Your argument only applies in cases of the music being ripped from cd or downloaded illegally (i.e a copy) - that would be a case of the vendor making personal backups, then selling them assuming the customer owns the original cd - but a far more complicated legal area is where the music has been purchased as legal downloads, then put onto the ipod.
I'm not discussing fair use in general. I'm discussing the seller in the article.
The seller goes by a shady legal theory used by spammers and other pirates... they make a "back up copy" for you. If you don't own the original item, you shouldn't buy or use the "back up".
Selling iTunes songs you bought and destroying your copies so you're truly transferring ownership of the file... it may well be legal. But these people who sell "pre-loaded" iPods with 11k songs and 30 hours of video for a $300 premium are not people who are within the letter or spirit of "fair use". They are just the same software pirates who spam you all the time about "0Em S0ftwhere" finding another lucrative piracy venue... Ebay.
If he had purchased all those songs legally, and eliminated all of his own copies upon selling the iPod, it should be legal.
According to TFA, that wasn't the situation. The seller was stating that if you didn't own any particular song or video on other media, you were obligated by copyright law to delete it from the iPod.
Spammers use this kind of shady legal reasoning to sell pirated software: They're not selling you the software. They're selling you the service of creating a back-up on CD/DVD. If you don't already own the software, you shouldn't buy it. It's not their fault if people who don't already own the software are buying these $60-$80 backup CDs and illegally installing the software.
It's a bunch of hogwash, IMO. And whether they're getting ill-gotten gains by slapping copies of software on CDs and selling them via spam or they're slapping pirated music and video on iPods and selling them via Ebay, it's still crap. If the case you cited (seller deleted/destroyed any other copies he had of the music/video he was selling) was what was happening, that would be one thing, but most of these sellers are not that honest.
The sellers are using the same argument many software spammers use. "We're not selling you the software. You should already own the software. We're just selling you a backup copy... wink, wink."
The same reasoning could be used... "I wasn't selling him cocaine illegally. I was filling his prescription for cocaine. No, I didn't check to see if he had one. I made it clear that if he didn't have a prescription, he shouldn't buy the cocaine from me."
Think the cocaine argument would fly in court? Then why would the fair use argument these pirates are trying stand up? It just doesn't hold water for me.
The contracts do not matter much. First of all contracts that obscure voting results can be easily invalidated as against public policy. Secondly even if the contracts were valid, the government can easily break the contracts if they want to. They will be liable for damamges, but since Diebold would not sustain any losses from breaking of the contracts the damages would be only nominal.
If Diebold copyrighted the database structure and registered the copyright with the LOC, actual damages will be of little concern as they could sue for $150,000 statutory damages per infringement of their copyright. So the damages would not be "nominal".
On the other hand, if the state cannot release the data, there is a question of whether the people could sue to overturn the election based on that as well as suing to have the use of the Diebold machines declared unconstitutional because of the prohibition on releasing the data.
I think it's in Diebold's best interest to back down on the copyright claim. If citizens nationwide sued to make the use of these machines unconstitutional, and got elections overturned, then the states could conceivably sue Diebold for selling them defective machines, recouping the cost of buying the machines, the cost of integrating them into their election systems, and the cost of re-running all elections that were overturned. And the defect would not be the machines themselves, but Diebold's IP stance on the software.
There's a genuine public interest in having the election system be as transparent as possible. That doesn't mean courts should force Diebold to remove the opacity they're injecting into the process. They're perfectly entitled to do that. But it does mean courts can force states and municipalities to stop using Diebold machines and overturn elections in which Diebold machines were used. In terms of an end-result that protects voters' rights, such court decisions would be the ideal outcome.
I find it interesting that this comes the day after NYT columnist David Pogue responded to a rash of personal attacks and other stupidity with his rules for internet hate mail. Pogue dealt with the idiots with humor. The Washington Post had to close down a blog.
One of Pogue's observations, which is by no means original, was that this sort of thing is partially driven by anonymity. You can say the meanest, most unreasonable, stupid crap in an e-mail or blog comment, and there are no consequences. If you want, you don't even have to deal with the consequence of a reasoned reply or rebuttal.
The Post could employ some automatic filters to weed out some of the worst offenders, and thus it seems hard to believe their claim that it was requiring two full-time moderators to keep out the blog comments that violated their standards. Either those were some pretty heavy standards that made context such an issue that automated filtering was ineffective, or their web guys are pretty inept.
Simple, pledge not money, but to subscribe to the pay cable service (Showtime, HBO) that picks up the series. If they can get 200,000 new subscribers, between the subscriber fees and the post-season DVD sales, that justifies a 13-episode order.
To the old rule that one should never argue politics or religion, because there is no way to win, I believe we must add operating systems as a third thing one should never argue.
Add to that the following statement (my own): "Being a Microsoft proponent in an argument about operating systems is like being a white male in a discussion on discrimination."
Helping the Chinese government to silence and jail dissidents is wrong, but, should Microsoft be singled out? Shouldn't the OSDL be ostracized by freedom loving people by letting Red Flag Linux join?
A country that jails people for expressing opposing political viewpoints is in material violation of the spirit of the free software movement. IMO, there should be an anti-totalitarian variant of the GPL that denies repressive states and their institutions any license under which they can legally run the software or use the source. And the FSF should be suing these states at the Hague daily.
Why should the burden of trying to use software as a lever to lift state oppression fall on the shoulders of Microsoft? If any group has a philosophical goal that is in line with lifting oppression, it is the Free Software movement. So why is Microsoft lambasted in the NYT while the OSDL gets cheered for admitting Red Flag Linux?
In case of a natural disaster, they are on a server... unless the server was the point of impact of that disaster. Then you may think distributed copies, which leads to a problem of who has the proper copy and what data gets lost during automatic updates.
Two words for you... rsync and squid. Not error proof, but with checksums and redundancy, pretty close so long as errors are not introduced at the root server.
But wouldn't it be fun to hack the root server and make sure all your old enemies are listed as currently under treatment for syphilis and Dick Chafing (not to be confused with Dick Cheney, which is much worse).;-)
I like their prediction of the expansion of FIOS (fiber optic broadband to the home at speeds of 30 megabits). I'm a Verizon customer and I've been salivating, waiting for them to bring it to my area.
There are those who will put forward the argument that 30 megabits isn't going to improve the average Internet experience over the 5-8 megabit speeds being offered now by a lot of cable and some DSL providers. But didn't Bill Gates once say that 640k of memory should be more than enough for anyone?:-)
Just like most broadband service offerings, speed will be asynchronous. Right now, my 8 megabit downstream line is only 768k upstream. But the 5 and 15 megabit service will be 2 megabits up, which gives you better than a T1 into the home. The 30 megabit service gives you 5 megabits up. The consumer packages, according to their FAQ, do not allow you to run a server, but give it a little time. 5 megabits up is enough to run a nice little web server so long as you don't get Slashdotted or DDOS'ed.
Of course, it also means that compromised PCs will be able to do nasty things their botnet masters command 6-7 times faster. But when I go FIOS, I go 100% Linux.
Their conclusion about why it's plagued with problems: Too many Microsoft programs that have too many direct hooks into the OS to make them play well together (i.e. Media Player, IE, Word, Outlook, MSN messenger, etc.).
Their solution about how to shore it up: don't use IE, Media Player, Outlook, etc.
I hate to sound like a kid, but DUH!
Given, I use Firefox, Thunderbird, and other non-Microsoft programs because I like them better and they tend to work better, but the fact that they're less likely to compromise my system is also a consideration.
Note, though, that I say less likely. We have had bug/security fix releases of Firefox and there was a brouhaha with the GreaseMonkey extension inducing a vulnerability, BUT for the most part it seems the fixes were less frequent than with IE-related patches, plus they usually only compromised the browser, not your whole PC.
That's the big problem with many of the Microsoft glitches. They're not limited to the vulnerable Microsoft application. The vulnerable app provides a gateway for compromising the whole PC.
Dell has become a poster child for crappycustomerservice. Do AMD fans want Dell dragging AMD's good name down with them? I'd prefer that Dell self-destruct on their own without pulling AMD into their vortex of suckage.
Amazon already catalogs bestsellers and "uniquely popular" items for thousands of U.S. cities in their Purchase Circles section.
When they first started the idea, they gave it some PR, but now it's sort of a low man on the totem pole, relegated to the backwaters. When I checked 6400+ cities, only 2800 of them were recording enough activity to warrant a bestseller or "uniquely popular" list.
They generate the 2 types of lists for 5 classes of items: books, CDs, DVDs, toys, and consumer electronics. Now this might not be as potentially compromising as finding out a single person was ordering subversive books. Yet finding out a small town in Alabama's bestselling genre is showtunes is definitely something interesting.
Even in my own experience as a theoretician I find the truly brilliant ideas are not complex. They're insights that drastically simplify and clarify. They're the kind of things that, when you understand them, make you slap your head in awe and envy.
So, from this point of view, the hideous complexity of modern high-energy physics theories could well be a sign that they lack brilliance, that another Einstein is needed to clear away all the baroque epicycles, so to speak, and replace it all with something beautifully simple and far more powerful.
Damn, I wish I had mod points right now. This was very well said and cut through to the point of Einstein's genius. +1, baby, +1.
I think three major differences between bubble purchases and current purchases are pricing, financing, and profitability. Back in the bubble, money-losing companies were selling for 9 figures and paid for almost entirely in stock. Calcanis, whatever you want to say about him, was turning a profit with Weblogs, Inc., sold for 1/10th of what bubble prices used to run, and though the details are not clear, I'm betting he got a good chunk of the sale price in cash instead of restricted stock units.
Why did Active Desktop / CDF / PointCast / Netcaster etc. fail?
Because the content sucked. They worked with Disney, ABC, CNN and other big media types to provide the same sort of mind-numbing content that television provides. Compare that with the number of excellent tech blogs, sites like Slashdot and Digg, blogs by knowledgable experts in their subjects, more applications throwing stuff out in RSS/Atom (Flickr for instance).
I worked with IMDb as a contractor from '96 through '98, then got hired on a few months after Amazon bought them and they were rolling in dough. They tried an IE4/NS4 channel, and they weren't "big media" then (maybe 16 employees worldwide - I was the second full-time hire after the buy-out and everyone before the buyout came from the pool of volunteers who built IMDb). It died too.
What's positive about RSS, as opposed to the late mid-90s "push" craze, is that it's grown from a grass roots, hobbyist base. You don't have 5 fighting specs, each endorsed by a large player, each unable to generate a critical mass of content. It isn't one big hype machine based on a "killer app" where everyone has rushed blindly to get on the gravy train. You have a relatively solid, relatively mature spec upon which people are building, and you have a growing grass roots movement that may create that critical mass of content that shoves this over from the death knell that "push" saw to the ubiquity that text messaging has achieved.
BUT, it's still a bit techy, both to create and use a feed. And, as the big players jump in there's a lot of opportunity for it to fork and fracture. It's young and vulnerable, and doesn't have the critical mass yet. We'll see if it overcomes the poison pills that killed "push" and survives its own growing hype.
When I was designing geostats.info, I thought it would be very cool to include Amazon.com Purchase Circle data, but they don't offer it via RSS or the Amazon Web Services API, plus the screen scraping program from O'Reilly's 2003 Amazon Hacks book didn't work when I tried it.
After some digging via Google, I found a little-known way of coding their Purchase Circle URL's so the data is delivered as CSV (comma separated values). I wrote a script that translates that data into an RSS feed (with my Amazon Associates code embedded in the product links) and then set up CaRP to cache that data and re-format it to HTML for use in my pages.
"The parent was saying "it is disconcerting for non-geek members of the internet community to have this news delivered instead of going out and browsing for it."
Then perhaps a better description of RSS is like an e-mail reader where people give you their addresses, but you don't give them yours. Each time it updates, it asks just those people you've selected "do you have any new public mail for me to read"? If the answer is yes, it downloads it and you can read it.
RSS on the other hand, is "pushed" out to the recipients. Sure, people still have to surf to the site to get the feed URL, but it's still broadly a push content strategy.
IT'S NOT PUSH!!!! When they were calling it "push" in the '90s it wasn't push and it isn't now. If you subscribe to a feed, you still have to go retrieve that feed. Whether that retrieval is automated or on-demand, it's still retrieved, which is PULLING the data.
You can't forcibly update someone's RSS reader with your latest content. That is the most important reason it's not "push". It's why Pointcast and IE 4's "Channels" were not "push". Push is a bullshit misnomer that needs to be put to rest.
There are a wide variety of applications that support RSS (Firefox and Thunderbird come immediately to mind) and with RSS support due in IE 7, it's coming along. But in many ways, RSS is like the old "push" hype of the late mid-90s, and push died.
Pointcast got hot, then Microsoft and Netscape both brought out their variants on it, built into their 4.0 editions. Everyone in Internet marketing was talking about "push" (I tech edited "Marketing Online For Dummies" which came out in 1998), but it died.
Now, this could probably be due to the fact that it was not based on XML, but had a few semi-HTML markup language variants depending on whether you were producing your content for Pointcast, IE, Netscape, etc. The people I've talked to who are hot on RSS claim that the XML and standardization of the RSS specs make this a different ballgame.
I don't know. I'm still expecting Microsoft to "embrace and extend" so that RSS forks and RSS reader makers are scrambling to adapt to all the tags Microsoft introduces.
But in the end, RSS is basically the evolution of "push". I don't understand what's going to drive consumers to adopt it any more than they adopted the channels concept in IE4 and Netscape 4. Perhaps growing adoption by publishers will help push consumer adoption. But after watching all the hype rise, hit a crescendo, and then drop off into a whimper with push, I'm still not going to pin my hopes on RSS achieving widespread consumer adoption.
I'm not sure I buy an industry lawyer telling a 15 year old girl he wouldn't have a case unless she lied. If he had the power to coerce her, he'd say "just do it or else."
BUT, if it is the case that he did coerce her to commit perjury, I'd seriously suggest he be criminally indicted for contributing to the delinquency of a minor and any other child-harm charge they can use against him. Plus anything in the conspiracy vein.
It would nice to see an RIAA lawyer disbarred and jailed. I seriously doubt it would happen (see/. article in two weeks where the local prosecutor declines to file charges as he doesn't believe the witness is credible enough to build a case around). But a boy can dream, can't he?
And don't forget that there are very descriptively named functions in *NIX (and *NIX-like) OSes, such as "traceroute" which get mangled in Windows/DOS because of the old 8.3 naming convention, so they become names like "tracert".
Worth noting was that the bartender who was spot on claims he doesn't even look. He uses a count so his eyes don't deceive him.
I'd guess the count varies based on how slow/fast you count, but if you practice enough, you know how long you have to count to get the right amount. Generally, though, it's called the "four pour".
I didn't go to bartending school, but when I worked in a restaurant, I'd run the bar an hour a day when I wasn't running the computer systems. That's how I know about the four pour, because that's what I was taught by the bartender.
They reported this on NPR last night ("All Things Considered") and tested two Washington DC bartenders who turned out to be pretty accurate. One was spot on, the other went against the study and actually filled the tall glass a smidge more.
The real trick to this is the "four pour". With a certain standardized spout that they attach to bottles in most bars, you start pouring, count to four, and you're pretty close to the 1.5 ounce mark. This is what's taught in most bartending schools, and if the bartenders stick with it instead of trying to eyball the amount, they get it right much more often.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not discussing fair use in general. I'm discussing the seller in the article.
The seller goes by a shady legal theory used by spammers and other pirates... they make a "back up copy" for you. If you don't own the original item, you shouldn't buy or use the "back up".
Selling iTunes songs you bought and destroying your copies so you're truly transferring ownership of the file... it may well be legal. But these people who sell "pre-loaded" iPods with 11k songs and 30 hours of video for a $300 premium are not people who are within the letter or spirit of "fair use". They are just the same software pirates who spam you all the time about "0Em S0ftwhere" finding another lucrative piracy venue... Ebay.
- Greg
According to TFA, that wasn't the situation. The seller was stating that if you didn't own any particular song or video on other media, you were obligated by copyright law to delete it from the iPod.
Spammers use this kind of shady legal reasoning to sell pirated software: They're not selling you the software. They're selling you the service of creating a back-up on CD/DVD. If you don't already own the software, you shouldn't buy it. It's not their fault if people who don't already own the software are buying these $60-$80 backup CDs and illegally installing the software.
It's a bunch of hogwash, IMO. And whether they're getting ill-gotten gains by slapping copies of software on CDs and selling them via spam or they're slapping pirated music and video on iPods and selling them via Ebay, it's still crap. If the case you cited (seller deleted/destroyed any other copies he had of the music/video he was selling) was what was happening, that would be one thing, but most of these sellers are not that honest.
The same reasoning could be used... "I wasn't selling him cocaine illegally. I was filling his prescription for cocaine. No, I didn't check to see if he had one. I made it clear that if he didn't have a prescription, he shouldn't buy the cocaine from me."
Think the cocaine argument would fly in court? Then why would the fair use argument these pirates are trying stand up? It just doesn't hold water for me.
- Greg
If Diebold copyrighted the database structure and registered the copyright with the LOC, actual damages will be of little concern as they could sue for $150,000 statutory damages per infringement of their copyright. So the damages would not be "nominal".
On the other hand, if the state cannot release the data, there is a question of whether the people could sue to overturn the election based on that as well as suing to have the use of the Diebold machines declared unconstitutional because of the prohibition on releasing the data.
I think it's in Diebold's best interest to back down on the copyright claim. If citizens nationwide sued to make the use of these machines unconstitutional, and got elections overturned, then the states could conceivably sue Diebold for selling them defective machines, recouping the cost of buying the machines, the cost of integrating them into their election systems, and the cost of re-running all elections that were overturned. And the defect would not be the machines themselves, but Diebold's IP stance on the software.
There's a genuine public interest in having the election system be as transparent as possible. That doesn't mean courts should force Diebold to remove the opacity they're injecting into the process. They're perfectly entitled to do that. But it does mean courts can force states and municipalities to stop using Diebold machines and overturn elections in which Diebold machines were used. In terms of an end-result that protects voters' rights, such court decisions would be the ideal outcome.
Greg
One of Pogue's observations, which is by no means original, was that this sort of thing is partially driven by anonymity. You can say the meanest, most unreasonable, stupid crap in an e-mail or blog comment, and there are no consequences. If you want, you don't even have to deal with the consequence of a reasoned reply or rebuttal.
The Post could employ some automatic filters to weed out some of the worst offenders, and thus it seems hard to believe their claim that it was requiring two full-time moderators to keep out the blog comments that violated their standards. Either those were some pretty heavy standards that made context such an issue that automated filtering was ineffective, or their web guys are pretty inept.
- Greg
- Greg
Add to that the following statement (my own): "Being a Microsoft proponent in an argument about operating systems is like being a white male in a discussion on discrimination."
- Greg
A country that jails people for expressing opposing political viewpoints is in material violation of the spirit of the free software movement. IMO, there should be an anti-totalitarian variant of the GPL that denies repressive states and their institutions any license under which they can legally run the software or use the source. And the FSF should be suing these states at the Hague daily.
Why should the burden of trying to use software as a lever to lift state oppression fall on the shoulders of Microsoft? If any group has a philosophical goal that is in line with lifting oppression, it is the Free Software movement. So why is Microsoft lambasted in the NYT while the OSDL gets cheered for admitting Red Flag Linux?
- Greg
Two words for you... rsync and squid. Not error proof, but with checksums and redundancy, pretty close so long as errors are not introduced at the root server.
But wouldn't it be fun to hack the root server and make sure all your old enemies are listed as currently under treatment for syphilis and Dick Chafing (not to be confused with Dick Cheney, which is much worse). ;-)
- Greg
There are those who will put forward the argument that 30 megabits isn't going to improve the average Internet experience over the 5-8 megabit speeds being offered now by a lot of cable and some DSL providers. But didn't Bill Gates once say that 640k of memory should be more than enough for anyone? :-)
Just like most broadband service offerings, speed will be asynchronous. Right now, my 8 megabit downstream line is only 768k upstream. But the 5 and 15 megabit service will be 2 megabits up, which gives you better than a T1 into the home. The 30 megabit service gives you 5 megabits up. The consumer packages, according to their FAQ, do not allow you to run a server, but give it a little time. 5 megabits up is enough to run a nice little web server so long as you don't get Slashdotted or DDOS'ed.
Of course, it also means that compromised PCs will be able to do nasty things their botnet masters command 6-7 times faster. But when I go FIOS, I go 100% Linux.
- Greg
Their solution about how to shore it up: don't use IE, Media Player, Outlook, etc.
I hate to sound like a kid, but DUH!
Given, I use Firefox, Thunderbird, and other non-Microsoft programs because I like them better and they tend to work better, but the fact that they're less likely to compromise my system is also a consideration.
Note, though, that I say less likely. We have had bug/security fix releases of Firefox and there was a brouhaha with the GreaseMonkey extension inducing a vulnerability, BUT for the most part it seems the fixes were less frequent than with IE-related patches, plus they usually only compromised the browser, not your whole PC.
That's the big problem with many of the Microsoft glitches. They're not limited to the vulnerable Microsoft application. The vulnerable app provides a gateway for compromising the whole PC.
- Greg
Dell has become a poster child for crappy customer service. Do AMD fans want Dell dragging AMD's good name down with them? I'd prefer that Dell self-destruct on their own without pulling AMD into their vortex of suckage.
- Greg
I know. I used to work there. :-)
- Greg
When they first started the idea, they gave it some PR, but now it's sort of a low man on the totem pole, relegated to the backwaters. When I checked 6400+ cities, only 2800 of them were recording enough activity to warrant a bestseller or "uniquely popular" list.
They generate the 2 types of lists for 5 classes of items: books, CDs, DVDs, toys, and consumer electronics. Now this might not be as potentially compromising as finding out a single person was ordering subversive books. Yet finding out a small town in Alabama's bestselling genre is showtunes is definitely something interesting.
- Greg
Even in my own experience as a theoretician I find the truly brilliant ideas are not complex. They're insights that drastically simplify and clarify. They're the kind of things that, when you understand them, make you slap your head in awe and envy.
Damn, I wish I had mod points right now. This was very well said and cut through to the point of Einstein's genius. +1, baby, +1.So, from this point of view, the hideous complexity of modern high-energy physics theories could well be a sign that they lack brilliance, that another Einstein is needed to clear away all the baroque epicycles, so to speak, and replace it all with something beautifully simple and far more powerful.
- Greg
- Greg
Why did Active Desktop / CDF / PointCast / Netcaster etc. fail?
Because the content sucked. They worked with Disney, ABC, CNN and other big media types to provide the same sort of mind-numbing content that television provides. Compare that with the number of excellent tech blogs, sites like Slashdot and Digg, blogs by knowledgable experts in their subjects, more applications throwing stuff out in RSS/Atom (Flickr for instance).
I worked with IMDb as a contractor from '96 through '98, then got hired on a few months after Amazon bought them and they were rolling in dough. They tried an IE4/NS4 channel, and they weren't "big media" then (maybe 16 employees worldwide - I was the second full-time hire after the buy-out and everyone before the buyout came from the pool of volunteers who built IMDb). It died too.
What's positive about RSS, as opposed to the late mid-90s "push" craze, is that it's grown from a grass roots, hobbyist base. You don't have 5 fighting specs, each endorsed by a large player, each unable to generate a critical mass of content. It isn't one big hype machine based on a "killer app" where everyone has rushed blindly to get on the gravy train. You have a relatively solid, relatively mature spec upon which people are building, and you have a growing grass roots movement that may create that critical mass of content that shoves this over from the death knell that "push" saw to the ubiquity that text messaging has achieved.
BUT, it's still a bit techy, both to create and use a feed. And, as the big players jump in there's a lot of opportunity for it to fork and fracture. It's young and vulnerable, and doesn't have the critical mass yet. We'll see if it overcomes the poison pills that killed "push" and survives its own growing hype.
- Greg
After some digging via Google, I found a little-known way of coding their Purchase Circle URL's so the data is delivered as CSV (comma separated values). I wrote a script that translates that data into an RSS feed (with my Amazon Associates code embedded in the product links) and then set up CaRP to cache that data and re-format it to HTML for use in my pages.
Then perhaps a better description of RSS is like an e-mail reader where people give you their addresses, but you don't give them yours. Each time it updates, it asks just those people you've selected "do you have any new public mail for me to read"? If the answer is yes, it downloads it and you can read it.
- Greg
IT'S NOT PUSH!!!! When they were calling it "push" in the '90s it wasn't push and it isn't now. If you subscribe to a feed, you still have to go retrieve that feed. Whether that retrieval is automated or on-demand, it's still retrieved, which is PULLING the data.
You can't forcibly update someone's RSS reader with your latest content. That is the most important reason it's not "push". It's why Pointcast and IE 4's "Channels" were not "push". Push is a bullshit misnomer that needs to be put to rest.
- Greg
Pointcast got hot, then Microsoft and Netscape both brought out their variants on it, built into their 4.0 editions. Everyone in Internet marketing was talking about "push" (I tech edited "Marketing Online For Dummies" which came out in 1998), but it died.
Now, this could probably be due to the fact that it was not based on XML, but had a few semi-HTML markup language variants depending on whether you were producing your content for Pointcast, IE, Netscape, etc. The people I've talked to who are hot on RSS claim that the XML and standardization of the RSS specs make this a different ballgame.
I don't know. I'm still expecting Microsoft to "embrace and extend" so that RSS forks and RSS reader makers are scrambling to adapt to all the tags Microsoft introduces.
But in the end, RSS is basically the evolution of "push". I don't understand what's going to drive consumers to adopt it any more than they adopted the channels concept in IE4 and Netscape 4. Perhaps growing adoption by publishers will help push consumer adoption. But after watching all the hype rise, hit a crescendo, and then drop off into a whimper with push, I'm still not going to pin my hopes on RSS achieving widespread consumer adoption.
- Greg
BUT, if it is the case that he did coerce her to commit perjury, I'd seriously suggest he be criminally indicted for contributing to the delinquency of a minor and any other child-harm charge they can use against him. Plus anything in the conspiracy vein.
It would nice to see an RIAA lawyer disbarred and jailed. I seriously doubt it would happen (see /. article in two weeks where the local prosecutor declines to file charges as he doesn't believe the witness is credible enough to build a case around). But a boy can dream, can't he?
- Greg
And don't forget that there are very descriptively named functions in *NIX (and *NIX-like) OSes, such as "traceroute" which get mangled in Windows/DOS because of the old 8.3 naming convention, so they become names like "tracert".
I'd guess the count varies based on how slow/fast you count, but if you practice enough, you know how long you have to count to get the right amount. Generally, though, it's called the "four pour".
I didn't go to bartending school, but when I worked in a restaurant, I'd run the bar an hour a day when I wasn't running the computer systems. That's how I know about the four pour, because that's what I was taught by the bartender.
- Greg
The real trick to this is the "four pour". With a certain standardized spout that they attach to bottles in most bars, you start pouring, count to four, and you're pretty close to the 1.5 ounce mark. This is what's taught in most bartending schools, and if the bartenders stick with it instead of trying to eyball the amount, they get it right much more often.
- Greg