Nits are welcome! My point was that there's much room for creativity, even within a rigid structure. The folks who try to make "music" from DNA, as opposed to "auditory information" from DNA, are doing exactly that -- being creative within a certain framework.
It's a little like fractals (but not quite) -- all those fancy colors don't exist at all in the Mandelbrot set. They don't cycle, they're not all trippy (except, of course, to mathematicians). The visual representation is one way of displaying the information. The equations just aren't enough for most folks. But given that people work more off their eyes than their ears, the value of converting information to sound is yet to be proven.
I remember seeing this back in the 70's. Some TV science show, and they went to the trouble of masking out all but four keys on a piano for the demonstration of the "music of life". And, I'm pretty damned sure there's someone who's put out an album of DNA "songs". People commented how "beautiful" the "music" sounded.
If people want to fawn about how "beautiful" the "music" is, they're missing the point. Humans are, if nothing else, pattern-seeking computers. There isn't software yet that can spot trends in art, obscure connections between films, influences in music, etc.
Transforming information into "music" in a predictable way is just another way of receiving the information and giving us the chance to process it . If we weren't such visual creatures in the first place (imagine if Bat Boy were the rule rather than the exception), we'd be doing much more of this as a matter of routine. But as we trust our eyes more than we trust our ears, we tend to think of these applications as novelties. The fact that we see music as mere "entertainment" rather than as information makes it even more difficult for folks to see the real value here.
For this to be meaningful as a source of information, or a different way of looking at information (is there a difference?) then there should be no choice of duration, octave, instrumentation, harmony, etc. unless it makes hearing "things" easier, or if it is determined from the sequence. (every time you see GTACGG, shout "YIPPIE!") But if the performer gets to choose, we're hearing the performer's composition based on the information rather than a straightforward presentation of the information. Take a look into 12-tone music, for example.
Maybe after years of work on such things, we'll develop some decent guidelines on how to present information with sound, and Edward Tufte will come out with The Audio Presentation of Quantitative Information or Enlistening Information.
No, I'm not talking about breaking into the box, I'm talking a little social survey engineering.
When you're not watching TV, set it to a channel you don't usually watch and turn the TV itself off. For example, I'd set it to Univision and then see how long it takes for commercials in Spanish to start showing up on the other stations.
I hope Polly finds a place somewhere she can create content. So many of her articles were beautiful nail-on-head pieces.
Regardless, I've always got my Suck card for memories, and somewhere around here is some of their other promo material. Geez, I remember them before the ad at the bottom of the page. What "suck"ed me in was the promise of new daily content, and (damn, I'm getting old) I was using Mosaic, for the Fish's sake!
I guess I can live in the glory of being Suckster #177 according to my card. "I, _____________, am now a card-carrying member of the digital generation, and I suck."
I'm sure lots of lines of Cobol are still being written behind closed doors, in dirty little rooms filled with sterile programmers and clamorous machines, but I wouldn't offer that as an argument for its relevance (or its superiority over Java). Popularity is often a red herring in a debate of merits; if it were one we bought into, we'd all be running Windows.
Many thousands of lines of Visual Basic are being written behind closed doors, too. Doesn't make it a superior language/environment, just popular. Motif was the defacto standard for "legitimized" *nix/X programming for quite a while, and the model is still good.
However, more "modern" toolkits are going to catch on and take over, and I don't think Qt and GTK are going to be the end of it. Why? Because we live in a world informed by Visual Basic. Newcomer programmers are going to expect more and more of the busy work to be done with simple calls. It's a Good Thing, in that it allows the programmer to focus on the task at hand, but it is a Bad Thing, because in mastering the arcana, you master the basics whether you know it or not. (The Wipe-On/Wipe-Off effect.)
Motif, unless it's redesigned and rewritten -- and genuinely opened -- is going to wither on the vine for better or worse.
Well, yeah. It's irrational, but the # of folks that will gripe about violence in games is smaller than the # that will gripe about "soft-porn" in video games. Sex is bad, violence is
iffy.
I suspect the "average family" isn't concerned about fantasy violence nearly as much as they're concerned about fantasy sex, and I'm not talking only about parents.
Imagine Joe Q. Hacker, 35, married. Imagine now that he's playing Quake when the wife walks in. Imagine the range of reactions.
Now imagine that the game he was playing was not Quake, but in fact (the hypothetical) 3D photo-realistic 1st person "shooter", "Leisure Suit Larry, Buttman, and Max Hardcore's European Adventure" (Sierra: please don't sue me!), Now imagine the range of reactions.
That was actually just a theme. The Eazel theme is what contains the logo in that place, and Ximian either didn't include it at all, or just made the other theme the default. I'm pretty sure the help text contains the Eazel logo, though.
My concern is that this perception will go straight into the the Open Source FUD Handbook: "How do Open Source Developers make money? By scamming VC investors. Certainly not by selling free software."
Re:Isn't it illegal to deface US currency?
on
Making Small Change
·
· Score: 1
I don't believe it's illegal to deface US coins or currency unless there's intent to defraud.
Cutting cents down to the size of dimes and then trying to pass them as dimes is illegal. Drawing a zero after the numbers on a $10 bill and then trying to pass it as a $100 bill is illegal.
If the currency or coin has collector value, it's illegal to alter it to make it appear more valuable, but that's a different set of laws.
Sorry, but this hackneyed line about "only the government can censor" is utter bullshit.
Censorship is the deliberate attempt to block a flow of information. If you don't let your 8-year old watch hardcore porn at home, you're censoring his or her viewing. (Note that this is appropriate censorship, IMO)
Look up "censor" in a dictionary. Look up its origin -- show me where it means "an act committed by a government". I, as a consumer, by buying a connection from someone who uses the blacklist, am authorizing them to act as censor. Yes, it's voluntary, but it's still censorship.
If a public library doesn't carry a book, that's censorship because the library is supposed to carry everything, not because the library is a government entity. A private library operates under a different charter than a public library does. They're different entities with different purposes.
Likewise with an ISP. The blacklist is perfectly legal, and I do have the choice of going to an ISP that doesn't use it, but the question is about what the ISP is chartered to do, and what we believe an ISP should do. Does the ISP provide information or access? If it provides information, censorship is appropriate. If it provides access to information, then censorship is inappropriate.
The real issue is consumer education. When I buy a connection, and I'm told that it's spam-proof, I might like that. Unfortunately, there will be information I will be denied access to and I might never know that I'm being denied. I thought I was paying for a data pipe, and protection against unsolicited email, but how will I know that I'm paying for protection against entire sections of the net that hold no threat?
The ease of updating is one thing. If the initial announcement had bad information or a fix that was supplanted by a better one, they can update it and believe that they're being the sole source of reliable information. That way if someone trys an old fix and breaks something and they go whining to Microsoft, Microsoft can claim non-responsibility.
But I think the real reason for this is metrics. Microsoft would love to know how many people were affected by a vulnerability and the closest you can get is by measuring how many people came to get the info. They know who is on the mailing list, but with the information mirrored on third-party sites, they don't know how well the information is being used.
Data like this is very important to corporate types and beancounters. Their goal is not just to provide fixes, but to provide a service on the website, and by making that site the only legal point of contact on the web, they can fool themselves into believing that the data means something, which can translate into a bigger budget for the security folks, for the web folks, influence infrastructure and product planning, etc.
Still, there's nothing to prevent someone from posting a summary description of the fix, they just can't copy it word for word.
First off, Corel hasn't had a real direction in years. They were a specialty software company, then they caught the WordPerfect football after it had been kicked around a dozen times, then they came up with a Linux distro, then there was the NetWinder. I don't see a clear business objective in all this. If they dump the Linux distro, they can at least focus on their core business -- application software.
And now for the conspiracy -- they get money from Microsoft in the form of "nonvoting" shares, but Corel's so strapped for cash that Microsoft gets some serious influence. They do the.NET deal, but Corel doesn't have the resources to do anything with in it Linux, and Microsoft doesn't want that anyway, so they get rid of the Linux distro, and keep the rights to do.NET in Linux. Linux support in their application SW will be left to wither on the vine, and they'll sit on the.NET porting rights.
Don't laugh -- the same thing happened to the 100 mpg carburetor!!
Yep -- rpm -e'd the sucker. It kept trying to connect to the mothership and something wasn't working. If you don't pay RH for the updates, you only get a trial subscription to the service, so I bailed out of the config -- the error was due to my aborted config. Nevertheless, it kept coughing up sputum in the log when it couldn't phone home.
I got a little tired of seeing its feeble cries for help, so I put it out of it's misery.
It's not vaporware -- you can use a 2.4.0test kernel right now.
And as for Microsoft? Most importantly, Microsoft uses product announcements and projected delivery dates to deflect interest in competitor's products and they time releases to benefit their business. Why? Their product decisions are driven by their marketing efforts. They seek to create demand, and then fill it.
Linux kernel development and feature advancement are technology-driven and aim to supply solutions for existing demand. (Note that I'm referring to the kernel, not to application SW.) There is no marketing machine at the heart of Linux, and vaporware is the product of marketing.
This would make perfect sense -- copyright holders generally sign up with ASCAP/BMI to manage their royalties. (Although, I suspect the RIAA would really like to move to a licensing model.)
#include i_am_not_a_lawyer.h
The DMCA (specifically Title IV, Sec. 405) requires that webcasters (and specifically webcasters) pay licensing fees directly to the record company. It refers to the copyright holder of the sound recording, not the copyright of the song or the performance (three different things under copyright here).
However, what I read in this, the notion of a "webcast" is a broadcast, either on a subscription or non-subscription basis. Therefore, this restriction may not apply to client-selected streaming media. But, there's layer after layer of exceptions and qualifications that I can't make head nor tail of.
(Gawd help us if Legislators start writing tech specs!)
The full text can be found here if you're really interested in wading through it. It's much easier to get to than the loc.gov links.
One minor objection -- Tiemann didn't use the word "movement", he used the word "revolution".
Revolutions are hard to define sometimes. When does a movement become a revolution? When people start to take notice? How many people? Which people? It's this fuzziness that allows folks to jockey for leadership positions.
Red Hat seems to have a strategy of putting itself forward as the leader of a revolution, not the leader of a movement. Bob Young's book isn't a history of a movement, after all. The movement has broader (and fuzzier) goals. The revolution (as defined by RH) is targetted not against Closed Software, but against Microsoft and their apologists.
Will these companies have exclusive rights to those TLDs? If not, this seems kinda stupid. Not that having exclusive rights to a TLD makes much practical sense, either.
Right now, people who are aggressive in their pursuit of domain namespace will grab.net,.com. and.org at the same time. If we add more TLDs, then these same people will buy up as many names as they can.
If they don't you can bet that whoever grabs disney.sex or microsoft.sucks will get slapped with a suit.
We'll see even more namespace squabbling, even more lawsuits, even more domain grabs, and the only ones to really benefit will be marketdroids pitching TLDs to clients.
Bah!
If we're going this far, why not just hand the whole thing over to RealNames and do away with TLDs altogether.
This does demonstrate some of the capabilities of STM, but the greater benefit will be for "pure science" -- at least for the time being.
Right now, we can theorize about the relative stability and geometry of exotic molecules. These calculations are usually done on isolated molecules and are based on scientific assumptions about the nature of chemical bonds, combined with the limitations of numerical methods and computing power.
This technique has the potential of allowing us to verify geometries and relative stabilities of molecules predicted by these calculations. Using macro- or even micro- techniques, there's no way to get experimental confirmation of the validity of our assumptions and models.
The benefit for nanotechnology will come from the refinement of these models and methods.
The eholster wouldn't be too bad if you could actually put a handgun (Nerf or Glock, choose your poison) and a hipflask on it. Of course if I wore one I'd look like a bowling ball wearing a thong...
I'm not a lawyer, but this is correct as I recall. Trade secrets are indeed secrets. If they are leaked, then the company has legal leverage against those who leaked the secrets because the company has an agreement with those persons. I don't think they have any legal leverage (except nuisance lawsuits) against those who promulgated the leak unless that those persons are covered by some agreement.
They do have a web site at http://losf.org although I can't figure out exactly what it is they do and how they "create awareness and support development of Linux and Open Source" other than a student programming competition.
It's indeed a Good Thing to see such an honest and open response.
Quite often, you see retractions and responses being made in either a snide ("I'm sorry I wrote that, but you still suck.") or a fawning manner ("Thanks for pointing out thatyou own my ass, can I kiss it and make it better?").
Imagine I have a company named "XYZ". Let's say I've trademarked "XYZ". Even worse, let's say my company name is "XYZ.COM".
Would this mean that NSI would have to license the use of my company name in order to license the domain name containing a trademark back to me?
Still, it seems clear to me that when you purchase a name from the registrar, you're getting a service, not universal rights to the name. Although I think NSI's preparing to shoot themselves in the foot if they abuse this policy, the ownership of domain names is still a fuzzy area.
Slashdot Mirror
Nits are welcome! My point was that there's much room for creativity, even within a rigid structure. The folks who try to make "music" from DNA, as opposed to "auditory information" from DNA, are doing exactly that -- being creative within a certain framework.
It's a little like fractals (but not quite) -- all those fancy colors don't exist at all in the Mandelbrot set. They don't cycle, they're not all trippy (except, of course, to mathematicians). The visual representation is one way of displaying the information. The equations just aren't enough for most folks. But given that people work more off their eyes than their ears, the value of converting information to sound is yet to be proven.
If people want to fawn about how "beautiful" the "music" is, they're missing the point. Humans are, if nothing else, pattern-seeking computers. There isn't software yet that can spot trends in art, obscure connections between films, influences in music, etc.
Transforming information into "music" in a predictable way is just another way of receiving the information and giving us the chance to process it . If we weren't such visual creatures in the first place (imagine if Bat Boy were the rule rather than the exception), we'd be doing much more of this as a matter of routine. But as we trust our eyes more than we trust our ears, we tend to think of these applications as novelties. The fact that we see music as mere "entertainment" rather than as information makes it even more difficult for folks to see the real value here.
For this to be meaningful as a source of information, or a different way of looking at information (is there a difference?) then there should be no choice of duration, octave, instrumentation, harmony, etc. unless it makes hearing "things" easier, or if it is determined from the sequence. (every time you see GTACGG, shout "YIPPIE!") But if the performer gets to choose, we're hearing the performer's composition based on the information rather than a straightforward presentation of the information. Take a look into 12-tone music, for example.
Maybe after years of work on such things, we'll develop some decent guidelines on how to present information with sound, and Edward Tufte will come out with The Audio Presentation of Quantitative Information or Enlistening Information.
No, I'm not talking about breaking into the box, I'm talking a little social survey engineering.
When you're not watching TV, set it to a channel you don't usually watch and turn the TV itself off. For example, I'd set it to Univision and then see how long it takes for commercials in Spanish to start showing up on the other stations.
I hope Polly finds a place somewhere she can create content. So many of her articles were beautiful nail-on-head pieces.
Regardless, I've always got my Suck card for memories, and somewhere around here is some of their other promo material. Geez, I remember them before the ad at the bottom of the page. What "suck"ed me in was the promise of new daily content, and (damn, I'm getting old) I was using Mosaic, for the Fish's sake!
I guess I can live in the glory of being Suckster #177 according to my card. "I, _____________, am now a card-carrying member of the digital generation, and I suck."
Rembember: "It's all your fault!"
Many thousands of lines of Visual Basic are being written behind closed doors, too. Doesn't make it a superior language/environment, just popular. Motif was the defacto standard for "legitimized" *nix/X programming for quite a while, and the model is still good.
However, more "modern" toolkits are going to catch on and take over, and I don't think Qt and GTK are going to be the end of it. Why? Because we live in a world informed by Visual Basic. Newcomer programmers are going to expect more and more of the busy work to be done with simple calls. It's a Good Thing, in that it allows the programmer to focus on the task at hand, but it is a Bad Thing, because in mastering the arcana, you master the basics whether you know it or not. (The Wipe-On/Wipe-Off effect.)
Motif, unless it's redesigned and rewritten -- and genuinely opened -- is going to wither on the vine for better or worse.
(Yeah. this is something of a "me too" post...)
I suspect the "average family" isn't concerned about fantasy violence nearly as much as they're concerned about fantasy sex, and I'm not talking only about parents.
Imagine Joe Q. Hacker, 35, married. Imagine now that he's playing Quake when the wife walks in. Imagine the range of reactions.
Now imagine that the game he was playing was not Quake, but in fact (the hypothetical) 3D photo-realistic 1st person "shooter", "Leisure Suit Larry, Buttman, and Max Hardcore's European Adventure" (Sierra: please don't sue me!), Now imagine the range of reactions.
That was actually just a theme. The Eazel theme is what contains the logo in that place, and Ximian either didn't include it at all, or just made the other theme the default. I'm pretty sure the help text contains the Eazel logo, though.
My concern is that this perception will go straight into the the Open Source FUD Handbook: "How do Open Source Developers make money? By scamming VC investors. Certainly not by selling free software."
I don't believe it's illegal to deface US coins or currency unless there's intent to defraud.
Cutting cents down to the size of dimes and then trying to pass them as dimes is illegal. Drawing a zero after the numbers on a $10 bill and then trying to pass it as a $100 bill is illegal.
If the currency or coin has collector value, it's illegal to alter it to make it appear more valuable, but that's a different set of laws.
Censorship is the deliberate attempt to block a flow of information. If you don't let your 8-year old watch hardcore porn at home, you're censoring his or her viewing. (Note that this is appropriate censorship, IMO)
Look up "censor" in a dictionary. Look up its origin -- show me where it means "an act committed by a government". I, as a consumer, by buying a connection from someone who uses the blacklist, am authorizing them to act as censor. Yes, it's voluntary, but it's still censorship.
If a public library doesn't carry a book, that's censorship because the library is supposed to carry everything, not because the library is a government entity. A private library operates under a different charter than a public library does. They're different entities with different purposes.
Likewise with an ISP. The blacklist is perfectly legal, and I do have the choice of going to an ISP that doesn't use it, but the question is about what the ISP is chartered to do, and what we believe an ISP should do. Does the ISP provide information or access? If it provides information, censorship is appropriate. If it provides access to information, then censorship is inappropriate.
The real issue is consumer education. When I buy a connection, and I'm told that it's spam-proof, I might like that. Unfortunately, there will be information I will be denied access to and I might never know that I'm being denied. I thought I was paying for a data pipe, and protection against unsolicited email, but how will I know that I'm paying for protection against entire sections of the net that hold no threat?
The ease of updating is one thing. If the initial announcement had bad information or a fix that was supplanted by a better one, they can update it and believe that they're being the sole source of reliable information. That way if someone trys an old fix and breaks something and they go whining to Microsoft, Microsoft can claim non-responsibility.
But I think the real reason for this is metrics. Microsoft would love to know how many people were affected by a vulnerability and the closest you can get is by measuring how many people came to get the info. They know who is on the mailing list, but with the information mirrored on third-party sites, they don't know how well the information is being used.
Data like this is very important to corporate types and beancounters. Their goal is not just to provide fixes, but to provide a service on the website, and by making that site the only legal point of contact on the web, they can fool themselves into believing that the data means something, which can translate into a bigger budget for the security folks, for the web folks, influence infrastructure and product planning, etc.
Still, there's nothing to prevent someone from posting a summary description of the fix, they just can't copy it word for word.
(I am not a lawyer.)
First off, Corel hasn't had a real direction in years. They were a specialty software company, then they caught the WordPerfect football after it had been kicked around a dozen times, then they came up with a Linux distro, then there was the NetWinder. I don't see a clear business objective in all this. If they dump the Linux distro, they can at least focus on their core business -- application software.
.NET deal, but Corel doesn't have the resources to do anything with in it Linux, and Microsoft doesn't want that anyway, so they get rid of the Linux distro, and keep the rights to do .NET in Linux. Linux support in their application SW will be left to wither on the vine, and they'll sit on the .NET porting rights.
And now for the conspiracy -- they get money from Microsoft in the form of "nonvoting" shares, but Corel's so strapped for cash that Microsoft gets some serious influence. They do the
Don't laugh -- the same thing happened to the 100 mpg carburetor!!
Here's an idea that I should have thought of for the stupid patent competition.
Use a LoJack type-transponder in the laptop. When it's reported stolen, the transponder kicks off a magnetic pulse that scrambles the drive.
But seriously folks, the risk of physical theft of a system is a good argument for encrypted filesystems.
Yep -- rpm -e'd the sucker. It kept trying to connect to the mothership and something wasn't working. If you don't pay RH for the updates, you only get a trial subscription to the service, so I bailed out of the config -- the error was due to my aborted config. Nevertheless, it kept coughing up sputum in the log when it couldn't phone home.
:-)
I got a little tired of seeing its feeble cries for help, so I put it out of it's misery.
Two line fix? Mine was one-line.
It's not vaporware -- you can use a 2.4.0test kernel right now.
And as for Microsoft? Most importantly, Microsoft uses product announcements and projected delivery dates to deflect interest in competitor's products and they time releases to benefit their business. Why? Their product decisions are driven by their marketing efforts. They seek to create demand, and then fill it.
Linux kernel development and feature advancement are technology-driven and aim to supply solutions for existing demand. (Note that I'm referring to the kernel, not to application SW.) There is no marketing machine at the heart of Linux, and vaporware is the product of marketing.
This would make perfect sense -- copyright holders generally sign up with ASCAP/BMI to manage their royalties. (Although, I suspect the RIAA would really like to move to a licensing model.)
#include i_am_not_a_lawyer.h
The DMCA (specifically Title IV, Sec. 405) requires that webcasters (and specifically webcasters) pay licensing fees directly to the record company. It refers to the copyright holder of the sound recording, not the copyright of the song or the performance (three different things under copyright here).
However, what I read in this, the notion of a "webcast" is a broadcast, either on a subscription or non-subscription basis. Therefore, this restriction may not apply to client-selected streaming media. But, there's layer after layer of exceptions and qualifications that I can't make head nor tail of.
(Gawd help us if Legislators start writing tech specs!)
The full text can be found here if you're really interested in wading through it. It's much easier to get to than the loc.gov links.
One minor objection -- Tiemann didn't use the word "movement", he used the word "revolution".
Revolutions are hard to define sometimes. When does a movement become a revolution? When people start to take notice? How many people? Which people? It's this fuzziness that allows folks to jockey for leadership positions.
Red Hat seems to have a strategy of putting itself forward as the leader of a revolution, not the leader of a movement. Bob Young's book isn't a history of a movement, after all. The movement has broader (and fuzzier) goals. The revolution (as defined by RH) is targetted not against Closed Software, but against Microsoft and their apologists.
Will these companies have exclusive rights to those TLDs? If not, this seems kinda stupid. Not that having exclusive rights to a TLD makes much practical sense, either.
.net, .com. and .org at the same time. If we add more TLDs, then these same people will buy up as many names as they can.
Right now, people who are aggressive in their pursuit of domain namespace will grab
If they don't you can bet that whoever grabs disney.sex or microsoft.sucks will get slapped with a suit.
We'll see even more namespace squabbling, even more lawsuits, even more domain grabs, and the only ones to really benefit will be marketdroids pitching TLDs to clients.
Bah!
If we're going this far, why not just hand the whole thing over to RealNames and do away with TLDs altogether.
Humbug!
This does demonstrate some of the capabilities of STM, but the greater benefit will be for "pure science" -- at least for the time being.
Right now, we can theorize about the relative stability and geometry of exotic molecules. These calculations are usually done on isolated molecules and are based on scientific assumptions about the nature of chemical bonds, combined with the limitations of numerical methods and computing power.
This technique has the potential of allowing us to verify geometries and relative stabilities of molecules predicted by these calculations. Using macro- or even micro- techniques, there's no way to get experimental confirmation of the validity of our assumptions and models.
The benefit for nanotechnology will come from the refinement of these models and methods.
I hear Service Pack 1 to Microsoft Extinguish© is now available. It's a box of baking soda that takes 5 minutes to open.
The eholster wouldn't be too bad if you could actually put a handgun (Nerf or Glock, choose your poison) and a hipflask on it. Of course if I wore one I'd look like a bowling ball wearing a thong...
I'm not a lawyer, but this is correct as I recall. Trade secrets are indeed secrets. If they are leaked, then the company has legal leverage against those who leaked the secrets because the company has an agreement with those persons. I don't think they have any legal leverage (except nuisance lawsuits) against those who promulgated the leak unless that those persons are covered by some agreement.
They do have a web site at http://losf.org although I can't figure out exactly what it is they do and how they "create awareness and support development of Linux and Open Source" other than a student programming competition.
It's indeed a Good Thing to see such an honest and open response.
Quite often, you see retractions and responses being made in either a snide ("I'm sorry I wrote that, but you still suck.") or a fawning manner ("Thanks for pointing out thatyou own my ass, can I kiss it and make it better?").
-W-
IANAL.
Imagine I have a company named "XYZ". Let's say I've trademarked "XYZ". Even worse, let's say my company name is "XYZ.COM".
Would this mean that NSI would have to license the use of my company name in order to license the domain name containing a trademark back to me?
Still, it seems clear to me that when you purchase a name from the registrar, you're getting a service, not universal rights to the name. Although I think NSI's preparing to shoot themselves in the foot if they abuse this policy, the ownership of domain names is still a fuzzy area.