Actually, the treaties behind the WTO were never ratified, in the strict constitutional sense. The Clinton administration, seeing that it couldn't get the super-majority required for Senate ratification, used a workaround used by multiple administrations in the past (of both parties). Instead of calling the document a "treaty", they call it an "agreement". Then they can push a bill through Congress with only a simple majority, saying that the US will treat the "agreement" as national law.
The WTO has already overridden multiple other US laws. A protest filed by Mexican fishermen killed the old "dolphin safe tuna" laws; a protest from a South American country killed some restrictions on importing oil with high sulfur content, etc. There's currently a mini-trade war in progress, with EU countries imposing special duties on a number of US imports, because the US hasn't repealed some tax rules that the WTO views as an illegal trade subsidy.
There has been previous statements from some well known constitutional scholars (including Laurence Tribe at Harvard) that the US Congress should be ashamed of itself for allowing the rules in the constitution about treaty ratification to be ignored when inconvenient.
You can make a very good case that the games played with the patent system by the old Polaroid company directly led to its bankruptcy and liquidation. Their goal was to file as many patents as possible, making the narrowest possible claim, spread apart as much as possible, with the goal of keeping a permanent monopoly on instant photography.
That led them down the path of changing film formats as often as possible, in incompatible ways, forcing consumers to buy new cameras as often as possible. To do that, cameras had to be cheap; a consequence was that they broke easily.
If they had given anybody who asked a cheap license; to Kodak, Minolta, whatever, they might have sold enough film to stay around long enough to make a real digital effort.
It wasn't Polaroid; if you're thinking of film it was probably somebody like Fuji. The old Polaroid is completely gone; it went into bankruptcy and was liquidated. A different company bought the rights to make film, another bought it's id badge technology, and a few other people bought rights to use the Polaroid name.
I saw a story a while ago about somebody who bought the name Polaroid; did a spec for a flat panel television; getting it manufactured in China, and is trying to get them into stores. I think somebody else bought the name for other electronics (mp3 player, dvd drives, etc.)
Actually, a spacwalk to the bottom of the current shuttle is a big deal. All they've done so far is in and above the cargo bay. The onboard arm can't be used to get below the shuttle, or even really out to the sides.
To get to the sides and then to the bottom of the current shuttle, an astronaut would need say at least a 500-1000 foot safety tether, a way to pay it out and reel it in safely over the cargo bay doors, and a thruster system with lots of fuel (possibly sent through the safety tether). Remember it's freefall, and there are no handholds, footholds, safety lines, etc. to pull yourself along the sides and bottom of the ship. And if you tried to somehow cling to the tiles you could damage them.
I was a student at UCLA when CalPIRG first tried to start a chapter there, using the same ripoff tactic. University rules (at least at that time) required a student vote; CalPIRG lost. I heard they tried again a few years later, after I graduated. They found a way to get in then.
Decoding part of one of these msgs that got into our company showed a typical viagra spam. The site being spamvertised was "easye.us", which I think I've seen before from the same spammer that had a lot of sites of the form "4-6 random characters".{biz,info,us}. When I checked early this afternoon, it looked like easye.us had already been removed from the net.
If you're really concerned with privacy, you also have the choice to boycott the chains that use the cards, and instead give your business to chains that don't.
There are a number of problems with his statements...
First, SCO arguably does NOT own all of System 5. There are two reasons. (1) System 5 is not an independent product; it is a modification of previous system 5 releases, which were modifications of previous system 3 releases, which were modifications of Unix V32, Unix V7, Unix/PWB, Unix V6, etc. All versions of Unix prior to and including Unix V32 have been made public. Looking at the source base in total (commands & kernel), there's probably >50% or 60% commonality between the public versions of Unix, and system 5.
(2) As shown in the previous UCB vs ATT trial, ATT freely copied from other people without asking permission, giving attribution, etc.
SCO can't even say they control the definition of "what is Unix"; that is owned by the Open Group committee.
And their apparent definition of a "derived work" that they're trying to force down people's throats is different from the generally accepted definition of that term, at least with the parts of the computer industry that I've been involved with for over 25 years.
In Oregon, DSL are regulated in two pieces; a communications service and an information service. You have a choice of either getting a package of a DSL line & internet service from the phone company, OR getting just the DSL line from the phone company, and internet service from a third party ISP that offers DSL service.
If you use a third party isp, you have two bills. One from the phone company for the line, and one from the isp for the internet service. If you use the phone company as your isp, I think you just get one bill.
In theory, the phone company bill pays for the line maintainence, and your portion of the dsl head end in the phone company central office. Your isp bill pays for getting packets from the phone company central office to & from the internet.
There also were some non-phone company isp's that leased lines from the phone company (Covad?); I'm not sure though if they are still active in Oregon.
I do have some sympathy for the management involved.
Say they did have some knowledge while in orbit that the shielding was damaged, and that Columbia probably could not come back. Their choices were extremely limited.
The crew didn't have the tools, training, materials, etc. to do any repairs in flight.
The arm wasn't installed for this shuttle flight.
There were only two eva capable space suits on board. The only eva training the crew had was to try manual methods of closing the cargo bay doors if the automatic methods failed.
The shuttle apparently didn't have enough fuel to reach & dock with the space station.
Would they have had any choices other than:
a. Tell the crew the situation, and let the crew decide whether to take a chance.
b. Breaking every single shuttle launch safety rule, try to launch another shuttle with 1-2 crew, and a bunch of space suits, before Columbia ran out of consumables.
A limit on the number of unsolicited msgs per day also won't work. If you think about the total number of companies in the world & the costs to the sender of email, if sending spam became "acceptable", you could easily expect to receive hundreds to thousands of spam msgs a day. As soon as a gang member found your address and added it to lists, you'd start receiving broadcasts from the entire world. Unless you got off the lists (the electronic equivalent of a "No Solicitors" sign), your email address would become unusable quickly.
I wouldn't assume that all, or even "most" spam comes from people missing a check box in a privacy policy.
As one example, a year or two ago (in a Seattle area paper iirc), a reporter got interested in signs appearing on telephone poles saying that people with home computers could earn lots of money. So he signed up. The group behind the telephone pole signs supplied him with a list of thousands of email addresses, and a list of web sites that let users sign up for mailing lists without any security checks. He was to get paid a few cents for each email address, per each web site it was added to.
Actually, the statements in the EE times story tell you nothing whatsoever.
At the very minimum you need to know exactly how they are separating code that was in 32v from code that was in system 5, if they are doing that at all. System 5 is a modified copy of 32v; in the previous att usl vs uc berkeley lawsuit, issues of common code were resolved.
You need to know whether it was a header file or a source file.
They need to show that the code was post 32v, and was either originally developed at att usl, or the original developers assigned rights to att usl.
Examples of commonality sco couldn't claim are copied UC Berkeley networking code, and (iirc) Sun NFS code.
And those aren't the only examples.
During the times I was involved with actual Unix source code (mid 1970's to mid 1980's) for three different employers (UCLA, SDC, Tektronix) there was nothing similar to a nda. The school or company just agreed to not give source code access to non-"employees", and "employees" agreed not to give access to others who hadn't agreed to the Bell license.
Within those terms, there was a lot of access. At the yearly conferences (which later became USENIX) there was a typically conference distribution tape. That tape was a mixture of "new" things, and modifications to the Unix kernel or Unix commands. To assure that everybody was "licensed", when you first became a member you submitted a copy of the signature page of the license.
During that time we went from V6 Unix, PWB Unix,
V7 Unix, to 2BSD (pdp11) and 4BSD (vax).
Sharing went both ways of course. A number of changes/new cmds from other groups became part of the Official Bell release.
That sharing was a factor in the settlement of the USL vs UCBerkeley lawsuit, that ended in the free availability of the 386bsd work.
Re:Dang it, there goes my stomach lining...
on
I, Spammer
·
· Score: 1
You pay for spam in many ways; it's not just the added bandwidth...
Floods of spam hitting a single ISP can drag its mail servers into the ground. There have been multiple cases in the last 4-5 years where email services at major ISPs have been down for a couple of days because of a spam onslaught. This forces ISP's to buy larger mail servers than they otherwise would need (costs money); those larger servers use more electricity themselves, and might need more air conditioning (costs money). Recovering from onslaughts takes people time (costs money).
Many people will change email addresses to "run away" from spam, once the spammer gangs find the addresses in the first place. That's either administrative overhead within a ISP (costs money), or someone switching ISP's (again costs money).
The amount of traffic on the backbones between ISP's affect the monthly bills they pay; for at least some ISP's, the more spam the gangs attempt to send to their customers, the higher the possibility of seeing their bills go up.
The bandwidth leached by spammer gangs isn't just from the spam they send; the dictionary attacks can substantially hurt ISP servers; the web scraping can affect ISP servers; the SMTP error "bounce" messages that some sites generate to reject spam affect bandwidth, etc.
Most/all customer mailboxes at ISP's have a fixed maximun size. For customers that receive lots of legitimate mail, any spam could cause mailboxes to overflow, causing real wanted mail to be lost, etc. A customer could even lose an opportunity for a job because they didn't get their wanted email.
Spammer gangs are known to use list-washing tactics in vain attempts to "clean" their ill-gotten email addresses. They find web sites (or create them) that lets anybody submit addresses to "opt in" to whatever "product" is on that site. There was a newspaper story a year or two ago where a reporter answered one of those telephone pole signs that said "Make money at home using your computer". The "job" given the reporter was to take lists of email addresses found by the spammer gang, and register them on mailing lists at different web sites. He was to be paid a few cents per address he registered.
All those fake "opt-ins" cause extra spam both on the sites the address is "registered", and for the spammer gang, because they now claim that the address wants to receive all sorts of garbage.
And that of course also means that any spammer who claims they have lists of millions of email addresses, ALL of which have opted-in to spam, is a liar or a moron.
As a former employee of SDC (late 70's to early 80's), the correct name is "System Development Corporation", not "Systems Development Corporation".
This is because the company was spun out of Rand to develop one system; the first computer system for NORAD. SDC disappeared in the 80's after Burroughs bought it.
There was a free software community back then. An informal group of people in organizations with Unix source licenses swapped tapes. There was an "informal" national Unix users group meeting the summer I graduated from UCLA; I remember playing with the tape from that meeting.
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The WTO has already overridden multiple other US laws. A protest filed by Mexican fishermen killed the old "dolphin safe tuna" laws; a protest from a South American country killed some restrictions on importing oil with high sulfur content, etc. There's currently a mini-trade war in progress, with EU countries imposing special duties on a number of US imports, because the US hasn't repealed some tax rules that the WTO views as an illegal trade subsidy.
There has been previous statements from some well known constitutional scholars (including Laurence Tribe at Harvard) that the US Congress should be ashamed of itself for allowing the rules in the constitution about treaty ratification to be ignored when inconvenient.
That led them down the path of changing film formats as often as possible, in incompatible ways, forcing consumers to buy new cameras as often as possible. To do that, cameras had to be cheap; a consequence was that they broke easily.
If they had given anybody who asked a cheap license; to Kodak, Minolta, whatever, they might have sold enough film to stay around long enough to make a real digital effort.
I saw a story a while ago about somebody who bought the name Polaroid; did a spec for a flat panel television; getting it manufactured in China, and is trying to get them into stores. I think somebody else bought the name for other electronics (mp3 player, dvd drives, etc.)
To get to the sides and then to the bottom of the current shuttle, an astronaut would need say at least a 500-1000 foot safety tether, a way to pay it out and reel it in safely over the cargo bay doors, and a thruster system with lots of fuel (possibly sent through the safety tether). Remember it's freefall, and there are no handholds, footholds, safety lines, etc. to pull yourself along the sides and bottom of the ship. And if you tried to somehow cling to the tiles you could damage them.
I was a student at UCLA when CalPIRG first tried to start a chapter there, using the same ripoff tactic. University rules (at least at that time) required a student vote; CalPIRG lost. I heard they tried again a few years later, after I graduated. They found a way to get in then.
Decoding part of one of these msgs that got into our company showed a typical viagra spam. The site being spamvertised was "easye.us", which I think I've seen before from the same spammer that had a lot of sites of the form "4-6 random characters".{biz,info,us}. When I checked early this afternoon, it looked like easye.us had already been removed from the net.
If you're really concerned with privacy, you also have the choice to boycott the chains that use the cards, and instead give your business to chains that don't.
First, SCO arguably does NOT own all of System 5. There are two reasons. (1) System 5 is not an independent product; it is a modification of previous system 5 releases, which were modifications of previous system 3 releases, which were modifications of Unix V32, Unix V7, Unix/PWB, Unix V6, etc. All versions of Unix prior to and including Unix V32 have been made public. Looking at the source base in total (commands & kernel), there's probably >50% or 60% commonality between the public versions of Unix, and system 5.
(2) As shown in the previous UCB vs ATT trial, ATT freely copied from other people without asking permission, giving attribution, etc.
SCO can't even say they control the definition of "what is Unix"; that is owned by the Open Group committee.
And their apparent definition of a "derived work" that they're trying to force down people's throats is different from the generally accepted definition of that term, at least with the parts of the computer industry that I've been involved with for over 25 years.
Sigh...
In Oregon, DSL are regulated in two pieces; a communications service and an information service. You have a choice of either getting a package of a DSL line & internet service from the phone company, OR getting just the DSL line from the phone company, and internet service from a third party ISP that offers DSL service.
If you use a third party isp, you have two bills. One from the phone company for the line, and one from the isp for the internet service. If you use the phone company as your isp, I think you just get one bill.
In theory, the phone company bill pays for the line maintainence, and your portion of the dsl head end in the phone company central office. Your isp bill pays for getting packets from the phone company central office to & from the internet.
There also were some non-phone company isp's that leased lines from the phone company (Covad?); I'm not sure though if they are still active in Oregon.
Say they did have some knowledge while in orbit that the shielding was damaged, and that Columbia probably could not come back. Their choices were extremely limited.
The crew didn't have the tools, training, materials, etc. to do any repairs in flight.
The arm wasn't installed for this shuttle flight.
There were only two eva capable space suits on board. The only eva training the crew had was to try manual methods of closing the cargo bay doors if the automatic methods failed.
The shuttle apparently didn't have enough fuel to reach & dock with the space station.
Would they have had any choices other than:
a. Tell the crew the situation, and let the crew decide whether to take a chance.
b. Breaking every single shuttle launch safety rule, try to launch another shuttle with 1-2 crew, and a bunch of space suits, before Columbia ran out of consumables.
Neither choice would look good to me.
A limit on the number of unsolicited msgs per day also won't work. If you think about the total number of companies in the world & the costs to the sender of email, if sending spam became "acceptable", you could easily expect to receive hundreds to thousands of spam msgs a day. As soon as a gang member found your address and added it to lists, you'd start receiving broadcasts from the entire world. Unless you got off the lists (the electronic equivalent of a "No Solicitors" sign), your email address would become unusable quickly.
I wouldn't assume that all, or even "most" spam comes from people missing a check box in a privacy policy. As one example, a year or two ago (in a Seattle area paper iirc), a reporter got interested in signs appearing on telephone poles saying that people with home computers could earn lots of money. So he signed up. The group behind the telephone pole signs supplied him with a list of thousands of email addresses, and a list of web sites that let users sign up for mailing lists without any security checks. He was to get paid a few cents for each email address, per each web site it was added to.
Actually, the statements in the EE times story tell you nothing whatsoever.
At the very minimum you need to know exactly how they are separating code that was in 32v from code that was in system 5, if they are doing that at all. System 5 is a modified copy of 32v; in the previous att usl vs uc berkeley lawsuit, issues of common code were resolved.
You need to know whether it was a header file or a source file.
They need to show that the code was post 32v, and was either originally developed at att usl, or the original developers assigned rights to att usl.
Examples of commonality sco couldn't claim are copied UC Berkeley networking code, and (iirc) Sun NFS code.
And those aren't the only examples.
During the times I was involved with actual Unix source code (mid 1970's to mid 1980's) for three different employers (UCLA, SDC, Tektronix) there was nothing similar to a nda. The school or company just agreed to not give source code access to non-"employees", and "employees" agreed not to give access to others who hadn't agreed to the Bell license.
Within those terms, there was a lot of access. At the yearly conferences (which later became USENIX) there was a typically conference distribution tape. That tape was a mixture of "new" things, and modifications to the Unix kernel or Unix commands. To assure that everybody was "licensed", when you first became a member you submitted a copy of the signature page of the license.
During that time we went from V6 Unix, PWB Unix, V7 Unix, to 2BSD (pdp11) and 4BSD (vax).
Sharing went both ways of course. A number of changes/new cmds from other groups became part of the Official Bell release.
That sharing was a factor in the settlement of the USL vs UCBerkeley lawsuit, that ended in the free availability of the 386bsd work.
You pay for spam in many ways; it's not just the added bandwidth... Floods of spam hitting a single ISP can drag its mail servers into the ground. There have been multiple cases in the last 4-5 years where email services at major ISPs have been down for a couple of days because of a spam onslaught. This forces ISP's to buy larger mail servers than they otherwise would need (costs money); those larger servers use more electricity themselves, and might need more air conditioning (costs money). Recovering from onslaughts takes people time (costs money). Many people will change email addresses to "run away" from spam, once the spammer gangs find the addresses in the first place. That's either administrative overhead within a ISP (costs money), or someone switching ISP's (again costs money). The amount of traffic on the backbones between ISP's affect the monthly bills they pay; for at least some ISP's, the more spam the gangs attempt to send to their customers, the higher the possibility of seeing their bills go up. The bandwidth leached by spammer gangs isn't just from the spam they send; the dictionary attacks can substantially hurt ISP servers; the web scraping can affect ISP servers; the SMTP error "bounce" messages that some sites generate to reject spam affect bandwidth, etc. Most/all customer mailboxes at ISP's have a fixed maximun size. For customers that receive lots of legitimate mail, any spam could cause mailboxes to overflow, causing real wanted mail to be lost, etc. A customer could even lose an opportunity for a job because they didn't get their wanted email. Spammer gangs are known to use list-washing tactics in vain attempts to "clean" their ill-gotten email addresses. They find web sites (or create them) that lets anybody submit addresses to "opt in" to whatever "product" is on that site. There was a newspaper story a year or two ago where a reporter answered one of those telephone pole signs that said "Make money at home using your computer". The "job" given the reporter was to take lists of email addresses found by the spammer gang, and register them on mailing lists at different web sites. He was to be paid a few cents per address he registered. All those fake "opt-ins" cause extra spam both on the sites the address is "registered", and for the spammer gang, because they now claim that the address wants to receive all sorts of garbage. And that of course also means that any spammer who claims they have lists of millions of email addresses, ALL of which have opted-in to spam, is a liar or a moron.
As a former employee of SDC (late 70's to early 80's), the correct name is "System Development Corporation", not "Systems Development Corporation". This is because the company was spun out of Rand to develop one system; the first computer system for NORAD. SDC disappeared in the 80's after Burroughs bought it. There was a free software community back then. An informal group of people in organizations with Unix source licenses swapped tapes. There was an "informal" national Unix users group meeting the summer I graduated from UCLA; I remember playing with the tape from that meeting.