Get the story straight. It was [built by the USPS itself and] shut down due to cost constraints.
I'll stand corrected. I had that word of mouth.
As far as the other points you make, please substantiate them. Or did postal hisotry revisionists destroy that in a Vanal-esque period of American history we are unaware of?
Other posters have pointed out the the feud between the USPS and western union. (Composing a web search for the similar issue with fax is difficult, since there's so much stuff mentioning faxing and mailing filings for suits. B-) And I don't have time to hit a hardcopy library. So if you want to assert that the fight over the telegraph established precedents on wire transmission that headed off a fight on faximile I won't argue.)
On my main point: If you don't want to hit a physical library do a search for "Lysander Spooner" just for starters. here's a sample (edited to somewhat less colorfull language. When history - especially anarchist history - gets onto the web it's often posted by people with axes to grind. B-) ):
By the 1840's the issues of stamps and liberty collided again. During this period the fee for mail delivery was between 18-25 cents. Considering by 1865, the standard price for first-class delivery of letter weighing under 1/2oz was 2-3 cents, it proved to be a rather hefty, bloated and highly unpopular price....
In short, competition against the state's monopoly was not only desired but, due to the state's monopoly over mail delivery, the reform was slow in coming. A businessman who would successfully "take up, receive, order, dispatch, carry, convey or deliver any letter or letters, packet or packets, other than newspapers for hire or reward", in competition of the Post Office, would soon have their operation shut down...
Eventually this would lead to a breach in the postal monopoly through a jury verdict [United States v. Adams & Company (1843)]. Even though it was still 'illegal' for anyone to set up a stagecoach or other company to transport the letters, the jury agreed that passengers could rightfully carrying their own mail, or someone else's mail, and they refused to convict Adams...
Naturally, a number of companies soon sprang up to take advantage of the new laissez-faire loophole in the system. For the most part, these start-up postal companies were paying passengers a small sum to carry letters on a train or boat to the city which these passengers were already traveling to -- a win-win situation for all parties involved. Upon arrival, the passengers would transfer the letters they were paid to carry to couriers, who would deliver them to the addressee. Among these start-up companies was Lysander Spooner's American Letter Mail Company (Jan. 1844): a letter carrier service operating between Boston and New York, and soon after Philadelphia, and Baltimore.
Upon starting his venture Spooner boldly sent a letter to the Post Master General stating his intentions and, along with the letter, Spooner (who was trained attorney) enclosed one of his radical, well-reasoned pamphlets entitled The Unconstitutionality of the Laws of Congress Prohibiting Private Mails.
Soon Spooner's company was literally out-competing the Post Office's first-class mail 'service'; [The USPS took him to court and ran him out of money]
I've seen this already, and personally, I think it's a lot of crap. What is he suggesting? That any other systems of E-mail aside from ones controlled by the USPS would be *illegal*?
Exactly.
The USPS has a long history of using federal law to stamp out competing mail services.
The usual excuse is that it undermines fixed-rate universal service by "cherry-picking" the inespensive job of delivering mail in and between cities or their business-office cores, which subsidizes the mail in rural areas. Federal law gives them a monopoly on first class mail and its equivalents (sealed point-to-point message) and they have enforced it jealously in the past.
- Against many private competing mail carriers. - Against bicycle couriers. (Sometimes they'd let them carry and deliver IF you also bought a stamp.) - Against (shutting down) a pneumatic-tube package-deleivery system in Manhattan.
and so on.
I think they tried against Fax but the Bell system slapped them down. (They're a regulated monopoly.) Fedex initially got away with it because they promise overnight delivery (not available from USPS at the time) for a much HIGHER price than first-class mail.
What happens when people become nodes on a network?
People ARE nodes in a network. They have been since before there was electronic communication. They have been since they were prehuman apes.
It's called "being a social animal."
It's why making friends who might engage in mutually-beneficial projects and getting such friends to introduce you to other such friends, is called "networking".
Engineering and analyzing the structure and emergent behavior of electronic communication netowrks has given us additional understanding of the behavior, even as the electronic networks themselves have aided and amplified the functioning of the social networks.
"Global village" was coined when the only ones with effective access to large-scale communication was the professional newscriers and gossips. But general access to directed communication enables a "global city" - with distinct boroughs of differing cultures and interests but without geographic limitations.
Yep. The "Slashdot Effect" is the subset of Slashdot user behavior that cooresponds to a virtual flash crowd: Everybody "teleports" to the site of the news event.
But a "Smart Mob" is much different from a "Flash Crowd".
With a "Flash Crowd" hi-tek communication only enables the initial gathering. Once the mob forms they have the same characteristics as a pre-tech mob: Interpersonal communication is minimal, and the "mob organism" exhibits the collective intelligence of an ant army, far lower than that of a committee.
A "Smart Mob", on the other hand, has instant communication between separated members (and people not present). This enables large-scale organized behavior, cohesive action, regrouping, healing of "wounds", etc.
A Smart Mob has the same relation to a Flash Crowd as the "Permanent Floating Riot Club" did in the Niven short story. Though usually less hostile and sociopathic. B-)
Note that this is another example of human self-organizing behavior. Organizing people is never a problem - they do it spontaneously. Keeping them from organizing to do something undesirable, or doing something undesirable once organized, often is. (Which is why the US Constitution is primarily composed of rules limiting and channeling the government's power.)
In any sort of combat situation, there are only two types of people. You, and your enemy. Is that clear? Perhaps our society would do better to not listen to the likes of Gandhi...
Speaking of Ghandi - are you aware of his suggestion for what the Ashkenazi should do to protest the Third Reich's oppression of Jews?
Mass suicide in protest.
Sorry, but that's not on MY agenda as a way to resist oppression.
If you are doing regenerative braking (using the motor to generate electricity, and slowing yourself down in the process), you can waste the energy as heat (uncomfortable), use it to charge batteries (wasteful, since the efficiency is low, probably less than 50% for the round trip), pump water uphill (might be problematic in NYC, might not be very efficient), or spin up a flywheel attached to a generator. This last might actually have lower efficiency than the battery solution...
No way! Motors and generators can easily be designed with efficiencies approaching 100%. Excluding electric heaters (which are exactly 199%, since all the waste is heat B-) they're about the most efficient electrical devices known.
They'd slag down otherwise - ONE horsepower is almost exactly 3/4 of one KILOwatt - or half a high-end portable electric space heater. So one percent of loss in a 10,000 horsepower motor, generator, or rotary converter is 50 space heaters running full-blast at once. Much of that appears as heat in the copper windings and nearly all the rest as heat in the iron cores they wrap (with negligible losses as bearing friction and air resistance). So you'd quickly have molten copper and red-hot soft iron rather than a rotary machine if it weren't hysterically efficient.
The flywheel is even better: Bearing and air friction are the main drags, and they're tiny. (If you could put it in a magnetically-shielded perfect vaccuum bottle on hypothetical frictionless bearings the next biggest loss would be tidal heating - which won't stop it for geologic time.)
Contracts are allowed to be secret. Making a few extra copies of one you have signed or are considering might be fair use. But putting the full text of one in a database and publishing the database almost certainly isn't.
I could see that logic being applied to a negotiated contract; Company X may not want Company Y to know what Company Z's terms are. But EULA's are boiler plate and distributed to anyone who buys the software. They're not exactly secret, and I could be considering accepting the EULA for almost any software product at anytime.
That's not the issue.
The issue is that the other party owns the right to copy the document, and to license that right to others in the way that, in their opinion, will maximize their return (or otherwise do things to advance their interests). It's THEIRS. They OWN it. YOU can only use it (beyond "fair use") if you BUY the right from them, and only to the extent that they voluntarily licensed you.
Now maybe you're a competitor writing your own ELUA who doesn't want to spend the money on lawyers to craft one for you, but instead intend to take advantage of the text THEY paid THEIR lawyers to write - and then to litigate and set precedent with. Or maybe such people will read the data base and do the same. Or maybe you'll publish articles holding it up for ridicule and copy the WHOLE THING as a sidebar. Doesn't matter. It's theirs. If they don't want you to do something with it that, in THEIR opinion, hurts them (or doesn't help them enough, or doesn't fit their business model), tough luck.
Texas (and many other states) passed a building code "by reference." What this means is that they wrote a law saying, "Construction Company Consortium Foo has published a building code called Bar. It is now the law. Ask them for a copy." Builders are now requiored to follow a law they are not legally allowed to view, except by buying it from the industry association that wrote it.
There's a challenge to the building code copyright, on the basis that the intent of the model code was for it to be written into law, so writing it into the law is fair use and then copies of the law are then not copyrighted (though the model code, with the identical words, still is).
Of course if that loophole for the building code pans out it won't apply to ELUAs. They were never passed into law by a legislature, so their copyrights (if any) are rock-solid.
They're a CONTRACT. As such they're the work product of one or more lawyers, probably a work-for-hire so the client owns the copyright. Contracts are allowed to be secret. Making a few extra copies of one you have signed or are considering might be fair use. But putting the full text of one in a database and publishing the database almost certainly isn't.
You have to solve a computer-science tough problem
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Control of the .ORG TLD
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· Score: 3, Informative
The way this ought to work is with the database is distributed and replicated across all the registrars, with a majority-voting system for forcing consistency. That would eliminate any single point of failure.
Unfortunately that gets you into the "distributed update problem" which is unsolved (and may be insoluble).
Determining that.org is currently available and assigning it (thus making it unavailable) is an atomic action. Ways to reliably distribute such actions non-hierarchically across cooperating systems have not been found.
(It's not like nobody is working on this problem. It's the same as making a withdrawal from an account, but only if there's money to cover it. So there's big money to be made by getting it right on a no-single-point-of-failure distributed system. It's also the same as determining what constitutes the canonical "latest published" edition of a document - or piece of software - that is subject to revision. So hypertexties, computer scientists, and other academics have been beating their heads against it for years, too.)
The only practical solutions to date have been to have a designated system be the canonical decision-maker - and thus the authority on who is and who is not registered. This makes the operator of that system both the authority on who is and who is not registered, and the maintainer of the one canonical list (which is downloaded onto the other servers).
You can subdivide the namespace and have a multiplicity of "authorities", each with their own "turf". But this creates a hierarchy, starting with one particular authority who maintains the "root of the world" first level of division of the namespace. But that's what we have now..ORG would be a good place to deploy such a technology, so that when.COM comes up for renewal, we can get rid of the current single point of control.
Right. And if anybody solves the hard problem it will give us a testing ground that only has problems for non-profits, not for businesses that can lose megabux if they're down for a day, if bugs show up. B-)
The same argument could be used to stream videos.
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Borrowing ROMs
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Console Classics' legal argument http://www.consoleclassix.com/legal.htm could as easily be used by a video streaming service to "rent" movies over the internet. Rules:
- Don't bypass the encryption - digitize a tape or the output of a DVD player rather than using DECSS.
- Stream it to customers using a client that doesn't make a non-ephemeral local copy and dumps cache if the connection is lost (i.e. Realplay, Microsoft's media player with appropriate flags set, or a client of your own.)
- Don't have more streams going than you have purchased copies of the original program. (Might also be good to digitize each copy separately.)
Of course you'd want to rent for a several-day period (like a video rental store) rather than releasing the copy for re-rental as soon as the customer is done with it. Otherwise you'll have a much faster turnaround than a video store and will thus rent more showings per copy. Good for you but bad for the studio, so they're more likely to go after you in court.
Even with the same rental times you'll probably be slightly more efficient than a video chain, since you'll have ONE virtual store with a single pool of virtual tapes to serve all the customers, rather than having to divide the copies among multiple physical stores and guess the local markets right. But that's small potatoes. Your big profit improvement over a classic rental chain will come from not having to maintain the physical stores.
I thought that myth had been debunked. It now has passed into the realm of the 'factoid'.
Spaff published the piece a week before it was debunked. The file is dated Jul 19, the article you cite follows from an Economist article dated Jul 26.
Now looks like what we had was:
2 years of tenfold growth
3 years of twofold growth.
(dotcom bubble pop)
2 more years where numbers aren't in (though DSL connects were about doubling per year).
Substituting "doubles every year" in Spaff's article makes it a bit less gee-whiz, but no less valid.
LightReading had a very well-researched article about this earlier in the week.
And according to the article Worldcom was talking factor-of-10 per year, when in fact that was the right number for 1995 and 1996, but after that it was about factor-of-two per year. Still respectable, but nowhere NEAR Worldcom's numbers.
So with a factor-of-5 per year shortfall (and assuming bandwidth and customer base are proportional) when the bubble finally burst in early 2000 the dotcommers had one potential customer for each 125 they were expecting.
Having less than one percent of the market you thought you had can make the difference between a fantastic business plan and wastpaper.
WorldCom would hook up new customers with connections capable of handling, say, up to 1.5 Mbit/s of data, knowing that for most of the time the lines would only carry a fraction of this amount. WorldCom would then use the 1.5 Mbit/s figures, not the actual traffic figures, when citing Internet traffic growth statistics.
So they were like a water company talking about how much water you COULD use if you left your faucets open and sprinklers on 24/7, rather than how much you actually ran. (And if everybody else did, too. And if the city left all the fire hydrants open...)
Once the infrastructure (or is it extrastructure? but I digress) for bandwidth is there, isn't bandwidth actually free? I mean, I know that there are costs involved with running the network, upkeep of epuiptment, salaries to pay, ect.
No, it's not free. Because it isn't PAID for yet.
If they'd charged everybody an instalation fee that covered their costs to install the entire infrastructure, THEN it would be very cheap - maintainence, repair, helpdesk, billing department, etc. But would you want to pay, say, ten grand to get a phone hooked up? I don't think so.
So instead they borrow the ten grand per customer (or whatever) to build the network, and pay it off with interest over the next thirty years from the money they charge the customers. Your instalation fee pays maybe part of the installer's visit and the equipment he installs (if they don't wave that in a promotion to get more people hooked up.)
That's why it's such a disaster when they plan for customers who don't show up. They still have to pay off the loans, but they don't have a gang of people like you paying bills for your "almost free" bandwidth.
A price war (where there's competition) doesn't really solve the problem, because if they lower prices enough to attract people, they cut what you're paying so much that, even if they get EVERYBODY hooked up they won't collect enough to pay off the loan.
And that means that if people don't sign up and pay reasonable bills the providers will go bankrupt. If that happens the bond holders get paid pennies on the dollar, while the successors inherit or buy the installed equipment for pennies on the dollar. THEN the pices come down - possibly getting close to the maintainence cost plus a price-signal fee. But don't expect investors to pay for any new equipment when that new suburb goes up, or to string wires anywhere that doesn't already have them. Bandwidth fees become a way of rationing the installed base, like a natural resource limited commodity, rather than actually paying for the construction of the net.
Same thing happened with cable TV. Most cable systems went bankrupt, sometimes several times, before they actually became profitable (if they ever did). The original investors mostly lost their money while the systems ended up in the hands of the media conglomerates.
Didn't HP have the Pavillion that competed against Dell?
HP's computers, like the rest of their hardware, was built to a higher (and more expensive) standard, hardware-reliability wise. (I haven't opened mine to check, but HP's traditional approach to printed circuit boards is to plate the ENTIRE BOARD with gold, not just the contacts, for better corrosion resistance, extended life, and improved electrical stability.)
They inherited this approach from their history as a maker of high-end test equipment and factory automation.
This tends to make their stuff a bit pricey for the home market that Dell caters to. And downgrading it to go after consumers risks losing their niche in industry.
Looks like one bad decision after the next. First that moronic Compaq-HP merger and then this.
Makes sense to me.
Why would Dell want to be dependent on Compaq for its printers?
Why would Compaq want to assist Dell's sales of computer systems by selling them printers.
I expect Compaq-HP would have cut Dell off eventually, or ramped up the printer prices to put them at a competitive disadvantage to Compaq's line and sucked out their market share in the PC business. (If nothing else, continuing the relationship would bring up anti-trust issues eventually.)
So Dell started cutting the apron strings, and Compaq used this as an excuse to do as much damage to them as possible in one hit.
I could be wrong, but I don't think that's how it works. I thought the trick was to get the 'target' to _send_ the +++ATH0, not just recv it.
If I read this right:
You send him a ping (ICMP echo request) with the modem command in the payload.
He sends you a ping response (ICMP echo reply) with that same modem command in the reply's payload. He just sent it to the modem.
If he's on a PPP/slip link it looks to the modem like a command embedded in the stream.
If the modem doesn't correctly ignore commands where there isn't a minimum half-second pause (with no transitions whatsoever - even start/stop bits) between the +++ and the ATH, you got him.
Of course if YOU'RE on PPP/slip on a serial link you have to be careful that YOUR modem doesn't hang up and dial 911, too. B-)
Let's not go generalizing between consumer marketplace software and that designed for automating medical equipment, or between...... HMO or low-budget retirement home administrators and the people who build the FDA-approved equipment they use.
[Money] is a way to split barter into two halves, so a plumber doesn't have to find a farmer with a stopped-up sink whenever he wants groceries.
And without money a crook can just as easily steal the groceries, or kidnap the plumber and make him fix his sink.
I'm sure the people who designed Therac 25 knew that as well, but they still screwed up and killed patients.
An example of "Yes you can get screwups." - which will be the Tacoma Narrows Bridge / Three Mile Island of medical automation for the next century (or until a bigger screwup happens). It's also an example of the belt, suspenders, and wasteband button all snapping at once.
But how many medical automation products are in use? And how many of them are killing people through software bugs? I think you'll find that, in general, medical automation is already designed, implemented, and tested to a MUCH higher standard than, say, your latest commercial desktop OS.
We only need to look for a few minutes at most any place using technology to see people embracing mediocrity with little care. With each passing year, I worry more and more about the medical community too. The things I see in hospitals is especially worrysome.
Let's not go generalizing between consumer marketplace software and that designed for automating medical equipment, or between
I know it's cliche, but this is what happens when your primary focus is money. That's why the love of money is called the root of all evil. As long as profit happens, the mediocrity will continue, because the people making the money don't care about anything but making the money.
No. The problems you allude to are not inherent in money. They are what happens when short-sighted administrators focus solely on near-term profit (and are psychopathic enough to ignore non-money risks of human injury). Map human consequences into monitary terms by such mechanisms as liability suits and even a psychopath can grasp that cutting corners and killing people is a bad bet. And it's the job of the upper-level management (starting with the board) to insure that the lower-level managment (starting with the president, CEO, COO) aren't simultaneously short-sighted and psychopathic enough to take bad chances and kill the company.
Short-sighted crooks we will always have with us, and sometimes they work their ways into positions of trust. But encoding consequences into money terms can bite them big-time. Arthur Anderson LLP's board didn't institute such policies. Arthur Anderson LLP is as good as DEAD. An administrator at Worldcom got into a debt bind and cooked the books to save his own butt. Worldcom is bankrupt and he was the first one kicked out the door. And so on.
There's nothing magic - evil OR good - about money. It's just a convenient means for quantifying human effort and values, aspirations and miseries. It is "crystalized labor". It is a way to split barter into two halves, so a plumber doesn't have to find a farmer with a stopped-up sink whenever he wants groceries.
When you concentrate enough value and power in one place to do great good, you concentrate enough to do great evil. It's the people who then handle it who decide whether it does good or evil. And its the institutions around it that create good consequences for those who do good and bad for those who do evil. If the institutions work well enough, even most evil people may chose to do good - and the ones who chose to do evil will get squashed as a result.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll stand corrected. I had that word of mouth.
As far as the other points you make, please substantiate them. Or did postal hisotry revisionists destroy that in a Vanal-esque period of American history we are unaware of?
Other posters have pointed out the the feud between the USPS and western union. (Composing a web search for the similar issue with fax is difficult, since there's so much stuff mentioning faxing and mailing filings for suits. B-) And I don't have time to hit a hardcopy library. So if you want to assert that the fight over the telegraph established precedents on wire transmission that headed off a fight on faximile I won't argue.)
On my main point: If you don't want to hit a physical library do a search for "Lysander Spooner" just for starters. here's a sample (edited to somewhat less colorfull language. When history - especially anarchist history - gets onto the web it's often posted by people with axes to grind. B-) ):
I've seen this already, and personally, I think it's a lot of crap. What is he suggesting? That any other systems of E-mail aside from ones controlled by the USPS would be *illegal*?
Exactly.
The USPS has a long history of using federal law to stamp out competing mail services.
The usual excuse is that it undermines fixed-rate universal service by "cherry-picking" the inespensive job of delivering mail in and between cities or their business-office cores, which subsidizes the mail in rural areas. Federal law gives them a monopoly on first class mail and its equivalents (sealed point-to-point message) and they have enforced it jealously in the past.
- Against many private competing mail carriers.
- Against bicycle couriers. (Sometimes they'd let them carry and deliver IF you also bought a stamp.)
- Against (shutting down) a pneumatic-tube package-deleivery system in Manhattan.
and so on.
I think they tried against Fax but the Bell system slapped them down. (They're a regulated monopoly.) Fedex initially got away with it because they promise overnight delivery (not available from USPS at the time) for a much HIGHER price than first-class mail.
What happens when people become nodes on a network?
People ARE nodes in a network. They have been since before there was electronic communication. They have been since they were prehuman apes.
It's called "being a social animal."
It's why making friends who might engage in mutually-beneficial projects and getting such friends to introduce you to other such friends, is called "networking".
Engineering and analyzing the structure and emergent behavior of electronic communication netowrks has given us additional understanding of the behavior, even as the electronic networks themselves have aided and amplified the functioning of the social networks.
"Global village" was coined when the only ones with effective access to large-scale communication was the professional newscriers and gossips. But general access to directed communication enables a "global city" - with distinct boroughs of differing cultures and interests but without geographic limitations.
Flash Crowd == Slashdot Effect.
Yep. The "Slashdot Effect" is the subset of Slashdot user behavior that cooresponds to a virtual flash crowd: Everybody "teleports" to the site of the news event.
But a "Smart Mob" is much different from a "Flash Crowd".
With a "Flash Crowd" hi-tek communication only enables the initial gathering. Once the mob forms they have the same characteristics as a pre-tech mob: Interpersonal communication is minimal, and the "mob organism" exhibits the collective intelligence of an ant army, far lower than that of a committee.
A "Smart Mob", on the other hand, has instant communication between separated members (and people not present). This enables large-scale organized behavior, cohesive action, regrouping, healing of "wounds", etc.
A Smart Mob has the same relation to a Flash Crowd as the "Permanent Floating Riot Club" did in the Niven short story. Though usually less hostile and sociopathic. B-)
Note that this is another example of human self-organizing behavior. Organizing people is never a problem - they do it spontaneously. Keeping them from organizing to do something undesirable, or doing something undesirable once organized, often is. (Which is why the US Constitution is primarily composed of rules limiting and channeling the government's power.)
Too funny. Someone's been reading user friendly and decided to fight back perhaps?
I wonder how long until somebody DoSes reps Berman and Coble (and any other cosponsors of the legislation)?
It's not like the DoSsers can drive them any further into the RIAA's camp than they already are.
In any sort of combat situation, there are only two types of people. You, and your enemy. Is that clear? Perhaps our society would do better to not listen to the likes of Gandhi ...
Speaking of Ghandi - are you aware of his suggestion for what the Ashkenazi should do to protest the Third Reich's oppression of Jews?
Mass suicide in protest.
Sorry, but that's not on MY agenda as a way to resist oppression.
electric heaters (which are exactly 199%, since all the waste is heat B-)
Oops. Typo: 100%
(I'd have proofread it better but previewing or posting through the company's firewall and proxy server tends to crap out 19 times in 20.)
If you are doing regenerative braking (using the motor to generate electricity, and slowing yourself down in the process), you can waste the energy as heat (uncomfortable), use it to charge batteries (wasteful, since the efficiency is low, probably less than 50% for the round trip), pump water uphill (might be problematic in NYC, might not be very efficient), or spin up a flywheel attached to a generator. This last might actually have lower efficiency than the battery solution ...
No way! Motors and generators can easily be designed with efficiencies approaching 100%. Excluding electric heaters (which are exactly 199%, since all the waste is heat B-) they're about the most efficient electrical devices known.
They'd slag down otherwise - ONE horsepower is almost exactly 3/4 of one KILOwatt - or half a high-end portable electric space heater. So one percent of loss in a 10,000 horsepower motor, generator, or rotary converter is 50 space heaters running full-blast at once. Much of that appears as heat in the copper windings and nearly all the rest as heat in the iron cores they wrap (with negligible losses as bearing friction and air resistance). So you'd quickly have molten copper and red-hot soft iron rather than a rotary machine if it weren't hysterically efficient.
The flywheel is even better: Bearing and air friction are the main drags, and they're tiny. (If you could put it in a magnetically-shielded perfect vaccuum bottle on hypothetical frictionless bearings the next biggest loss would be tidal heating - which won't stop it for geologic time.)
Batteries aren't in the same league.
That's not the issue.
The issue is that the other party owns the right to copy the document, and to license that right to others in the way that, in their opinion, will maximize their return (or otherwise do things to advance their interests). It's THEIRS. They OWN it. YOU can only use it (beyond "fair use") if you BUY the right from them, and only to the extent that they voluntarily licensed you.
Now maybe you're a competitor writing your own ELUA who doesn't want to spend the money on lawyers to craft one for you, but instead intend to take advantage of the text THEY paid THEIR lawyers to write - and then to litigate and set precedent with. Or maybe such people will read the data base and do the same. Or maybe you'll publish articles holding it up for ridicule and copy the WHOLE THING as a sidebar. Doesn't matter. It's theirs. If they don't want you to do something with it that, in THEIR opinion, hurts them (or doesn't help them enough, or doesn't fit their business model), tough luck.
If you really have time, you might want to try to make an English translation of the EULAs so you're not breaking the copyright on them.
The original Copyright covers translations, too.
What if I didn't agree the the EULA of the product, and never opened it? Would I be in trouble for reproducing it?
Then you don't have a contract with the other party, which means if it's copyrighted you don't have a license to redistribute it.
Are EULA's copyrighted?
Yes, if the author/client wants them to be.
And since the US copyright law was "harmonized" with the Bourne Convention they don't even have to SAY that they're copyrighted to be copyrighted.
Texas (and many other states) passed a building code "by reference." What this means is that they wrote a law saying, "Construction Company Consortium Foo has published a building code called Bar. It is now the law. Ask them for a copy." Builders are now requiored to follow a law they are not legally allowed to view, except by buying it from the industry association that wrote it.
There's a challenge to the building code copyright, on the basis that the intent of the model code was for it to be written into law, so writing it into the law is fair use and then copies of the law are then not copyrighted (though the model code, with the identical words, still is).
Of course if that loophole for the building code pans out it won't apply to ELUAs. They were never passed into law by a legislature, so their copyrights (if any) are rock-solid.
They're a CONTRACT. As such they're the work product of one or more lawyers, probably a work-for-hire so the client owns the copyright. Contracts are allowed to be secret. Making a few extra copies of one you have signed or are considering might be fair use. But putting the full text of one in a database and publishing the database almost certainly isn't.
The way this ought to work is with the database is distributed and replicated across all the registrars, with a majority-voting system for forcing consistency. That would eliminate any single point of failure.
.org is currently available and assigning it (thus making it unavailable) is an atomic action. Ways to reliably distribute such actions non-hierarchically across cooperating systems have not been found.
.ORG would be a good place to deploy such a technology, so that when .COM comes up for renewal, we can get rid of the current single point of control.
Unfortunately that gets you into the "distributed update problem" which is unsolved (and may be insoluble).
Determining that
(It's not like nobody is working on this problem. It's the same as making a withdrawal from an account, but only if there's money to cover it. So there's big money to be made by getting it right on a no-single-point-of-failure distributed system. It's also the same as determining what constitutes the canonical "latest published" edition of a document - or piece of software - that is subject to revision. So hypertexties, computer scientists, and other academics have been beating their heads against it for years, too.)
The only practical solutions to date have been to have a designated system be the canonical decision-maker - and thus the authority on who is and who is not registered. This makes the operator of that system both the authority on who is and who is not registered, and the maintainer of the one canonical list (which is downloaded onto the other servers).
You can subdivide the namespace and have a multiplicity of "authorities", each with their own "turf". But this creates a hierarchy, starting with one particular authority who maintains the "root of the world" first level of division of the namespace. But that's what we have now.
Right. And if anybody solves the hard problem it will give us a testing ground that only has problems for non-profits, not for businesses that can lose megabux if they're down for a day, if bugs show up. B-)
Console Classics' legal argument http://www.consoleclassix.com/legal.htm could as easily be used by a video streaming service to "rent" movies over the internet. Rules:
- Don't bypass the encryption - digitize a tape or the output of a DVD player rather than using DECSS.
- Stream it to customers using a client that doesn't make a non-ephemeral local copy and dumps cache if the connection is lost (i.e. Realplay, Microsoft's media player with appropriate flags set, or a client of your own.)
- Don't have more streams going than you have purchased copies of the original program. (Might also be good to digitize each copy separately.)
Of course you'd want to rent for a several-day period (like a video rental store) rather than releasing the copy for re-rental as soon as the customer is done with it. Otherwise you'll have a much faster turnaround than a video store and will thus rent more showings per copy. Good for you but bad for the studio, so they're more likely to go after you in court.
Even with the same rental times you'll probably be slightly more efficient than a video chain, since you'll have ONE virtual store with a single pool of virtual tapes to serve all the customers, rather than having to divide the copies among multiple physical stores and guess the local markets right. But that's small potatoes. Your big profit improvement over a classic rental chain will come from not having to maintain the physical stores.
I thought that myth had been debunked. It now has passed into the realm of the 'factoid'.
Spaff published the piece a week before it was debunked. The file is dated Jul 19, the article you cite follows from an Economist article dated Jul 26.
Now looks like what we had was:
2 years of tenfold growth
3 years of twofold growth.
(dotcom bubble pop)
2 more years where numbers aren't in (though DSL connects were about doubling per year).
Substituting "doubles every year" in Spaff's article makes it a bit less gee-whiz, but no less valid.
fully automatic weapons and sawed off shotguns are illegal in their own right.
No, they're not. They're just heavily taxed.
And the tax is collected by the same bureau of yahoos who collect the tax on liquor from the citizens of, for instance, West Virginia.
You saw examples of their tax collection tactics at a (primarily non-white) church in Waco, Texas and a mountain man's house on Ruby Ridge, Idaho.
BTW, are you in a militia?
Yes.
So are you.
(Unless you're crippled or a child.)
A "militia" is "every ablebodied [adult person] with [whatever weapon he/she owns, can borrow, can make, or can steal from the enemy]".
LightReading had a very well-researched article about this earlier in the week.
And according to the article Worldcom was talking factor-of-10 per year, when in fact that was the right number for 1995 and 1996, but after that it was about factor-of-two per year. Still respectable, but nowhere NEAR Worldcom's numbers.
So with a factor-of-5 per year shortfall (and assuming bandwidth and customer base are proportional) when the bubble finally burst in early 2000 the dotcommers had one potential customer for each 125 they were expecting.
Having less than one percent of the market you thought you had can make the difference between a fantastic business plan and wastpaper.
WorldCom would hook up new customers with connections capable of handling, say, up to 1.5 Mbit/s of data, knowing that for most of the time the lines would only carry a fraction of this amount. WorldCom would then use the 1.5 Mbit/s figures, not the actual traffic figures, when citing Internet traffic growth statistics.
So they were like a water company talking about how much water you COULD use if you left your faucets open and sprinklers on 24/7, rather than how much you actually ran. (And if everybody else did, too. And if the city left all the fire hydrants open...)
Once the infrastructure (or is it extrastructure? but I digress) for bandwidth is there, isn't bandwidth actually free? I mean, I know that there are costs involved with running the network, upkeep of epuiptment, salaries to pay, ect.
No, it's not free. Because it isn't PAID for yet.
If they'd charged everybody an instalation fee that covered their costs to install the entire infrastructure, THEN it would be very cheap - maintainence, repair, helpdesk, billing department, etc. But would you want to pay, say, ten grand to get a phone hooked up? I don't think so.
So instead they borrow the ten grand per customer (or whatever) to build the network, and pay it off with interest over the next thirty years from the money they charge the customers. Your instalation fee pays maybe part of the installer's visit and the equipment he installs (if they don't wave that in a promotion to get more people hooked up.)
That's why it's such a disaster when they plan for customers who don't show up. They still have to pay off the loans, but they don't have a gang of people like you paying bills for your "almost free" bandwidth.
A price war (where there's competition) doesn't really solve the problem, because if they lower prices enough to attract people, they cut what you're paying so much that, even if they get EVERYBODY hooked up they won't collect enough to pay off the loan.
And that means that if people don't sign up and pay reasonable bills the providers will go bankrupt. If that happens the bond holders get paid pennies on the dollar, while the successors inherit or buy the installed equipment for pennies on the dollar. THEN the pices come down - possibly getting close to the maintainence cost plus a price-signal fee. But don't expect investors to pay for any new equipment when that new suburb goes up, or to string wires anywhere that doesn't already have them. Bandwidth fees become a way of rationing the installed base, like a natural resource limited commodity, rather than actually paying for the construction of the net.
Same thing happened with cable TV. Most cable systems went bankrupt, sometimes several times, before they actually became profitable (if they ever did). The original investors mostly lost their money while the systems ended up in the hands of the media conglomerates.
Didn't HP have the Pavillion that competed against Dell?
HP's computers, like the rest of their hardware, was built to a higher (and more expensive) standard, hardware-reliability wise. (I haven't opened mine to check, but HP's traditional approach to printed circuit boards is to plate the ENTIRE BOARD with gold, not just the contacts, for better corrosion resistance, extended life, and improved electrical stability.)
They inherited this approach from their history as a maker of high-end test equipment and factory automation.
This tends to make their stuff a bit pricey for the home market that Dell caters to. And downgrading it to go after consumers risks losing their niche in industry.
Looks like one bad decision after the next. First that moronic Compaq-HP merger and then this.
Makes sense to me.
Why would Dell want to be dependent on Compaq for its printers?
Why would Compaq want to assist Dell's sales of computer systems by selling them printers.
I expect Compaq-HP would have cut Dell off eventually, or ramped up the printer prices to put them at a competitive disadvantage to Compaq's line and sucked out their market share in the PC business. (If nothing else, continuing the relationship would bring up anti-trust issues eventually.)
So Dell started cutting the apron strings, and Compaq used this as an excuse to do as much damage to them as possible in one hit.
If I read this right:
You send him a ping (ICMP echo request) with the modem command in the payload.
He sends you a ping response (ICMP echo reply) with that same modem command in the reply's payload. He just sent it to the modem.
If he's on a PPP/slip link it looks to the modem like a command embedded in the stream.
If the modem doesn't correctly ignore commands where there isn't a minimum half-second pause (with no transitions whatsoever - even start/stop bits) between the +++ and the ATH, you got him.
Of course if YOU'RE on PPP/slip on a serial link you have to be careful that YOUR modem doesn't hang up and dial 911, too. B-)
Oops. Blew the edit.
... ... HMO or low-budget retirement home administrators and the people who build the FDA-approved equipment they use.
Let's not go generalizing between consumer marketplace software and that designed for automating medical equipment, or between
[Money] is a way to split barter into two halves, so a plumber doesn't have to find a farmer with a stopped-up sink whenever he wants groceries.
And without money a crook can just as easily steal the groceries, or kidnap the plumber and make him fix his sink.
I'm sure the people who designed Therac 25 knew that as well, but they still screwed up and killed patients.
An example of "Yes you can get screwups." - which will be the Tacoma Narrows Bridge / Three Mile Island of medical automation for the next century (or until a bigger screwup happens). It's also an example of the belt, suspenders, and wasteband button all snapping at once.
But how many medical automation products are in use? And how many of them are killing people through software bugs? I think you'll find that, in general, medical automation is already designed, implemented, and tested to a MUCH higher standard than, say, your latest commercial desktop OS.
We only need to look for a few minutes at most any place using technology to see people embracing mediocrity with little care. With each passing year, I worry more and more about the medical community too. The things I see in hospitals is especially worrysome.
Let's not go generalizing between consumer marketplace software and that designed for automating medical equipment, or between
I know it's cliche, but this is what happens when your primary focus is money. That's why the love of money is called the root of all evil. As long as profit happens, the mediocrity will continue, because the people making the money don't care about anything but making the money.
No. The problems you allude to are not inherent in money. They are what happens when short-sighted administrators focus solely on near-term profit (and are psychopathic enough to ignore non-money risks of human injury). Map human consequences into monitary terms by such mechanisms as liability suits and even a psychopath can grasp that cutting corners and killing people is a bad bet. And it's the job of the upper-level management (starting with the board) to insure that the lower-level managment (starting with the president, CEO, COO) aren't simultaneously short-sighted and psychopathic enough to take bad chances and kill the company.
Short-sighted crooks we will always have with us, and sometimes they work their ways into positions of trust. But encoding consequences into money terms can bite them big-time. Arthur Anderson LLP's board didn't institute such policies. Arthur Anderson LLP is as good as DEAD. An administrator at Worldcom got into a debt bind and cooked the books to save his own butt. Worldcom is bankrupt and he was the first one kicked out the door. And so on.
There's nothing magic - evil OR good - about money. It's just a convenient means for quantifying human effort and values, aspirations and miseries. It is "crystalized labor". It is a way to split barter into two halves, so a plumber doesn't have to find a farmer with a stopped-up sink whenever he wants groceries.
When you concentrate enough value and power in one place to do great good, you concentrate enough to do great evil. It's the people who then handle it who decide whether it does good or evil. And its the institutions around it that create good consequences for those who do good and bad for those who do evil. If the institutions work well enough, even most evil people may chose to do good - and the ones who chose to do evil will get squashed as a result.