an archaic rule that has never been applied, and certainly should not be applied now. Thousands of Web sites are published in the .net TLD that are not networks, and thousands of Web sites are published in the .org TLD that are commercial in nature. You're on one now.
As a small-time businessman, I would be extremely frustrated if a domain name speculator decided to hold a domain name containing my trademark hostage to try and extort a few dollars from me.
This ruling does not prevent you from seeking relief if a domain registrant is doing that to you. A person who registers a domain strictly for the purpose of reselling it to a trademark holder can still be sued. The new Senate cybersquatting law imposes penalties up to $100,000, so if the House passes the same law you've got another means of protecting your mark.
What this ruling does is protect the guy who registered a domain similar to your trademark with no knowledge of your company and no desire to traffic on your trademark with his Web site.
To protect against this, I've been reflexually registering domain names left and right which have anything to do with my work. This is annoying, time consuming, and expensive.
This is your decision, not a requirement forced on your business by the domain-name structure. (Besides, how much money are we talking about -- you probably spend more on coffee.)
Your trademark prevents people from operating a similarly named or marked business in the same jurisdiction who are selling the same category of products.
It doesn't prevent anyone else from using the words in your trademark in ways that are unrelated to your business.
You already have legal relief if someone appropriates your trademark and trades on the name of your business in a similar profession. You shouldn't expect similar relief simply because a URL contains the same word (or words) as your mark. It's an inappropriate extension of the trademark law, especially when the worldwide nature of the Internet is considered.
hey, you did that java book, didn't you?
Yup, that's me. Java and Internet books made-to-order. If you're a Rogers Cadenhead completist, visit my home page to, uh, complete your collection.
Ah, laura lemay. there's a wacky one.
Yikes! After reading that, I feel much better about my decision not to create a FAQ on things I've learned while auto-erotically asphyxiating myself.
I'm one of the people who suggested Abe Ingersoll as an interview subject on Slashdot. The guy snuck into the unsecured network of the Road Rules producers and used the information he gained to (a) improve his odds of getting on the show, (b) play head games with people on the show, and (c) improve his odds of getting laid while on the show. Millions of TV viewers know the guy as a "computer hacker" or "computer cracker."
Add all of this up, and I think it's worthwhile to see what's rattling around in the guy's head. Besides, he's not much more of an MTV fan than people making comments here, comparing Road Rules to "looking up someone's asshole" in the Salon article.
Some questions:
Ouch. I don't think I've ever seen grep used before to bludgeon someone -- very nice work.
In other words, "hehe".
Microsoft works. Some think they are evil, some don't.. I don't care personally. Microsoft WORKS.
Define "works". I'm using Windows 98 on a souped-up Dell PC as my workday computer, and several times a day I deal with crashes and lock-ups. Even simple tasks like writing a document in Word are so prone to crashing that I hit File-Save every few minutes as a hedge against my operating system.
They might not be totally uniform (WinNT->95/98/2000). But they are generally 90% compatible and uniform. They allow people to create programs which run everywhere (Windows is closest to everywhere). Write once.. run everywhere.
While that is Microsoft's definition of "write once, run everywhere," it isn't shared by many people outside of the company. A Visual Basic program compiled on Windows 98 isn't going to have much success on a Linux system or a Macintosh. On the other hand, I'm executing the same Perl script on a BSD system and my Windows 98 machine.
The town?s rural, central Florida neighbors remained suspicious and hostile.
I live near Central Florida and have driven by Celebration a few times. Its not far enough away from Orlando to have rural neighbors -- Celebration is part of the city's huge suburban sprawl.
Anyone who is interested in the original plans for EPCOT's city of tomorrow should visit www.waltopia.com.
That's like finding the oldest living tree, and cutting it down to put in a museum.
That's already happened (sort of).
From Alamut:
Prometheus
In 1964, a graduate student cut down the oldest living tree, a bristlecone pine (Pinus longaeva, Pinus aristata) in order to count its rings:
"Late in the year of 1964 a young geographer, Donald R. Currey, a student at this university, who was working toward his doctorate, was in the Southwest searching for evidence of Ice Age glaciers. The Wheeler Peak glacier and related phenomena attracted him. When this student and his associate came upon the bristlecones at the timberline, they began to take core samples from several trees, discovering one to be over 4,000 years old! Needless to say they were excited, and at some point, their only coring tool broke. The end of the field season was nearing. They asked for (and I still can't believe it!) were granted permission by the U.S. Forest Service to cut the tree down. The tree was 'Prometheus'.
"After cutting the trunk at a convenient level, which happened to be more than eight feet above the original base, 4,844 rings were counted. This student had just killed the oldest living thing on earth! Eventually, dendrochronologists determined the tree to be 4,950 years of age."
For some reason, Prof. Donald R. Currey's home page at the University of Utah doesn't mention the accomplishment
Suck's whole shtick is cheap cynicism. This article is not a surprise. Nor is it very interesting.
Frankly, I'm disappointed that this is all you have to say on the subject. I hope you're planning a new essay about what happens to a gift culture once Christmas is over, Bob Young got 400 million presents, and hundreds of others didn't even take home a coal-filled stocking.
As those inside know, it's not about money. It's about respect.
I read your first Salon piece, and frankly I don't buy this at all. You got the letter, so you must have contributed something valuable to Linux. In this gift society, didn't your gift already earn you respect?
Why in the world would an open-source developer need the respect of E*TRADE? Online brokerages and the stock market are not about respect, quality or any other admirable goal. They're about money -- a completely amoral barometer of right and wrong.
Your efforts to equate respect with money help to prove the point of Suck's commentary.
Artisan Entertainment spent $15 MILLION marketing the film, according to one of the Time or Newsweek stories that ran recently.
The media (and our resident media whore) seem to have missed this fact. The real genius of the Blair Witch Project occured in Artisan's offices, not with a small group of 20- and 30-somethings with a handheld camera in the woods
C'mon, get with the program here. It's obvious that he wrote those sentences while under the control of the Blair witch. The witch was clouding his mind, and may have been doing it for months without our knowledge.
Well, actually, some of us knew.
First it's a great movie....
It's a great movie, but is it worth the cover of both "Time" and "Newsweek?"
Then it isn't......
But it's not a great movie, nor even a particularly frightening one.
And finally, he seems unsure.....
If the "Blair Witch Project" isn't a great movie, it might very well be an influential one
C'mon, get with the program here. It's obvious that he wrote those sentences while under the control of the Blair witch. The witch was clouding his mind, and may have been doing it for months without our knowledge.
Well, actually, some of us knew.
It's not what you see and hear that scares you, it's what you don't see and hear.
I'm getting motion sickness from reading this same tired mantra over and over again in defensive of a minimalist plotline.
Imagine yourself reading a very scary reply to your message, kid. Think of all the unknown things I could have spelled out for you in this message, but which I'm leaving to your childlike imagination in honor of a $50K flick that made it big because of $15 million in marketing hype.
Scared yet?
If you think cybersquatting is impolite, don't invite any cybersquatters to your parties.
Otherwise, though, it's a bit extreme to support laws that restrict behavior you think is merely "impolite." Lawmaker meddling in the operation of the Internet is almost always a bad thing.
Children who have no political or other representation are thus subjected to wider restrictions and censorship than would ever be considered for adults ...
This is news to you? There's a word for subjecting a child to more restrictions and censorship than an adult, and it's called parenting.
The "media history" recommendation of this pediatricians' group is odious, but there are a lot more pressing concerns than pediatricians stopping kids from watching TV. One is the lack of pediatricians who care enough about my child to know his name, much less his TV habits. (Needless to say, we're in an HMO.)
Besides, television is more than 50 years old. It's no more "new-media technology" than an electric typewriter.
The U.S. cybersquatting law recently passed by the Senate requires that the courts prove you registered a domain "in bad faith."
Bad faith is a tough thing to prove in court.
If you knowingly register a domain because it's the name of a company or a trademark, and route traffic to a competing company or to something like a porn site, you've gone a long way towards proving bad faith.
If you register a domain for the purpose of parody and publish a parody site (as in my own Drudge Retort at http://www.drudge.com), you're on strong legal ground in the U.S. The Senate's cybersquatting law even affirms the use of a domain for the purpose of parody or political comment (such as www.pepsibloodbath.com).
Another way to get yourself in trouble is to register a domain that's identical (or similar) to a company's name or trademark, and contact that company to see if they're interested in buying it. That would look terrible in court -- some domain registrants in the UK lost all of their domains by contacting companies like Virgin to sell domain names they had acquired.
Anyone who is concerned about this legislation in the U.S. should visit the Congress Web site at http://thomas.loc.gov and search for bill number S.1255.RS, the "Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act of 1999." The bill is fairly limited in the kind of domain use that is being prohibited.