I think the use of this for yahoo.com email and other such uses would count as prior art.
Besides, I posted the idea from a Coder's perspecitve, from a personal perspective, I'd patent it perhaps to keep it from being used (if it was actually patentable). =P
Filing lawsuits to protect your price information is just dumb, not to mention waste (if not abuse) of the legal system.
Personal feelings about freedom of information aside, and just from a coder's POV, here's my solution.
If they really want to avoid getting scraped, they should just get their existing, underpaid web developers to create a backend setup that generates the prices as gif's that give OCR hell (such as those used to prevent automated registration of say Yahoo! email accounts).
Coders are cheaper than lawyers (at least those needed to write such code as this).
Sure, the compition could pay more money to get somebody to develop better OCR to read each and every dynamically generated GIF, but most people require proof reading of OCR data, which leads to even more cost.
Something I learned from my Uncle who works with the DOD is this: Any lock can be picked; Any encryption can be broken. It's just a matter of if it's worth the time and money to get what's inside.
In short, with a little one time cost, the company that doesn't want it's prices scraped can just make it so hard to scrape their prices that it's not worth it. The price of scraping the graphically displayed price tags would also be an ongoing cost of software and proofreaders that would dip into profit margins, which management at the company that desires the scraping won't like.
It's not perfect, but it's better (and more bankable) than going whining to the legal system. (Especially since coders are generally cheaper than lawyers).
Well, you set it up to record your favorite songs of any of 10 radio stations in the area and then play them back to you (like recording all your favorite evening weekday network shows and watching them all saturday afternoon) whenever you like... sorta like having an MP3 player, but without all the effort of ripping your CDs, instead you just enter a play list and it plays whatever of it it can find.
Well, at least when people that see my geekness and know I shop online bitch at me to "Buy local! Support your local economy!" I can slap them with a big "You ignorant fsck!" lecture about how my buying from Buy.com just helped pay for that textbook their little mini-yuppi-brat-child just smeared boogies in.
Besides, most of the big online stores already started doing it volentarily. I say even w/ tax and shipping, it still beats getting outta my chair and running around the brick and mortar obstical course.
The challenge-response thing is a great idea for yet-unknown senders. However, users should be able to have a white list that doesn't require a challenge.
Using that, they could sent out an email/insert into paper bill statement that would give users information on where to grab a quick self-installing tool for their platform/email client that would allow 1 click additions to white lists... (or just add it to their Web Mail interface)
Then, earthlink would give users 2 more months of spam (while they build their white list and such) before turning on the challenge-response system.
Another idea, is take email that isn't obvious spam yet fails the challenge-response system and put it in a Junk folder of some sort where users can 1 click white list the sender... So Timmy goes, 'Hey, where's my starwars newsletter?' and Timmy checks his junk, finds the starwars newsletter and in 1 click sends it to his inbox and white lists newsletter@starwars.com or whatever. Of course, if a month or two goes by and you haven't pulled an item from the junk folder, it's assumed you don't care and it gets deleted.
And yet another solution is to have earthlink build it's own white list of responsible, trusted senders (such as rhn-admin@rhn.redhat.com and such) so that users will only have to check that junk folder if it's either A) a sender that misbehaves or B) a sender that earthlink hasn't heard of yet. And to that matter... could always add a sender rating so that if enough people put a certain email address (rhn-admin@rhn.redhat.com) on their whitelist, earthlink would then either add it automatically or give some admin the task of checking out that the sender is really cool and then adding them to the earthlink wide white list.
Anywho, that's just my 0.02USD
One of the producers at my gamedev co. has a degree in psych. Believe me, it helps a lot with keeping things running smooth with the in house development team as well as getting the publishers to pull their heads out of their asses (which needs to be done often).
Besides, who's going to comply to legislation? Discovery Kids, Nickelodeon, Mattel, etc. Or the porn sites? There's plenty of legit porn sites, but there's also plenty of shady ones. On that note it's not right or wrong, it's how many of my tax $ will it take to enforce. Opt-in is better than crack down.
Can you expect it to be safe to allow your children to play in the alleys, the parking lots behind supermarkets, underneath overpasses and bridges? No. But you can (in some areas) expect it to be safe to allow you child to play in the school yard or the local park (in _some_ areas).
Now, if you want to take little Billy to go learn about astrophysics, you'd go w/ him to the university library, wouldn't you?
So why not turn off the.kids.us filter and spend a little quality time w/ the kid?
What ever happened to.kids.us? Make a section of the internet, require review and control to allow ppl to register.kids.us and then all the censorware you'd need for your kids would be something that only allowed access to domains in.kids.us? I'm sure ppl like Nickelodeon and Mattel would buy in w/in the first month.
That's it, problem solved. If it's safe, it applies for a.kids.us DNS entry.
That technology actually already exists, it's built into a lot of current radar detectors.
Workmen set up a beacon near their work site which broadcasts a signal on a specific band which is detected and a special indicator lights up.
As far as emergency vehicles go, it wouldn't be hard. I remember hearing that in some cities emergency vehicles transmit a signal when their siren is on which is picked up by some traffic signals, the lights then change their cycle as much as possible (cant just go green->red right away) to accomidate the emergency vehicle's passage. So, just put that everywhere and have the next generation of radar detectors tune into that as well.
And for those of you living in states that forbid such devices as radar detectors it's usually only illegal in commercial vehicles (such as big rigs and such), but they make special versions (specifically for big rigs and the like) that only pick up construction band (and i'd imagine other specific beacons like at truck scales and such). So, just build onto those models instead of the dodge-a-ticket versions.
This would've helped me a while back. With smoking there's 2 addictions, the physical addiction to nicotine and the habit. I tried a few brands of 'herbal' smokes which contain ingredients like marshmallow and catnip, they tasted disgusting and i'm sure they still had the carcinogens and tar, just in lesser amounts (smoke is smoke is smoke). Anywho, so if there'd been herbal smokes that tasted like the real thing (like these) i probably would've had better chances. For now i'm just going to have to go the other way around and use the patch, break the habit then the addiction. =P
The big flaw with Lindows is the Click-N-Run package (it was discussed in an article previously here on/. but i don't have time to hunt it down right now).
Point of it was, it'd be great... Lindows is good, Click-N-Run sucks. Thats how you have to get all your apps. You get 10 free downloads from their junk aisle or something. And there were questions about what if the download fails, does it still count? and what about making backups of your downloaded software (definately not for a novice). Also, supposedly (i have no 1st hand knowledge) some of the software Click-N-Run charges for is avail. for free elsewhere on the web (OpenOffice?). But, i guess they're charging for the convenience of downloading it from them and whatever else their client software does.
As far as just Lindows goes, the UI is okay, and the existing apps are still more than you get with a base install of windows (sans bundled software). But it's in no way complete. Also, the target market for this machine is probably not going to have DSL/Cable, so those Click-N-Run downloads (if they go for them) are going to take a while.
So, Lindows=NotBad Click-N-Run=JustRun
I bought one when my AMD K6-2 450 finally died and it's case was donated to my cats (they love old cases).
Anyways, I just wanted a cheap system to turn into a simple home server. It works perfect.
I've got it running RH8.0, Samba, a firewall/gateway setup using IPTables, DHCP server and I'll soon be adding some MP3 streaming so I can listen to MP3's all over the house.
It has yet to dissapoint me, despite the lag when I'm on it (since I'm only actually on it 4 hours a week or so for tweaking).
All in all, it's a great warm body machine (for when anything w/ a pulse will do).
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I think the use of this for yahoo.com email and other such uses would count as prior art.
Besides, I posted the idea from a Coder's perspecitve, from a personal perspective, I'd patent it perhaps to keep it from being used (if it was actually patentable). =P
Filing lawsuits to protect your price information is just dumb, not to mention waste (if not abuse) of the legal system.
Personal feelings about freedom of information aside, and just from a coder's POV, here's my solution.
If they really want to avoid getting scraped, they should just get their existing, underpaid web developers to create a backend setup that generates the prices as gif's that give OCR hell (such as those used to prevent automated registration of say Yahoo! email accounts).
Coders are cheaper than lawyers (at least those needed to write such code as this).
Sure, the compition could pay more money to get somebody to develop better OCR to read each and every dynamically generated GIF, but most people require proof reading of OCR data, which leads to even more cost.
Something I learned from my Uncle who works with the DOD is this: Any lock can be picked; Any encryption can be broken. It's just a matter of if it's worth the time and money to get what's inside.
In short, with a little one time cost, the company that doesn't want it's prices scraped can just make it so hard to scrape their prices that it's not worth it. The price of scraping the graphically displayed price tags would also be an ongoing cost of software and proofreaders that would dip into profit margins, which management at the company that desires the scraping won't like.
It's not perfect, but it's better (and more bankable) than going whining to the legal system. (Especially since coders are generally cheaper than lawyers).
Well, you set it up to record your favorite songs of any of 10 radio stations in the area and then play them back to you (like recording all your favorite evening weekday network shows and watching them all saturday afternoon) whenever you like... sorta like having an MP3 player, but without all the effort of ripping your CDs, instead you just enter a play list and it plays whatever of it it can find.
Well, at least when people that see my geekness and know I shop online bitch at me to "Buy local! Support your local economy!" I can slap them with a big "You ignorant fsck!" lecture about how my buying from Buy.com just helped pay for that textbook their little mini-yuppi-brat-child just smeared boogies in. Besides, most of the big online stores already started doing it volentarily. I say even w/ tax and shipping, it still beats getting outta my chair and running around the brick and mortar obstical course.
The challenge-response thing is a great idea for yet-unknown senders. However, users should be able to have a white list that doesn't require a challenge. Using that, they could sent out an email/insert into paper bill statement that would give users information on where to grab a quick self-installing tool for their platform/email client that would allow 1 click additions to white lists... (or just add it to their Web Mail interface) Then, earthlink would give users 2 more months of spam (while they build their white list and such) before turning on the challenge-response system. Another idea, is take email that isn't obvious spam yet fails the challenge-response system and put it in a Junk folder of some sort where users can 1 click white list the sender... So Timmy goes, 'Hey, where's my starwars newsletter?' and Timmy checks his junk, finds the starwars newsletter and in 1 click sends it to his inbox and white lists newsletter@starwars.com or whatever. Of course, if a month or two goes by and you haven't pulled an item from the junk folder, it's assumed you don't care and it gets deleted. And yet another solution is to have earthlink build it's own white list of responsible, trusted senders (such as rhn-admin@rhn.redhat.com and such) so that users will only have to check that junk folder if it's either A) a sender that misbehaves or B) a sender that earthlink hasn't heard of yet. And to that matter... could always add a sender rating so that if enough people put a certain email address (rhn-admin@rhn.redhat.com) on their whitelist, earthlink would then either add it automatically or give some admin the task of checking out that the sender is really cool and then adding them to the earthlink wide white list. Anywho, that's just my 0.02USD
One of the producers at my gamedev co. has a degree in psych. Believe me, it helps a lot with keeping things running smooth with the in house development team as well as getting the publishers to pull their heads out of their asses (which needs to be done often).
Besides, who's going to comply to legislation? Discovery Kids, Nickelodeon, Mattel, etc. Or the porn sites? There's plenty of legit porn sites, but there's also plenty of shady ones. On that note it's not right or wrong, it's how many of my tax $ will it take to enforce. Opt-in is better than crack down.
Can you expect it to be safe to allow your children to play in the alleys, the parking lots behind supermarkets, underneath overpasses and bridges? No. But you can (in some areas) expect it to be safe to allow you child to play in the school yard or the local park (in _some_ areas). Now, if you want to take little Billy to go learn about astrophysics, you'd go w/ him to the university library, wouldn't you? So why not turn off the .kids.us filter and spend a little quality time w/ the kid?
What ever happened to .kids.us? Make a section of the internet, require review and control to allow ppl to register .kids.us and then all the censorware you'd need for your kids would be something that only allowed access to domains in .kids.us? I'm sure ppl like Nickelodeon and Mattel would buy in w/in the first month.
.kids.us DNS entry.
That's it, problem solved. If it's safe, it applies for a
That technology actually already exists, it's built into a lot of current radar detectors.
Workmen set up a beacon near their work site which broadcasts a signal on a specific band which is detected and a special indicator lights up.
As far as emergency vehicles go, it wouldn't be hard. I remember hearing that in some cities emergency vehicles transmit a signal when their siren is on which is picked up by some traffic signals, the lights then change their cycle as much as possible (cant just go green->red right away) to accomidate the emergency vehicle's passage. So, just put that everywhere and have the next generation of radar detectors tune into that as well.
And for those of you living in states that forbid such devices as radar detectors it's usually only illegal in commercial vehicles (such as big rigs and such), but they make special versions (specifically for big rigs and the like) that only pick up construction band (and i'd imagine other specific beacons like at truck scales and such). So, just build onto those models instead of the dodge-a-ticket versions.
This would've helped me a while back. With smoking there's 2 addictions, the physical addiction to nicotine and the habit. I tried a few brands of 'herbal' smokes which contain ingredients like marshmallow and catnip, they tasted disgusting and i'm sure they still had the carcinogens and tar, just in lesser amounts (smoke is smoke is smoke).
Anywho, so if there'd been herbal smokes that tasted like the real thing (like these) i probably would've had better chances.
For now i'm just going to have to go the other way around and use the patch, break the habit then the addiction. =P
The big flaw with Lindows is the Click-N-Run package (it was discussed in an article previously here on /. but i don't have time to hunt it down right now).
Point of it was, it'd be great... Lindows is good, Click-N-Run sucks. Thats how you have to get all your apps. You get 10 free downloads from their junk aisle or something. And there were questions about what if the download fails, does it still count? and what about making backups of your downloaded software (definately not for a novice). Also, supposedly (i have no 1st hand knowledge) some of the software Click-N-Run charges for is avail. for free elsewhere on the web (OpenOffice?). But, i guess they're charging for the convenience of downloading it from them and whatever else their client software does.
As far as just Lindows goes, the UI is okay, and the existing apps are still more than you get with a base install of windows (sans bundled software). But it's in no way complete. Also, the target market for this machine is probably not going to have DSL/Cable, so those Click-N-Run downloads (if they go for them) are going to take a while.
So, Lindows=NotBad Click-N-Run=JustRun
I bought one when my AMD K6-2 450 finally died and it's case was donated to my cats (they love old cases). Anyways, I just wanted a cheap system to turn into a simple home server. It works perfect. I've got it running RH8.0, Samba, a firewall/gateway setup using IPTables, DHCP server and I'll soon be adding some MP3 streaming so I can listen to MP3's all over the house. It has yet to dissapoint me, despite the lag when I'm on it (since I'm only actually on it 4 hours a week or so for tweaking). All in all, it's a great warm body machine (for when anything w/ a pulse will do).