But it doesn't only apply to Sony's copyrighted material. If Time/Warner goes after someone for uploading their stuff, I'd expect the default first defense to become "Sony Rootkit" [...]
Not quite as easy. Using it as a defense against T/W becomes a question of fact -- was it someone else exploiting the Sony rootkit who was really committing the piracy. As a question of FACT, the T/W lawyers can require that to be determined during a jury phase of the trial. And, as it probably wasn't true, makes life less happy. Unclean hands (which would apply if Sony is the only other party) is an equity based defense, which I understand (but IANAL) that as a question of law and equity (not of fact) can be ruled on by the judge directly, without the need to go to Jury trial; slam-bam-thankyeemam, one precedent screwing Sony by saying it is no longer allowed to sue over copyright violation in the US, and one RIAA massive headache. In a question of equity, it doesn't matter that you've violated the law; because Sony did as well, they can't come to the court to ask for redress.
Of course, the judge could (very likely -- 90%?) rule the other way, or postpone a decision until later, or any number of other things. I wouldn't take it as a license to pirate; but if I were brought up on charges for pirating Sony music, you'd be damn sure I'd ask my lawyer about when the best time to pull out that defense might be.
Uploading Sony music onto P2P? Why don't you go cease-and-desist-yourself
That's not the worst of it. I am not a lawyer. However, I do know (if probably misunderstand) there's this nice thing called "the clean hands doctrine". It basically says that if you do something legally (or sometimes morally) wrong, and you try complaining in court about someone else doing something wrong, the judge will tell you to shove off — with the usual legalese bells and whistles. Sony has committed (arguably) a federal crime while trying to protect their copyrights. Their legal standing to protect those copyrights in court is thereby endangered. It's not CERTAIN a judge would rule against Sony on that basis... but if they get the wrong judge, he might well rule they are no longer allowed to enforce those copyright claims against anyone in the US who bought those DRMCDs. Not the sort of precedent the RIAA would want to risk seeing the light of day, even if it doesn't survive appeal.
See here. The trolls may, in fact, be encrypted messages... or may just be random numbers. Or maybe someone's using Slashdot for their drug deals; I dunno, I don't work for the NSA. Feel free to try and get CmdrTaco drunk enough to talk about whether he's gotten a national security letter over it the next time you see him.
In making this determination, we have addressed the
seminal question of whether ID is science. We have concluded that it is not, and moreover that ID cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents.
To be fair, the judge (in his 123 page opinion) didn't rule that "intelligent design cant be taught in Dover" as stated in the summary
Check the order at the end of the 139 page ruling:
Pursuant to Fed.R.Civ.P. 65, Defendants are permanently enjoined from maintaining the ID Policy in any school within the Dover Area School District.
Technically, I think a lawyer would call that an order, not a ruling, but I don't think you're qualified to split hairs that fine. Anyway, the other 139 pages pretty much are nothing but rulings as to WHY they shouldn't have thought they could get away with it, and screwed up almost every step of the way. Of course, the summary used the word "discussed", not "taught", which is inaccurate insofar as private citizens (and religious leaders) are free to advocate it... in those capacities. But again, I don't think you're trying to split that hair. The summary is essentially accurate.
I'm sure teachers could still discuss intelligent design should they be so included.
I presume you mean "inclined", not "included". I will note that the prime defendant was the "Dover School District"; since the teachers are employees of the Dover School District, that would likely be deemed to violate letter as well as spirit of the order. I also refer you to the section begining page 64:
After a searching review of the record and applicable caselaw, we find that while ID arguments may be true, a proposition on which the Court takes no position, ID is not science.
(Emphasis added)
Even if new science teachers come in who are willing to touch this turd with an eleven foot pole (unlike the current batch; check out p. 127), they would be facing major legal problems if they tried teaching it in science class. (Unless, of course, merely presenting it as an example of something that ISN'T science....) On the bright side for the religious right, the Judge expressly did not take a position as to whether ID was the Truth. Not that anyone but religious moderates will be able to see that as a bright side.
I strongly suggest you read the ruling before further comment; it's in fairly plain English; if you take the legal citations to mean "because the Courts have already said so", it's even easier.
No. We're losing the Internet to the Stupid, who are about to turn it over to the Greedy, the Shortsighted, and the Unimaginative, because they say they will make things better and keep the Internet away from the Bad Guys.
Definitly don't accept a deal going like I'll send you a check on a higher amouth, you send me the item and the money left over. The check WILL be false.
See my above comment. There is nothing wrong with accepting money orders or cheques. Just make sure you wait until they clear at your bank before you ship the item. Anyone who sent a legitimate payment will understand this, and it only takes 3-5 days.
Very wrong.
I'd agree money orders aren't bad, provided you have the local WU (or whichever) office pay them to cash. Checks (by whatever spelling you like) are another matter. You are NOT safe when your bank has "cleared" the check, and in 3-5 days marks the funds available. You are only safe when the issuing bank has validated the check, which may take up to two weeks, even for a domestic (same country) bank. Overseas banks may take up to two months for validation, especially from "certain countries in Africa". Furthermore, finding out whether this has happened from your bank is very difficult, because most bank tellers or telephone customer account representatives these days don't understand the difference between "issuing bank validated" and "funds marked as available" — which is not the same thing at all, at all, at all.
While the risk of this happening with checks or cashiers checks IN GENERAL is low, situations (as described) where the check recieved is for more than the amount of the transaction, and the buyer want the difference returned, it is much more probable than not that this type of fraud is being attempted. And since most sellers don't undersand this until AFTER they've been bitten, it becomes difficult to re-list an item after the funds are marked available, the item is shipped off... and then the issuing bank bounces the check.
It is possible to avoid this, if you are careful in advance. First, find a small locally based bank with a nearby branch, that provides free checking with a low minimum deposit. Make an appointment with the local branch president. Explain that you plan to set up a separate checking account for working on EBay, and make sure that the LBP understands the difference between "funds available" and "issuing bank cleared", and that this distinction may be a major concern in some cases. (If not, find another bank. Tellers not understanding the difference is one thing, but a branch president is entirely another matter.) Set up the account, and use that for the EBay related buying and selling. (I'd also recommend tying that to your Paypal account, rather than your main household checking account. I don't trust Paypal with my primary checking account information.)
Whenever you are handling a check that raises your suspicions (IE: issuing bank from out of the country, not for the correct amount, etc.), let the branch president know as you deposit the check. After the funds are marked as available, check with him (or her) by phone about once a week to see if the issuing bank has cleared the check. Don't ship anything until it he says it has. If you're deeply paranoid, get permission to record the phone call when he says it has cleared at the issuing bank.
Obviously, your terms of sale should clearly specify to buyers that you reserve the right to delay shipping until your local bank president verifies the check has cleared, yada yada yada. (And doing that should deter most would-be fraudsters right there.)
As an additional aside, the increase in shipping costs overseas (and thus end buyer price) should (using basic microeconomics) mean that far fewer people overseas will be as willing to buy, so not doing international business won't have that big an effect on your Ebay sales.
This isn't QUITE true; there are one or two older personal NAT routers where the initial factory firmware has had exploits published (especially with certain dumb default settings), and there are a few software packages with versions that both poked holes in the XP firewall and were exploitable. As far as I know, nothing in the wild specifically targets both, so unless you have reason to be worried about highly personalized targetting of your computer, it should be just fine. (If you do have reason, buy a newer router first.)
Anyone can write in anyone's name. We could have elected George Carlin (name picked at random).
Well, anyone over 18 can write in any native born American over 35. But George Carlin would probably have been marginally better for international diplomacy... he usually can keep people smiling while he's being insanely rude to them.
Re-read more carefully. "Patents are commonly invalidated during litigation" (emphasis added). If litigation is uncommon, it is invalid to conclude that patents must be commonly invalidated.
I suppose a definative way to measure it would be to take a sample — say, 10000 randomly selected patents from those issued during 2004 — and attempt legal challenges against them all. Of course, you'd piss off 10000 people, not to mention every judge you encountered, and need to pay a fortune in legal expenses...
Nevehgonnahappen. Still, while you'd probably lose an awful lot of the cases, I think you'd probably find a statistically measurable fraction of patents too readily granted.
Apple also hide file extensions by default. It's amazingly annoying, but I never here anyone complain about that, only about MS doing it. Weird.
Consider this a complaint about it. Also, let me throw in a complaint that OS X doesn't mark resource fork files (begining with._ in the name) as "hidden" when working with a FAT/FAT32 drive.
6. Joe must still be able to connect to the Internet afterwards.
Some problems are easy to get when someone else uses a backhoe. Some are easy to solve when you use one.
I have yet to see a _good_ website where I can just say to them "go here http:"
More seriously, check out OurTaxDollarsAtWork. Unfortunately, it's targeted to users in a Domain environment, not standalone home machines. Still, it's probably a better starting point than many.
Oh, and you misspelled her name, although it sounds the same. Ms. Ivana Chatham, second senior partner at Dewey, Chatham, Fischer and Howe (aka "The Old Firm"), has been a mainstay in legal circles for years. Last I heard, those legal behemoths were still unable to persuade Google to allow the firm to represent the search giant, due to fundamental differences of corporate philosophy.
Still, they're not headed for the poorhouse (to live, anyway). DCF&H's best publicized client has been Microsoft, who has had them on retainer for years.
I wonder how this and the coming e-paper revolution would play out. Google could really become poised to become the biggest book publisher in the world, when after browsing the book online, for a fee with 75% going to the author, it can be downloaded to your 8.5"x11" e-paper you use to read all your stuff (effectively your library.)
Almost.
You would still want to allow for a cut for editors, for authors willing to accept the help. Many slush pile authors REALLY need to keep their day jobs, and even tentacled horrors that crawl from the deep sea of slush are much more paletable after baking under the harsh glare of a disciplined editor's gimlet eye. I have no doubt that many authors would find themselves with a larger piece of a much smaller pie without editorial assistance.
Also, Print-on-demand grows ever more economical, approaching basic mass market publishing price. Imagine Google contracts with a POD publisher, and maybe also offers salaried positions to a couple talented-and-open-minded editors. Google Press makes the books on-line browsable. Editions are available as your suggested downloadable e-paper, but also paperback, trade (oversize) paperback, hardbound, or acid free leather. More costly materials, of course, mean higher cover (?) price, with a smaller percentage of sale price (but larger absolute amount) going to the author.
Of course, editorial talent is almost as hard to find as authorial talent. Still, it has possibilities....
ROI requires accurate estimates of the probabilites, as well as consequences, of security compromise. Companies concerned about the damage to their image tend to make security incidents underreported. This makes accurate probabilistic risk assessment, and corresponding ROI calculation, difficult.
So he reformatted his drive but the virus was still there? What?
1) He was told to; this does not mean he did it.
2) He may not have done a proper full (MBR) reformat
3) He may have backed up the infection vector with his "important" files, on other infected media.
4) If the infection vector was via email, he might have redownloaded and reopened the message from a POP/IMAP server that retained a copy.
It is also theoretically possible to make something that will survive anything short of degaussing or reformatting after taking apart the hard drive. Modern hard drives often include flashable firmware, a simple (roughly 486 grade) processor, and as much as 16MB of RAM. This is potentially powerful enough for a custom microkernel on the drive itself, able to meddle with the boot process and rootkit the OS as it loads into the machine's RAM. To implement something like this, a Black Hat would need to know the exact model drive and its firmware release, probably know the same on the motherboard as well, be able to work at (likely proprietary) machine language level for that model hard drive control board, and there would be nil room for error. On the bright side for the black hat, if done with the skill I'd expect from someone able to do the work at all, the only signs of infection would be a modest decrease in the hard drive performance, a few sectors marked as "bad", and the odd bit of (potentially intermittent and encrypted) network traffic.
I'd bet on numbers 1-4, though. A hard drive native rootkit is at least one full level beyond what Sysinternals called "a level of sophistication not seen in rootkits to date"
on their RootkitRevealer page. Probably more than one. As far as I know, not even a lab example of such has been reported developed, and it doesn't sound like this guy is high enough on the NSA's SPECIAL Christmas card list to be likely to encounter one of their toys. But I like keeping the tin-foil hat crowd awake at night. =)
If you're not going to mandate that adult content can only be hosted on.xxx, then it will be useless for the reasons the fundies want. You know, that bit about not being forced to give up property of your.com domain?
You appear mistaken in at several items.
First, it would be technically trivial (although pricey) for sites with.com hosted porn to convert the entire content to a kid-safe "I agree/I disagree" page, with "I agree" pointing to the.XXX site. The current porn sites don't need to give up their.com entirely -- although I'd bet Playboy wouldn't be happy about the move. Still, it would be a good compromise between property rights and self-regulation; hopefully, the domain registry rules would facilitate such.
Next you don't specify what reasons you think the fundies want, nor even what you think they want. I'm guessing you're saying they want Porn off the mainstream net, and that the lack of a XXX mandate means there will still be porn on.COM and elsewhere. In reality, the fundies don't want it off the mainstream web, they want it gone (which is the basis for the Bush administration's objection to the.XXX creation: the domain would legitimize porn). The fundies also want all sex that isn't guy-topside missionary position within a marriage for the purpose of having kids gone, too... if that.
A much bigger problem than you seem to have noticed is that.com/.net/.org aren't the only domains for finding porn. One of the biggest gallery sites I found is in Hungary. About a third of the galleries are broken, but it still had had about 20 gigabytes worth of pics.... with more added every week. That's not counting the screenshots from the couple hundred DRM-ed.WMV half-hour plus videos they have. (Individual license required, and the TOS page is in Hungarian, so I only downloaded the one.) National subdomains (IE, *.xxx.au, *.xxx.hu, *.xxx.uk, etc.) would also need to be implemented.
And, of course, that's only the traffic on port 80. There's Usenet and Bittorrent, too. The fundies are... well, fucked. =)
On the other hand, for those of us with more pragmatic social agendas,.XXX will be a step towards helping keep the children from wandering in the adult merchandise so easily, and keep you from having to confuse a six year old with more facts of life than they have any interest in. Not the end of the journey, mind you, but a "modest" step.
start looking at the real problem: the ignorance, lazyness and naivity of the average user
It doesn't require much looking. Based on what I know of the several thousand years of recorded history, that's not a solvable problem. Improving the technology is an approach more likely to reduce the Spam in my inbox. That this suggested solution is crap does not prove all such approaches are crap... although the existance of the form response strongly implies most of the obvious ones are. =)
It's as simple as implementing new security standards and specs, testing them with the cooperation of the security community, setting a worldwide/nationwide rollout date, then requiring everyone's software to support them as of that date. Think "Attention (ebay|Yahoo|Google|MSN) Users: After JULY 23, 2007, you must have upgraded your Web browser to support the new HardenedHTTP specification. Browsers which support this include: Mozilla Firefox 2.0, Netscape 8.1, Opera 9.01, or Internet Explorer 8 Beta."
Sigh... You don't seem to understand the difference between SMTP and HTTP. You also forgot part of the announcement:
"These clients are not available on Linux, due to patent restrictions on HardenedHTTP and HardenedSMTP. Systems administrators: you must upgrade to Microsoft Exchange Server 12 and Microsoft IIS 7.1 for Windows Server, or Apple OS X Server 12 with iWeb and iMail servers. Other mail servers do not support the patented NoSpam(TM) authentication protocols."
It may be just that simple... but that's not very simple.
approach to fighting spam . Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work.
(One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may
have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal
law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(x) Users of email will not put up with it
(X) System administrators will not put up with it
(x) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential
employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(x) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(x) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
(x) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
(x) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(x) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(x) Extreme profitability of spam
(x) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(x) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been
shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasu
The initial report of IBM deploying a 7-qbit quantum computer came out December 19, 2001. The 8-qbit result from TFA was first reported (from a Google News search) November 30, 2005-- roughly four years. This gives a doubling period of roughly 20 years (7485 days).
Which means there should be a 16 qbit machine by 2025, the 32 qbit machine by 2045... hmm. How unhelpful.
What I don't understand, is why was a constitutional amendment required to ban alcohal in the US, but one is NOT required to ban other items, such as marijuana and other drugs, software that breaks encryption, and most anything else that is banned by federal law?
Most of those merely ban the import or interstate sale, and the DMCA encryption focuses "only" on copyrighted materials, all within the federal powers. Of course, Gonzales v. Raich was the case that changed the scope of federal authority, blowing the principle out of the water... wrongly, in my opinion. However, a constitutional amendment to restrict back this abuse of federal authority against purely intrastate non-commercial activity is unlikely to happen any time soon.
Slashdot Mirror
Not quite as easy. Using it as a defense against T/W becomes a question of fact -- was it someone else exploiting the Sony rootkit who was really committing the piracy. As a question of FACT, the T/W lawyers can require that to be determined during a jury phase of the trial. And, as it probably wasn't true, makes life less happy. Unclean hands (which would apply if Sony is the only other party) is an equity based defense, which I understand (but IANAL) that as a question of law and equity (not of fact) can be ruled on by the judge directly, without the need to go to Jury trial; slam-bam-thankyeemam, one precedent screwing Sony by saying it is no longer allowed to sue over copyright violation in the US, and one RIAA massive headache. In a question of equity, it doesn't matter that you've violated the law; because Sony did as well, they can't come to the court to ask for redress.
Of course, the judge could (very likely -- 90%?) rule the other way, or postpone a decision until later, or any number of other things. I wouldn't take it as a license to pirate; but if I were brought up on charges for pirating Sony music, you'd be damn sure I'd ask my lawyer about when the best time to pull out that defense might be.
That's not the worst of it. I am not a lawyer. However, I do know (if probably misunderstand) there's this nice thing called "the clean hands doctrine". It basically says that if you do something legally (or sometimes morally) wrong, and you try complaining in court about someone else doing something wrong, the judge will tell you to shove off — with the usual legalese bells and whistles. Sony has committed (arguably) a federal crime while trying to protect their copyrights. Their legal standing to protect those copyrights in court is thereby endangered. It's not CERTAIN a judge would rule against Sony on that basis... but if they get the wrong judge, he might well rule they are no longer allowed to enforce those copyright claims against anyone in the US who bought those DRMCDs. Not the sort of precedent the RIAA would want to risk seeing the light of day, even if it doesn't survive appeal.
See here. The trolls may, in fact, be encrypted messages... or may just be random numbers. Or maybe someone's using Slashdot for their drug deals; I dunno, I don't work for the NSA. Feel free to try and get CmdrTaco drunk enough to talk about whether he's gotten a national security letter over it the next time you see him.
They already revolt anyone who sees them. They've been revolting forever....
Wrong.
Ruling, Page 136:
QED.
Check the order at the end of the 139 page ruling:
Technically, I think a lawyer would call that an order, not a ruling, but I don't think you're qualified to split hairs that fine. Anyway, the other 139 pages pretty much are nothing but rulings as to WHY they shouldn't have thought they could get away with it, and screwed up almost every step of the way. Of course, the summary used the word "discussed", not "taught", which is inaccurate insofar as private citizens (and religious leaders) are free to advocate it... in those capacities. But again, I don't think you're trying to split that hair. The summary is essentially accurate.I'm sure teachers could still discuss intelligent design should they be so included.
I presume you mean "inclined", not "included". I will note that the prime defendant was the "Dover School District"; since the teachers are employees of the Dover School District, that would likely be deemed to violate letter as well as spirit of the order. I also refer you to the section begining page 64:
(Emphasis added)Even if new science teachers come in who are willing to touch this turd with an eleven foot pole (unlike the current batch; check out p. 127), they would be facing major legal problems if they tried teaching it in science class. (Unless, of course, merely presenting it as an example of something that ISN'T science....) On the bright side for the religious right, the Judge expressly did not take a position as to whether ID was the Truth. Not that anyone but religious moderates will be able to see that as a bright side.
I strongly suggest you read the ruling before further comment; it's in fairly plain English; if you take the legal citations to mean "because the Courts have already said so", it's even easier.
No. We're losing the Internet to the Stupid, who are about to turn it over to the Greedy, the Shortsighted, and the Unimaginative, because they say they will make things better and keep the Internet away from the Bad Guys.
I'd agree money orders aren't bad, provided you have the local WU (or whichever) office pay them to cash. Checks (by whatever spelling you like) are another matter. You are NOT safe when your bank has "cleared" the check, and in 3-5 days marks the funds available. You are only safe when the issuing bank has validated the check, which may take up to two weeks, even for a domestic (same country) bank. Overseas banks may take up to two months for validation, especially from "certain countries in Africa". Furthermore, finding out whether this has happened from your bank is very difficult, because most bank tellers or telephone customer account representatives these days don't understand the difference between "issuing bank validated" and "funds marked as available" — which is not the same thing at all, at all, at all.
While the risk of this happening with checks or cashiers checks IN GENERAL is low, situations (as described) where the check recieved is for more than the amount of the transaction, and the buyer want the difference returned, it is much more probable than not that this type of fraud is being attempted. And since most sellers don't undersand this until AFTER they've been bitten, it becomes difficult to re-list an item after the funds are marked available, the item is shipped off... and then the issuing bank bounces the check.
It is possible to avoid this, if you are careful in advance. First, find a small locally based bank with a nearby branch, that provides free checking with a low minimum deposit. Make an appointment with the local branch president. Explain that you plan to set up a separate checking account for working on EBay, and make sure that the LBP understands the difference between "funds available" and "issuing bank cleared", and that this distinction may be a major concern in some cases. (If not, find another bank. Tellers not understanding the difference is one thing, but a branch president is entirely another matter.) Set up the account, and use that for the EBay related buying and selling. (I'd also recommend tying that to your Paypal account, rather than your main household checking account. I don't trust Paypal with my primary checking account information.)
Whenever you are handling a check that raises your suspicions (IE: issuing bank from out of the country, not for the correct amount, etc.), let the branch president know as you deposit the check. After the funds are marked as available, check with him (or her) by phone about once a week to see if the issuing bank has cleared the check. Don't ship anything until it he says it has. If you're deeply paranoid, get permission to record the phone call when he says it has cleared at the issuing bank.
Obviously, your terms of sale should clearly specify to buyers that you reserve the right to delay shipping until your local bank president verifies the check has cleared, yada yada yada. (And doing that should deter most would-be fraudsters right there.)
As an additional aside, the increase in shipping costs overseas (and thus end buyer price) should (using basic microeconomics) mean that far fewer people overseas will be as willing to buy, so not doing international business won't have that big an effect on your Ebay sales.
This isn't QUITE true; there are one or two older personal NAT routers where the initial factory firmware has had exploits published (especially with certain dumb default settings), and there are a few software packages with versions that both poked holes in the XP firewall and were exploitable. As far as I know, nothing in the wild specifically targets both, so unless you have reason to be worried about highly personalized targetting of your computer, it should be just fine. (If you do have reason, buy a newer router first.)
Well, anyone over 18 can write in any native born American over 35. But George Carlin would probably have been marginally better for international diplomacy... he usually can keep people smiling while he's being insanely rude to them.
Perhaps Dennis Leary as VP?
I suppose a definative way to measure it would be to take a sample — say, 10000 randomly selected patents from those issued during 2004 — and attempt legal challenges against them all. Of course, you'd piss off 10000 people, not to mention every judge you encountered, and need to pay a fortune in legal expenses...
Nevehgonnahappen. Still, while you'd probably lose an awful lot of the cases, I think you'd probably find a statistically measurable fraction of patents too readily granted.
Consider this a complaint about it. Also, let me throw in a complaint that OS X doesn't mark resource fork files (begining with ._ in the name) as "hidden" when working with a FAT/FAT32 drive.
[...]
6. Joe must still be able to connect to the Internet afterwards.
Some problems are easy to get when someone else uses a backhoe. Some are easy to solve when you use one.
I have yet to see a _good_ website where I can just say to them "go here http:"
More seriously, check out Our Tax Dollars At Work. Unfortunately, it's targeted to users in a Domain environment, not standalone home machines. Still, it's probably a better starting point than many.
Still, they're not headed for the poorhouse (to live, anyway). DCF&H's best publicized client has been Microsoft, who has had them on retainer for years.
Almost.
You would still want to allow for a cut for editors, for authors willing to accept the help. Many slush pile authors REALLY need to keep their day jobs, and even tentacled horrors that crawl from the deep sea of slush are much more paletable after baking under the harsh glare of a disciplined editor's gimlet eye. I have no doubt that many authors would find themselves with a larger piece of a much smaller pie without editorial assistance.
Also, Print-on-demand grows ever more economical, approaching basic mass market publishing price. Imagine Google contracts with a POD publisher, and maybe also offers salaried positions to a couple talented-and-open-minded editors. Google Press makes the books on-line browsable. Editions are available as your suggested downloadable e-paper, but also paperback, trade (oversize) paperback, hardbound, or acid free leather. More costly materials, of course, mean higher cover (?) price, with a smaller percentage of sale price (but larger absolute amount) going to the author.
Of course, editorial talent is almost as hard to find as authorial talent. Still, it has possibilities....
Creation Took Eight Days...
1) He was told to; this does not mean he did it.
2) He may not have done a proper full (MBR) reformat
3) He may have backed up the infection vector with his "important" files, on other infected media.
4) If the infection vector was via email, he might have redownloaded and reopened the message from a POP/IMAP server that retained a copy.
It is also theoretically possible to make something that will survive anything short of degaussing or reformatting after taking apart the hard drive. Modern hard drives often include flashable firmware, a simple (roughly 486 grade) processor, and as much as 16MB of RAM. This is potentially powerful enough for a custom microkernel on the drive itself, able to meddle with the boot process and rootkit the OS as it loads into the machine's RAM. To implement something like this, a Black Hat would need to know the exact model drive and its firmware release, probably know the same on the motherboard as well, be able to work at (likely proprietary) machine language level for that model hard drive control board, and there would be nil room for error. On the bright side for the black hat, if done with the skill I'd expect from someone able to do the work at all, the only signs of infection would be a modest decrease in the hard drive performance, a few sectors marked as "bad", and the odd bit of (potentially intermittent and encrypted) network traffic.
I'd bet on numbers 1-4, though. A hard drive native rootkit is at least one full level beyond what Sysinternals called "a level of sophistication not seen in rootkits to date" on their RootkitRevealer page. Probably more than one. As far as I know, not even a lab example of such has been reported developed, and it doesn't sound like this guy is high enough on the NSA's SPECIAL Christmas card list to be likely to encounter one of their toys. But I like keeping the tin-foil hat crowd awake at night. =)
You appear mistaken in at several items.
First, it would be technically trivial (although pricey) for sites with .com hosted porn to convert the entire content to a kid-safe "I agree/I disagree" page, with "I agree" pointing to the .XXX site. The current porn sites don't need to give up their .com entirely -- although I'd bet Playboy wouldn't be happy about the move. Still, it would be a good compromise between property rights and self-regulation; hopefully, the domain registry rules would facilitate such.
Next you don't specify what reasons you think the fundies want, nor even what you think they want. I'm guessing you're saying they want Porn off the mainstream net, and that the lack of a XXX mandate means there will still be porn on .COM and elsewhere. In reality, the fundies don't want it off the mainstream web, they want it gone (which is the basis for the Bush administration's objection to the .XXX creation: the domain would legitimize porn). The fundies also want all sex that isn't guy-topside missionary position within a marriage for the purpose of having kids gone, too... if that.
A much bigger problem than you seem to have noticed is that .com/.net/.org aren't the only domains for finding porn. One of the biggest gallery sites I found is in Hungary. About a third of the galleries are broken, but it still had had about 20 gigabytes worth of pics.... with more added every week. That's not counting the screenshots from the couple hundred DRM-ed .WMV half-hour plus videos they have. (Individual license required, and the TOS page is in Hungarian, so I only downloaded the one.) National subdomains (IE, *.xxx.au, *.xxx.hu, *.xxx.uk, etc.) would also need to be implemented.
And, of course, that's only the traffic on port 80. There's Usenet and Bittorrent, too. The fundies are... well, fucked. =)
On the other hand, for those of us with more pragmatic social agendas, .XXX will be a step towards helping keep the children from wandering in the adult merchandise so easily, and keep you from having to confuse a six year old with more facts of life than they have any interest in. Not the end of the journey, mind you, but a "modest" step.
Letting diverse schools of thought contend? Evidently not.
It doesn't require much looking. Based on what I know of the several thousand years of recorded history, that's not a solvable problem. Improving the technology is an approach more likely to reduce the Spam in my inbox. That this suggested solution is crap does not prove all such approaches are crap... although the existance of the form response strongly implies most of the obvious ones are. =)
Sigh... You don't seem to understand the difference between SMTP and HTTP. You also forgot part of the announcement:
It may be just that simple... but that's not very simple.
This comment advocates a
( ) technical (x) legislative (x) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam . Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(x) Users of email will not put up with it
(X) System administrators will not put up with it
(x) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(x) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(x) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
(x) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
(x) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(x) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(x) Extreme profitability of spam
(x) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(x) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasu
Probably more... normal companies only care about the bottom line from the balance sheets, not an employee's bottom line.
Which means there should be a 16 qbit machine by 2025, the 32 qbit machine by 2045... hmm. How unhelpful.
Most of those merely ban the import or interstate sale, and the DMCA encryption focuses "only" on copyrighted materials, all within the federal powers. Of course, Gonzales v. Raich was the case that changed the scope of federal authority, blowing the principle out of the water... wrongly, in my opinion. However, a constitutional amendment to restrict back this abuse of federal authority against purely intrastate non-commercial activity is unlikely to happen any time soon.