The DMCA is (supposedly) to prevent the unauthorized creation of new copies. It simply has the (un)wanted side effect of also allowing a copyright owner to control how the work is used.
You can Do IBM / "International Business Machines" because, even though each of the words is common, the triplet is not. On the other hand, it still leaves it to me to creat VBM (Vancouver Business Machines), but "Inner National Business Machines" might get shot down. IBM doesn't own "* Business Machines", but the similarity between International and Inner National might upset a judge.
Windows, on the other hand describes a common (though relatively new, at that time) GUI style environment tool. It'd be kinda like me trying to trademark "Mouse" as a computer input device name... I could do "Scamper Mouse", or even possibly "Rat", but not just "Mouse".
Microsoft Windows, or MS Windows is an appropriate trademard, but allowing "Windows" to be trademarked for what it is being used for is a mistake.
As I remember it, somebody else got "Windows" trademarked for an unrelated computer product, then Microsoft bought the name off of them. Now they're trying to use the trademark on something it wasn't originally obtained for and something it should never have been obtained for.
The fact that Microsoft documentation from the early 80's uses the word "Window" to generically refer to a computer window didn't help their case
Copyright gives the author the right to control the creation of copies. It does not give the right to control the use of those copies once created and sold. What monsterpattern is doing may arguably be theft (though I doubt it), but it's definitely not copyright violation unless they're making and selling photocopies.
I think that Monsterpatterns is on pretty solid ground here.
Local!? Pfft! What an insult! That would be Assistant Vice-Overlord of Operations, Planet Earth, Sol System, Phase III, thank you. It is a considered a local position, but not on the spatial scales you had in mind.
So, in all seriousness: What is your position within/for monsanto?
One of my definitions of a cult is somebody who says 'Just give us your money and control of your life, and everything will be fine'. Symantec's CTO seems to be almost going there... suggesting that we should give them control of our security and trust that they'll handle everything for us.. Of course, if someone ever managed to break into the Symantec site and manage to plant a trojan in place of their virus engine, the net would be seriously F*cked(TM).
One solution (as pointed to by an earlier poster) is diversity.. If people are running different OSs and different flavours then it's a bit harder for somebody to take total control. I wouldn't even suggest a 100% movement away from MS (although 75% would make life a lot easier). Even the heavily audited OpenBSD has managed a root compromise or two in it's history, and it only takes one zero-day bug to bring down a whole system.
For those people running MS, yes -- you definitely need help. That having been said, I would still suggest some diversity there... Not all machines should be running Semantic. There should be at least a few running other AntiVirus products (like AVG). That way if Semantic misses something, there's still a possibility that one of the other virus checkers in a company will catch the bug (and enable faster recovery). It would also provide some hope of survival in the case of a symantec takeover like I mentioned in the first paragraph.
The article states that the winds went up to 10 metres/second during the day... That comes to ~22 miles/hour. Not too bad if you're ok with the really thin air.
[units(1) is your friend]
BTW: a balloon wouldn't be that bad of an idea... I think that mars' atmosphere is something like what we find at around 60~100thousand feet. We've already got balloons that can do the same on earth, so mars should be possible too.
Actually, the farmer says he never bought Mansanto seeds, the plants were growing in a ditch by the road, and that the plants contaminated the farmer's conventional canola (costing him the years crop.) If I were the farmer, I would have sued Mansanto for crop contamination.
It's not quite that straight... Schmeisers story (the court documents give both sides pretty completely) is that he was spraying weeds with Roundup(tm) when he noticed that some of the canola in the area (which would have normally been killed by the herbicide) had survived --Finding that to be a bit weird, he sprayed a larger area and found a large patch that seemed to be roundup-resistant.. This appeared to be pretty much the area closest to the road.
The next summer, the seeds from the quarter section that he had sprayed were used to plant at least one of his quarter sections. This is the crop that Monsanto now claims to own. Part of the problem, however, is that the genetically modified seed has also contaminated the rest of his seed. If Monsanto wins a permanent injunction against Schmeiser ever using their seeds again, he'll not only have to turn over the seeds and profits from the mostly-monsanto patch... He'll also have to turn over any seeds with any monsanto contamination -- effectively, this will mean that he will have to destroy a couple of generations worth of breeding experiments because almost all of his stock now has at least a bit of monsanto seed in it.
Monsanto's claim was originally that he arranged (barter or sale) to have a monsanto-licensed farmer give him some of their roundup-ready seed (in violation of contract). Schmeiser claimed that it had appeared on his land, and he had the right to do what he wanted to with his crop. The (lower) courts decided that it didn't matter how the seed had landed on his land.. Monsanto had a patent on the seed, and nobody not licensed by them was allowed to use seeds with those genetics.
This decision could be especially problematic for some farmers because Canola is pretty much a weed. All sorts of farmers anywhere downwind from someone using Monsanto canola is likely to have at least a small proportion of genetically contaminated seed -- they could then have Monsanto going after them, as well.
The CBC also has a link
to the Schmeiser/Monsanto story it includes all sorts of backgrounder links including the full court documents from (at least) the original court case. It tells the story pretty completely from both sides, if you're willing to read the affidavits.
Just yesterday, CBC Radio had an interview with the Enron executive who blew the whistle. She says that she found out, after the fact, that the first thing that the Enron Higher-ups did when she first wrote her letter to the CEO about the oddities she was seeing was to look at what would happen if they fired her. Their conclusion, in this case: If she sued them for wrongful dismissal, the details of the accounting fraud would come out in court and the whole thing would just blow up in their face.
They didn't keep her on because she did something vaguely assoicated with the right thing.. They kept her on because firing her would make it harder to keep the mess covered up. She did not have a very encouraging estimate of the half-life of your average whistle-blower.
The US Government has (or, at least, had) very elaborate procedures in place to protect whistle-blowers from retalation. I don't know if those are still in place, but that's really the only way that an employee can be sure that blowing the whistle won't result in a blown job.
I can only imagine this would be useful for talk radio... I mean... what would be the point of using this for a top 40 station?
CBC Radio 1 (AM) in Canada plays shows from various international broadcasters overnight (1AM-5AM) I just wrote a script that automatically records each night's shows (in 1 hour blocks) so that I can play it back during the day.
I guess that it kinda classifies as talk radio. They also play specific things at specific times... ranging from rare music (Heinkelman's 45's comes to mind (sp)). to spoken humor. I can understand not caring about top-40 radio, but that's not the only thing on the dial. Try spinning the dial sometime and listen to the nearest station you find... It can be interesting sometimes.
The harrier has both radar and visual seeking missiles (AMRAAM for medum range (50mi) and sidewinders (and others) for shorter range. It also has a five-barrel 25mm cannon on one side and two (single barrel?) 25mm cannons on the other.
Although the sidewinders are mostly heat seeking missiles (making them probably useless against prop-driven mustangs), there is an AIM-9R optical seeking version which would probably be quite happy hunting down a mustang. Using the AMRAAM, with it's 50 mile range would be rather like hunting Iraqis...
It has a maximum speed of between 650 and 750 MPH (depending on the source) and a minimum speed of zero (Stall speed, what's that?).
According to some sources, it can go supersonic at high altitudes.
Maneuverability includes the ability to use it's VTOL thrusters in combat -- I expect that the resulting maneuverability would be good enough for it to have been classified as a UFO if seen in the '50s (i.e. "You can't do that with an aircraft!!").
Although later versions of the mustang had missile capability, I believe that they were 'dumb' missiles (I could be wrong). In any event, I seriously doubt that the mustang's missiles were up to 1990's avionics standards.
When I talk about the Harrier, I'm speaking about the British navy version -- which was apparently intended as an air defence fighter with secondary roles of ground/sea attack. The US version (and, I think the RAF/Royal Marines versions) seem to be more oriented towards specialized ground attack (close air support) roles.
count the number of characters in my sig, then make sure that you've properly attributed your sig (YOU have the space!). As it is, I had to mangle the quote to make it fit in the allotted space.
One thing that you can do is foreward your email through your ISP. If you're using Sendmail this is done with the smarthost entry:
# "Smart" relay host (may be null) DSmail.MyISP.net
would forward youre spam (er, email) through the box mail.myISP.net . Most ISPs have a designated server that will allow email forewarding from anybody in their network space.
Since it was done using your 12 year old sister as a 'model'?
Anybody worried about police busting his porn site would have to be stashing some seriously hardcore stuff... and they'd also have to be pretty stupid to have a wireless node broadcasting it to the neighborhood -- even if it is 'encrypted'.
Do you really think a slashdotting is that intense? Slashdot isn't a particularly big site, and it handles the load. CNN's traffic dwarfs/.'s on a slow news day, let alone during war coverage.
Yeah, and a 25 year old harrier may not be much of a combat fighter, but if you pit it against a 1942 mustang it's not going to be much of a fight.
Slashdot may not be "a particularly big site", but it is built with a large handfull of boxes, it's own routers, etc. and probably a couple hundred megabits bandwidth. Some of the sites that get slashdotted are things that are co-hosted with dozens or even hundreds of other sites on a single box at a large hosting company and (maybe) a 10 megabit pipe.
I have a friend who's site gets throttled by his (free) service provider with just a couple dozen hits in an hour. Just the slashdot editorial team viewing his site could put him near his limit, much less being posted on the front page.
My own web site spent some time being hosted on my home ADSL connection. 0.5megabits split over 10,000/.ers trying to get first post comes to 50baud per viewer -- and that presumes that the old 200Mz P2 that I let do the hosting doesn't collapse under the load. If I had an hour or so warning, I could at least change the box to run level 3 so that the RAM being eaten up by X could be freed up. I might even switch it over to my primary desktop box and/or just mirror it somewhere with the pipe to handle the load.
I disagree that it was stupid, and I definitely disagree that it was a ripoff of Star Trek.
The Enterprise was a large, well-outfitted High-tech starship willfully exploring space. Space 1999 was a bunch of shell-shocked astronauts trying to deal with interstellar space using vaguely 20'th century technology.
About the only thing that the two shows had in common was space.
The Wayback Machine's archive of the site includes this little bit about Living Steel that doesn't seem to appear on the site now:
It also starts with the following bit:
Living steel is the product of a tradional school of European swordsmithing
and is a trademark of Angel Sword. (emphasis mine)
OK guys: This is ad copy. I'm going to give them a little bit of room to wax poetic. I don't believe the bit about magic either -- but if you're going to accept the contents of an ad as an expression of the god-given truth, "I've got a bridge to sell you"(tm).
The blurb on magic comes after a number of paragraphs on the history, politics and science of swordmaking. It's a short, almost throwaway bit, and it's really not the focus of the page. If that's all that they have about magic on their website, then I'd say that ridiculing them over it is a red herring.
That is a damn shame for sure. But I wouldn't go out driving around in vehicles in the middle of a war zone in the dead of night...
Remember that this is in a war zone, where a heavy firefight had unnerved soldiers who had received (in some cases) years of training to keep a cool head under fire.
Consider the (fictional) scanario:
The two houses to the north and south of you have been destroyed by the crossfire and the fighting is moving your way (i.e. your house is next)." Since some Iraqi soldiers have faked surrender and then started firing on troops, 'pretending' to surrender isn't an option. You have two obvious choices:
If you leave your house, you and your family will have to run a gauntlet of vicious crossfire.
If you stay, you know that a standard tactic of urban warfare is to throw in a couple of grenades and then shoot anything left moving.
You have 50 seconds to decide
You tell me which is the 'stupid' choice.
For civilians (and soldiers, for that matter), the choice in war is not always 'be safe or get killed'. It's
often more like: "Which form of death would you rather risk?"
I don't envy anybody a choice like that. Nor will I pretend to know any better from 10,000 miles away and in hindsight.
I'm not sure I should be flattered that the best way to tell a picture of me from a picture of a rock is that I have more redundant image data.:-)
Look at it this way: If your (potential) lover told you: "Your face looks like a random clump of flesh.", would you feel more or less flattered?
Although a forest may seem random, if you take a look, you'll see a lot of repetetive patters. Thousands of leaves, all alike. Symetry to the leaves. All the trees of the same species look much the same (that's part of how we define them as species), and the various branches of a single tree tend to have the same basic pattern repeated. All of that repetition makes life easier on gzip.
If you want your face to be hard to compress, you can make your skin randomly mottled, set your eyes at random angles (and shapes). remove the circular symetry of your eyes and beat your nose in with a small hammer.
If you then blow your lips (and teeth) off with a ballpeen hammer so that they have a really random shape, you should have a pleasantly non-compressable picture. (just don't ask me for a date).
I've blown 6MP images up to 20"x30". They look great.
Really? That's only 100 dpi.
100DPI isn't that bad for regular image use. When people are looking at a picture of that size, they rarely get closer than about a foot or two. At those distances, 100dpi can seem pretty sharp. -- and with ink bleed, it probably shouldn't look that badly pixelated when you look close, either.
Having blown up consumer 200ASA film to similar sizes, I can see the grain there too -- the randomnes of it tends to make it less noticable, but it's pretty obvious when you take a close look.
It's just polite to make such links both active and accurate (extraneous spaces in both links -- probably inserted by slashdot because you tried to submit the URLs as plain text).
I can't recall changing any settings in 9x or 3.1 that would seriously mess up my system.
I remember one system where changing the buffer size for a printer driver caused the mouse to stop working. Yes, changing the setting back 'fixed' the mouse. Windows 3.1 -- Just before Win95 was released. I didn't even bother TRYING to figure out why. Just shook my head and went back to my nice, stable, Unix boxes. It's my favorite example of MS-Windows Wierdness -- but I've generally managed to stay away from Windows.
It's not that you'll reduce your Win95 box to a smoking wreck.. but you'll change one thing, and something else -- seemingly unrelated will burp uncontrollably. The general Mantra with Windows seems to be 'If it (almost) works, don't touch it'.
Slashdot Mirror
The DMCA is (supposedly) to prevent the unauthorized creation of new copies. It simply has the (un)wanted side effect of also allowing a copyright owner to control how the work is used.
You're at 3 now.
Don't worry. Be happy.
Windows, on the other hand describes a common (though relatively new, at that time) GUI style environment tool. It'd be kinda like me trying to trademark "Mouse" as a computer input device name... I could do "Scamper Mouse", or even possibly "Rat", but not just "Mouse".
Microsoft Windows, or MS Windows is an appropriate trademard, but allowing "Windows" to be trademarked for what it is being used for is a mistake.
As I remember it, somebody else got "Windows" trademarked for an unrelated computer product, then Microsoft bought the name off of them. Now they're trying to use the trademark on something it wasn't originally obtained for and something it should never have been obtained for.
The fact that Microsoft documentation from the early 80's uses the word "Window" to generically refer to a computer window didn't help their case
I think that Monsterpatterns is on pretty solid ground here.
So, in all seriousness: What is your position within/for monsanto?
One solution (as pointed to by an earlier poster) is diversity.. If people are running different OSs and different flavours then it's a bit harder for somebody to take total control. I wouldn't even suggest a 100% movement away from MS (although 75% would make life a lot easier). Even the heavily audited OpenBSD has managed a root compromise or two in it's history, and it only takes one zero-day bug to bring down a whole system.
For those people running MS, yes -- you definitely need help. That having been said, I would still suggest some diversity there... Not all machines should be running Semantic. There should be at least a few running other AntiVirus products (like AVG). That way if Semantic misses something, there's still a possibility that one of the other virus checkers in a company will catch the bug (and enable faster recovery). It would also provide some hope of survival in the case of a symantec takeover like I mentioned in the first paragraph.
BTW: a balloon wouldn't be that bad of an idea... I think that mars' atmosphere is something like what we find at around 60~100thousand feet. We've already got balloons that can do the same on earth, so mars should be possible too.
It's not quite that straight... Schmeisers story (the court documents give both sides pretty completely) is that he was spraying weeds with Roundup(tm) when he noticed that some of the canola in the area (which would have normally been killed by the herbicide) had survived --Finding that to be a bit weird, he sprayed a larger area and found a large patch that seemed to be roundup-resistant.. This appeared to be pretty much the area closest to the road.
The next summer, the seeds from the quarter section that he had sprayed were used to plant at least one of his quarter sections. This is the crop that Monsanto now claims to own. Part of the problem, however, is that the genetically modified seed has also contaminated the rest of his seed. If Monsanto wins a permanent injunction against Schmeiser ever using their seeds again, he'll not only have to turn over the seeds and profits from the mostly-monsanto patch... He'll also have to turn over any seeds with any monsanto contamination -- effectively, this will mean that he will have to destroy a couple of generations worth of breeding experiments because almost all of his stock now has at least a bit of monsanto seed in it.
Monsanto's claim was originally that he arranged (barter or sale) to have a monsanto-licensed farmer give him some of their roundup-ready seed (in violation of contract). Schmeiser claimed that it had appeared on his land, and he had the right to do what he wanted to with his crop. The (lower) courts decided that it didn't matter how the seed had landed on his land.. Monsanto had a patent on the seed, and nobody not licensed by them was allowed to use seeds with those genetics.
This decision could be especially problematic for some farmers because Canola is pretty much a weed. All sorts of farmers anywhere downwind from someone using Monsanto canola is likely to have at least a small proportion of genetically contaminated seed -- they could then have Monsanto going after them, as well.
The CBC also has a link to the Schmeiser/Monsanto story it includes all sorts of backgrounder links including the full court documents from (at least) the original court case. It tells the story pretty completely from both sides, if you're willing to read the affidavits.
They didn't keep her on because she did something vaguely assoicated with the right thing.. They kept her on because firing her would make it harder to keep the mess covered up. She did not have a very encouraging estimate of the half-life of your average whistle-blower.
The US Government has (or, at least, had) very elaborate procedures in place to protect whistle-blowers from retalation. I don't know if those are still in place, but that's really the only way that an employee can be sure that blowing the whistle won't result in a blown job.
I guess that it kinda classifies as talk radio. They also play specific things at specific times... ranging from rare music (Heinkelman's 45's comes to mind (sp)). to spoken humor. I can understand not caring about top-40 radio, but that's not the only thing on the dial. Try spinning the dial sometime and listen to the nearest station you find... It can be interesting sometimes.
Only if I want to include an attribution...
Thank you for your attribution, BTW. It creates a far better context for the joke.
Although the sidewinders are mostly heat seeking missiles (making them probably useless against prop-driven mustangs), there is an AIM-9R optical seeking version which would probably be quite happy hunting down a mustang. Using the AMRAAM, with it's 50 mile range would be rather like hunting Iraqis...
It has a maximum speed of between 650 and 750 MPH (depending on the source) and a minimum speed of zero (Stall speed, what's that?). According to some sources, it can go supersonic at high altitudes.
Maneuverability includes the ability to use it's VTOL thrusters in combat -- I expect that the resulting maneuverability would be good enough for it to have been classified as a UFO if seen in the '50s (i.e. "You can't do that with an aircraft!!").
Although later versions of the mustang had missile capability, I believe that they were 'dumb' missiles (I could be wrong). In any event, I seriously doubt that the mustang's missiles were up to 1990's avionics standards.
When I talk about the Harrier, I'm speaking about the British navy version -- which was apparently intended as an air defence fighter with secondary roles of ground/sea attack. The US version (and, I think the RAF/Royal Marines versions) seem to be more oriented towards specialized ground attack (close air support) roles.
count the number of characters in my sig, then make sure that you've properly attributed your sig (YOU have the space!). As it is, I had to mangle the quote to make it fit in the allotted space.
Since it was done using your 12 year old sister as a 'model'?
Anybody worried about police busting his porn site would have to be stashing some seriously hardcore stuff... and they'd also have to be pretty stupid to have a wireless node broadcasting it to the neighborhood -- even if it is 'encrypted'.
Yeah, and a 25 year old harrier may not be much of a combat fighter, but if you pit it against a 1942 mustang it's not going to be much of a fight.
Slashdot may not be "a particularly big site", but it is built with a large handfull of boxes, it's own routers, etc. and probably a couple hundred megabits bandwidth. Some of the sites that get slashdotted are things that are co-hosted with dozens or even hundreds of other sites on a single box at a large hosting company and (maybe) a 10 megabit pipe.
I have a friend who's site gets throttled by his (free) service provider with just a couple dozen hits in an hour. Just the slashdot editorial team viewing his site could put him near his limit, much less being posted on the front page.
My own web site spent some time being hosted on my home ADSL connection. 0.5megabits split over 10,000 /.ers trying to get first post comes to 50baud per viewer -- and that presumes that the old 200Mz P2 that I let do the hosting doesn't collapse under the load. If I had an hour or so warning, I could at least change the box to run level 3 so that the RAM being eaten up by X could be freed up. I might even switch it over to my primary desktop box and/or just mirror it somewhere with the pipe to handle the load.
The Enterprise was a large, well-outfitted High-tech starship willfully exploring space. Space 1999 was a bunch of shell-shocked astronauts trying to deal with interstellar space using vaguely 20'th century technology.
About the only thing that the two shows had in common was space.
It also starts with the following bit:
OK guys: This is ad copy. I'm going to give them a little bit of room to wax poetic. I don't believe the bit about magic either -- but if you're going to accept the contents of an ad as an expression of the god-given truth, "I've got a bridge to sell you"(tm).The blurb on magic comes after a number of paragraphs on the history, politics and science of swordmaking. It's a short, almost throwaway bit, and it's really not the focus of the page. If that's all that they have about magic on their website, then I'd say that ridiculing them over it is a red herring.
Remember that this is in a war zone, where a heavy firefight had unnerved soldiers who had received (in some cases) years of training to keep a cool head under fire.
Consider the (fictional) scanario:
The two houses to the north and south of you have been destroyed by the crossfire and the fighting is moving your way (i.e. your house is next)." Since some Iraqi soldiers have faked surrender and then started firing on troops, 'pretending' to surrender isn't an option. You have two obvious choices:
- If you leave your house, you and your family will have to run a gauntlet of vicious crossfire.
- If you stay, you know that a standard tactic of urban warfare is to throw in a couple of grenades and then shoot anything left moving.
- You have 50 seconds to decide
You tell me which is the 'stupid' choice.For civilians (and soldiers, for that matter), the choice in war is not always 'be safe or get killed'. It's often more like: "Which form of death would you rather risk?"
I don't envy anybody a choice like that. Nor will I pretend to know any better from 10,000 miles away and in hindsight.
Look at it this way: If your (potential) lover told you: "Your face looks like a random clump of flesh.", would you feel more or less flattered?
Although a forest may seem random, if you take a look, you'll see a lot of repetetive patters. Thousands of leaves, all alike. Symetry to the leaves. All the trees of the same species look much the same (that's part of how we define them as species), and the various branches of a single tree tend to have the same basic pattern repeated. All of that repetition makes life easier on gzip.
If you want your face to be hard to compress, you can make your skin randomly mottled, set your eyes at random angles (and shapes). remove the circular symetry of your eyes and beat your nose in with a small hammer.
If you then blow your lips (and teeth) off with a ballpeen hammer so that they have a really random shape, you should have a pleasantly non-compressable picture. (just don't ask me for a date).
Really? That's only 100 dpi.
100DPI isn't that bad for regular image use. When people are looking at a picture of that size, they rarely get closer than about a foot or two. At those distances, 100dpi can seem pretty sharp. -- and with ink bleed, it probably shouldn't look that badly pixelated when you look close, either.
Having blown up consumer 200ASA film to similar sizes, I can see the grain there too -- the randomnes of it tends to make it less noticable, but it's pretty obvious when you take a close look.
and: http://www.luminous-landscape.com/reviews/cameras
It's just polite to make such links both active and accurate (extraneous spaces in both links -- probably inserted by slashdot because you tried to submit the URLs as plain text).
Yeah, but the text is real sharp, isn't it?
I remember one system where changing the buffer size for a printer driver caused the mouse to stop working. Yes, changing the setting back 'fixed' the mouse. Windows 3.1 -- Just before Win95 was released. I didn't even bother TRYING to figure out why. Just shook my head and went back to my nice, stable, Unix boxes. It's my favorite example of MS-Windows Wierdness -- but I've generally managed to stay away from Windows.
It's not that you'll reduce your Win95 box to a smoking wreck.. but you'll change one thing, and something else -- seemingly unrelated will burp uncontrollably. The general Mantra with Windows seems to be 'If it (almost) works, don't touch it'.