Counting megabytes of SMTP traffic doesn't solve the problem of a user sending out a legitimate large-sized newsletter (there are likely better ways of doing what he's doing, but he's not a spammer). Now if some of that SMTP traffic was hitting spamtrap addresses on your ISPs mailboxes, you'd have a much better case.
How about everyone text? Its generally more efficient (no miscommunication), easier to be safer (when you text you still have the message hours down the line and can respond instantly), and in all honesty a lot less rude to the other person.
Slower to write for most of us. More expensive. Not interactive. Not real time.
The reason people talk louder on cell phones is probably the same reason they used to talk louder on landlines: Sidetone, or the lack thereof. When you don't hear yourself over the phone, you speak louder to compensate. I've noticed cell phones, especially the really tiny ones, have almost no sidetone.
Hi, I'm betterunixthanunix, I have worked as a programmer in the past, and I have never owned or had a desire to own a MacBook or any other Apple computer (or any other Apple product at all).
You mean there's a techie who actually didn't have any desire to own a TiBook when it first came out? Hard to believe, but I guess it is a big universe.
ISPs should be disconnecting zombied machines. The catch is they need a test which catches most zombie machines while not catching any non-zombies, and most ISPs are neither competent enough nor interested enough to do so. If their procedure has systemic problems which disconnects non-zombies, then the cure is worse than the disease.
Unfortunately, an AT&T Go Phone costs minimum $100/year. Net10 appears to cost $200/year. Virgin Mobile costs $80, and TracFone costs $100. So it isn't cheaper per year.
Gee... come to think of it -- maybe they are receiving a service from government!
Non sequitur. I never said unimproved land should be untaxed. I said that land value taxation provides an extreme penalty to the owners of unimproved land. If I have a 5 acre vacant lot and my neighbor builds a mansion on the 5 acre lot next door, his mansion and my lot are taxed the same. If you compare land-value taxation on a revenue-neutral bases with traditional property taxation, the owners of unimproved property will take far larger proportion of the burden in the land-value scheme.
either its free, or there's control. i love ursula k leguin. in fact, i noticed cameron ripped her off with the "every plant is a node in a giant neural network" idea in avatar. it was a short story of hers, i forget the name, and she played it like a horror movie instead.
Using ideas from frothing-at-the-mouth copyright absolutists like LeGuin is Cameron's stock in trade; Harlan Ellison successfully sued him over _Terminator_ for the similarity between the opening sequence and Ellison's story _The Warriors_.
Quite a number of movies and TV shows use Apple ][ assembler dumps for various computer-related activities; I imagine the intent in those cases is to present something which looks both cryptic and meaningful.
With all due respect to Zappa, it's Marcel Duchamp who understood this first, around 1913.
Duchamp didn't even need a frame. There's a story about his "In Advance of a Broken Arm" (which consisted of a snow shovel), in which he was asked to provide the piece as part of a retrospective on his work. He didn't have the original snow shovel any more, so he went out to a hardware store, bought a snow shovel, and presented it as a reconstruction of the orignal piece.
Even if we accept Schneier's source at his word, an "internal intercept" system which shows traffic on an account is NOT the same as a system which feeds all your details to the government. There's a difference between a system which Google employees can use to comply with government warrants (as required by CALEA) and a system directly accessible by government officials ala AT&T.
Still, if you think anything you send via email unencrypted anywhere in the Western world is safe from the US government (and, by extension, any government able to penetrate the US government), you're dreaming.
That isn't quite how it works. Other than the normal billing logs, the phone companies do NOT log all the data, much less voice logs, without a specific request.
I don't know about cell. But on land lines, they DO log everything. The switches emit raw call record data. The billing logs are produced from the call record data.
Frankly Intuit & the like make too much money on what basically amounts to a couple data entry boxes & a macro that pre-fills forms w/ simple mathematics.
A lot of data entry boxes. Yeah, the software isn't all that sophisticated, but it is big, and does need to be revised every year. I wouldn't buy it if I had a 1040EZ or 1040A, but since I need a full 1040 with Schedules A,B, and C, the software is worth the money.
In fact, if you ask the IRS for advice on how to handle a tax issue, and they give it to you (which is unusual), they *still* disclaim responsibility for their possibly being wrong, and people have undergone financial and (I think) criminal sanctions *for believing what the IRS told them*.
If you get the advice IN WRITING (I think this means dead trees), you can escape penalties and criminal sanctions. You're still on the hook for interest and taxes.
Actually, the patents can't cover the bitstreams. Case law such as In re Warmerdam indicates that nonfunctional descriptive material (such as a picture or a song) isn't a process, machine, article of manufacture, or composition of matter, so it doesn't meet the requirements of 35 USC 101.
Which doesn't stop patent claims covering "A machine readable medium containing X", where X is some thing not patentable on its own.
However, the patents can potentially cover (modulo any prior art issues) the process of transmitting the bitstreams. It may sound like some really thin slices of salami to you, but that's how the law works.
To get a patent out of that you have to slice the salami so thin there's no salami at all. The claim would have to read something like "A process for transmitting a bit stream wherein the bitstream to be transmitted was produced by the method of claim X", possibly with a detailed description of the perfectly standard method of transmission. In other words, the only thing distinguishing the claimed invention from the prior art would be the actual content of the bitstream.
By the way, your example about the "fancy new saw" and the resulting cut wood is wrong. As long as the cut wood resulting from using the fancy new saw has a specific, substantial, and credible use (for example, it's not merely ornamental, although there's something called a design patent that covers ornamental designs), it is patent eligible under 35 USC 101, because it's an article of manufacture.
Yes, the cut wood might be patent eligible. It is not, however, covered by the patent on the saw used to cut it; it would be just as patentable if produced by some other method.
Your point proves you wrong. Since it doesn't have CO2 producing factories or SUVs (and everything else NOT being equal, too) all what happens there has a whole different cause.
Indeed, even distributing H.264 content over the internet or broadcasting it over the airwaves requires the consent of the MPEG-LA
Now that's ridiculous. Unlike many other technology subject to patents, it's pretty clear that H.264 is useful, novel, and non-obvious. But allowing claims that cover not just the encoder and decoder, but the actual bitstreams they produce, is completely abusive of the patent system. A fancy new saw to cut complex curves in wood might be patentable, but allowing that patent to cover the product would be silly on the face of it. This is no different.
How is solid evidence of shrinking polar caps not highly damaging?
Yeah, obviously shrinking polar caps are evidence of anthropogenic global warming. That darned Mars rover is just heating up the place.
The question that will matter to all of us in coming years is not whether the IPCC had, in the midst of a large report of substance, accidentally transposed numbers when discussing a real and dangerous trend.
A better question is whether the IPCC, in a report full of nonsense and propaganda, accidentally told an easily-verifiable whopper.
Fail, fail. The government is standing up to China on behalf of a corporation. If our government actually believed in human rights, we wouldn't favor trade with China above all other nations.
We don't. What was once called "Most Favored Nation" status is now called "Normal Trade Relations", and pretty much every country but North Korea, Cuba, and Libya is on it (maybe a few others as well; I'm not sure about Iraq, for instance). Of course among those, not all are equal, but when you put it all together likely the absolutely most favored would be Canada.
Seriously, was anyone really surprised? Mess with bad cops, and you'll come to a bad end. This is unfortunately true everywhere, including the United States.
1. The servers hacked where those whose purpose was to supply email headers to the US government. Why shouldn't the Chinese gov get them too?
Cite please, or you're making this up to start a rumor.
2. Google hacked into the computer from which they claim the attacked originated. Why is *that* ok?
By the principles of self defense. The belief among much of the so-called white-hat community that it is somehow unethical to respond in kind to hacking is ridiculous and counterproductive.
Slashdot Mirror
Counting megabytes of SMTP traffic doesn't solve the problem of a user sending out a legitimate large-sized newsletter (there are likely better ways of doing what he's doing, but he's not a spammer). Now if some of that SMTP traffic was hitting spamtrap addresses on your ISPs mailboxes, you'd have a much better case.
Slower to write for most of us. More expensive. Not interactive. Not real time.
The reason people talk louder on cell phones is probably the same reason they used to talk louder on landlines: Sidetone, or the lack thereof. When you don't hear yourself over the phone, you speak louder to compensate. I've noticed cell phones, especially the really tiny ones, have almost no sidetone.
You mean there's a techie who actually didn't have any desire to own a TiBook when it first came out? Hard to believe, but I guess it is a big universe.
ISPs should be disconnecting zombied machines. The catch is they need a test which catches most zombie machines while not catching any non-zombies, and most ISPs are neither competent enough nor interested enough to do so. If their procedure has systemic problems which disconnects non-zombies, then the cure is worse than the disease.
Unfortunately, an AT&T Go Phone costs minimum $100/year. Net10 appears to cost $200/year. Virgin Mobile costs $80, and TracFone costs $100. So it isn't cheaper per year.
Non sequitur. I never said unimproved land should be untaxed. I said that land value taxation provides an extreme penalty to the owners of unimproved land. If I have a 5 acre vacant lot and my neighbor builds a mansion on the 5 acre lot next door, his mansion and my lot are taxed the same. If you compare land-value taxation on a revenue-neutral bases with traditional property taxation, the owners of unimproved property will take far larger proportion of the burden in the land-value scheme.
Using ideas from frothing-at-the-mouth copyright absolutists like LeGuin is Cameron's stock in trade; Harlan Ellison successfully sued him over _Terminator_ for the similarity between the opening sequence and Ellison's story _The Warriors_.
Except that Stephen Hawking (both famous and rich, I believe, though sadly unable to really enjoy it) beat you to it.
Quite a number of movies and TV shows use Apple ][ assembler dumps for various computer-related activities; I imagine the intent in those cases is to present something which looks both cryptic and meaningful.
Duchamp didn't even need a frame. There's a story about his "In Advance of a Broken Arm" (which consisted of a snow shovel), in which he was asked to provide the piece as part of a retrospective on his work. He didn't have the original snow shovel any more, so he went out to a hardware store, bought a snow shovel, and presented it as a reconstruction of the orignal piece.
A lot of people, including a lot of artists, don't get conceptual art. And sometimes the Emperor really is naked.
Even if we accept Schneier's source at his word, an "internal intercept" system which shows traffic on an account is NOT the same as a system which feeds all your details to the government. There's a difference between a system which Google employees can use to comply with government warrants (as required by CALEA) and a system directly accessible by government officials ala AT&T.
Still, if you think anything you send via email unencrypted anywhere in the Western world is safe from the US government (and, by extension, any government able to penetrate the US government), you're dreaming.
I don't know about cell. But on land lines, they DO log everything. The switches emit raw call record data. The billing logs are produced from the call record data.
A lot of data entry boxes. Yeah, the software isn't all that sophisticated, but it is big, and does need to be revised every year. I wouldn't buy it if I had a 1040EZ or 1040A, but since I need a full 1040 with Schedules A,B, and C, the software is worth the money.
If you get the advice IN WRITING (I think this means dead trees), you can escape penalties and criminal sanctions. You're still on the hook for interest and taxes.
Which doesn't stop patent claims covering "A machine readable medium containing X", where X is some thing not patentable on its own.
To get a patent out of that you have to slice the salami so thin there's no salami at all. The claim would have to read something like "A process for transmitting a bit stream wherein the bitstream to be transmitted was produced by the method of claim X", possibly with a detailed description of the perfectly standard method of transmission. In other words, the only thing distinguishing the claimed invention from the prior art would be the actual content of the bitstream.
Yes, the cut wood might be patent eligible. It is not, however, covered by the patent on the saw used to cut it; it would be just as patentable if produced by some other method.
Circular reasoning at its roundest.
Specifically, the _AT&T_ implementation of GSM. Which sort of throws the problem right back to them.
Now that's ridiculous. Unlike many other technology subject to patents, it's pretty clear that H.264 is useful, novel, and non-obvious. But allowing claims that cover not just the encoder and decoder, but the actual bitstreams they produce, is completely abusive of the patent system. A fancy new saw to cut complex curves in wood might be patentable, but allowing that patent to cover the product would be silly on the face of it. This is no different.
Yeah, obviously shrinking polar caps are evidence of anthropogenic global warming. That darned Mars rover is just heating up the place.
A better question is whether the IPCC, in a report full of nonsense and propaganda, accidentally told an easily-verifiable whopper.
We don't. What was once called "Most Favored Nation" status is now called "Normal Trade Relations", and pretty much every country but North Korea, Cuba, and Libya is on it (maybe a few others as well; I'm not sure about Iraq, for instance). Of course among those, not all are equal, but when you put it all together likely the absolutely most favored would be Canada.
Seriously, was anyone really surprised? Mess with bad cops, and you'll come to a bad end. This is unfortunately true everywhere, including the United States.
Cite please, or you're making this up to start a rumor.
By the principles of self defense. The belief among much of the so-called white-hat community that it is somehow unethical to respond in kind to hacking is ridiculous and counterproductive.