The idea is to prevent consumer confusion. A movie logo on a software product is not likely to cause the software to be mistaken for the movie. A computer manufacturer's logo on a software product is likely to cause at least some people to assume that the product was made by the company whose logo appears in the product.
As far as Serial ATA goes, why reinvent the wheel? Why not just adopt the SSA protocol for drive attachment? If it was widely adopted the price would come down significantly. As far as speed and flexibility, it is already further along that Serial ATA is attempting to be. I guess that since it comes from IBM, the odds of it being adopted elsewhere (despite the published spec) are slim, though.
Let's say that I want to post a bunch of MP3s which are quite clearly copyrighted songs, and I don't want to get caught, and in particular I don't want to get sued. I could take over some poorly secured machine, use that to take over another poorly secured machine, erase all traces of having broken into the first machine (logs, etc, including whatever software I installed to break into the second machine), and put my MP3s onto the second machine. I could then advertise the second machine on Napster or whatever, and when someone comes after that machine's owner, they'll look at their logs and such and realize that they were compromised from the fist machine I broke into. The owner of the first machine will have no way to show that they were broken into in the first place, and they stand the best chance of taking the blame. The odds of the attack being traced back to me are close to nil. (Something similar happened to me after I first set up my home machine. I hadn't gotten around to securing it more than minimally (setting a good root password), but I had taken the precaution of putting my logs on write-only media. Someone broke in and dropped in a bunch of MP3s, and I never was able to trace it back, because the site I was attacked from had no logs left to check.)
Isaac Asimov Arthur Clarke Ray Bradbury Robert Heinlein C. J. Cherryh (sp?) Roger Zelazny (Amber series in particular) Kurt Vonnegut Greg Bear Ben Bova Robert Anton Wilson
Sprint and MCI did pretty well out of the AT&T breakup. Certainly long-distance became competitive almost immediatly. Now that the baby bells have become strong, independant companies, they want some of the long-distance market, too. In order to do that, they'll have to open up to local service competition on land lines (as opposed to cell phones). It's taken too long, but still we in the US will soon see competition for local phone service.
The problem with this dialog is that it is based on the assumption that the United States is a society which values individual liberty and responsibility. While this appears to have once been true, and while vestiges of the belief remain in the society, the belief itself has passed long ago. We are now a society in which a third of the people believe that the government should control money and property, while a third of the people believe that government should control personal behavior and moral choice. Then there's the third that keeps voting for the lizard so that the wrong lizard won't win. Frankly, I have a hard time seeing how the US today is any different from the Europe of the 1500s-1700s in terms of liberties. It is about time for another geographical separation, where the best 2% of the population runs off to a remote and difficult place and builds something wonderful, much as was done with the US. Mars, anyone?
Yes, sir, of course you can close your account. Behind me you see the beginnings of a great labyrinth. The vault is in the castle beyond the city of the goblins. Please make your request to the teller on duty there.
If killing people is inherently immoral even in the defense of your country's interests, then it must be more so when it is in the interests of convenience. If the people who create and operate non-lethal systems used by the military are culpable for the people killed by the military's combat arms, then those who build or operate non-lethal civilian-operated systems must be culpable for deaths which happen as a result of the existence of those systems. Let's try the bastard civil engineers who built the interstate highway system!
It's a really badly written standard disclaimer. Any statement made by a company which offers stock (or is about to?) must include a disclaimer that any forward-looking statements inherently contain risk and should not be used as a basis for investment.
I don't think that creating "bandwidth-hungry applications" is the optimal way to increase bandwidth. That's like saying that MS Word is great because it forces people to buy bigger CPUs!
Can just anyone in, say, Saigon get one [SIC] Welfare
It's a Communist society. They take care of everyone. In effect, anyone and everyone there can be taken care of far better than they can under the American "welfare" system. (The downfall is in the long term, of course.)
The point is that the poor now tremendously outnumber the rich
And they always have, and they always will. Wealth is created at a point, then works its way out. The larger the accumulation of wealth, the longer it takes to work its way out. But it's not a zero-sum game. While the poor outnumber the rich still, the vast majority of the poor in the industrialized world today are as well or better off than the rich of 100 years ago.
India really doesn't have all that many problems; certainly no more than the US. Yet why is their standard of living so much lower than ours?
Perhaps if you were to look at population density and the time during which industrialization began in India, you would see why this is so.
By and large, humans 200 years ago were everywhere hungry, cold, ill and few in number. By and large, humans 200 years from now will be fed, housed and clothed, healthy and numerous - in fact we are already there in the industrialized world, and are getting there overall as a species.
What hippie bus did this guy step off of? More to the point, what he is proposing is essentially a culture in which toys replace - rather than supplement - useful work. Short-term personal fulfillment would be followed by long-term economic stagnation while we dig out from under the pile of useless idiots we had created from the current pile of marginally useful idiots in society. Imagine if MTV ran the world... Better yet, let's not!
Most of this money would have been spent anyway, at a slightly different time. A large amount of it was for such things as replacing one application with an updated one. For example, we replaced our financial package a year before plan, replaced our merchandising system a year late (but with more of a sense of urgency), upgraded a dozen or so applications we would have upgraded over the next year anyway and so forth. Those companies which generally use custom software probably had it worse than my company, though.
Re:My take on all of this.
on
Apocalypse Not
·
· Score: 1
I agree to a point. Certainly a lot of this was overblown by people wanting to make a profit - apocalyptic groups, certain authors, the media and so forth. Going on to imply that all or almost all of the "problem" was in this category is cynical and wrong. The list of Y2K problems (so far, and only including those that came about since the date rollover) at my company is:
a script to clean out old files cleaned out too many of them
the charting interface to an ordering application is down because the operators didn't follow their procedures when quiescing the host
truck loads of goods planned at the end of 1999 didn't process in 2000 (until we opened up the plan and re-saved it)
Now, this does not take into account the many, many bugs which would have come up had we not taken action, including inability to plan this year's budget and pay our bills!
At a friend's company, they found the problem in 6 places in an application completed early in 1999. The best part is the purpose of the problematic application: Y2K date testing.:-)
The first failures of any large scale related to Y2K began with the credit card companies a couple of years ago. The last one that affected me was an untested routine for exploding ads for the retailer for whom I work, which was discovered last night when the system failed to print discount stickers due to not finding any ads due prior to Jan 5, 1900. The system was correctly setting the date of the ad, but incorrectly comparing that date to the needed date. The developers missed it in testing, and got a phone call at 2 am as a result.
Well, there is a problem with a short lifespan for technology patents: how do you define what is a technology patent? Let's say that we are going to allow original algorithms to be patented for 5 years, with hardware and so forth falling into the conventional patent limits. What about a hardware implementation of an algorithm, like an ASIC? OK, so we have to include hardware. But if we say that computing hardware is patentable for a shorter-than-normal duration, than how do we handle hardware that can be used in computers and elsewhere, like a special pivot designed for a disk drive and also useful for microsurgical instruments? It is very difficult to differentiate between what you want to protect and what you don't. My personal thinking is that code, however implemented, should be copyrightable but not patentable. Then, implementations would be protected, but algorithms would be available to all under fair use standards.
While I agree with your central point, I think that it goes a little beyond this.
Any scheme which relies upon a central authority or site to manage or index web content will fail because the web gets too big too fast. This means that sites must be responsible for identifying themselves, and in a distributed way.
One way to do this would be to have a DNS-like system of distributed "web-index" servers, which describe the sites and their content as known to that server. Then, each of the web-index servers could gain information from local web pages, and report it up some heirarchy with a known root. You would then be able to find sites by content type, by specific knowledge areas (Dewey decimal website classification?) or whatever, depending on how the standard is defined.
This has the advantage of distributing the load, increasing the likelihood of finding what you want quickly, and allowing easy site hiding (by obscurity) for non-general-use sites.
Sure. But the things that you can do without an SSN in the US are limited more each day. You cannot vote now without one. You cannot drive now without one. You cannot get a job without one unless you fall into certain very difficult to get into categories (oddly enough, like working for the Congress!). Effectively, a normal life requires a social security number.
Any legally created entity (such as a corporation) which has special favors granted it under the law (such as exemption from individual prosecution for the executives [for business decisions]) is already subject to regulation by the entity (such as the Federal government) which created that organization's special status under the law. No additional "precedent" is needed for the government to regulate this industry, just as no precedent would be needed for the government to regulate any corporation in any industry in the US.
I have six passwords that I have memorized. They are each long, complex and difficult to crack. I rotate through them, and change all of my frequently-used account passwords at the same time. That way, I try the current password first, and if it doesn't work (because I forgot to change this account, for example), I know I'll get it in five more tries.
First, a treaty is not a contract in any sense. Second, and more important in this case, the treaty contains an expiration date, which passed in the early or mid 1980's.
Slashdot Mirror
The idea is to prevent consumer confusion. A movie logo on a software product is not likely to cause the software to be mistaken for the movie. A computer manufacturer's logo on a software product is likely to cause at least some people to assume that the product was made by the company whose logo appears in the product.
As far as Serial ATA goes, why reinvent the wheel? Why not just adopt the SSA protocol for drive attachment? If it was widely adopted the price would come down significantly. As far as speed and flexibility, it is already further along that Serial ATA is attempting to be. I guess that since it comes from IBM, the odds of it being adopted elsewhere (despite the published spec) are slim, though.
I am.
Let's say that I want to post a bunch of MP3s which are quite clearly copyrighted songs, and I don't want to get caught, and in particular I don't want to get sued. I could take over some poorly secured machine, use that to take over another poorly secured machine, erase all traces of having broken into the first machine (logs, etc, including whatever software I installed to break into the second machine), and put my MP3s onto the second machine. I could then advertise the second machine on Napster or whatever, and when someone comes after that machine's owner, they'll look at their logs and such and realize that they were compromised from the fist machine I broke into. The owner of the first machine will have no way to show that they were broken into in the first place, and they stand the best chance of taking the blame. The odds of the attack being traced back to me are close to nil. (Something similar happened to me after I first set up my home machine. I hadn't gotten around to securing it more than minimally (setting a good root password), but I had taken the precaution of putting my logs on write-only media. Someone broke in and dropped in a bunch of MP3s, and I never was able to trace it back, because the site I was attacked from had no logs left to check.)
There is, actually. Stop being an anonymous coward and sign up. Then go fill out the preferences and deselect the Star Wars category. Et Voila!
-jeff
Isaac Asimov
Arthur Clarke
Ray Bradbury
Robert Heinlein
C. J. Cherryh (sp?)
Roger Zelazny (Amber series in particular)
Kurt Vonnegut
Greg Bear
Ben Bova
Robert Anton Wilson
Enjoy
Sprint and MCI did pretty well out of the AT&T breakup. Certainly long-distance became competitive almost immediatly. Now that the baby bells have become strong, independant companies, they want some of the long-distance market, too. In order to do that, they'll have to open up to local service competition on land lines (as opposed to cell phones). It's taken too long, but still we in the US will soon see competition for local phone service.
Actually, the United States was a republic until 1913 or so (direct election of senators), since when it has been a representative democracy.
The problem with this dialog is that it is based on the assumption that the United States is a society which values individual liberty and responsibility. While this appears to have once been true, and while vestiges of the belief remain in the society, the belief itself has passed long ago. We are now a society in which a third of the people believe that the government should control money and property, while a third of the people believe that government should control personal behavior and moral choice. Then there's the third that keeps voting for the lizard so that the wrong lizard won't win. Frankly, I have a hard time seeing how the US today is any different from the Europe of the 1500s-1700s in terms of liberties. It is about time for another geographical separation, where the best 2% of the population runs off to a remote and difficult place and builds something wonderful, much as was done with the US. Mars, anyone?
Yes, sir, of course you can close your account. Behind me you see the beginnings of a great labyrinth. The vault is in the castle beyond the city of the goblins. Please make your request to the teller on duty there.
If killing people is inherently immoral even in the defense of your country's interests, then it must be more so when it is in the interests of convenience. If the people who create and operate non-lethal systems used by the military are culpable for the people killed by the military's combat arms, then those who build or operate non-lethal civilian-operated systems must be culpable for deaths which happen as a result of the existence of those systems. Let's try the bastard civil engineers who built the interstate highway system!
It's a really badly written standard disclaimer. Any statement made by a company which offers stock (or is about to?) must include a disclaimer that any forward-looking statements inherently contain risk and should not be used as a basis for investment.
I don't think that creating "bandwidth-hungry applications" is the optimal way to increase bandwidth. That's like saying that MS Word is great because it forces people to buy bigger CPUs!
Can just anyone in, say, Saigon get one [SIC] Welfare
It's a Communist society. They take care of everyone. In effect, anyone and everyone there can be taken care of far better than they can under the American "welfare" system. (The downfall is in the long term, of course.)
The point is that the poor now tremendously outnumber the rich
And they always have, and they always will. Wealth is created at a point, then works its way out. The larger the accumulation of wealth, the longer it takes to work its way out. But it's not a zero-sum game. While the poor outnumber the rich still, the vast majority of the poor in the industrialized world today are as well or better off than the rich of 100 years ago.
India really doesn't have all that many problems; certainly no more than the US. Yet why is their standard of living so much
lower than ours?
Perhaps if you were to look at population density and the time during which industrialization began in India, you would see why this is so.
By and large, humans 200 years ago were everywhere hungry, cold, ill and few in number. By and large, humans 200 years from now will be fed, housed and clothed, healthy and numerous - in fact we are already there in the industrialized world, and are getting there overall as a species.
What hippie bus did this guy step off of? More to the point, what he is proposing is essentially a culture in which toys replace - rather than supplement - useful work. Short-term personal fulfillment would be followed by long-term economic stagnation while we dig out from under the pile of useless idiots we had created from the current pile of marginally useful idiots in society. Imagine if MTV ran the world... Better yet, let's not!
Most of this money would have been spent anyway, at a slightly different time. A large amount of it was for such things as replacing one application with an updated one. For example, we replaced our financial package a year before plan, replaced our merchandising system a year late (but with more of a sense of urgency), upgraded a dozen or so applications we would have upgraded over the next year anyway and so forth. Those companies which generally use custom software probably had it worse than my company, though.
Now, this does not take into account the many, many bugs which would have come up had we not taken action, including inability to plan this year's budget and pay our bills!
At a friend's company, they found the problem in 6 places in an application completed early in 1999. The best part is the purpose of the problematic application: Y2K date testing. :-)
The first failures of any large scale related to Y2K began with the credit card companies a couple of years ago. The last one that affected me was an untested routine for exploding ads for the retailer for whom I work, which was discovered last night when the system failed to print discount stickers due to not finding any ads due prior to Jan 5, 1900. The system was correctly setting the date of the ad, but incorrectly comparing that date to the needed date. The developers missed it in testing, and got a phone call at 2 am as a result.
Well, there is a problem with a short lifespan for technology patents: how do you define what is a technology patent? Let's say that we are going to allow original algorithms to be patented for 5 years, with hardware and so forth falling into the conventional patent limits. What about a hardware implementation of an algorithm, like an ASIC? OK, so we have to include hardware. But if we say that computing hardware is patentable for a shorter-than-normal duration, than how do we handle hardware that can be used in computers and elsewhere, like a special pivot designed for a disk drive and also useful for microsurgical instruments? It is very difficult to differentiate between what you want to protect and what you don't. My personal thinking is that code, however implemented, should be copyrightable but not patentable. Then, implementations would be protected, but algorithms would be available to all under fair use standards.
While I agree with your central point, I think that it goes a little beyond this.
Any scheme which relies upon a central authority or site to manage or index web content will fail because the web gets too big too fast. This means that sites must be responsible for identifying themselves, and in a distributed way.
One way to do this would be to have a DNS-like system of distributed "web-index" servers, which describe the sites and their content as known to that server. Then, each of the web-index servers could gain information from local web pages, and report it up some heirarchy with a known root. You would then be able to find sites by content type, by specific knowledge areas (Dewey decimal website classification?) or whatever, depending on how the standard is defined.
This has the advantage of distributing the load, increasing the likelihood of finding what you want quickly, and allowing easy site hiding (by obscurity) for non-general-use sites.
Sure. But the things that you can do without an SSN in the US are limited more each day. You cannot vote now without one. You cannot drive now without one. You cannot get a job without one unless you fall into certain very difficult to get into categories (oddly enough, like working for the Congress!). Effectively, a normal life requires a social security number.
Your papers, please?
-jeff
Any legally created entity (such as a corporation) which has special favors granted it under the law (such as exemption from individual prosecution for the executives [for business decisions]) is already subject to regulation by the entity (such as the Federal government) which created that organization's special status under the law. No additional "precedent" is needed for the government to regulate this industry, just as no precedent would be needed for the government to regulate any corporation in any industry in the US.
-jeff
I have six passwords that I have memorized. They are each long, complex and difficult to crack. I rotate through them, and change all of my frequently-used account passwords at the same time. That way, I try the current password first, and if it doesn't work (because I forgot to change this account, for example), I know I'll get it in five more tries.
-jeff
First, a treaty is not a contract in any sense.
Second, and more important in this case, the treaty contains an expiration date, which passed in the early or mid 1980's.