When I was in public schools, I had the benefit of being identified in the high-performer category because I had actually learned a lot from of math from watching PBS programs such as Square One Television, and my mother had taught me to read before my first day of kindergarden unlike any other member of my class.
As more and more resources are being allocated to "special ed" for those who underperform because such spending is mandatory under various laws, I notice that the programs for the overperformers are being cut back repeatedly because they are strictly optional. I wonder how many future whiz-kids we're losing to the fact that they're getting bored in too-dumb-for-them mainstream classes and therefore goofing off with their extra time instead of being given work that's at their actual mental level rather than their age's level.
I honestly think that the more different teaching concepts that are used within the same classroom, the better chance a student will connect with at least one that actually makes them grasp the concept.
It's instructors who rely on only one presentation technique all year who connect with only the students who respond to that technique, and end up having no way to bring the ones who get lost back into the fold.
This is also a problem we're facing in the "War on Terror". Those who subscribe to the terrorist-corrupted version of Islam believe that if they die while attacking non-believers they'll be taken to the happiest possible afterlife. Therefore, they design attacks in which they are sure to die, and we have nobody left to prosecute.
The 19 worst offenders in the Sept. 11 attacks died, therefore our criminal justice system is totally ineffective against them.
To the suicidal, that would be a license to do anything they want before they died. Afterall, even if caught they would get away with it every time until they died.
The spamming+felony part of the guidelines are more or less irrelavant. It's just a pile-on for a criminal who likely is already on the way to a 200+ year sentance the other laws they've broken.
Compared to distribution of child porn or plain classic fraud, using spam during the comission of those crimes is nothing much.
Of course, we know that advertising spammers already make a point of setting themselves up outside of US jurisdiction, just like the online casino operators do...
What the NAB is also affraid of is that that the satellite players potentially could relay "local" content through those ground-based repeaters by individually addressing them. As a result, they're licensed to only be "repeaters"... they have to broadcast the same bitstream that's going nationally.
Now, XM's "local traffic and weather" channels are actually national channels. Every city's traffic is availalbe coast-to-coast, and coming out of every repeater. Still, the local broadcasters are trying to use this as a smokescreen to fool the FCC into taking the repeaters away.
XM isn't actively selling the commericals on the talk-format stations. What you hear there are the commercials that are being distributed by the various talk show syndicators on the same feed as the program is on.
Many of these "network ads" are truely spam-level prices because every single one of the OTA stations are covering the network up with a local ad during that time slot, so only XM listeners end up hearing it. XM might be well served to create some promos for some of their other channels to air in that time...
What has the NAB going crazy is that XM has some land-based repeaters to fill holes in their satellite patern. In order to get those land-based repeaters, XM had to promise that they'd never use them to create local stations by broadcasting different things in different places, they had to relay the whole national signal.
Now, the "local traffic and weather" channels on XM now are actually national channels. That is to say, you can hear a Boston traffic report in Los Angeles perfectly clear. Not sure why anybody would want to, but it's there if you want it. All of the land-based repeaters are relaying all of the channels, even the ones intended for far-away cities. Therefore, XM is complying with the letter of the agreement just fine.
However, the NAB is trying to say that these "local" services violate the rules just to make life harder for XM.
The pro-war rallies were all started by Clear Channel. They say the listeners started them, but I listen to talk radio and it was explained that all the listeners had to do was form a group and contact Clear Channel. Clear Channel would do the rest.
Clear Channel doesn't hold any political views at all that don't directly concern its business. However, a certain class of Clear Channel's employees are often hired because of their political views and ability to communicate them. Clear Channel employs and distributes Rush Limbaugh, Clear Channel employs and distributes Art Bell. They're much more interested in how many people will listen than which side of the political debate such people are on.
So, what happened with those rallies is that they were being propped up by a conservitive talk show host and their staff, and Clear Channel didn't stop their employees from spending their time that way because holding a rally is an effective promotion for the radio station and show.
Trust me, if Air America Radio starts to get some rattings traction, there will be a rash of left-wing political commentators all over Clear Channel's airwaves, no matter who's holding the White House. Clear Channel's interest is in getting people to listen to blabbermouths, not in changing politcal opinions.
What CC wants is for the FCC to regulate the content on satellite radio. They threw in XM because it has name recognition, despite their stake in it (which I believe stands around 30%), but what I believe is part of their true objective is FCC regulation...
You hit the nail right on the head. Broadcasters basically think at this point that they cannot safely air Howard Stern, Bubba The Love Sponge or any other similar program without fear of large FCC fines. However, right now those shows can find a safe haven on XM and Sirius with no FCC content restrictions at all. XM and Sirius might sensor their "family level" channels on their own, but Playboy Radio being a premium channel can do absolutely anything they want.
The broadcasters see this as a popular content type that they're about to lose access to about to be used against them. They want the same standards applied to the satellite broadcasters...
Actually. Clear Channel is usually in favor of keeping regulations away from XM, since they own a stake in it.
Clear Channel is practically out of the NAB because to put it mildly, their interests are often contradictory to the interests of small station owners. They just don't fit in with the club anymore.
Smart investors know that consumer trust is one of those things that fall into the category of "goodwill"... that magical dollar value that represents the difference between the sum of all of the company's worldly goods and the combined worth of all of the issued shares.
In short, if Google betrays the trust customers have in it and therefore is no longer trusted, the company won't be worth as much.
Does SCO have any goodwill left? Doesn't look like it, and that's part of the reason major investor seems to be trying to cash out chips...
Well, yeah, but do they keep a database table with my search queries next to my cookie ID forever? We know they have the ability to... but do they actually do it?
Paranoia says "of course they do." Trust says "We think they don't."
So I will/would simply not use this service to send really private mails. But I don't care if there's a private archive somewhere of me writing "happy birthday" to my father.
I wouldn't use e-mail to send any truely secret material at all. Even if you can use encryption to hide your message, you still can't encrypt SMTP headers for the system to work. Therefore, a possible interceptor would still be able to deduce that somebody sent something to you, and it's something that I've taken an unusual effort to make hard to read... that alone is information about who most likely has just gotten the secret which can be used to chase after you in hopes of getting the secret out of you.
"governmental request" means pretty much they'll turn over any information withouut a subpoena. I suppose for a free service, you get what you pay for.
Just notice that the wording is in a negative mode at that point. They're listing situaitons in which they won't reveal information. They're not saying that they will hand over infomation to a weak government request... just that you don't get to sue them if they decide to so.
It all goes back to whether you trust Google to know the difference between a non-mandatory government request they should comply with and one they should turn away.
You can bet your last dollar that MSNmail, etc will (or already do; I don't use MSN) offer Syncronzation with their desktop apps.
Microsoft-owned Hotmail has been integrated into Outlook Express since the late 90s. A free msn.com address is nothing more than Hotmail by another name.
I say there's a 10:1 chance that Google blocks attachments. For me, that means that GMail is essentially a glorified, logged IM. and.. just wait till the jane user discovers she can't send her photos to friends and family.
It's about time that we told Jane User that e-mail is not the right tool to be using to send 30 MB of pictures to Grandma, particularly if Grandma hasn't requested all of them. Send only the pictures grandma wants to see over a realtime session in an IM client, or post them to a password-protected website or FTP server. If Jane User hasn't met these other technolgies, it's time she got an introduction.
Google's mantra of "Don't Be Evil" has yet to be violated in the minds of most observers. However, the paranoia usually reserved for companies that have had histories of evil behavior is coming out against this... and that's what makes me feel Google's getting an unfair shake.
There's laws about not being what you claim to be because the free market has a bad habit of being fooled by fraud. We need some regulation for the market to work, just not too much.
Sometimes the public needs to be protected from its own stupidity. However, sometimes the people who try to protect the public end up being stupid and the public needs protected from that...
One thing they'd have to be careful about is determining the difference between a "spamvertised link" that's bad and should be downscored in PageRank, and a "newsworthly link" that keeps getting spread by e-mail newsletters or friends telling friends which should be upscored in PageRank.
That's a very tricky judgement call for software to make...
I think they've clarified they privacy policy to a level that us geeks should easily be able to understand...
When you hit "delete", more often than not in computer land, your data is not immediately rendered unrecoverable. In most operating systems, deleted files are ushered over to a "holding bin" for a final clear-out command to really get rid of them in case we want to change our mind. Once the OS finally lets go of the file, the file system often takes the short cut of just removing the index pointers to the file and/or marking the space as "unused", but leaving the data still spinning on the drive until something eventually wants to use that space... let's face it, a "quick format" doesn't have time to hit every track on the drive, it's taking a shortcut and that's what makes it "quick".
So, really, they're just saying that in order to make their magical mega-system work, "delete" isn't going to mean "Expunge it all right away!" but simply "Put in the pile that'll be discarded the next time the garbage collection process comes by." Therefore, they'll need to keep your "deleted" e-mails for an undisclosed length of time... they don't intend on keeping it forever, although they have to word the privacy policy in a way that might be misread that way because to do less just wouldn't be being honest.
If you don't have root access to the e-mail system where you work, you don't really know if "delete really means delete" on that system either. Your boss may in fact have access to your e-mail... you might as well assume that they do unless you know otherwise.
If you've got a trust-nobody mentality then what Google has to say means nothing, they're going to rip up their privacy policy and send every e-mail that goes through their system directly to John Ashcroft using their PageRank sorting technology to indicate which e-mails are most relavant to his desire to repeal every amendment in numbered order...
Of course, if you're sane, you trust Google because if they really wanted to screw the world over, they simply could decide that since their search engine is so good, everybody needs to pay $25 a month to keep accessing it... or decide to start logging all search queries to a user-specific cookie... or just take their bat and ball and go home. They've already got enough power to mess with us even worse than Gmail could be, and they've yet to be caught abusing any of that power or going back on their word.
That's how trust is really built... by letting them have the ability to screw up and seeing that they don't manage to do so. I'd certainly trust my e-mail with Google more so than I'd trust some of the other major "free e-mail" services out there.
Name any publisher of sheet music. They license music to radio stations, to record labels, and to movie studios.
Interesting to note, they don't have full control of their copyrights. Once sheet music and lyrics are published, anybody has a right to perform them in public on a recording for a price that is set by law. This is what's known as the "mechanical royalties" because there's no barganing in the mater, the songwriter (or holder of the songwriter's copyright) gets paid the price the law says they're owed and that's that.
Britney Spears's recording company, therefore, has the exclusive rights to her performance of Baby One More Time... but absolutely any artist can do a cover of the song at the mechanical rates, and there's nothing Britney's label can do about it.
Streaming radio's problem right now is that their mechanical payment process has too high a rate set, and far too detailed of a reporting requirement because they have to pay per actual person listening to the stream while the song is playing, while radio stations by comparision just have to pay by their average daily listeners according to the ratings. They're basically on a fixed playing field tilted against them, while songwriters seem to have a level one with the rest of the world.
If only there was a way to measure and collect mechanical royalties fairly for the unencumbered transfer of MP3s/ACCs/OGGs...
Have you talked to the librarians? Maybe they could find you a local funding partner so that there could be an enough-to-go-around supply at the front desk...
Slashdot Mirror
When I was in public schools, I had the benefit of being identified in the high-performer category because I had actually learned a lot from of math from watching PBS programs such as Square One Television, and my mother had taught me to read before my first day of kindergarden unlike any other member of my class.
As more and more resources are being allocated to "special ed" for those who underperform because such spending is mandatory under various laws, I notice that the programs for the overperformers are being cut back repeatedly because they are strictly optional. I wonder how many future whiz-kids we're losing to the fact that they're getting bored in too-dumb-for-them mainstream classes and therefore goofing off with their extra time instead of being given work that's at their actual mental level rather than their age's level.
I honestly think that the more different teaching concepts that are used within the same classroom, the better chance a student will connect with at least one that actually makes them grasp the concept.
It's instructors who rely on only one presentation technique all year who connect with only the students who respond to that technique, and end up having no way to bring the ones who get lost back into the fold.
This is also a problem we're facing in the "War on Terror". Those who subscribe to the terrorist-corrupted version of Islam believe that if they die while attacking non-believers they'll be taken to the happiest possible afterlife. Therefore, they design attacks in which they are sure to die, and we have nobody left to prosecute.
The 19 worst offenders in the Sept. 11 attacks died, therefore our criminal justice system is totally ineffective against them.
To the suicidal, that would be a license to do anything they want before they died. Afterall, even if caught they would get away with it every time until they died.
The spamming+felony part of the guidelines are more or less irrelavant. It's just a pile-on for a criminal who likely is already on the way to a 200+ year sentance the other laws they've broken.
Compared to distribution of child porn or plain classic fraud, using spam during the comission of those crimes is nothing much.
Of course, we know that advertising spammers already make a point of setting themselves up outside of US jurisdiction, just like the online casino operators do...
What the NAB is also affraid of is that that the satellite players potentially could relay "local" content through those ground-based repeaters by individually addressing them. As a result, they're licensed to only be "repeaters"... they have to broadcast the same bitstream that's going nationally.
Now, XM's "local traffic and weather" channels are actually national channels. Every city's traffic is availalbe coast-to-coast, and coming out of every repeater. Still, the local broadcasters are trying to use this as a smokescreen to fool the FCC into taking the repeaters away.
XM isn't actively selling the commericals on the talk-format stations. What you hear there are the commercials that are being distributed by the various talk show syndicators on the same feed as the program is on.
Many of these "network ads" are truely spam-level prices because every single one of the OTA stations are covering the network up with a local ad during that time slot, so only XM listeners end up hearing it. XM might be well served to create some promos for some of their other channels to air in that time...
What has the NAB going crazy is that XM has some land-based repeaters to fill holes in their satellite patern. In order to get those land-based repeaters, XM had to promise that they'd never use them to create local stations by broadcasting different things in different places, they had to relay the whole national signal.
Now, the "local traffic and weather" channels on XM now are actually national channels. That is to say, you can hear a Boston traffic report in Los Angeles perfectly clear. Not sure why anybody would want to, but it's there if you want it. All of the land-based repeaters are relaying all of the channels, even the ones intended for far-away cities. Therefore, XM is complying with the letter of the agreement just fine.
However, the NAB is trying to say that these "local" services violate the rules just to make life harder for XM.
The pro-war rallies were all started by Clear Channel. They say the listeners started them, but I listen to talk radio and it was explained that all the listeners had to do was form a group and contact Clear Channel. Clear Channel would do the rest.
Clear Channel doesn't hold any political views at all that don't directly concern its business. However, a certain class of Clear Channel's employees are often hired because of their political views and ability to communicate them. Clear Channel employs and distributes Rush Limbaugh, Clear Channel employs and distributes Art Bell. They're much more interested in how many people will listen than which side of the political debate such people are on.
So, what happened with those rallies is that they were being propped up by a conservitive talk show host and their staff, and Clear Channel didn't stop their employees from spending their time that way because holding a rally is an effective promotion for the radio station and show.
Trust me, if Air America Radio starts to get some rattings traction, there will be a rash of left-wing political commentators all over Clear Channel's airwaves, no matter who's holding the White House. Clear Channel's interest is in getting people to listen to blabbermouths, not in changing politcal opinions.
What CC wants is for the FCC to regulate the content on satellite radio. They threw in XM because it has name recognition, despite their stake in it (which I believe stands around 30%), but what I believe is part of their true objective is FCC regulation...
You hit the nail right on the head. Broadcasters basically think at this point that they cannot safely air Howard Stern, Bubba The Love Sponge or any other similar program without fear of large FCC fines. However, right now those shows can find a safe haven on XM and Sirius with no FCC content restrictions at all. XM and Sirius might sensor their "family level" channels on their own, but Playboy Radio being a premium channel can do absolutely anything they want.
The broadcasters see this as a popular content type that they're about to lose access to about to be used against them. They want the same standards applied to the satellite broadcasters...
Actually. Clear Channel is usually in favor of keeping regulations away from XM, since they own a stake in it.
Clear Channel is practically out of the NAB because to put it mildly, their interests are often contradictory to the interests of small station owners. They just don't fit in with the club anymore.
Smart investors know that consumer trust is one of those things that fall into the category of "goodwill"... that magical dollar value that represents the difference between the sum of all of the company's worldly goods and the combined worth of all of the issued shares.
In short, if Google betrays the trust customers have in it and therefore is no longer trusted, the company won't be worth as much.
Does SCO have any goodwill left? Doesn't look like it, and that's part of the reason major investor seems to be trying to cash out chips...
Well, yeah, but do they keep a database table with my search queries next to my cookie ID forever? We know they have the ability to... but do they actually do it?
Paranoia says "of course they do." Trust says "We think they don't."
So I will/would simply not use this service to send really private mails. But I don't care if there's a private archive somewhere of me writing "happy birthday" to my father.
I wouldn't use e-mail to send any truely secret material at all. Even if you can use encryption to hide your message, you still can't encrypt SMTP headers for the system to work. Therefore, a possible interceptor would still be able to deduce that somebody sent something to you, and it's something that I've taken an unusual effort to make hard to read... that alone is information about who most likely has just gotten the secret which can be used to chase after you in hopes of getting the secret out of you.
Even if GMail's perfect, it still won't fix SMTP.
"governmental request" means pretty much they'll turn over any information withouut a subpoena. I suppose for a free service, you get what you pay for.
Just notice that the wording is in a negative mode at that point. They're listing situaitons in which they won't reveal information. They're not saying that they will hand over infomation to a weak government request... just that you don't get to sue them if they decide to so.
It all goes back to whether you trust Google to know the difference between a non-mandatory government request they should comply with and one they should turn away.
You can bet your last dollar that MSNmail, etc will (or already do; I don't use MSN) offer Syncronzation with their desktop apps.
Microsoft-owned Hotmail has been integrated into Outlook Express since the late 90s. A free msn.com address is nothing more than Hotmail by another name.
I say there's a 10:1 chance that Google blocks attachments. For me, that means that GMail is essentially a glorified, logged IM. and.. just wait till the jane user discovers she can't send her photos to friends and family.
It's about time that we told Jane User that e-mail is not the right tool to be using to send 30 MB of pictures to Grandma, particularly if Grandma hasn't requested all of them. Send only the pictures grandma wants to see over a realtime session in an IM client, or post them to a password-protected website or FTP server. If Jane User hasn't met these other technolgies, it's time she got an introduction.
Google's mantra of "Don't Be Evil" has yet to be violated in the minds of most observers. However, the paranoia usually reserved for companies that have had histories of evil behavior is coming out against this... and that's what makes me feel Google's getting an unfair shake.
There's laws about not being what you claim to be because the free market has a bad habit of being fooled by fraud. We need some regulation for the market to work, just not too much.
Sometimes the public needs to be protected from its own stupidity. However, sometimes the people who try to protect the public end up being stupid and the public needs protected from that...
One thing they'd have to be careful about is determining the difference between a "spamvertised link" that's bad and should be downscored in PageRank, and a "newsworthly link" that keeps getting spread by e-mail newsletters or friends telling friends which should be upscored in PageRank. That's a very tricky judgement call for software to make...
I think they've clarified they privacy policy to a level that us geeks should easily be able to understand...
When you hit "delete", more often than not in computer land, your data is not immediately rendered unrecoverable. In most operating systems, deleted files are ushered over to a "holding bin" for a final clear-out command to really get rid of them in case we want to change our mind. Once the OS finally lets go of the file, the file system often takes the short cut of just removing the index pointers to the file and/or marking the space as "unused", but leaving the data still spinning on the drive until something eventually wants to use that space... let's face it, a "quick format" doesn't have time to hit every track on the drive, it's taking a shortcut and that's what makes it "quick".
So, really, they're just saying that in order to make their magical mega-system work, "delete" isn't going to mean "Expunge it all right away!" but simply "Put in the pile that'll be discarded the next time the garbage collection process comes by." Therefore, they'll need to keep your "deleted" e-mails for an undisclosed length of time... they don't intend on keeping it forever, although they have to word the privacy policy in a way that might be misread that way because to do less just wouldn't be being honest.
If you don't have root access to the e-mail system where you work, you don't really know if "delete really means delete" on that system either. Your boss may in fact have access to your e-mail... you might as well assume that they do unless you know otherwise.
If you've got a trust-nobody mentality then what Google has to say means nothing, they're going to rip up their privacy policy and send every e-mail that goes through their system directly to John Ashcroft using their PageRank sorting technology to indicate which e-mails are most relavant to his desire to repeal every amendment in numbered order...
Of course, if you're sane, you trust Google because if they really wanted to screw the world over, they simply could decide that since their search engine is so good, everybody needs to pay $25 a month to keep accessing it... or decide to start logging all search queries to a user-specific cookie... or just take their bat and ball and go home. They've already got enough power to mess with us even worse than Gmail could be, and they've yet to be caught abusing any of that power or going back on their word.
That's how trust is really built... by letting them have the ability to screw up and seeing that they don't manage to do so. I'd certainly trust my e-mail with Google more so than I'd trust some of the other major "free e-mail" services out there.
Name any publisher of sheet music. They license music to radio stations, to record labels, and to movie studios.
Interesting to note, they don't have full control of their copyrights. Once sheet music and lyrics are published, anybody has a right to perform them in public on a recording for a price that is set by law. This is what's known as the "mechanical royalties" because there's no barganing in the mater, the songwriter (or holder of the songwriter's copyright) gets paid the price the law says they're owed and that's that.
Britney Spears's recording company, therefore, has the exclusive rights to her performance of Baby One More Time... but absolutely any artist can do a cover of the song at the mechanical rates, and there's nothing Britney's label can do about it.
Streaming radio's problem right now is that their mechanical payment process has too high a rate set, and far too detailed of a reporting requirement because they have to pay per actual person listening to the stream while the song is playing, while radio stations by comparision just have to pay by their average daily listeners according to the ratings. They're basically on a fixed playing field tilted against them, while songwriters seem to have a level one with the rest of the world.
If only there was a way to measure and collect mechanical royalties fairly for the unencumbered transfer of MP3s/ACCs/OGGs...
That's what I want to know! What's stopping them? They should have every game *ever* published for the PC.
Since when was the PC a console in video game terms?
Have you talked to the librarians? Maybe they could find you a local funding partner so that there could be an enough-to-go-around supply at the front desk...