Try reading the FA. It might make you less ignorant looking when you post a rant. Their solution is an economic one rather than a legal one. They're using 'warranty' in its colloquial sense, not as a term of art.
Stripped of jargon and graphs, their idea is to create a system based on whitelists. If you're not on a whitelist of the person you send a message to, they can deduct money from an escrow account that you have set up for that purpose. The premise is that people won't open mail from people not on their whitelist unless there is money in that escrow account to pay for their time, thus imposing sufficient costs on spammers to make the current model unprofitable.
The primary problem I see with this is getting enough people to start using this system. The majority of people probably aren't going to bother with it unless they have to, which means that most emails will be accepted whether or not it costs the sender money, good or spam, because most of a given recipient's contacts will not have the escrow set up. Unless creating the escrow account is mandated, which makes it no different than most of the 'tax' systems, I don't see this model working any better than what we have today.
What looks good in an academic paper doesn't always translate into the real world. Would their idea work? Yes, with sufficient participation. Will there ever be sufficient participation? No. Look at pgp keys/signatures. There are means of validating the sender's identity now that would stop spam, but they are not used because it requires people to opt-in and most people don't care enough (no matter how much they complain about spam).
Using Google? (Reading Slashdot? The followup story)
Looking for images of quaternion fractals?
On the 3rd of February 2004, this page (or rather the page that was here) was swamped by requests and the server subsequentially failed. The reason was traced to Google introducing a fractal looking logo (see below), which when clicked, performed an image search for "julia" and "fractal". The two most interesting resulting images on the top row of the list were on this page (or rather the page that was here).
[Image used without permission from Google]
In order to get this server functional again, the pages that were here have been moved somewhere else. It shouldn't be too hard to find them if you really want to, do a Google search for "Quaternion fractal" or if you would like to create your own Quaternion fractals try POVRay.
Please note that this is not a criticism of Google but rather an interesting dimension to the power they wield. They have hundreds (thousands?) of servers worldwide that distribute their traffic load. If even a small percentage of that traffic is directed to a single server.....what chance does it have?
Questions: Should Google ask permission before potentially sending huge traffic loads to a single page/server? Should they regulate traffic to individual sites/pages by changing the order of the search results?
Happy searching!
Google giveth
and Google taketh away
Blessed is Google?
[Roger Bagula]
I don't think they 'won' the battle with the US courts, I think they bought the president.
I can't think of much nice to say about Bush, but the Appeal's Court reversal of the break up of Microsoft was handed down in June 2001, only 6 months after Bush took office. Considering that the decision was made by appointed judges -- none of whom (AFAIK, but I'm almost positive) were appointed by Bush -- and not by the federal prosecutors or any other arm of the executive branch, I'd say that it's highly unlikely that the change of president had anything to do with this.
IMHO, politicians are corrupt (or not) regardless of ideologoy/party affiliation, but I have a slightly higher opinion of our appointed-for-life judges who don't have to answer to any special interests once they're on the bench. I don't agree with the decision to overrule the break-up of Microsoft, but I don't believe that it had anything to do with politics or bribery (insulation from the policital process does not guarantee competency, after all).
39 They thought about changing their name, but, sadly, Whizzinator was already taken.
U.K. energy company Powergen finds itself so often confused with a similarly named Italian battery maker that it issues a statement disavowing any connection between the two enterprises. It's not so much the Italian company that the Brits want to distance themselves from as its Web address: Powergenitalia.com.
increasing the dramatic tension
Say by having a character fall over a cliff and then magically survive, for example? I think Jackson did a great job of showing us Middle Earth,but I'm very disappointed in him as a storyteller. Too many cheap Hollywood cliches.
It did happen -- just the timing and location was different. In the books, the Hobbits stop at Rivendell on the way back, I believe, and that's when Frodo tells Bilbo it's gone. Minor change, and understandable.
I'll give you four (all of which bothered me), and there are several others.
(1) Arwen -- very minor and peripheral character in the book with, as the article mentions, only one line in the entire saga (not that I mind seeing Liv Tyler, but I found that whole subplot extremely contrived).
(2) Aragorn -- he has been working toward his 'destiny' his entire life; there is no "Oh, I'm not good enough" angst in the books.
(3) Faramir -- was struck by a poisoned dart riding back toward the citadel, and was carried back by another warrior (and to begin with was never sent on a suicide mission by his father).
(4) Sam -- was never sent away by Frodo, who never trusted Gollum but knew he may be of use.
The omissions -- like the Scouring of the Shire -- were a little disappointing but necessary. All of the changes, however, were gratuitous Hollywood and detracted from the story IMHO.
I have to agree with the author of the article in wishing that Jackson has spent as much time and attention to detail on the story as he did on the visuals. Yes, yes, I know there had to be omissions and none of those bothered me -- it was the changes to the story that I found disappointing and completely unnecessary
In preparation for the likely slashdotting, here are the current results of the poll. Notice the many non-U.S. built vehicles here (you'd think that at least the poster would RTFA, but apparently not).:
Which of these cars do you consider to be the worst?
1975-1980 AMC Pacer
177 votes (11%)
1970-1974 Chevrolet Vega
203 votes (12%)
1970-1972 Citroen SM
28 votes (2%)
1978-1988 Fiat Strada
24 votes (1%)
1983-1989 Ford Bronco II
36 votes (2%)
1957-1959 Ford Edsel
40 votes (2%)
1971-1980 Ford Pinto
233 votes (14%)
1978 Honda Accord hatchback
56 votes (3%)
1971 Mazda RX-2
9 votes (1%)
1979-1984 Oldsmobile Delta 88
30 votes (2%)
1984 Pontiac Fiero
62 votes (4%)
1956-1968 Renault Dauphine
75 votes (5%)
1957-1962 Sachsenring Trabant P50
90 votes (6%)
1981-1991 Yugo GV
567 votes (35%)
A Company has to decide if building the rest from scratch is less than just licensing an OS that already finished the hard stuff.
Depends on what 'building from scratch' would cost. A $30/phone licensing fee, for example, would pay for a lot of coders when you start talking about tens-of-thousands of phones. Companies are going to go with what is most cost-effective, not necessarily what is easiest.
To expand on some of the other responses, Congress can make almost any law based on its Constituionally granted powers, but they cannot overturn the Supreme Court's interpretation of the Constitution. This law is an answer to Feist, not an attempt to change it -- without knowing all of the details I would be willing to bet that this is based on congress's authority to regulate interstate commerce, not copyright. If it were copyright, the Supreme Court could indeed tell them to pound sand.
Two comments:
First, in one sense this happened long ago (and makes this law even more stupid). LexisNexis and Westlaw, the two monster legal database companies, had a big lawsuit when they first started moving online because one (Lexis, I think) was copying the other's printed cases to build their online database. The way it came down, if I remember correctly, is that the material itself (e.g., the court's opinion) cannot be copyrighted, but the way it is presented can (such as the numbering system).
Second, I don't think this will have any effect on public access to law. You may not realize it, but everyone of you almost definitely has access to a public law library -- either at the county courthouse, a local university, whatever (no guarantees as to its quality, but its there if you look). Even more relevant, though, is that most court opinions and state laws are available free online from your state goverment (try your state supreme court and legislature webpages), and the trend has been for more and more of this to be published on the web at the same time LexisNexis and Westlaw have grown. The reasons that people use the pay services are that you can find all of the information in one place, and they have sophisticated search tools to find what you are looking for. Local laws/ordinances are harder to find, but they should be available at that law library I mentioned.
We're not acknowledging that we were in the wrong, but simply that the risk-reward ratio of spending months in court wasn't right for us.
Yay. Chalk up another win for the good guys. It is nice to see, however, that the US legal system isn't the only one where extortion is a valid tactic.
Slashdot Mirror
Try reading the FA. It might make you less ignorant looking when you post a rant. Their solution is an economic one rather than a legal one. They're using 'warranty' in its colloquial sense, not as a term of art.
The primary problem I see with this is getting enough people to start using this system. The majority of people probably aren't going to bother with it unless they have to, which means that most emails will be accepted whether or not it costs the sender money, good or spam, because most of a given recipient's contacts will not have the escrow set up. Unless creating the escrow account is mandated, which makes it no different than most of the 'tax' systems, I don't see this model working any better than what we have today.
What looks good in an academic paper doesn't always translate into the real world. Would their idea work? Yes, with sufficient participation. Will there ever be sufficient participation? No. Look at pgp keys/signatures. There are means of validating the sender's identity now that would stop spam, but they are not used because it requires people to opt-in and most people don't care enough (no matter how much they complain about spam).It appears that Mandrake has their distro-specific 3.2 RPMs up as of yesterday.
. . . the biggest problem is the just-plain-dumbasses.
Here's the actual text now:
Using Google? (Reading Slashdot? The followup story)
Looking for images of quaternion fractals?
On the 3rd of February 2004, this page (or rather the page that was here) was swamped by requests and the server subsequentially failed. The reason was traced to Google introducing a fractal looking logo (see below), which when clicked, performed an image search for "julia" and "fractal". The two most interesting resulting images on the top row of the list were on this page (or rather the page that was here).
[Image used without permission from Google]
In order to get this server functional again, the pages that were here have been moved somewhere else. It shouldn't be too hard to find them if you really want to, do a Google search for "Quaternion fractal" or if you would like to create your own Quaternion fractals try POVRay.
Please note that this is not a criticism of Google but rather an interesting dimension to the power they wield. They have hundreds (thousands?) of servers worldwide that distribute their traffic load. If even a small percentage of that traffic is directed to a single server.....what chance does it have?
Questions: Should Google ask permission before potentially sending huge traffic loads to a single page/server? Should they regulate traffic to individual sites/pages by changing the order of the search results?
Happy searching!
Google giveth
and Google taketh away
Blessed is Google?
[Roger Bagula]
I for one welcome our new "previously unknown Linux Thought Leader" overlord!
I don't think they 'won' the battle with the US courts, I think they bought the president.
I can't think of much nice to say about Bush, but the Appeal's Court reversal of the break up of Microsoft was handed down in June 2001, only 6 months after Bush took office. Considering that the decision was made by appointed judges -- none of whom (AFAIK, but I'm almost positive) were appointed by Bush -- and not by the federal prosecutors or any other arm of the executive branch, I'd say that it's highly unlikely that the change of president had anything to do with this.
IMHO, politicians are corrupt (or not) regardless of ideologoy/party affiliation, but I have a slightly higher opinion of our appointed-for-life judges who don't have to answer to any special interests once they're on the bench. I don't agree with the decision to overrule the break-up of Microsoft, but I don't believe that it had anything to do with politics or bribery (insulation from the policital process does not guarantee competency, after all).
39 They thought about changing their name, but, sadly, Whizzinator was already taken.
U.K. energy company Powergen finds itself so often confused with a similarly named Italian battery maker that it issues a statement disavowing any connection between the two enterprises. It's not so much the Italian company that the Brits want to distance themselves from as its Web address: Powergenitalia.com.
The humor . . . it is too much . . .
increasing the dramatic tension
Say by having a character fall over a cliff and then magically survive, for example? I think Jackson did a great job of showing us Middle Earth,but I'm very disappointed in him as a storyteller. Too many cheap Hollywood cliches.
It did happen -- just the timing and location was different. In the books, the Hobbits stop at Rivendell on the way back, I believe, and that's when Frodo tells Bilbo it's gone. Minor change, and understandable.
I'll give you four (all of which bothered me), and there are several others.
(1) Arwen -- very minor and peripheral character in the book with, as the article mentions, only one line in the entire saga (not that I mind seeing Liv Tyler, but I found that whole subplot extremely contrived).
(2) Aragorn -- he has been working toward his 'destiny' his entire life; there is no "Oh, I'm not good enough" angst in the books.
(3) Faramir -- was struck by a poisoned dart riding back toward the citadel, and was carried back by another warrior (and to begin with was never sent on a suicide mission by his father).
(4) Sam -- was never sent away by Frodo, who never trusted Gollum but knew he may be of use.
The omissions -- like the Scouring of the Shire -- were a little disappointing but necessary. All of the changes, however, were gratuitous Hollywood and detracted from the story IMHO.
I have to agree with the author of the article in wishing that Jackson has spent as much time and attention to detail on the story as he did on the visuals. Yes, yes, I know there had to be omissions and none of those bothered me -- it was the changes to the story that I found disappointing and completely unnecessary
Lord of the Rings. 'Nuff said.
In preparation for the likely slashdotting, here are the current results of the poll. Notice the many non-U.S. built vehicles here (you'd think that at least the poster would RTFA, but apparently not).:
Which of these cars do you consider to be the worst?
1975-1980 AMC Pacer
177 votes (11%)
1970-1974 Chevrolet Vega
203 votes (12%)
1970-1972 Citroen SM
28 votes (2%)
1978-1988 Fiat Strada
24 votes (1%)
1983-1989 Ford Bronco II
36 votes (2%)
1957-1959 Ford Edsel
40 votes (2%)
1971-1980 Ford Pinto
233 votes (14%)
1978 Honda Accord hatchback
56 votes (3%)
1971 Mazda RX-2
9 votes (1%)
1979-1984 Oldsmobile Delta 88
30 votes (2%)
1984 Pontiac Fiero
62 votes (4%)
1956-1968 Renault Dauphine
75 votes (5%)
1957-1962 Sachsenring Trabant P50
90 votes (6%)
1981-1991 Yugo GV
567 votes (35%)
A Company has to decide if building the rest from scratch is less than just licensing an OS that already finished the hard stuff.
Depends on what 'building from scratch' would cost. A $30/phone licensing fee, for example, would pay for a lot of coders when you start talking about tens-of-thousands of phones. Companies are going to go with what is most cost-effective, not necessarily what is easiest.
Oh man!!! Did ya check out the only active link on that page? It's for Gentoo. Now that's a Windows Update!
To expand on some of the other responses, Congress can make almost any law based on its Constituionally granted powers, but they cannot overturn the Supreme Court's interpretation of the Constitution. This law is an answer to Feist, not an attempt to change it -- without knowing all of the details I would be willing to bet that this is based on congress's authority to regulate interstate commerce, not copyright. If it were copyright, the Supreme Court could indeed tell them to pound sand.
Two comments:
First, in one sense this happened long ago (and makes this law even more stupid). LexisNexis and Westlaw, the two monster legal database companies, had a big lawsuit when they first started moving online because one (Lexis, I think) was copying the other's printed cases to build their online database. The way it came down, if I remember correctly, is that the material itself (e.g., the court's opinion) cannot be copyrighted, but the way it is presented can (such as the numbering system).
Second, I don't think this will have any effect on public access to law. You may not realize it, but everyone of you almost definitely has access to a public law library -- either at the county courthouse, a local university, whatever (no guarantees as to its quality, but its there if you look). Even more relevant, though, is that most court opinions and state laws are available free online from your state goverment (try your state supreme court and legislature webpages), and the trend has been for more and more of this to be published on the web at the same time LexisNexis and Westlaw have grown. The reasons that people use the pay services are that you can find all of the information in one place, and they have sophisticated search tools to find what you are looking for. Local laws/ordinances are harder to find, but they should be available at that law library I mentioned.
So, I guess Darl McBride opened that PR school after all.
Heres a link that may help.
Exactly my point. Right now, it's just a couple individuals. I'm waiting to see how this develops.
Ahh -- but you are forgetting that nearly every law congress passes exempts congress from its effect.
Watergate, anyone?
Seriously, though, it'll be interesting to see if this is just a case of an overzealous intern and an incomptent tech, or if there is more to it.
We're not acknowledging that we were in the wrong, but simply that the risk-reward ratio of spending months in court wasn't right for us.
Yay. Chalk up another win for the good guys. It is nice to see, however, that the US legal system isn't the only one where extortion is a valid tactic.
Not to mention having to deal with PETA in addition to the RIAA, and maybe the ASPCA and some other acronyms.