In the law you ask for more than you can get. Nobody opens with their bottom dollar.
As for the strategy, USENET wasn't hurt by Ellison. Usenet, and the Internet have been hurt far more by the few hundred individuals who spam and crap all over everything.
Ellison was a leader in exploring individual legal rights over Internet matters. His argument advanced individual rights. Exactly what is the problem with that?
I predate "groklaw" and wouldn't rip Heinline's "grok" from Stranger in a Strange Land. Shame that paralegal decided to start a blog without an original name - still a nice blog that.
I've had this nick since 1987 when I started using it on The Well and BIX. That was the year I started law school.
As for the case: the law makes you take certain steps. In Chess you must open with a pawn or a knight. Period. Them's the rules..
For Ellison - who acted through his attorney - and it was the attorney came up with the strategy - the route he took and rules he used were both: successful and mandated by law.
Ellison had been fighting print pirates for years - this was just the war on a new front. He won and AOL lost. How many people have the guts to bring a suit and risk losing and paying a massive attorney's fee award to AOL? Check the pleadings. There is a fee petition in there and the Court denied it...but it could have bankrupted Ellison had the decision gone the other way. Fee petitions are decided by judges - not juries.
Exactly. Prickly doesn't convey the proper image of Ellison.
An under-medicated, short curmudgeon, with distinct bi-polar and antisocial traits who used his personality as a birth control device is a somewhat more accurate description of the Ellison I know.
A simple, solid short story of a family man and his "souped-up" car. Ellison is a craftsman who mastered the short story - Shatner came late to the party and only because Roddenberry cast him in a SF role.
Ellison is a writer, first, last and always. His muse may wain, but the body of work is solid.
Finally, Ellison has done dramatic readings for years. It is another outlet for the artist and many of those are classics.
Harlan, and anybody else who was proud of their work, would fight to keep their creation - both in the form that it was written and under some mechanism to recover payment for the work.
Ellison "prickly"? You must be using some meaning of the word "prickly" that I wasn't previously familiar with.
Harlan was a wicked, wicked young man. His readings at Worldcon in NYC in the late 60's and early 70's were the stuff of massive panel debates. AND, fawning admiration by most of the attendees.
I can remember one piece that Harlan read an overtly raw sex piece from the dais at the Commodore Hotel, around the time that he published "I see a man sitting in a chair and the chair is biting his leg" in a collaboration with Robert Sheckley. I recall that Sheckley, Gunn, and Silverberg were all onthe panel and a room full of college kids had their first exposure to erotic literature.
The man wrote, and read, brilliantly. Yes, he has short-man's syndrome, but in his defense, he has taste and style and a willingness to explore just about anything as a writer.
From his Dangerous Visions anthologies to his scripts for Demon with a Glass Hand and City on the Edge of Forever to The Glass Teat and The Other Glass Teat, Ellison has cranked out a lifetime's work nearly every year for the first 20 years of his professional life. Only Isaac Asimov was more prolific.
Ellison had a legitimate, hard fought, lawsuit for copyright violation. Companies were reprinting his work and selling it without paying any royalty and Ellison had every right to fight for his property rights.
If the current administration has its way, we have no business archiving anything.
One of GWB's first acts was to lock down the Reagan administration's (and, all subsequent administration's) data forever. The 12 year release cycle that the Ford Administration approved was revoked within weeks of Jan 2000 (some cynics say, to prevent data about Iran-Contra and GHWB's involvement becoming public - but that's just crazy talk).
The only data less available than old parchment in a vault is random magnetic domains and / or the lack thereof.
You can't prosecute what didn't happen... Ask Oliver North about those PROFs backup tapes.
In ten years there will be no "official" record.
Bush will have achieved what countless computer marketing schemes promised: a paperless office.
The corrupt politician's wet-dream - no records.
It all started as "a matter of national security" - but the first victim (*target*) was a cartographer mapping Caribou trails through ANWAR.
Now, states like Missouri have eliminated publishing certain rules, laws and regulations on the Internet - as too costly. Yep, if you want to read the regs to Chap. 213 R.S.Mo. you have to go to Jefferson City and ask nicely at the Mo. Commission on Human Rights to look at a copy of the new rules. One per Commission....Damn electrons and ink are dangerous to 'merican republicans. Ration them - then burn-bag and deep six 'em.
He was a guy who attended a few classes and lied about his standing to hang around.
Either he wanted an education (without credit-hours) or, he had no better place to be.
Woz did it better when he obtained his degree....took a business prof down for trying to tell him how Apple made the Fortune 500 - and got it wrong. Woz matriculated under an assumed name...
However, Jobs may yet hand Bill Gates a pink slip....OSX heading foe WINTEL - a stable, newbie-friendly, OS that could run Windoze as a task...
Jobs corporate ju jitsu - Bill just hasn't noticed that his company is dead yet.
Now we get to the subject: publishing comments from the public. The original CR was a bi-monthly publication and the room for public comments in the magazine format was greatly limited. From my own observation the entire "critical" letter section did not exceed 12 column inches a year. You can rest assured that they edited the comments very well, indeed. Certainly no more than 24 letters were published in a year, and usually many fewer.
Now CR has decided to provide unlimited bitch and moan space, but no editor. There goes the neighborhood...
Turning to the corporate world: in the original incarnation, CR didn't accept the corporate "freebies" to test, didn't accept advertising and, they bought their test subjects from retail outlets so that they obtained a representative sample of the product (a car to a TV to washer-dryers). After purchasing random consumer end product, CR evaluated them based upon a reasonable objective criterion. The magazine gave a whole page to 2 pages on the testing methodology and the rationale for the testing method. Then they gave a rundown of the winners and losers along with a table showing the names, prices, and performance results for every product tested. Today, we don't see the test results, or the write-up, that the original CR provided.
I do believe that CR has been "chilled" in its speech by some corporate pressures and the "veggie libel" laws. It seems to me that the public bitch and moan page just cheap "content" generator provided in a way for CR to skirt the liability issues by making use of the Telecommunications Act of 1996's "bulletin board liability" shield.
I bought CR for the independent lab results, the professional writing and the high quality editing. Now we don't have the comprehensive testing or the writing - and editing just flew out the window.
Has anybody actually read CR recently? Better still, who has compared the CR from the 1970's with the 2000's? The evaluations and the NEGATIVE reports have been supplanted by mostly happy-talk and non-substantive reviews of major manufacturers products.
The on-line CR has even less to recommend itself. Now they are putting the public out-front to eat the defamation actions where the old CR would have done the research and published the dirt.
I blame the CR board member Burnele Powell, a law professor and law school dean. Who better to blame than the lawyers?
Standard 304. COURSE OF STUDY AND ACADEMIC CALENDAR.
(a) A law school shall have an academic year of not fewer than 130 days on which classes are regularly scheduled in the law school, extending into not fewer than eight calendar months. The law school shall provide adequate time for reading periods, examinations, and breaks, but such time does not count toward the 130-day academic year requirement.
(b) A law school shall require, as a condition for graduation, successful completion of a course of study in residence of not fewer than 58,000 minutes of instruction time, except as otherwise provided. At least 45,000 of these minutes shall be by attendance in regularly scheduled class sessions at the law school.
(c) A law school shall require that the course of study for the J.D. degree be completed no sooner than 24 months and not longer than 84 months after a student has commenced law study at the law school or a law school from which the school has accepted transfer credit.
WP is the DOJ choice by tradition - not any other reason. Most US District Courts require Jury Instructions submitted in WP format on 3.5" floppies....
This has been the case since 1987. We are talking entrenched technology nothing else.
Might as well shoot for the top - take a law degree (2.5-3 years depending if you take summer classes) + take the Patent Bar and become a Patent Attorney who drafts applications for software patents.
You will be among the 12,000 or so US Patent Attorneys on the planet and, with only a small amount of luck (and a tough hide to make it through law school) you should go far.
If you are really serious about this business then Franklin Pierce law school (an IP first type of law school) should be your target.
You are correct - the competence of the installation and maintenance are certainly determinative factors, albeit that a comparison of a certain class of OS that has inherent type-X vulnerabilities vs. the next class of OS that has inherent both type X + type Y vulnerabilities may be comparing apples to oranges.
Type X + Type Y vulnerabilities may give rise to the argument that the administration and installation of the OS with the different classes of vulnerabilities may be substantially more complex to secure - or, significantly less where the limitations inherent in the system are limitations that directly effect some primary communication protocol.
Compare: a mismanaged primary SBC switch serving the entire Dallas-Ft. Worth, Tx metro area to a mismanaged in-house PBX in a Baghdad hotel; Or, somebody serving ASCII images with a TI-99a to serving ecommerce at Amazon.
Exploits of Amazon and massive telephone switches are far more common because of their complexity and connectivity - with our without competent administration; TI-99 ASCII image servers have all of the exploits that a baby 8-bit system has and the inherent risks are limited by the limited nature of the system. - and a Baghdad hotel PBX with no functioning power or telecommunications infrastructure is a dead horse....
Stock splits are exactly that - a quick way to issue double that class of stock.
If Apple is trading at pretty close to the top of their market ( aside from Tiger and the new Apple Portable Campstove a/k/a a G-5 laptop and whatever the Mini turns out to be) and there doesn't seem to be any Insanely Great stuff in the pipeline. ..then this is not the time to buy.
Buying at or around the split is buying "high" - however, if the Mini really does make significant inroads into the Wintel world or becomes a home entertainment center - then the split allows more shares to trade and trade volume could increase....and, share price might go up.
If you want to wager - well, the market odds are not as bad as a casino... most of the time (e.g. ENRON).
Stick with a well-diversified portfolio and enjoy the fact that the Bond market will beat Bush into line sooner or later over the deficits.
If there isn't already a Usenetgroup by this name- there damn well ought to be.
DS9 was the last-best effort of the franchise. The Trek universe has run its course. It should die and never, ever be brought back.
Enterprise, The Undiscovered Country, Nemesis and a host of real stinkeroos from all of the franchise says this horse is dead. Stop beating it and enjoy the excellent shows: "City on the Edge of Forever", Ellison & ST matched only by Ted Sturgeon's, "Shore Leave" and trailed by David Gerrold's"The Trouble with Tribbles"
Some like the poor adaptation of the Berserker saga in "The Doomsday Machine"; TNG has few good episodes and, IMHO, "The Inner Light" tops the series; Voyager and Enterprise leave me cold.
DS9 has the outstanding, "Far Beyond the Stars", the return to Gerrold's Tribbles in "Trials and Tribbilations"; and, "In the Pale Moonlight" coupled with "The Seige of AR-558" DS9 takes war in fantasy to the edge of reality.
The ensemble cast of DS9 worked better together than any other cast in the franchise and, they were - for the most part - far better actors with better material - despite Berman & Braga. Ira Steven Behr is the man responsible for the quality of DS9.
Behr made certain that Cisco wouldn't be back - they didn't kill him - they revealed him to be a God/wormhole alien - end of that character. Period.
Slashdot Mirror
Harlan would have:
Punched me out
stolen my gal
hogged the dais
and, bragged about it.
You do nice graphics. I feel much better about you, too.
In the law you ask for more than you can get. Nobody opens with their bottom dollar.
As for the strategy, USENET wasn't hurt by Ellison. Usenet, and the Internet have been hurt far more by the few hundred individuals who spam and crap all over everything.
Ellison was a leader in exploring individual legal rights over Internet matters. His argument advanced individual rights. Exactly what is the problem with that?
I predate "groklaw" and wouldn't rip Heinline's "grok" from Stranger in a Strange Land. Shame that paralegal decided to start a blog without an original name - still a nice blog that.
I've had this nick since 1987 when I started using it on The Well and BIX. That was the year I started law school.
As for the case: the law makes you take certain steps. In Chess you must open with a pawn or a knight. Period. Them's the rules..
For Ellison - who acted through his attorney - and it was the attorney came up with the strategy - the route he took and rules he used were both: successful and mandated by law.
Ellison had been fighting print pirates for years - this was just the war on a new front. He won and AOL lost. How many people have the guts to bring a suit and risk losing and paying a massive attorney's fee award to AOL? Check the pleadings. There is a fee petition in there and the Court denied it...but it could have bankrupted Ellison had the decision gone the other way. Fee petitions are decided by judges - not juries.
Haven't seen a copy of one in 25 years!
It does show that Ellison had range and guts.
I just don't remember if it was really all that good,.. How does he compare with Nin?
Exactly. Prickly doesn't convey the proper image of Ellison.
An under-medicated, short curmudgeon, with distinct bi-polar and antisocial traits who used his personality as a birth control device is a somewhat more accurate description of the Ellison I know.
Not a chance.
Read, Dogfight on 101
Then compare Shatner with Ellison, if you can.
A simple, solid short story of a family man and his "souped-up" car. Ellison is a craftsman who mastered the short story - Shatner came late to the party and only because Roddenberry cast him in a SF role.
Ellison is a writer, first, last and always. His muse may wain, but the body of work is solid.
Finally, Ellison has done dramatic readings for years. It is another outlet for the artist and many of those are classics.
See, http://www.audible.com/ and search for Ellison as narrator.
Harlan, and anybody else who was proud of their work, would fight to keep their creation - both in the form that it was written and under some mechanism to recover payment for the work.
Harlan was right. End of story.
Ellison "prickly"? You must be using some meaning of the word "prickly" that I wasn't previously familiar with.
Harlan was a wicked, wicked young man. His readings at Worldcon in NYC in the late 60's and early 70's were the stuff of massive panel debates. AND, fawning admiration by most of the attendees.
I can remember one piece that Harlan read an overtly raw sex piece from the dais at the Commodore Hotel, around the time that he published "I see a man sitting in a chair and the chair is biting his leg" in a collaboration with Robert Sheckley. I recall that Sheckley, Gunn, and Silverberg were all onthe panel and a room full of college kids had their first exposure to erotic literature.
The man wrote, and read, brilliantly. Yes, he has short-man's syndrome, but in his defense, he has taste and style and a willingness to explore just about anything as a writer.
From his Dangerous Visions anthologies to his scripts for Demon with a Glass Hand and City on the Edge of Forever to The Glass Teat and The Other Glass Teat, Ellison has cranked out a lifetime's work nearly every year for the first 20 years of his professional life. Only Isaac Asimov was more prolific.
Ellison had a legitimate, hard fought, lawsuit for copyright violation. Companies were reprinting his work and selling it without paying any royalty and Ellison had every right to fight for his property rights.
See, http://harlanellison.com/home.htm/ for Ellison's (way out of date) home page and,
See, http://www.authorslawyer.com/c-ellison.shtml/ for the copyright action.
If the current administration has its way, we have no business archiving anything.
One of GWB's first acts was to lock down the Reagan administration's (and, all subsequent administration's) data forever. The 12 year release cycle that the Ford Administration approved was revoked within weeks of Jan 2000 (some cynics say, to prevent data about Iran-Contra and GHWB's involvement becoming public - but that's just crazy talk).
The only data less available than old parchment in a vault is random magnetic domains and / or the lack thereof.
You can't prosecute what didn't happen... Ask Oliver North about those PROFs backup tapes.
In ten years there will be no "official" record.
Bush will have achieved what countless computer marketing schemes promised: a paperless office.
The corrupt politician's wet-dream - no records.
It all started as "a matter of national security" - but the first victim (*target*) was a cartographer mapping Caribou trails through ANWAR.
Now, states like Missouri have eliminated publishing certain rules, laws and regulations on the Internet - as too costly. Yep, if you want to read the regs to Chap. 213 R.S.Mo. you have to go to Jefferson City and ask nicely at the Mo. Commission on Human Rights to look at a copy of the new rules. One per Commission....Damn electrons and ink are dangerous to 'merican republicans. Ration them - then burn-bag and deep six 'em.
This is simple: give a thumb-print
Now - at the time benefits are sought.
Future - when joining the workforce
Always: run matching scans - weekly - across states
Catch double/triple 100 dippers and use minimaly intrusive biometrics
not rocket science
Jobs sponged off of Reed...
He was a guy who attended a few classes and lied about his standing to hang around.
Either he wanted an education (without credit-hours) or, he had no better place to be.
Woz did it better when he obtained his degree....took a business prof down for trying to tell him how Apple made the Fortune 500 - and got it wrong. Woz matriculated under an assumed name...
However, Jobs may yet hand Bill Gates a pink slip....OSX heading foe WINTEL - a stable, newbie-friendly, OS that could run Windoze as a task...
Jobs corporate ju jitsu - Bill just hasn't noticed that his company is dead yet.
But they aren't "in business", they're a consumer union - not a "business". At least that's what they say in the masthead.
Now we get to the subject: publishing comments from the public. The original CR was a bi-monthly publication and the room for public comments in the magazine format was greatly limited. From my own observation the entire "critical" letter section did not exceed 12 column inches a year. You can rest assured that they edited the comments very well, indeed. Certainly no more than 24 letters were published in a year, and usually many fewer.
Now CR has decided to provide unlimited bitch and moan space, but no editor. There goes the neighborhood...
Turning to the corporate world: in the original incarnation, CR didn't accept the corporate "freebies" to test, didn't accept advertising and, they bought their test subjects from retail outlets so that they obtained a representative sample of the product (a car to a TV to washer-dryers). After purchasing random consumer end product, CR evaluated them based upon a reasonable objective criterion. The magazine gave a whole page to 2 pages on the testing methodology and the rationale for the testing method. Then they gave a rundown of the winners and losers along with a table showing the names, prices, and performance results for every product tested. Today, we don't see the test results, or the write-up, that the original CR provided.
I do believe that CR has been "chilled" in its speech by some corporate pressures and the "veggie libel" laws. It seems to me that the public bitch and moan page just cheap "content" generator provided in a way for CR to skirt the liability issues by making use of the Telecommunications Act of 1996's "bulletin board liability" shield.
I bought CR for the independent lab results, the professional writing and the high quality editing. Now we don't have the comprehensive testing or the writing - and editing just flew out the window.
I agree with you that the on-line version is the same as the print content.
I believe that you started reading 10 years after CR made their name. They were the "non-commercial" answer to the UL Labs.
Today, you must admit, CR has dropped the number of testing criteria and the number of products tested.
In the early 70's through the early 80's CR had a grid of 6-12 criterion for each product tested and the grid was published for EACH product.
Today they don't cover as many products, they aren't as comprehensive in their testing and they have become lawsuit-shy.
I'm open to evidence to the contrary, but I became disgusted by the dilution of their "mission" after almost 30 years as a member.
Has anybody actually read CR recently? Better still, who has compared the CR from the 1970's with the 2000's? The evaluations and the NEGATIVE reports have been supplanted by mostly happy-talk and non-substantive reviews of major manufacturers products.
The on-line CR has even less to recommend itself. Now they are putting the public out-front to eat the defamation actions where the old CR would have done the research and published the dirt.
I blame the CR board member Burnele Powell, a law professor and law school dean. Who better to blame than the lawyers?
http://www.abanet.org/legaled/standards/chapter3.h tml/
I trust that this makes it perfectly clear... BY ABA/AALS regs.
You can complete the degree in as few as 24 months:
Standard 304. COURSE OF STUDY AND ACADEMIC CALENDAR.
(a) A law school shall have an academic year of not fewer than 130 days on which classes are regularly scheduled in the law school, extending into not fewer than eight calendar months. The law school shall provide adequate time for reading periods, examinations, and breaks, but such time does not count toward the 130-day academic year requirement.
(b) A law school shall require, as a condition for graduation, successful completion of a course of study in residence of not fewer than 58,000 minutes of instruction time, except as otherwise provided. At least 45,000 of these minutes shall be by attendance in regularly scheduled class sessions at the law school.
(c) A law school shall require that the course of study for the J.D. degree be completed no sooner than 24 months and not longer than 84 months after a student has commenced law study at the law school or a law school from which the school has accepted transfer credit.
WP is the DOJ choice by tradition - not any other reason. Most US District Courts require Jury Instructions submitted in WP format on 3.5" floppies....
This has been the case since 1987. We are talking entrenched technology nothing else.
My former law partner graduated in 2.5 by skipping the clerking experience and taking summer classes. He was an EE with an eye towards patent law...
Browse a few law school sites....
Might as well shoot for the top - take a law degree (2.5-3 years depending if you take summer classes) + take the Patent Bar and become a Patent Attorney who drafts applications for software patents.
You will be among the 12,000 or so US Patent Attorneys on the planet and, with only a small amount of luck (and a tough hide to make it through law school) you should go far.
If you are really serious about this business then Franklin Pierce law school (an IP first type of law school) should be your target.
This is not a joke....
You are correct - the competence of the installation and maintenance are certainly determinative factors, albeit that a comparison of a certain class of OS that has inherent type-X vulnerabilities vs. the next class of OS that has inherent both type X + type Y vulnerabilities may be comparing apples to oranges.
Type X + Type Y vulnerabilities may give rise to the argument that the administration and installation of the OS with the different classes of vulnerabilities may be substantially more complex to secure - or, significantly less where the limitations inherent in the system are limitations that directly effect some primary communication protocol.
Compare: a mismanaged primary SBC switch serving the entire Dallas-Ft. Worth, Tx metro area to a mismanaged in-house PBX in a Baghdad hotel; Or, somebody serving ASCII images with a TI-99a to serving ecommerce at Amazon.
Exploits of Amazon and massive telephone switches are far more common because of their complexity and connectivity - with our without competent administration; TI-99 ASCII image servers have all of the exploits that a baby 8-bit system has and the inherent risks are limited by the limited nature of the system. - and a Baghdad hotel PBX with no functioning power or telecommunications infrastructure is a dead horse....
Stock splits are exactly that - a quick way to issue double that class of stock.
.then this is not the time to buy.
If Apple is trading at pretty close to the top of their market ( aside from Tiger and the new Apple Portable Campstove a/k/a a G-5 laptop and whatever the Mini turns out to be) and there doesn't seem to be any Insanely Great stuff in the pipeline. .
Buying at or around the split is buying "high" - however, if the Mini really does make significant inroads into the Wintel world or becomes a home entertainment center - then the split allows more shares to trade and trade volume could increase....and, share price might go up.
If you want to wager - well, the market odds are not as bad as a casino... most of the time (e.g. ENRON).
Stick with a well-diversified portfolio and enjoy the fact that the Bond market will beat Bush into line sooner or later over the deficits.
If there isn't already a Usenetgroup by this name- there damn well ought to be.
DS9 was the last-best effort of the franchise. The Trek universe has run its course. It should die and never, ever be brought back.
Enterprise, The Undiscovered Country, Nemesis and a host of real stinkeroos from all of the franchise says this horse is dead. Stop beating it and enjoy the excellent shows: "City on the Edge of Forever", Ellison & ST matched only by Ted Sturgeon's, "Shore Leave" and trailed by David Gerrold's"The Trouble with Tribbles"
Some like the poor adaptation of the Berserker saga in "The Doomsday Machine"; TNG has few good episodes and, IMHO, "The Inner Light" tops the series; Voyager and Enterprise leave me cold.
DS9 has the outstanding, "Far Beyond the Stars", the return to Gerrold's Tribbles in "Trials and Tribbilations"; and, "In the Pale Moonlight" coupled with "The Seige of AR-558" DS9 takes war in fantasy to the edge of reality.
The ensemble cast of DS9 worked better together than any other cast in the franchise and, they were - for the most part - far better actors with better material - despite Berman & Braga. Ira Steven Behr is the man responsible for the quality of DS9.
Behr made certain that Cisco wouldn't be back - they didn't kill him - they revealed him to be a God/wormhole alien - end of that character. Period.
Let it go. Let it go. Let it go.
Wrote some wicked dystopian SF with these things. It was around 1968. The only difference between then and now is that armed RPVs exist today.
I wonder if they will use a race or religion - based FoF discrimination system? Shoot the brown people or, shoot the non Christian?
http://www.keithlaumer.com/
The Streets of San Francisco are out on DVD?
No way!