I've yet to see a consumer bill-pay service that doesn't offer a "If we screw up, we'll eat the penalty fee and call the company your payment missed and take the blame." policy. Of course, such a policy rarely gets used because most mistakes are the consumer's data entry flaw rather than a system flaw.
Remember, the the original Sony Betamax decision at the Supreme Court didn't say that we were allowed to use VCRs to permanantly archive anything. It said that we had the right to time-shift content we obtained from TV broadcasters.
Therefore, a TiVo really doesn't have the legally established right to have a "Save Until I Delete" feature. Current TiVo devices offer that "green ball" as a keep-forever setting, but that's really in the gray area that we've never seen any court rulings about how legal that is.
So, another chip off the "fair use" tree has fallen away from us, but this wasn't really one that was well established to begin with. At least this is also a dent in the "broadcast flag" that might have marked PPV movies as being in a no-DVR-zone...
The strength of SMTP/POP3 e-mail system is that you can get e-mail from people that you've never heard of... the weakness of the SMTP/POP3 e-mail us that your inbox is wide open for anybody who wants in, and that means spammers who you never heard of and would rather never hear from.
Of course, a closed invitation-only community will stay mostly spam-free because anybody who does spam will get booted rather quickly, and the community will move on without them.
We've already seen blog spam when no registration is required to post a comment... but blogs that require commenters register are mostly spam-free because no spam bot is good enough to remember to register at a zillion sites.
In short, there are times where "closed" systems are better than "open" ones. And isn't it interesting that they tend to come to/. in the form of a story in this puke-brown section that totally clashes with the normal geek-green.:)
Among the field of smaller lesser-known ERP programs that are customized for a specific industry, there is most likely only one or two vendors that match the a specific business's needs. However, those programs come with the appropriate support organization... not as large as the generalists, but that also means you can be known on a first name basis with the support reps and know who you're dealing with.
Either that, or the "drop the one we can win, persue the one we can't win" plan is a way to make it look like they're trying to keep big business in check, while actually doing nothing effective.
It's a good thing I still demand my paychecks printed on a piece of paper in an envelope I can carry to the bank myself.
Funny, I perfer "Direct Deposit", "ACH Transfers", and "Online Bill Pay" because when properly configured computer systems move my money, I see there less risk of it going wrong. Paper checks can get lost in transit and take several days to clear, but with electronic transfers the transaction clears instantly and I get access to the money that's rightfully mine immediately rather than having to wait up to a week for processing to happen.
"3 major players"... but there are a ton of industry-specific ERP-ish systems out there for every industry you can think of ranging from office supply sellers to construction project managers. Also, there's plenty of business out there who skip over the full marketplace and hire a programmer to make their own resource tracking program using tools as simple as Microsoft Access which works great for a truely small business even though its scalablity is limited.
I agree with the judge here... the ERP software field is filled with players small and large. There's no monopoly risk in letting Oracle and PeopleSoft merge... just like there's far more places that sell hambugers than McDonald's and Burger King. Just because their two of the biggest, doesn't make a merger that creates a monopoly possible.
Unfortuantely, those spyware/adware people have a bounty system keeping them in existant... why else would they pull our data our push out ads? Somebody's paying them somehow.
Worms are a two-sided problem. In order for them to happen, it takes a software writer (far too often that software writer being named "Microsoft"...) to create software that has a ready-to-exploit flaw in it, and then it just takes one evil-minded programmer to kick a worm through that hole and make a mess that makes all of us wearing white hats have to do some serious cleanup and deal with downtimes.
While I'm glad the kid is going to get taken to justice, I'm still a little troubled by the fact that all Microsoft doing for their part of it is releasing a "you shoulda run Windows Update" patch and kicking in a quarter-million US dollar reward... both of which they're doing out of the kindness of Bill Gates' heart because there's no law requiring either of them.
I know small time programmers need liability protection from the abuse of their software... but shouldn't a large company like Microsoft be liable for the cleanup costs associated with their own security bugs?
"Guess and check" is a term you should have learned in algebra class, or maybe while reading about the SAT test.
Instead of doing all the work to actually solve a problem, it's sometimes easier to assume a solution and plug it into the unknown variable's slot, and see if that leads to a contradiction or not. If there's no contradiction, then your assumed solution is most likely correct and you can run with it.
All digital zooms are based on this. There's no way for certain that they can make up pixels that they didn't get as input correctly, so they're always guessing.
The record in a DNS root server never is meant to identify your web server, it's meant to indentify your primary and secondary DNS server, and it's those servers that work for you (or at least the ISP you work with) to identify your web server.
So, if you want fallover if your main web server goes down, you just need to update your local DNS record, not the one at the root servers. It's when your DNS servers explode that the five-minute updates would be helpful.
True, but I don't see how the DNS system's delay-created waiting period protected much from fraudulent transfers of domains. Afterall, you wouldn't know a false transfer took place until your DNS server got the bad news too...
This will be a Good Thing(TM) if the DNS root servers can handle the load. Of course, if they can't it'll have to go in the Bad Idea(TM) file.
The key thing comes down to if we can trust VeriSign to be doing their homework correctly. VeriSign's a very funny company to think about because their entire product line is based on encryption and ID services that define VeriSign as a root of trust... if you don't trust VeriSign to be an honest actor, practically everything they do becomes worthless.
It's so hard to get trust-based systems to work these days...
Yet all DVRs on the market currently use MPEG compression to put more data on the HD at the expense of video quality... so, they're not even storing all the video in that came from the original TV station feed to begin with. I'm not quite sure what Sony's magic tech will do when asked to zoom in on an MPEG artifact...
I refuse to accept "digital zoom" as being any better than just putting a magnifying glass next to the same old low res image.
Come on, it's trying to create data that just plain isn't coming from the original source, therefore it's nothing but guess and check logic. Sure it my smooth out what it thinks is a rough edge... but that's still only guessing and making up detail that just wasn't there.
In a sense, what Google's doing here is taking what used to happen when you typed a non-domain'ed phrase into IE's address bar, a search at your selected search engine, and declaring that if the confidence score is high enough, equating that to an "I'm feeling lucky" click on the Google homepage.
In a sense, if the PageRank of hit #1 is so far away from the PageRank of hit #2... why bother with the selection screen, just assume that the user wants to see #1 and give it to them.
I realized just how drastic Syracuse's Hot 107.9 was when I was at SU when I bought a copy of Voice 5's "When you think about me" and noticed how different the whole message of the song is played slower. It's interesting that Windows Media Player gives me the capability to duplicate those modifications if I want to via ActiveX.
Radio stations have always desired to "watermark" their feeds for various reasons which include:
- A brand identity - Making sure diary-keeping listeners know and remember which station they are listening to - Making sure anything recorded is clear what station was recorded - Making sure that if the competition grabs a song from their air, they get an unclean copy that they can't use. - Complying with publisher requests to protect new content.
"Clean" recordings are what you usually have to pay for. Any form of broadcast is expected to have some bit of interference either by signal technology, DJs doing their intro thing, or intentional mucking. Pure digital streams have to do more mucking than usual because their delivery system is so clean.
Sorry. Fair use is "common law" not "statuory law". Therefore, terms of service which are "contract law" always trump fair use. The correct order is law of the land, agreements, and then traditions.
This is a problem in the system, but attempts to correct it by putting fair use concepts into the written laws keep failing for some strange set of reasons that are hard to explain here.
Sorry... you lost me at your complaint that governments are an unfair monopoly. If you think there should be a competitor to the US Constitution, you may need to leave this nation... but where would you go that's better run?
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I've yet to see a consumer bill-pay service that doesn't offer a "If we screw up, we'll eat the penalty fee and call the company your payment missed and take the blame." policy. Of course, such a policy rarely gets used because most mistakes are the consumer's data entry flaw rather than a system flaw.
Remember, the the original Sony Betamax decision at the Supreme Court didn't say that we were allowed to use VCRs to permanantly archive anything. It said that we had the right to time-shift content we obtained from TV broadcasters.
Therefore, a TiVo really doesn't have the legally established right to have a "Save Until I Delete" feature. Current TiVo devices offer that "green ball" as a keep-forever setting, but that's really in the gray area that we've never seen any court rulings about how legal that is.
So, another chip off the "fair use" tree has fallen away from us, but this wasn't really one that was well established to begin with. At least this is also a dent in the "broadcast flag" that might have marked PPV movies as being in a no-DVR-zone...
The strength of SMTP/POP3 e-mail system is that you can get e-mail from people that you've never heard of... the weakness of the SMTP/POP3 e-mail us that your inbox is wide open for anybody who wants in, and that means spammers who you never heard of and would rather never hear from.
/. in the form of a story in this puke-brown section that totally clashes with the normal geek-green. :)
Of course, a closed invitation-only community will stay mostly spam-free because anybody who does spam will get booted rather quickly, and the community will move on without them.
We've already seen blog spam when no registration is required to post a comment... but blogs that require commenters register are mostly spam-free because no spam bot is good enough to remember to register at a zillion sites.
In short, there are times where "closed" systems are better than "open" ones. And isn't it interesting that they tend to come to
Among the field of smaller lesser-known ERP programs that are customized for a specific industry, there is most likely only one or two vendors that match the a specific business's needs. However, those programs come with the appropriate support organization... not as large as the generalists, but that also means you can be known on a first name basis with the support reps and know who you're dealing with.
Why does player #4 need to be a single entity? Can't the large number of small players be thought of as that player ready to asorb the slack?
Either that, or the "drop the one we can win, persue the one we can't win" plan is a way to make it look like they're trying to keep big business in check, while actually doing nothing effective.
It's a good thing I still demand my paychecks printed on a piece of paper in an envelope I can carry to the bank myself.
Funny, I perfer "Direct Deposit", "ACH Transfers", and "Online Bill Pay" because when properly configured computer systems move my money, I see there less risk of it going wrong. Paper checks can get lost in transit and take several days to clear, but with electronic transfers the transaction clears instantly and I get access to the money that's rightfully mine immediately rather than having to wait up to a week for processing to happen.
"3 major players"... but there are a ton of industry-specific ERP-ish systems out there for every industry you can think of ranging from office supply sellers to construction project managers. Also, there's plenty of business out there who skip over the full marketplace and hire a programmer to make their own resource tracking program using tools as simple as Microsoft Access which works great for a truely small business even though its scalablity is limited.
I agree with the judge here... the ERP software field is filled with players small and large. There's no monopoly risk in letting Oracle and PeopleSoft merge... just like there's far more places that sell hambugers than McDonald's and Burger King. Just because their two of the biggest, doesn't make a merger that creates a monopoly possible.
That's how the world is. My post asks how the world should be.
Software cannot run itself. In order for a worm to exist, there has to be some exploitable host process that starts the ball rolling...
Unfortuantely, those spyware/adware people have a bounty system keeping them in existant... why else would they pull our data our push out ads? Somebody's paying them somehow.
Worms are a two-sided problem. In order for them to happen, it takes a software writer (far too often that software writer being named "Microsoft"...) to create software that has a ready-to-exploit flaw in it, and then it just takes one evil-minded programmer to kick a worm through that hole and make a mess that makes all of us wearing white hats have to do some serious cleanup and deal with downtimes.
While I'm glad the kid is going to get taken to justice, I'm still a little troubled by the fact that all Microsoft doing for their part of it is releasing a "you shoulda run Windows Update" patch and kicking in a quarter-million US dollar reward... both of which they're doing out of the kindness of Bill Gates' heart because there's no law requiring either of them.
I know small time programmers need liability protection from the abuse of their software... but shouldn't a large company like Microsoft be liable for the cleanup costs associated with their own security bugs?
"Guess and check" is a term you should have learned in algebra class, or maybe while reading about the SAT test.
Instead of doing all the work to actually solve a problem, it's sometimes easier to assume a solution and plug it into the unknown variable's slot, and see if that leads to a contradiction or not. If there's no contradiction, then your assumed solution is most likely correct and you can run with it.
All digital zooms are based on this. There's no way for certain that they can make up pixels that they didn't get as input correctly, so they're always guessing.
I would point out that my brain runs on analog technology, not digital... :)
What's the point in that?
The record in a DNS root server never is meant to identify your web server, it's meant to indentify your primary and secondary DNS server, and it's those servers that work for you (or at least the ISP you work with) to identify your web server.
So, if you want fallover if your main web server goes down, you just need to update your local DNS record, not the one at the root servers. It's when your DNS servers explode that the five-minute updates would be helpful.
True, but I don't see how the DNS system's delay-created waiting period protected much from fraudulent transfers of domains. Afterall, you wouldn't know a false transfer took place until your DNS server got the bad news too...
This will be a Good Thing(TM) if the DNS root servers can handle the load. Of course, if they can't it'll have to go in the Bad Idea(TM) file.
The key thing comes down to if we can trust VeriSign to be doing their homework correctly. VeriSign's a very funny company to think about because their entire product line is based on encryption and ID services that define VeriSign as a root of trust... if you don't trust VeriSign to be an honest actor, practically everything they do becomes worthless.
It's so hard to get trust-based systems to work these days...
Yet all DVRs on the market currently use MPEG compression to put more data on the HD at the expense of video quality... so, they're not even storing all the video in that came from the original TV station feed to begin with. I'm not quite sure what Sony's magic tech will do when asked to zoom in on an MPEG artifact...
I refuse to accept "digital zoom" as being any better than just putting a magnifying glass next to the same old low res image.
Come on, it's trying to create data that just plain isn't coming from the original source, therefore it's nothing but guess and check logic. Sure it my smooth out what it thinks is a rough edge... but that's still only guessing and making up detail that just wasn't there.
In a sense, what Google's doing here is taking what used to happen when you typed a non-domain'ed phrase into IE's address bar, a search at your selected search engine, and declaring that if the confidence score is high enough, equating that to an "I'm feeling lucky" click on the Google homepage.
In a sense, if the PageRank of hit #1 is so far away from the PageRank of hit #2... why bother with the selection screen, just assume that the user wants to see #1 and give it to them.
I realized just how drastic Syracuse's Hot 107.9 was when I was at SU when I bought a copy of Voice 5's "When you think about me" and noticed how different the whole message of the song is played slower. It's interesting that Windows Media Player gives me the capability to duplicate those modifications if I want to via ActiveX.
Radio stations have always desired to "watermark" their feeds for various reasons which include:
- A brand identity
- Making sure diary-keeping listeners know and remember which station they are listening to
- Making sure anything recorded is clear what station was recorded
- Making sure that if the competition grabs a song from their air, they get an unclean copy that they can't use.
- Complying with publisher requests to protect new content.
"Clean" recordings are what you usually have to pay for. Any form of broadcast is expected to have some bit of interference either by signal technology, DJs doing their intro thing, or intentional mucking. Pure digital streams have to do more mucking than usual because their delivery system is so clean.
5) Users declare that GMailFS's already slow performace cannot possibly get any slower, and then it does. Users abaondon GMailFS and buy a hard disk.
fair use trumps terms of service. period.
Sorry. Fair use is "common law" not "statuory law". Therefore, terms of service which are "contract law" always trump fair use. The correct order is law of the land, agreements, and then traditions.
This is a problem in the system, but attempts to correct it by putting fair use concepts into the written laws keep failing for some strange set of reasons that are hard to explain here.
Sorry... you lost me at your complaint that governments are an unfair monopoly. If you think there should be a competitor to the US Constitution, you may need to leave this nation... but where would you go that's better run?