It's actually quite simple: as the plaintiff in most of the lawsuits, he chose the venue, which was a courthouse conveniently located a few miles away. In the case of Benn v Novak, Benn filed the lawsuit in his (Benn's) local jurisdiction. Novak never showed up for any of those court appearances, so the default judgement was entered. Given that it's been over 30 days since the judgement was entered, and Novak STILL hasn't responded, it's unlikely that judgement will be overturned. However, it is possible that the resulting order (for the sale of his domain name) will be overturned, given the statutes governing bankruptcy.
And, it is also certainly possible (likely?) that Benn will never recover the $50,000 judgement entered by the court. I doubt he expects it, either, given that Novak hasn't paid $37,000 in attorneys' fees for his LAST bankruptcy.
Can't. There's a stay on the sale for 90 days, as of June 5th. The court in Alabama received word of the bankruptcy filing and therefore has delayed the sale of the domain name until after a bankruptcy court hearing in September. See Exhibit C in this document.
But the documentation on MySQL is also better; SHOW TABLES can found with little to no trouble. On the other hand, finding the pg_class information was a pain in the neck. Not only was the information (that I found anyway) not on the PostgreSQL site, it was buried several levels deep in a forum posting.
While this isn't making any points on how good a database is, if I can't find the documentation without Googling all over the place, it isn't perfect for me.
Yes, but with the current market penetration of cell phones, ham radio use is largely superfluous. We'll be able to turn over that spectrum to new uses. What do all the other Slashdot users think we can do with all this extra spectrum space?
Speak for yourself. I find that setting up and working with MySQL is easier than PostgreSQL.
Consider how you find the names of all the tables in a database:
On MySQL: SHOW TABLES
On Informix: SELECT tabname FROM systables
On PostgreSQL: SELECT relname FROM pg_class WHERE reltype='r'
Now if you hadn't known about the structure of pg_class beforehand and done considerable digging into the documentation, you'd be lost. A newbie even more so. Shouldn't something so simple be easy to do?
If you liked the game and you don't want to pull the Apple II out of the attic to play it, somebody has ported Taipan for Linux.
It's fairly close, but there are a few bugs, which the maintainer has promised to take care of. In particular, due to the well-known bug in rand() where the least significant bit consistently alternates between 1 and 0, you will never be allowed to purchase a new ship. However, it's open source, so it's easy enough to fix.
No, but the Apple IIgs does run GNO/ME, the GNO Multi-Tasking Environment. What does GNO stand for? "GNO's Not ORCA!" ORCA/C was the prevalent C compiler for the Apple II.
GNO/ME, like Linux, was a Unix work-a-like. As I recall, the system had a limit of 32 concurrent processes, but otherwise emulated a slow Unix machine rather well. We even had dmake for dependency-checking Makefiles.
And BTW,/. is not only for Linux. Don't be a bigot.
You are incorrect. There are three data registers on the Apple II. You have the Accumulator, the X-register, and the Y-register. The X and Y registers are usually referred to as index registers, while the Accumulator is better known as a general purpose register.
There is also the Stack register and the Flags register, but those are both special purpose and cannot be used for just anything (in particular, the Stack register contains a pointer to the return address of the current subroutine in memory page 1, and the Flags register changes everytime a Load, Add, Subtract, Increment, Decrement, Logical And, Logical Or, Logical Xor, or BIT instruction is executed).
You misread then. It mentions quite specificially that NTFS is used on Windows, while ext3 is used on RedHat.
Re:Computer religion sucks
on
SCO DOS'ed
·
· Score: 1
Uh, it's been, what, 3 weeks now that the war has been over and the U.S. forces still haven't found any weapons of mass destruction? Oh, and Dubya is still sure that they'll find some? Wake up and smell the truth: Iraq was in compliance with the U.N. Security Council when the U.S. invaded.
What Dubya needs now is a way to save face in the world over the fact that he was wrong -- plain and simple, wrong.
France and Germany may have been dealing with the Iraqis in violation of U.N. resolutions, but it appears that there method of disarming Iraq worked -- not the U.S. method.
And to take this post back on topic - yep, that's the way the U.S. currently works. Might makes right. Shoot 'em all and sort it out later. If they didn't die, they didn't get the point. Et cetera. Is it any wonder that our kids take the same attitude against SCO?
You misread the Constitution. All laws passed by Congress are reviewable by the judiciary. Congress may pass any law it likes, with any language it wants, but at the end of the day, it can be thrown out by a federal court.
Contrast this to Amendments to the Constitution, which are not reviewable. As history tells us, the Supreme Court would have been happy to have thrown out the provisions of the Eighteenth Amendment (which brought the US into the era of Prohibition), but are constitutionally unable to do so. This is precisely why the Twentyfirst Amendment had to be passed (to repeal Prohibition).
If so, does this mean I can sell a 'secure e-mail encryption system' using the code a=26, b=25... and sue anyone who tells me they can break it or dares to talk about how it works?
You're welcome to sue anybody you like for any reason you like. Winning, on the other hand, is another matter.
Of course, using the DMCA, you can also cause anybody disclosing your "secret" to be imprisoned (remember Dmitry Skylarov?) while awaiting trial. There's something to be said about the chilling effects such a threat would have.
If these people wanted to make the systems more secure, they should bring their findings to the people who made it.
And they did. Months later, just before giving a talk on more problems with Blackboard's system which enabled them to clone data terminals, they get a restraining order. And here we are.
Geez, doesn't anybody actually READ the materials before posting?
They did - or more precisely, Acidus did. This is not the first go-around with Blackboard. Read the FAQ. The first time he published the exploits of Blackboard, they stonewalled him, all the while claiming to their customers, "Anyone with half a brain knows these exploits aren't possible." The only problem was that most of their customers had full brains - and understood that Blackboard was bullshitting them (and contacted Acidus directly to confirm this).
That was true when SSNs were first assigned, but the system has long since started reassigning numbers to new individuals after the original holder died. While the first three numbers generally still do reflect the general area where one was born (or actually, where your parents lived at the time of your birth -- which is not always the same), the second two numbers do not necessarily reflect anything about your birth year.
If you throttle to 50-100 pages/sec per IP, you've made absolutely no dent in the problems that the screenscraper is causing. Remember, we're talking about the website interfacing with an internal database with contention from other sources (i.e. travel agents). Try 20 pages/minute per IP to downgrade the screenscraper.
For the sake of images, we'll move those to a separate web server which isn't throttled, so normal users loading pages aren't slowed down. The screen scraper, by contrast, isn't interested in the images, only in the textual information.
If that company containing real users threw just 21 users at my site, they're going to have a slow experience. That's a problem.
Threatening and/or filing a lawsuit against the screenscrapers is both less complicated and cheaper than engaging in an arms race.
Yes, and then X Large Company who is sitting behind a NAT (for security reasons) goes to my site and it's really slow. Of course, they immediately go to a competitor (who isn't screen-scraped constantly, and whose site is thus much faster).
Thank you. I've just lost the business of X Large Company. Got any more bright ideas?
And no, I don't know the IPs of all my customers (considering that we're constantly getting new customers all the time).
...ownership of "bond rates, mutual fund performance calculations" etc.
You were almost right, until you used the word "calculations". Consider for a moment: do you own your computer processing time? If somebody were to run a program on your computer without your consent and eat up processing power, would you take offense? Shouldn't that be illegal?
Before you answer, consider why computer viruses and trojan horses are bad, and why society punishes people who write them.
If someone is abusing your system, you warn them, or complain to their service provider, authorities.
And American did, multiple times; as stated in the complaint, the lawsuit is their last resort.
If it's customer initiated, you'd get the same hit anyway, and they are practically extending your reach, or you don't want your price listed amongst the other suppliers, hmmm?
Complete baloney. A screen scraper hits your site whether or not an actual customer sees the prices. Most screen scrape sites don't use live triggers to screen scrape, because there's a potential time penalty (especially when the remote site, such as American's, is checking into a database with high contention).
I worked for a very large online bookseller and this was always a problem.
If you're the scrapee, if lots of people are doing this, you could make a site/page that provides data to scrapees in a resource and bandwidth friendly manner, and in a machine parseable format too.
Legitimate sites don't need to screenscrape: they'll set up a working relationship with the company in question and get the data via legitimate channels. If the company doesn't want to deal, well, that's more screen real estate for their competitors.
And why not? Not that I'm about to go out and dispatch some spammers. However, if called to sit on a jury where a guy murdered a spammer, I'm definitely voting "not guilty".
Debt collection agencies get into heaps of trouble every year for "unfair debt collection practices". Check out the website of your state's agency for regulating the debt collection trade and you'll find several settlements *every* *year*, where the debt collection agency managed to collect money from people who didn't actually owe any money.
For every person who complains to the proper agency, there are probably 100 people who just gave in to the demands to save on the hassle of contesting the alleged debt.
For one particular company who tried this with me, not only did I contest it, but I have documented evidence of *two* separate illegal actions on the part of the debt collector (either of which, by federal law, makes the debt uncollectable).
Slashdot Mirror
Every comment located therein is useful particularly only for people understanding and modifying that code.
And, it is also certainly possible (likely?) that Benn will never recover the $50,000 judgement entered by the court. I doubt he expects it, either, given that Novak hasn't paid $37,000 in attorneys' fees for his LAST bankruptcy.
Can't. There's a stay on the sale for 90 days, as of June 5th. The court in Alabama received word of the bankruptcy filing and therefore has delayed the sale of the domain name until after a bankruptcy court hearing in September. See Exhibit C in this document.
While this isn't making any points on how good a database is, if I can't find the documentation without Googling all over the place, it isn't perfect for me.
Yes, but with the current market penetration of cell phones, ham radio use is largely superfluous. We'll be able to turn over that spectrum to new uses. What do all the other Slashdot users think we can do with all this extra spectrum space?
Consider how you find the names of all the tables in a database:
On MySQL: SHOW TABLES
On Informix: SELECT tabname FROM systables
On PostgreSQL: SELECT relname FROM pg_class WHERE reltype='r'
Now if you hadn't known about the structure of pg_class beforehand and done considerable digging into the documentation, you'd be lost. A newbie even more so. Shouldn't something so simple be easy to do?
It's fairly close, but there are a few bugs, which the maintainer has promised to take care of. In particular, due to the well-known bug in rand() where the least significant bit consistently alternates between 1 and 0, you will never be allowed to purchase a new ship. However, it's open source, so it's easy enough to fix.
GNO/ME, like Linux, was a Unix work-a-like. As I recall, the system had a limit of 32 concurrent processes, but otherwise emulated a slow Unix machine rather well. We even had dmake for dependency-checking Makefiles.
And BTW, /. is not only for Linux. Don't be a bigot.
There is also the Stack register and the Flags register, but those are both special purpose and cannot be used for just anything (in particular, the Stack register contains a pointer to the return address of the current subroutine in memory page 1, and the Flags register changes everytime a Load, Add, Subtract, Increment, Decrement, Logical And, Logical Or, Logical Xor, or BIT instruction is executed).
You misread then. It mentions quite specificially that NTFS is used on Windows, while ext3 is used on RedHat.
What Dubya needs now is a way to save face in the world over the fact that he was wrong -- plain and simple, wrong.
France and Germany may have been dealing with the Iraqis in violation of U.N. resolutions, but it appears that there method of disarming Iraq worked -- not the U.S. method.
And to take this post back on topic - yep, that's the way the U.S. currently works. Might makes right. Shoot 'em all and sort it out later. If they didn't die, they didn't get the point. Et cetera. Is it any wonder that our kids take the same attitude against SCO?
But wait, you say, Slashdot is already a well known site.
Yes, of course it is. But there's a huge difference between a news site and a weblog, so they shouldn't have any trouble with my naming scheme, right?
And if Cmdr Taco says otherwise, he's just a whiny little bitch.
Disclaimer, for the humor impaired: this is sarcasm.
Contrast this to Amendments to the Constitution, which are not reviewable. As history tells us, the Supreme Court would have been happy to have thrown out the provisions of the Eighteenth Amendment (which brought the US into the era of Prohibition), but are constitutionally unable to do so. This is precisely why the Twentyfirst Amendment had to be passed (to repeal Prohibition).
And who the fsck modded this idiot up?
You're welcome to sue anybody you like for any reason you like. Winning, on the other hand, is another matter.
Of course, using the DMCA, you can also cause anybody disclosing your "secret" to be imprisoned (remember Dmitry Skylarov?) while awaiting trial. There's something to be said about the chilling effects such a threat would have.
And they did. Months later, just before giving a talk on more problems with Blackboard's system which enabled them to clone data terminals, they get a restraining order. And here we are.
Geez, doesn't anybody actually READ the materials before posting?
They did - or more precisely, Acidus did. This is not the first go-around with Blackboard. Read the FAQ. The first time he published the exploits of Blackboard, they stonewalled him, all the while claiming to their customers, "Anyone with half a brain knows these exploits aren't possible." The only problem was that most of their customers had full brains - and understood that Blackboard was bullshitting them (and contacted Acidus directly to confirm this).
That was true when SSNs were first assigned, but the system has long since started reassigning numbers to new individuals after the original holder died. While the first three numbers generally still do reflect the general area where one was born (or actually, where your parents lived at the time of your birth -- which is not always the same), the second two numbers do not necessarily reflect anything about your birth year.
For the sake of images, we'll move those to a separate web server which isn't throttled, so normal users loading pages aren't slowed down. The screen scraper, by contrast, isn't interested in the images, only in the textual information.
If that company containing real users threw just 21 users at my site, they're going to have a slow experience. That's a problem.
Threatening and/or filing a lawsuit against the screenscrapers is both less complicated and cheaper than engaging in an arms race.
Thank you. I've just lost the business of X Large Company. Got any more bright ideas?
And no, I don't know the IPs of all my customers (considering that we're constantly getting new customers all the time).
You were almost right, until you used the word "calculations". Consider for a moment: do you own your computer processing time? If somebody were to run a program on your computer without your consent and eat up processing power, would you take offense? Shouldn't that be illegal?
Before you answer, consider why computer viruses and trojan horses are bad, and why society punishes people who write them.
And American did, multiple times; as stated in the complaint, the lawsuit is their last resort.
If it's customer initiated, you'd get the same hit anyway, and they are practically extending your reach, or you don't want your price listed amongst the other suppliers, hmmm?
Complete baloney. A screen scraper hits your site whether or not an actual customer sees the prices. Most screen scrape sites don't use live triggers to screen scrape, because there's a potential time penalty (especially when the remote site, such as American's, is checking into a database with high contention).
I worked for a very large online bookseller and this was always a problem.
If you're the scrapee, if lots of people are doing this, you could make a site/page that provides data to scrapees in a resource and bandwidth friendly manner, and in a machine parseable format too.
Legitimate sites don't need to screenscrape: they'll set up a working relationship with the company in question and get the data via legitimate channels. If the company doesn't want to deal, well, that's more screen real estate for their competitors.
Why don't they just call themselves the "Umbrella Corporation"
Because that would infringe on a Citi subsidiary trademark -- Traveler's Insurance.
And why not? Not that I'm about to go out and dispatch some spammers. However, if called to sit on a jury where a guy murdered a spammer, I'm definitely voting "not guilty".
For every person who complains to the proper agency, there are probably 100 people who just gave in to the demands to save on the hassle of contesting the alleged debt.
For one particular company who tried this with me, not only did I contest it, but I have documented evidence of *two* separate illegal actions on the part of the debt collector (either of which, by federal law, makes the debt uncollectable).