A better argument was made in the case of copy machines. Better because it doesn't try to convince the public, but it convinced the legislature. That argument is why at my local libraries, each copier has a lable above it saying something about making copies without permission violates section 15 of something. Otherwise it would say "Please visit the Central Office with your written permission to make photocopies. -- And remember: our copy machines don't violate copyright, you do."
It's not the individuals who are making the stink about it, its the big corporations. The corps and the laws they can get their congresscritters to pass. So write your congresscritter. Also, you would be interested in this bill where Rep. Lofgren basically codifies what you are trying to get across.
Optical tracking, on the other hand, is the best improvement to the mouse that has been made since the scroll wheel.
Actually, optical mice have been around much longer than the mouse scroll wheel. I was using them on Xerox machines over a decade ago. It was at the time that the companies wanted you to keep them on the grey/black checkerboard, even though they worked on almost any surface.
As such, civil disobedience against the DMCA would (sadly) be a wasted effort for those of us north of the US-Canada border. About the best we can do from up here is to donate to the EFF, and hope they make a difference.
Not quite. Because the US and Canada politics have some close relationships, you could do things that are against the DMCA. It is sort-of like the crypto export issues, and other stupid problems with the US. Unlike crypto export, copyright issues affect everyone.
If the US is the only place that makes it illigal, and everyone all over the world (including the US) is doing it, then it makes the law pointless. If everyone were exporting strong crypto (it wouldn't make a difference) then the laws preventing it in the US would be (eventually) overturned by some reasonable judge.
So while donating to the EFF is a good thing (I'm not discouraging it), establishing a status-quo of violation of another country's laws would help get the law changed, or at least get people to move to your country.
And before that, it was estimated that 6 computers would be enough for the entire world. What are they useful for beyond filling out logarithm and projectile targeting tables, anyway?
N1 will make it much easier to run corporate data centres--thus eliminating much of the work now done by armies of systems administrators.
Since most business is small business, it doesn't change anything. As everyone has already pointed out, who will administer the adminstration tools? Who will fix the hardware problems? Who will run the wires or set up the WAP?
And for those of us who read the article, it is time to buy your Elvis white & rhinstone suit...
Fogel's ruling, issued Aug. 30, struck down PayPal's requirement that customers submit disputes to private, binding arbitration in Santa Clara County, rather than suing in court. It is the latest of several business arbitration policies to be overturned since the state Supreme Court set standards in 2000 for determining when a company's rules were unfairly one- sided
So at the national level (minimum standard) by using the service the people agree to be bound. But states can provide additional consumer protection (stricter standard). In this case, they decided that one-sided business practices could be challenged in court.
This isn't against the supreme court ruling at all. They just need two claims in the suit: (1) Challenge the business practice (one-sided arbitration) and (2) Seek assistance from improperly-handled complaints.
The font tag, used properly, CAN BE a great tool. Many HTML-generating programs don't use it properly. First, they don't specify just the elements they want in the font, they specify all the optional values, they specify absolute font sizes, and so on. Some wrap every line of text in their own font tag. Some programs wrap every line in EXACTLY THE SAME font tag. That's where it is wasteful.
The gripe with Yahoo! and others is (if you look at their code) every line of text has a font tag around it. Most of them are size=+1 and size=-1, and several lines that say: <small> <small> <br> </small> </small> . in fact, if you look at the yahoo! main page today, there are over 130 pairs of font tags, and about 200 words. That would generally be considered bad code-to-content ratio for formatting text.
Those are what is fairly wasteful.
As for the comment that they are standard, they are not. Tags like <big> and <small> are standard, but <font> was removed from the standard when CSS was introduced several years ago. The way you are supposed to do it is: <P style="font-size: 95%; color: blue" > or use whatever style tags you want. As part of the style, you could specify any of a number of font faces or styles. In this case, the paragraph should have a slightly smaller than normal font, in blue.
I believe in God and that the earth was created, and I believe in evolution. There is nothing contradictory between them, in my view.
I had a HS biology teacher explain this about a decade ago. When he explained it it was like hearing a truth expounded by a sage. He said something like this:
It's time to talk about the Theory of Evolution. Every year I get calls from outraged parents who think that in some way I'm denying God or their views of Creation. Personally I am Christian, I believe in God, and that He did create the Earth. I am also a biologist and believe in the theory of evolution. If YOU or your parents think that is sacrelige then simply remember that Evolution is still a THEORY, meaning not proven. For the rest of us, I think they work together quite nicely.
Let me explain: We know of billions of species on the Earth, and scientists think that they are only a small percentage of all the species on Earth. All creatures on Earth share over 90% of the same genes -- we don't even know what they do or how they do it. Do you really think that an all-powerful, all-knowing being would sit down and build every one from scratch? I would say "no". Such a being would create a single 'good' template creature and through reproduction, mutations, and other intercetion build a variety of creatures that can survive in all the climates of the Earth. God could easily have started with a single algae that was a good building block for all of life. It split into plants and amoeba, the amoeba became multi-celled, then more complex, and so on. God, being omnipotent, could easily have directed changes as needed.
If you want to stick with the 7 days and nights of creation, God could easily have been considering things at relativistic speeds, a week in his time was on earth, or have had some sort of age accelerator like you would have in star trek. The book of Genesis doesn't say how God did the things, only that he said to have them done and they were done. The commands to have them done would have been to billions of angels.
Going back to the example of evolution, there are ongoing studies of spiders that are migrating between a desert and a nearby taiga [forest]. The spiders are starting to drift apart genetically -- the taiga spiders are more aggressive since their environment demands it. The non-aggressive taiga spiders are dying off due to competition with the aggressive spiders. When the aggressive spiders move back to the desert, they quickly die because they attack scorpians and centipedes. When the two spiders mate, their offspring are not aggressive enough to survive in the taiga and not patient enough to live in the desert, and nearly always die. The scientists studing them are watching evolution occur; once their gene pools drift enough that the desert and taiga spiders cannot mate, they will be called two separate species.
Does that mean that God didn't create the Earth and everything that is in it? No, that is bad science. Science is applying logic to known facts. It only means that species CAN evolve and change. Does it mean that man came from apes? Again, the answer is no. Scientists see that Man and Apes have similar genetic structure, but all creatures on earth have similar genetic code. Science has not yet found good reasons for the differences between Man and Apes, such as the difference in the joining of the spine and skull, nor has it found reasons for Man being self-aware, aware of consequences to actions beyond the immediate, or the level of creativity that Mankind can show that no other species has demonstrated.
To explain all of that simply, science still relies on religion. Science is the 'how', and religion is the 'why'.
The same teacher was able to clearly explain and resolve potential reasons why things like carbon-dating could be off. (He had many potential reasons and was able to show in literature where the published assumptions can be found, such as the assumtion that the level of Carbon-14 has always been the same, even though some evidence has been submitted which is contrary to that.) In fact all of science is based on assumtions (I think they are correct, but we could all be wrong) that laws of science are Universal, that matter/energy cannot be created nor destroyed, and so on.
Not on technical subjects. On an area that I have experience, if you don't have experience I and ask you enough questions to make you very uncomfortable, or until I can either force you to say "I don't know" or state some obvious lies.
As an example (graphics is my area) I could start with basic operations
Ask: How can you tell if a poly is forward-facing or backward-facing? (Simple, use the normal, based on the cross-product) If they get it, but it sounds a little flakey...
Ask: Given these three points on the screen, tell me if this is a back face or front face? (Easy enough for experienced people, tricky for recent college grads with no experience, tough for pretenders.)
Ask: Where would you need to consider if a poly is forward- or backward-facing? (I would expect several answers, the foremost being culling.)
Just with those questions I could learn a lot about the person's skills in 3D. If they get the first question totally wrong ('There is no such thing as a front or back face, a polygon is a polygon') then you could tell them the right answer, and suggest that the job is not right for them at that time. If they just said it was based on the cross product, but couldn't compute a cross-product by hand, I would need to assess their math skills. I'd ask them where they would look it up, and if they felt is was something they would need to know for that job. Asking the open-ended question of where they would use it would totally blow away someone who is lying, as they wouldn't know what to say. A college grad who has heard the terms but can't remember could give examples, and an experienced person would rattle off culling, inside/outside detection (after bounding shape tests), collision detection, two-sided texture mapping (which side gets each texture), some skinning algorithms, and so on.
Of course, on any of those getting an "I don't know" will let you probe around that specific area to find out where the limits of their knowledge are.
Other than the hardware, it is skills (not money) that are required.
You said it yourself -- can afford to hire it. If they have the skills available through volunteers then hardware costs are the financial barrier. If they don't have the skills, they will have to hire people or obtain them through other means. That may mean paying professionals, or it may mean appealing to the public masses for volunteers, or a combination of the two.
I'm not disagreeing with disk imaging utilities. I have used them many times in my career. I agree and know from experiecne that windows records all its changes, and each change can potentially degrade performance. While working at a University I had the joy of working with Ghost on several labs with a combined total of probably 300 computers. When we built the disk images, we tried several things, and found that it worked best when each image was specific to each hardware configuration for Win98. I haven't used them on any of the Windows 2000 versions. I would imagine that W2K Professional would handle it fairly easily, while based on what I've seen, W2K Server has more hardware ties. I would assume Advanced Server and Datacenter Server have substantially more hardware ties.
Regardless...
Bull. WinXP will have some issues with doing this, however, 2K will be fine. At MOST it will require a reboot after initial detection.
Yes, it did reboot after initial detection. After reboot it then detected the 'new' processor again, and needed to reboot. Then it detected the hardware again, and needed to reboot. Then it detected the hardware again, and again, and again, and again... until we re-installed.
You may not believe me, but that is your option. We had (at that time) cluster of 24 computers for parallel processing. After the cluster had been up for just a few weeks, one of the CPU's in one of the nodes failed. BIOS showed the bad CPU, and we replaced it. Each of the machines was dual boot GNU/Linux and Windows 2000 Server. The GNU/Linux boot worked just fine, not even a note in the logs that the hardware was different.
It was on slashdot last week. The actual story is here.
There was some debate as to whether that made the book into a gift and/or unordered merchandise (under the laws of the postal service), or if the shrinkwrapped contract was enforceable. While the postal rules say you can recieve it as a gift, the cover states that opening the shrinkwrap implies acceptance of the license agreement.
The good search engines today use algorithms that were not even around 30 years ago
Actually, they were around. Most of them were in the information and library sciences. They were primarily text summary routines, reverse text lookup. They were around, but not popular until the early 1990's.
It doesn't work anymore. Windows 2000 and XP both have problems when you swap drives, even on the same hardware. They look at the CPU ID's and other garbage.
In one machine, we replaced a processor that died after a week -- Windows 2000 Server wanted to be reinstalled.
Of course, if you have two or three disks per machine, and keep each set of disks with that specific machine, then everything will work just peachy.
That's where the original poster had the problem, and you are correct. There is no standard for consent.
Do you imply consent to recieve postal mail? Yes. This isn't a probelem because you bear no cost. This may change in response to the sneak-wrap license in mailed books that have been reported. In that case you cannot discard or destroy what was mailed, and you must bear the cost of returning the item if you do not accept the charges.
Do you imply consent to recieve junk faxes? No. This is a problem because you would bear the recieve cost. A good example of this is faxing a looped paper with writing on it -- the reciever must throw out all the fax paper wasted before they notice the junk fax and disconnect the call.
Do you imply consent to have pages linked to? Possibly. By publishing information in tangible forms, libraries are authorized to collect it, references to the book/article can be legally made, and fair use copies can be made, even with the legal notice that copies in whole or part cannot be made by any means. The courts need to review if the URL is the same as a reference to an article, book, or other publication, and can be used regarless of legal notices to the contrary. For example, how could a report cite a website when they are unable to show the source? As for the bandwidth issue that the original poster mentioned, it is taken care of by the agreement between the ISP and individual.
Do you imply consent to recieve junk email? Possibly. You bear the cost for recieving the item, so many people classify it similar to a junk fax. Some people try to say it is the same as junk ads in postal mail, but it differs because of the assignment of cost.
A web site is pubilshed with the intent of being publicly viewable. While the/. effect (and similar problems from news sites) can cause problems, the content was placed there for public release and viewing. Generally web pages are placed on high-capacity ISP's. By publishing, you are explicitly offering it to the public. If the individual has a problem with their bandwidth agreement (such as automatically charging more rather than capping use) then it is the individual's problem, not the community's. It is of the form that the publisher pays to publish, and the viewer pays costs associated for viewing, and both consent to those fees.
An email box is a low-bandwidth item where everything must be reviewed by hand. Spam is unsolicited and can cost a significant amount to the reciever without their consent.
So in my view, posting and linking imply consent, spam is without consent. That's where the law should come in -- just like sex with consent is okay, but without consent is rape.
Use of any robot, spider, other automatic device, or manual process to monitor or copy our Web pages or the content contained herein is strictly forbidden.
Oops, looks like I just used a manual process to copy content.:)
So not only does the search engine link to it, but because of the way a search engine works it has to copy the content for indexing. That's not even mentioning google's cache. I would love to see some of these tried in court (but not the US court; it's too risky.)
Many standards have already been published. Things like PCI, AGP, and various processor socket pin layouts are well known. Also, instruction sets are common knowledge, and converting code bytes to/from assembly is is not difficult.
If you are asking for companies to release their schematics and actual instructions for the fabrication of the chips, that wouldn't be likely (just like OSS and Free Software isn't likely) from big corporations without a *LOT* of pushing. Those represent thousands or millions of work hours, and a huge investment. Unlike releasing under GPL and OSS licenses, companies cannot reasonably expect hackers to improve on their work because of the cost of fabrication and development, and therefore wouldn't see any potential benefit. Consider the multi-billion transistor chipsets -- that's a lot of work to be putting out.
Of course, if there is a large group of EE talent that is willing to volunteer the hours building and re-engineering chips, it might work.
Untrue. Zilla in ENGLISH has no meaning. Zilla or Zillah DOES have meaning in other languages, such as Arabic, and could be considered a suffix. Several US companies have taken the Arabic 'zillah' as part of their name, for example.
The word sounds interesting and was made popular by the Godzilla series, and then it became abused by a number of companies. That does not mean that Godzilla owns that particular series of letters.
As for their claim that Davezilla was using their name "GODZILLA", that would be a problem. (although he claims he did not.) Finally, as to their claims of ownership of the image, we would need to look at their trademark registration to see if the two images really are confusing (that's up to a Judge, if Davezilla wants to do that).
Slashdot Mirror
It's not the individuals who are making the stink about it, its the big corporations. The corps and the laws they can get their congresscritters to pass. So write your congresscritter. Also, you would be interested in this bill where Rep. Lofgren basically codifies what you are trying to get across.
frob.
Some people are SO inconsiderate. <grin>
Frob.
frob.
Not quite. Because the US and Canada politics have some close relationships, you could do things that are against the DMCA. It is sort-of like the crypto export issues, and other stupid problems with the US. Unlike crypto export, copyright issues affect everyone.
If the US is the only place that makes it illigal, and everyone all over the world (including the US) is doing it, then it makes the law pointless. If everyone were exporting strong crypto (it wouldn't make a difference) then the laws preventing it in the US would be (eventually) overturned by some reasonable judge.
So while donating to the EFF is a good thing (I'm not discouraging it), establishing a status-quo of violation of another country's laws would help get the law changed, or at least get people to move to your country.
frob.
And before that, it was estimated that 6 computers would be enough for the entire world. What are they useful for beyond filling out logarithm and projectile targeting tables, anyway?
Since most business is small business, it doesn't change anything. As everyone has already pointed out, who will administer the adminstration tools? Who will fix the hardware problems? Who will run the wires or set up the WAP?
And for those of us who read the article, it is time to buy your Elvis white & rhinstone suit...
This isn't against the supreme court ruling at all. They just need two claims in the suit: (1) Challenge the business practice (one-sided arbitration) and (2) Seek assistance from improperly-handled complaints.
Frob.
The font tag, used properly, CAN BE a great tool. Many HTML-generating programs don't use it properly. First, they don't specify just the elements they want in the font, they specify all the optional values, they specify absolute font sizes, and so on. Some wrap every line of text in their own font tag. Some programs wrap every line in EXACTLY THE SAME font tag. That's where it is wasteful.
The gripe with Yahoo! and others is (if you look at their code) every line of text has a font tag around it. Most of them are size=+1 and size=-1, and several lines that say: <small> <small> <br> </small> </small> . in fact, if you look at the yahoo! main page today, there are over 130 pairs of font tags, and about 200 words. That would generally be considered bad code-to-content ratio for formatting text.
Those are what is fairly wasteful.
As for the comment that they are standard, they are not. Tags like <big> and <small> are standard, but <font> was removed from the standard when CSS was introduced several years ago. The way you are supposed to do it is: <P style="font-size: 95%; color: blue" > or use whatever style tags you want. As part of the style, you could specify any of a number of font faces or styles. In this case, the paragraph should have a slightly smaller than normal font, in blue.
Frob.
I believe in God and that the earth was created, and I believe in evolution. There is nothing contradictory between them, in my view. I had a HS biology teacher explain this about a decade ago. When he explained it it was like hearing a truth expounded by a sage. He said something like this:
The same teacher was able to clearly explain and resolve potential reasons why things like carbon-dating could be off. (He had many potential reasons and was able to show in literature where the published assumptions can be found, such as the assumtion that the level of Carbon-14 has always been the same, even though some evidence has been submitted which is contrary to that.) In fact all of science is based on assumtions (I think they are correct, but we could all be wrong) that laws of science are Universal, that matter/energy cannot be created nor destroyed, and so on.
As an example (graphics is my area) I could start with basic operations
- Ask: How can you tell if a poly is forward-facing or backward-facing? (Simple, use the normal, based on the cross-product) If they get it, but it sounds a little flakey...
- Ask: Given these three points on the screen, tell me if this is a back face or front face? (Easy enough for experienced people, tricky for recent college grads with no experience, tough for pretenders.)
- Ask: Where would you need to consider if a poly is forward- or backward-facing? (I would expect several answers, the foremost being culling.)
Just with those questions I could learn a lot about the person's skills in 3D. If they get the first question totally wrong ('There is no such thing as a front or back face, a polygon is a polygon') then you could tell them the right answer, and suggest that the job is not right for them at that time. If they just said it was based on the cross product, but couldn't compute a cross-product by hand, I would need to assess their math skills. I'd ask them where they would look it up, and if they felt is was something they would need to know for that job. Asking the open-ended question of where they would use it would totally blow away someone who is lying, as they wouldn't know what to say. A college grad who has heard the terms but can't remember could give examples, and an experienced person would rattle off culling, inside/outside detection (after bounding shape tests), collision detection, two-sided texture mapping (which side gets each texture), some skinning algorithms, and so on.Of course, on any of those getting an "I don't know" will let you probe around that specific area to find out where the limits of their knowledge are.
frob.
You said it yourself -- can afford to hire it. If they have the skills available through volunteers then hardware costs are the financial barrier. If they don't have the skills, they will have to hire people or obtain them through other means. That may mean paying professionals, or it may mean appealing to the public masses for volunteers, or a combination of the two.
frob.
I'm not disagreeing with disk imaging utilities. I have used them many times in my career. I agree and know from experiecne that windows records all its changes, and each change can potentially degrade performance. While working at a University I had the joy of working with Ghost on several labs with a combined total of probably 300 computers. When we built the disk images, we tried several things, and found that it worked best when each image was specific to each hardware configuration for Win98. I haven't used them on any of the Windows 2000 versions. I would imagine that W2K Professional would handle it fairly easily, while based on what I've seen, W2K Server has more hardware ties. I would assume Advanced Server and Datacenter Server have substantially more hardware ties.
Regardless...
Yes, it did reboot after initial detection. After reboot it then detected the 'new' processor again, and needed to reboot. Then it detected the hardware again, and needed to reboot. Then it detected the hardware again, and again, and again, and again... until we re-installed.
You may not believe me, but that is your option. We had (at that time) cluster of 24 computers for parallel processing. After the cluster had been up for just a few weeks, one of the CPU's in one of the nodes failed. BIOS showed the bad CPU, and we replaced it. Each of the machines was dual boot GNU/Linux and Windows 2000 Server. The GNU/Linux boot worked just fine, not even a note in the logs that the hardware was different.
It was on slashdot last week. The actual story is here.
There was some debate as to whether that made the book into a gift and/or unordered merchandise (under the laws of the postal service), or if the shrinkwrapped contract was enforceable. While the postal rules say you can recieve it as a gift, the cover states that opening the shrinkwrap implies acceptance of the license agreement.
In one machine, we replaced a processor that died after a week -- Windows 2000 Server wanted to be reinstalled.
Of course, if you have two or three disks per machine, and keep each set of disks with that specific machine, then everything will work just peachy.
Do you imply consent to recieve postal mail? Yes. This isn't a probelem because you bear no cost. This may change in response to the sneak-wrap license in mailed books that have been reported. In that case you cannot discard or destroy what was mailed, and you must bear the cost of returning the item if you do not accept the charges.
Do you imply consent to recieve junk faxes? No. This is a problem because you would bear the recieve cost. A good example of this is faxing a looped paper with writing on it -- the reciever must throw out all the fax paper wasted before they notice the junk fax and disconnect the call.
Do you imply consent to have pages linked to? Possibly. By publishing information in tangible forms, libraries are authorized to collect it, references to the book/article can be legally made, and fair use copies can be made, even with the legal notice that copies in whole or part cannot be made by any means. The courts need to review if the URL is the same as a reference to an article, book, or other publication, and can be used regarless of legal notices to the contrary. For example, how could a report cite a website when they are unable to show the source? As for the bandwidth issue that the original poster mentioned, it is taken care of by the agreement between the ISP and individual.
Do you imply consent to recieve junk email? Possibly. You bear the cost for recieving the item, so many people classify it similar to a junk fax. Some people try to say it is the same as junk ads in postal mail, but it differs because of the assignment of cost.
frob.
Of course, that means you can't view a page TWICE.
A web site is pubilshed with the intent of being publicly viewable. While the /. effect (and similar problems from news sites) can cause problems, the content was placed there for public release and viewing. Generally web pages are placed on high-capacity ISP's. By publishing, you are explicitly offering it to the public. If the individual has a problem with their bandwidth agreement (such as automatically charging more rather than capping use) then it is the individual's problem, not the community's. It is of the form that the publisher pays to publish, and the viewer pays costs associated for viewing, and both consent to those fees.
An email box is a low-bandwidth item where everything must be reviewed by hand. Spam is unsolicited and can cost a significant amount to the reciever without their consent.
So in my view, posting and linking imply consent, spam is without consent. That's where the law should come in -- just like sex with consent is okay, but without consent is rape.
frob.
So not only does the search engine link to it, but because of the way a search engine works it has to copy the content for indexing. That's not even mentioning google's cache. I would love to see some of these tried in court (but not the US court; it's too risky.)
If you are asking for companies to release their schematics and actual instructions for the fabrication of the chips, that wouldn't be likely (just like OSS and Free Software isn't likely) from big corporations without a *LOT* of pushing. Those represent thousands or millions of work hours, and a huge investment. Unlike releasing under GPL and OSS licenses, companies cannot reasonably expect hackers to improve on their work because of the cost of fabrication and development, and therefore wouldn't see any potential benefit. Consider the multi-billion transistor chipsets -- that's a lot of work to be putting out.
Of course, if there is a large group of EE talent that is willing to volunteer the hours building and re-engineering chips, it might work.
frob.
Factorization is the 'hard' problem that keeps PKE working.
frob.
The word sounds interesting and was made popular by the Godzilla series, and then it became abused by a number of companies. That does not mean that Godzilla owns that particular series of letters.
As for their claim that Davezilla was using their name "GODZILLA", that would be a problem. (although he claims he did not.) Finally, as to their claims of ownership of the image, we would need to look at their trademark registration to see if the two images really are confusing (that's up to a Judge, if Davezilla wants to do that).
frob.
Go!Zilla, nomo zilla, :Zilla Clothing, My Zilla, Budgie-ZILLA, ZILLA sports, TrafficZilla, WebZilla, and even a thorny plant named Zilla
So they have lots of legal battles if they want. (Watch them claim that the thorny Zilla plant stole their ideas of a thorny reptile...)
frob.
The EFF Alerts are the most successful attempt yet. Visit them.