I appreciate the "Canada just foiled..." posts and E-mails, but I would point out that the reply I made was in specific reference to a comment on foreign policy. Please read the parent.
Further, on general principle, I don't count foiled terrorist plots as attacks any more than I consider my plot to win a bazillion dollars on the Portuguese lottery an actual statement of earnings. Yes, Canada arrested a guy and his accomplices who had ordered what was it, several tonnes of fertilizer? Who does that anymore? Not organized terror cells, that's for sure. They were domestic, and at best, playing at being terrorists. I'm not saying they weren't a threat, but unless we're already in some Dickian pre-crime police state, the best we can say is these guys tried to order a lot of shit. Pun intended.
Similarly, there are terror attacks (successful and foiled), against countries, whose foreign policies bully no one -- like Canada or India.
Huh? Canada, while not ever experiencing a terrorist attack in response to Canadian foreign policy, hasn't experienced a terrorist attack since 1985 (Air India 182), not including violence deemed terrorist in nature against Cuban, Turkish and Indian politicians on Canadian soil, which brings me to my second point. You might want to ask Pakistan, Sri Lanka, or any Sikh about that lack of bullying thing you're claiming for India.
As a Welshman born and bred I'd like to (a) point out that one Welshman's knee-jerk jump to the front of the racist line is not indicative of all of us, most of us are actually quite thick-skinned, and (b) let you all know that "twpsyn" is Welsh for idiot, feel free to throw that around to any other Cymro whose inferiority complex can't let them hear the "Wales/whales" gag for the nine hundredth time.
If you don't mind my tweaking, I think "you really lose a very powerful comment on the human condition if Deckard is a replicant" or a human. I think the point is to *not* know; to ask "is Deckard a replicant?" is to ask "am *I* a replicant?". Take that to it's logical conclusion and one has to ask "am I human?" (and if I think so, prove it).
People trying to draw solid conclusions out of Dick's work or any adaptations thereof are going to go as mad as the genius himself, or simply can't stomach the unknowingness of it all and clutch at an answer where one doesn't, shouldn't and can't exist.
I would assume that there will likely be some form of accreditation that you are in fact a porn site, that you put in an effort to not process any old credit card, that the.xxx tenants utilize some form of age verification etc etc, that's assuming the registrar is bright enough to implement.
Of course, we'll never not see porn on the other tlds, but one thing you can be sure of... the good stuff is on.xxx
This would relegate non.xxx porn to the backalleys of the Web, and we can all shop for boobage in a safer environment.
I for one value the porn industry for it's innovation online, both technically and economically; it's been a de facto standard setter in many ways. Porn should have a home on the Web just like anything else, and if we can all stop and notice that instead of the government regulating where porn should be it could be globally self-regulated, we should applaud the new domain.
There's a healthy, thriving industry that makes money by staying within the law, if the registrar can cobble together some form of triple-X HONCode (credit card verification, no malicious downloads etc or you're kicked), the Internet stands to benefit as a whole, if only from the model.
By the by, it's not going to be of much use banning *all* porn at work or on child-safe filters, it's not illegal to host porn in most tlds and it never should be. This no more assures that all porn is in the.xxx domain anymore than calling a country Wales ensures all Welshmen are within it's borders.
Well, I didn't mean social values earned from other humans, merely those earned in the person/game relationship.
Let's say you have good/. karma, and you post a comment on a separate site that has opted to incorporate your/. karma and +1 you. Or -1 you. Whatever that site chooses to do with the information.
I can't go mess with the external system's scoring methodology any more than I can here, it's between you and the machines.
So, imagine a (shudder) Steam-powered/Roger Wilco/Friendster/Karma doohickey, that uses a Drupal-like universal sign-up. You log into CounterStrike 9, and you need positive karma to use the mike in open gameplay, but you've only played Quake 12 up until now. Your past three year's good karma in Quake 12 gets added into the CounterStrike mix and wahoo! you can talk openly on the mike without playing $must_have_played_this_many_times_before_mic_privs or in other words, InstaTrust.
Another example. I'm playing DrugRunners, one class I can play is the Banker. To convince players to bank with me, I don't RP them, it's all done outside the game in chat, it's external to the gaming experience. Or I might form a Cartel and need other players to join. Why not allow potential clients or cartel members to see my (made up score) Clan Leader score from, um, Ultima or something.
Things that demonstrate *how* you play, not *who* or *what* you play, could be valuable currency.
You could carry around with you your team killing scores, or your total gold acquired or whatever.
I'm not saying bring a mage from Ultima into Everquest, but if you played a good game why not bring some of that respect with you?
No reason why trust you build up in one game can't be carried with you to another. Not only trust, but other sociological and socio-economic metrics might be transferrable between persistent universes. If you've proven yourself a valuable team-player instead of solo artist in one game, say Battlefield, maybe that's useful to your persona in Eve. If you've racked up social credit as a good strategist in Drugrunners, maybe that can be taken to another game.
Heck, if you've never been banned for cursing in and mike spamming in CounterStrike, maybe that can go towards a $doesnotmikespam var in another FPS.
I think what should be transferred is gamesmanship metrics, not avatars themselves but what *you* bring to the game.
AOL already has a method for allowing bulk mailers to get through. It's called the Enhanced Whitelist. See http://postmaster.info.aol.com/tools/whitelist_gui des.html for their ruleset. This is what they use to deliver solicited spam. I call it spam, you call it spam, the AOLer who opted to receive it often calls it spam, but it's still solicited. See anything in those rules you disagree with? Much as I dislike AOL, respect to the rules.
We can argue all day about what spam is or is not, but the world of commerce will still crank out solicited mail until you ask them to stop. It's just too easy to mark it as spam these days, or assume all opt-outs are nefarious gotchas looking for live addresses.
Everyone here complains about spam, but as soon as a couple of companies try to get the ball rolling on any kind of reputation-based sending you all cry foul.
I'm a bulk sender of newsletters for a non-profit, small volume, maybe 500k a year. I'm happy to spend a small amount per E-mail, it's the cost of doing business. Beats wasting one of my staff chewing up several hundred dollars in labour every couple of weeks trying to get E-mail through.
Reputation models and some kind of micropayment is what E-mail needs. Lower all our bandwidth costs and charge us per E-mail sent. E-mail costs money, but most users generally don't see that fact.
Face it, E-mail is broken. Fix it, or watch the leading ISPs do it for you.
As a non-profit sender myself, I already contacted Goodmail. AOL *will* continue the enhanced whitelist service, which if you're not using, you should be. The Goodmail system will be the only way for large volume senders to get into AOL inboxes, they will be removed from the enhanced whitelist and forced to sign all outgoing mail with a Goodmail seal if they want AOL eyeballs.
It doesn't stop much of anything, we all either circumvent the bans or find non-banned sources. Editing Wikipedia is more involved than browsing though, and I find it an incredible waste if not downright offensive that federal funds go towards congressional staffers editing documents on non-governmental Web sites. At least hire a lobby or PR firm to spam Wikipedia, keep the staff on task. Any computer registering as a government IP should not be involved with editing Wikipedia, period. The people paid for the computer, pay for the bandwidth, and pay the salaries. If the people wanted the government to write an encyclopaedia, they'd ask them. So the staffers do it from home, fine, at least I'm not paying them to do it.
All.gov addresses should be banned from editing in Wikipedia. The US Government has no mandate to update public Web sites, and should be banned by their internal IT staff. Gov computers are banned from accessing such things as Gmail, game sites, bulletin boards and many other things deemed inappropriate use of government resources, in an effort to ensure that government property is only being used to conduct government work. As such, Wikipedia would be doing us all a favour by banning any gov addresses from editing, thereby reminding government employees that they should stop editing wikis and get back to spending our hard-earned money running the country.
There are six words missing from this 10,000 word essay; "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy".
It featured hypertext, multimedia content objects, a wiki-like browsing interface and of course collaborative document editing (which sounds bad but was mostly harmless).
Sturdy, rugged, built to take all kinds of knocks, apparently easily recharged despite country (or planet, for that matter) and quite affordable. All pre-1980.
Well, the barrier to entry, i.e. being able to operate a VoIP company is indeed low, but the barrier to competing with a telco who can charge less and market themselves more until you're out of business is insurmountable.
As for the airlines, I'm not sure why everyone is crying foul so fast. Not that I'm personally agreeing with it, but the theory of having direct taxation supporting a popular government includes said government ensuring the availability, affordability and reliability of what are perceived as necessary public services, which in these times include communications and transportation. In the case of the airlines, much of the regulation has to do with safety.
As for government handouts, when there are handouts to be had you will find players trying to game the system, whether it be unemployment checks or billion-dollar pension fund bailouts.
I hardly think the entire industry is guilty of this, a few airlines in a global market does not an industry's business plan make. I for one disagreed with the excessive handouts offered to a few US airlines after the attacks of September 11th. This, however, does not preclude me from agreeing that the VoIP market can gain from the regulatory restraining of the predatory nature of the incumbent telcos.
Regulation, at least in it's early stages, can often benefit an industry and thereby its' consumers. In this particular case the government intends to thwart the wholesale takeover of VoIP as a public service by the dominant telcos.
If we admit that VoIP is the future of telephonic communication then we must also agree that entrenched companies offering what is, to the layman, the exact same service, will undoubtedly slash prices to gain penetration until the market is saturated and then begin hiking prices back up to profitability.
Startups and smaller companies that are relatively late to market will be unable to compete with telcos who can comfortably make VoIP a loss leader until such time they see fit.
Regardless of the motive, anything that allows fresh, new companies to deliver fresh, new services instead of aging behemoths like the Bells is, IMHO, a Good Thing (TM).
This aired on NPR a while ago: "A Texas game ranch that offers real-time hunting via the Internet is drawing criticism. Hunters such as Dale Hagberg, an Indiana man paralyzed from the neck down, can shoot animals with a rifle controlled by computer mouse."
"Christ, even Douglas himself said that there was no such thing as the official Hitchhiker story. This movie is just another take on the whole Hitchiker idea."
I keep hearing this in defense of the film's unfunniness. No-one's arguing that Vogsphere shouldn't be in the film. The problems lie with the butchered Guide entries, coordinates for Magrathea for a ship that gets where it's going in a completely different fashion, trying to retain some of Adams' lines under the mistaken belief that by cutting words out of sentences written by a writer who would famously "turn up for work with half a script, work all day and leave with a third", you can further distil them while keeping the comedy.
I for one left the movie feeling like a 14 year-old boy who'd been seduced by Miss Jones the hot gym teacher; I felt good in a general sense but lots of little nagging feelings telling me something was very, very wrong.
Mind you, if they hadn't ended the movie with the absolute most diabolical, travesty-inducing joke I might not feel so bitter. The other end of the universe? The only thing sadder was the belly laugh the joke elicited from the unread half of the Brooklyn audience.
I mean come on, we practically wrote the book on piracy. Black Bart, Blackbeard, Chris Condent, Calico Jack, Henry Morgan for chrissakes. Hell you could add Francis Drake to the list, the Spanish wouldn't argue.
No, there were no counterfeit LV goods sold. Had there been, the case would have been very different.
LV sued for "trademark counterfeit". Google sold a name that doesn't belong to Google. In essence, Google is selling knock-off LV ads. Whether or not those ads pointed to rivals or counterfeiters was immaterial, the sale of the name is what the fine was levied for.
Le Meridien sued for actual harm, wherein it's competitors were bidding on the LM mark. LV sued purely speculatively ("danger of...").
As for how this impacts someone who doesn't rely on the "similar results" or paid listings on the right (and don't forget the two at the top), of course it doesn't, but the suit centres around consumer protection, and not all consumers, maybe more than half, don't distinguish sponsored listings from Google's results.
Not all purchasers of Le Meridien's or Louis Vitton's goods and services are/. readers. Some of them are my mother.
Sure, but instead of being asked for your card by an interested customer, you pay Google to hang out at the LV booth at the ridiculously-overpriced-handbag convention and jump up every time someone approaches to look at the LV bags and give them *your* card, all the while wearing a hat with LV written on it.
Slashdot Mirror
I appreciate the "Canada just foiled..." posts and E-mails, but I would point out that the reply I made was in specific reference to a comment on foreign policy. Please read the parent. Further, on general principle, I don't count foiled terrorist plots as attacks any more than I consider my plot to win a bazillion dollars on the Portuguese lottery an actual statement of earnings. Yes, Canada arrested a guy and his accomplices who had ordered what was it, several tonnes of fertilizer? Who does that anymore? Not organized terror cells, that's for sure. They were domestic, and at best, playing at being terrorists. I'm not saying they weren't a threat, but unless we're already in some Dickian pre-crime police state, the best we can say is these guys tried to order a lot of shit. Pun intended.
Similarly, there are terror attacks (successful and foiled), against countries, whose foreign policies bully no one -- like Canada or India.
Huh? Canada, while not ever experiencing a terrorist attack in response to Canadian foreign policy, hasn't experienced a terrorist attack since 1985 (Air India 182), not including violence deemed terrorist in nature against Cuban, Turkish and Indian politicians on Canadian soil, which brings me to my second point. You might want to ask Pakistan, Sri Lanka, or any Sikh about that lack of bullying thing you're claiming for India.
As a Welshman born and bred I'd like to (a) point out that one Welshman's knee-jerk jump to the front of the racist line is not indicative of all of us, most of us are actually quite thick-skinned, and (b) let you all know that "twpsyn" is Welsh for idiot, feel free to throw that around to any other Cymro whose inferiority complex can't let them hear the "Wales/whales" gag for the nine hundredth time.
hwyl,
mae'n enw ydy mwnci
If you don't mind my tweaking, I think "you really lose a very powerful comment on the human condition if Deckard is a replicant" or a human. I think the point is to *not* know; to ask "is Deckard a replicant?" is to ask "am *I* a replicant?". Take that to it's logical conclusion and one has to ask "am I human?" (and if I think so, prove it).
People trying to draw solid conclusions out of Dick's work or any adaptations thereof are going to go as mad as the genius himself, or simply can't stomach the unknowingness of it all and clutch at an answer where one doesn't, shouldn't and can't exist.
Dick didn't write answers, he wrote questions.
I would assume that there will likely be some form of accreditation that you are in fact a porn site, that you put in an effort to not process any old credit card, that the .xxx tenants utilize some form of age verification etc etc, that's assuming the registrar is bright enough to implement.
.xxx
.xxx porn to the backalleys of the Web, and we can all shop for boobage in a safer environment.
.xxx domain anymore than calling a country Wales ensures all Welshmen are within it's borders.
Of course, we'll never not see porn on the other tlds, but one thing you can be sure of... the good stuff is on
This would relegate non
I for one value the porn industry for it's innovation online, both technically and economically; it's been a de facto standard setter in many ways. Porn should have a home on the Web just like anything else, and if we can all stop and notice that instead of the government regulating where porn should be it could be globally self-regulated, we should applaud the new domain.
There's a healthy, thriving industry that makes money by staying within the law, if the registrar can cobble together some form of triple-X HONCode (credit card verification, no malicious downloads etc or you're kicked), the Internet stands to benefit as a whole, if only from the model.
By the by, it's not going to be of much use banning *all* porn at work or on child-safe filters, it's not illegal to host porn in most tlds and it never should be. This no more assures that all porn is in the
"Mind you, this is pretty much how it works in the real world, minus the ability to spawn multiple accounts and build a fictional support base."
Worked for Bush...
(Sorry, couldn't resist)
Well, I didn't mean social values earned from other humans, merely those earned in the person/game relationship.
/. karma, and you post a comment on a separate site that has opted to incorporate your /. karma and +1 you. Or -1 you. Whatever that site chooses to do with the information.
s or in other words, InstaTrust.
Let's say you have good
I can't go mess with the external system's scoring methodology any more than I can here, it's between you and the machines.
So, imagine a (shudder) Steam-powered/Roger Wilco/Friendster/Karma doohickey, that uses a Drupal-like universal sign-up. You log into CounterStrike 9, and you need positive karma to use the mike in open gameplay, but you've only played Quake 12 up until now. Your past three year's good karma in Quake 12 gets added into the CounterStrike mix and wahoo! you can talk openly on the mike without playing $must_have_played_this_many_times_before_mic_priv
Another example. I'm playing DrugRunners, one class I can play is the Banker. To convince players to bank with me, I don't RP them, it's all done outside the game in chat, it's external to the gaming experience. Or I might form a Cartel and need other players to join. Why not allow potential clients or cartel members to see my (made up score) Clan Leader score from, um, Ultima or something.
Things that demonstrate *how* you play, not *who* or *what* you play, could be valuable currency.
You could carry around with you your team killing scores, or your total gold acquired or whatever.
I'm not saying bring a mage from Ultima into Everquest, but if you played a good game why not bring some of that respect with you?
No reason why trust you build up in one game can't be carried with you to another. Not only trust, but other sociological and socio-economic metrics might be transferrable between persistent universes. If you've proven yourself a valuable team-player instead of solo artist in one game, say Battlefield, maybe that's useful to your persona in Eve. If you've racked up social credit as a good strategist in Drugrunners, maybe that can be taken to another game.
Heck, if you've never been banned for cursing in and mike spamming in CounterStrike, maybe that can go towards a $doesnotmikespam var in another FPS.
I think what should be transferred is gamesmanship metrics, not avatars themselves but what *you* bring to the game.
best laugh I had all day, thank you.
AOL already has a method for allowing bulk mailers to get through. It's called the Enhanced Whitelist. See http://postmaster.info.aol.com/tools/whitelist_gui des.html for their ruleset. This is what they use to deliver solicited spam. I call it spam, you call it spam, the AOLer who opted to receive it often calls it spam, but it's still solicited. See anything in those rules you disagree with? Much as I dislike AOL, respect to the rules.
We can argue all day about what spam is or is not, but the world of commerce will still crank out solicited mail until you ask them to stop. It's just too easy to mark it as spam these days, or assume all opt-outs are nefarious gotchas looking for live addresses.
Everyone here complains about spam, but as soon as a couple of companies try to get the ball rolling on any kind of reputation-based sending you all cry foul.
I'm a bulk sender of newsletters for a non-profit, small volume, maybe 500k a year. I'm happy to spend a small amount per E-mail, it's the cost of doing business. Beats wasting one of my staff chewing up several hundred dollars in labour every couple of weeks trying to get E-mail through.
Reputation models and some kind of micropayment is what E-mail needs. Lower all our bandwidth costs and charge us per E-mail sent. E-mail costs money, but most users generally don't see that fact.
Face it, E-mail is broken. Fix it, or watch the leading ISPs do it for you.
As a non-profit sender myself, I already contacted Goodmail. AOL *will* continue the enhanced whitelist service, which if you're not using, you should be. The Goodmail system will be the only way for large volume senders to get into AOL inboxes, they will be removed from the enhanced whitelist and forced to sign all outgoing mail with a Goodmail seal if they want AOL eyeballs.
No, I didn't. Yes I do. And yes, sorry, you are.
It doesn't stop much of anything, we all either circumvent the bans or find non-banned sources. Editing Wikipedia is more involved than browsing though, and I find it an incredible waste if not downright offensive that federal funds go towards congressional staffers editing documents on non-governmental Web sites. At least hire a lobby or PR firm to spam Wikipedia, keep the staff on task. Any computer registering as a government IP should not be involved with editing Wikipedia, period. The people paid for the computer, pay for the bandwidth, and pay the salaries. If the people wanted the government to write an encyclopaedia, they'd ask them. So the staffers do it from home, fine, at least I'm not paying them to do it.
All .gov addresses should be banned from editing in Wikipedia. The US Government has no mandate to update public Web sites, and should be banned by their internal IT staff. Gov computers are banned from accessing such things as Gmail, game sites, bulletin boards and many other things deemed inappropriate use of government resources, in an effort to ensure that government property is only being used to conduct government work. As such, Wikipedia would be doing us all a favour by banning any gov addresses from editing, thereby reminding government employees that they should stop editing wikis and get back to spending our hard-earned money running the country.
There are six words missing from this 10,000 word essay; "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy".
It featured hypertext, multimedia content objects, a wiki-like browsing interface and of course collaborative document editing (which sounds bad but was mostly harmless).
Sturdy, rugged, built to take all kinds of knocks, apparently easily recharged despite country (or planet, for that matter) and quite affordable. All pre-1980.
Well, the barrier to entry, i.e. being able to operate a VoIP company is indeed low, but the barrier to competing with a telco who can charge less and market themselves more until you're out of business is insurmountable.
As for the airlines, I'm not sure why everyone is crying foul so fast. Not that I'm personally agreeing with it, but the theory of having direct taxation supporting a popular government includes said government ensuring the availability, affordability and reliability of what are perceived as necessary public services, which in these times include communications and transportation. In the case of the airlines, much of the regulation has to do with safety.
As for government handouts, when there are handouts to be had you will find players trying to game the system, whether it be unemployment checks or billion-dollar pension fund bailouts.
I hardly think the entire industry is guilty of this, a few airlines in a global market does not an industry's business plan make. I for one disagreed with the excessive handouts offered to a few US airlines after the attacks of September 11th. This, however, does not preclude me from agreeing that the VoIP market can gain from the regulatory restraining of the predatory nature of the incumbent telcos.
Regulation, at least in it's early stages, can often benefit an industry and thereby its' consumers. In this particular case the government intends to thwart the wholesale takeover of VoIP as a public service by the dominant telcos.
If we admit that VoIP is the future of telephonic communication then we must also agree that entrenched companies offering what is, to the layman, the exact same service, will undoubtedly slash prices to gain penetration until the market is saturated and then begin hiking prices back up to profitability.
Startups and smaller companies that are relatively late to market will be unable to compete with telcos who can comfortably make VoIP a loss leader until such time they see fit.
Regardless of the motive, anything that allows fresh, new companies to deliver fresh, new services instead of aging behemoths like the Bells is, IMHO, a Good Thing (TM).
This aired on NPR a while ago: "A Texas game ranch that offers real-time hunting via the Internet is drawing criticism. Hunters such as Dale Hagberg, an Indiana man paralyzed from the neck down, can shoot animals with a rifle controlled by computer mouse."
The audio archive is here.
(I hope the Web UI follows accesibility standards...)
"Christ, even Douglas himself said that there was no such thing as the official Hitchhiker story. This movie is just another take on the whole Hitchiker idea."
I keep hearing this in defense of the film's unfunniness. No-one's arguing that Vogsphere shouldn't be in the film. The problems lie with the butchered Guide entries, coordinates for Magrathea for a ship that gets where it's going in a completely different fashion, trying to retain some of Adams' lines under the mistaken belief that by cutting words out of sentences written by a writer who would famously "turn up for work with half a script, work all day and leave with a third", you can further distil them while keeping the comedy.
I for one left the movie feeling like a 14 year-old boy who'd been seduced by Miss Jones the hot gym teacher; I felt good in a general sense but lots of little nagging feelings telling me something was very, very wrong.
Mind you, if they hadn't ended the movie with the absolute most diabolical, travesty-inducing joke I might not feel so bitter. The other end of the universe? The only thing sadder was the belly laugh the joke elicited from the unread half of the Brooklyn audience.
Try http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&cl ient=safari&rls=en-us&q=define%3Afob+off&btnG=Sear ch
Where are my socks?
Actually he's from my neck of the woods in South Wales.
I mean come on, we practically wrote the book on piracy. Black Bart, Blackbeard, Chris Condent, Calico Jack, Henry Morgan for chrissakes. Hell you could add Francis Drake to the list, the Spanish wouldn't argue.
No, there were no counterfeit LV goods sold. Had there been, the case would have been very different.
/. readers. Some of them are my mother.
LV sued for "trademark counterfeit". Google sold a name that doesn't belong to Google. In essence, Google is selling knock-off LV ads. Whether or not those ads pointed to rivals or counterfeiters was immaterial, the sale of the name is what the fine was levied for.
Le Meridien sued for actual harm, wherein it's competitors were bidding on the LM mark. LV sued purely speculatively ("danger of...").
As for how this impacts someone who doesn't rely on the "similar results" or paid listings on the right (and don't forget the two at the top), of course it doesn't, but the suit centres around consumer protection, and not all consumers, maybe more than half, don't distinguish sponsored listings from Google's results.
Not all purchasers of Le Meridien's or Louis Vitton's goods and services are
Sure, but instead of being asked for your card by an interested customer, you pay Google to hang out at the LV booth at the ridiculously-overpriced-handbag convention and jump up every time someone approaches to look at the LV bags and give them *your* card, all the while wearing a hat with LV written on it.