I think this is because C-SPAN is funded and operated by a consortium of cable providers as a public service, and therefore the cspan.tv domain will not be charged for (or at least I would hope not).
Separate issue: I can understand Tuvalu selling their TLD as opposed to operating it themselves.
1) They don't have the population or technology to use.tv for their citizens. Besides, there are about 10,600 of them and they have their own language; what do you want to bet that they could each still register a personal.tv address (fullname.tv) without any overlap with DotTV's real estate?
2) Appointing even a single person to broker individual deals with television broadcasters would take away a significant portion of the manpower available in their economy.
3) After about a decade or two, the Tuvaluans get.tv back and can either use it for themselves or broker a new deal with DotTV (or perhaps a competitor? WebTV?) So they get a guaranteed annual income which has a great effect on their bottom line, plus retain ownership of.tv, an asset whose worth will not decrease with usage. Better than renting out real estate!
4) I seriously doubt any individual businessman or governor in Tuvalu will try to swindle the country out of this money. "Bob stole our money!" "Dang! Okay, everyone help us find Bob." "He's over here." Even if "Bob" got off the islands, he's still going to be the only person abroad with a Tuvalu passport and thus very conspicuous and easy to track.
These people live without the Net like most people in the world. They have no reliable source of water, only what food they can catch and grow, certainly no television; relatively few of them have telephones or electricity. Of course they jumped at a chance to make $50 million off of something as meaningless to them as a TLD! I think the fact that they didn't permanently sign away their rights to.tv for a tenth of that figure shows great foresight on their part. Assigning Tuvalu the.tv TLD almost seems like a humanitarian gesture on the part of Network Solutions -- they just handed the nation free money. Maybe Tuvalu and a few others will turn out like some of the Middle Eastern nations after crude oil suddenly became worth money. Instead of OPEC we'll have STOC -- the Sensical TLD-Owning Countries.
Jake
Re:oral sex angers the christian god!
on
Dumb Laws
·
· Score: 1
show me ONE PLACE where the Bible refers to the missionary position
Off the top of my head, I'd guess that there COULD be no mention of the "missionary position" since missionaries came about to spread the religion which the Bible defined. In other words, there were no missionaries to have sex in the missionary position when the Bible was assembled and published (in those days, copied by hand).
Sure we can. Didn't you see "Futurama" this weekend? Even on planets where a pillow weighs 150 pounds, humans (and aliens too:P ) can walk around just fine. We'll move slower and our hair will be flat, but we'll be just fine. Oh, and watch your girdles.
"...dark matter, each pound of which weighs over ten thousand pounds!"
Yes, but isn't your name just a collection of sounds that identify you?
Your name is what makes you turn and look at whoever said it. Most people's names aren't meaningful in any other way than as proper names, at least in the languages I've studied. You can be 'Suzy' or 'Carlos' or 'Viktor' but there is no dictionary definition for those names other than as proper names. In that context, then, it would seem that your name would more properly be pronounced as you yourself (or perhaps your parents) pronounce it, regardless of the language context.
Also, think of animals. My dog's name is Bubba. If my friend from Russia called to my dog with a different pronunciation (probably by evening out the vowels so they sound the same), Bubba wouldn't be so likely to recognize his name and come as called. Pets recognize the sounds that comprise their names, not any given pronunciation of the written forms of their names. ('Bubba' isn't the best example of this in terms of a name whose pronunciation would change significantly between Russian and English; I just wanted to make my dog known on Slashdot!:P
I work at a large university in Texas (no, the other one) where I interact with many people from Africa, South and Central America, Asia, etc. None of them have ever told me, "My name is X, but you should pronounce it Y." On the other hand, I'm certainly no linguistics expert.
Agreed -- glasses are a pain in sports. I've got soft contacts as well and I can do most sports with no problem, but there are a couple of exceptions.
Swimming: It feels like my contacts are going to float out of my eyes if I open them under water, esp. if I'm moving or there's a current.
Boxing / Sparring: I've been hit in the face a few times while boxing. I was wearing headgear and my opponent was wearing big gloves. Getting hit in the vicinity of the eye tended to knock the contacts out of my eyes, which resulted in me forfeiting the match. It's very difficult to hit your opponent if you can't see him! This hasn't happened while sparring (with no gloves or headgear), so I wonder if the headgear scrunching up my face or the soft padding in the boxing glove that could conform to my face's contours might have had a large effect. The possibility still makes me nervous when I spar, though.
So as far as I know, you need good natural or surgically corrected vision to swim underwater comfortably or box.
Note that the problem with boxing / sparring could potentially be a safety issue, not just a sports issue. If I get attacked (at a bar, for example), I don't want to lose my ability to see my attacker just because he lands a quick blow to the face. That could be the first step to getting killed.
Hmm, on second thought, ignore me, I'm just paranoid.
I'm getting corrective surgery as soon as I have the money, my prescription stabilizes and I've thoroughly researched the different types available.
I need one of these for the next time I go see a movie at the theater. Now if only there were a "crying baby killer." Well, one that won't get you put on death row.
We in Texas say "y'all." We are for the most part not retarded or inbred. I would wager that the per capita rate of retardation and productive incestuous relationships in New England and Texas are very similar.
We Texans are most definitely not southerners, with the possible exception of East Texans. Texans are Texans. Other categorizations ill suit us.
Therefore, when you hear someone use "y'all," you should not assume that the person is a "retard inbred southerner." There is a similar chance that the speaker is a retard inbred Texan, or a retard inbred yankee who has come to the realization that making a contraction of "you" and "all" is much more in line with accepted rules of English than pluralizing the already-plural "you" to yield "youse."
Please come up with a better argument for our next debate, which will concern "ain't."
From what I know of this type of setup, 1 NIC connects the proxy-masq-firewall box to the cable modem (which outputs on an Ethernet line) and the other connects the box to the hub, which all your local machines plug into as well. At least, that's how I'm going to set mine up.
One high-flying balloon (like a weather balloon), one medium-power portable transmitter activated by an altimeter and one pre-recorded message. It would be fun to see their initial reactions.
Problems: properly targeting the Bent Space dish positioning the balloon directly over the dish justifying the waste of all that money for a stupid stunt like this
Of course, the last could be said of the Bent Space "service" as well.
Back in high school, the neighbor kid and I used to take one of those backyardyard insecticide sprayers and fill it with gasoline to make a flame thrower. The device was a 5-gallon drum with a hand-operated pump on top to pressurize the liquid and a short tube connecting to a metal wand about 1' long with a garden-hose-style trigger on it to release the liquid. We'd fill up the drum, pump for pressure, squirt a bit to get a slow drip going on the end to light, then write our names in the grass by his house.
What Universal wants is akin to requiring a person to read every part of a magazine from the front cover to the end of the article they're interested in.
I'm certainly free to recommend in my own writings that the reader look at the second paragraph on the first page of the first article in the Forum section of this month's Playboy, for example. Universal would like to make it illegal for me to provide a hyperlink to the comparable web page. In print, I give the reader the page number, article title, magazine title and issue number in order to point him to the text I would like him to read. The information I have given him is just a "real-world URL." It is simply the location at which the text I am referring to can be found. On a web site, I could provide the same information to "link" to a printed article, or if referring to a web page I could write out a URL for the reader to cut-and-paste into his browser's location bar, or I could take out the cut-and-paste work by using tags to make the link automatic with the click of a button.
The only problem I can see with linking to a deep page is if the referring page represents the content behind the link as its own property. I can't photocopy the first article in the Playboy Forum and include it in my writings; that would be obvious plagarism. Likewise, I shouldn't link to the article without providing some indication that the material behind the link is Playboy's property. This may even include simply ensuring that the page I'm linking to is readily identifiable as Playboy's website and not mine (I'm still undecided on this point, and anyway it's more polite to make it clear at the link).
Advertising revenue, which I can understand is a concern for Universal, must not be considered as an issue in the law. Universal is free to publish a web site and charge advertisers to put banners there, but cannot require people to look at the advertisements. That's why those annoying blow-in cards that fall out of magazines are so widely used. It's practically the only way to guarantee a reader will see that ad. Otherwise, most people quickly scan a page to identify the ads on it and then ignore them, focusing on the article they are interested in. The web equivalent is the annoying pop-up window advertisements on GeoCities member sites and elsewhere.
I think of a website as like a magazine or newspaper. Newspapers derive a negligible income from per-issue price; most of their money comes from advertising. Yet I may still refer someone to a particular article on a particular page without telling them to read the whole paper until they figure out which article I'm talking about. Universal would like to think of a website as a house. You come in the front door, not a window, and pay attention to everything your host tells you.
Legally requiring every visitor at a web site to read the main pages before reading the article they came for is as ridiculous as selling a magazine with the requirement that the reader read every page of the magazine that precedes the article he is interested in.
AntiOnline recently published a review (http://www.antionline.com/cgi-bin/News?type=antio nline&date=07-12-1999&story=abuse.news) of several ISPs' willingness to look into crack attempts as reported by private citizens.
Interestingly, while AOL rolls over for the government, they seem to have little interest in helping the net community keep the neighborhood a nice place to live. Of course, any particular individual can't do much to hurt AOL, while falling in the government's bad graces might possibly be fatal to its financial health.
Each area of a city would be responsible for funding and maintaining its own network. The area networks of a city would connect together, and the state governments would maintain the intercity lines. States would handle connexions to neighboring states.
I can think of one problem with this approach. In order for an area of a city or community to pay for this infrastructure, some sort of tax or tax-equivalent would have to be set up among the residents to raise money for the installation and maintenance of the lines. We would then begin to see the same regional effects that we see with the public school system. Affluent communities (such as Sugar Land in Houston) would have residents who would be willing and able to pay hefty taxes, fees, etc. to support installation of fiber optics, while economically depressed communities (such as Houston's Fifth Ward) would end up with maybe enough to upgrade existing phone lines. Then we would see a call for a "Robin Hood" style of redistributing the broadband taxes or fees more equally among the communities. Even if this were based on privately collected fees, which I suspect could not support building a broadband infrastructure anyway, there would still be a push for government intervention, though it would stand less chance of being successful. A "Robin Hood" scheme would be of no help, though, if what we have seen in Texas of "Robin Hood" as applied to the school system is any indication.
In any case, I would hate to see the school-system style of community taxation used to fund community broadband access because I think we would see the same effect on broadband access that we do with public schools. Exacerbating a current problem with net access, I think we would see poor (and disproportionately minority) communities unable to afford more than the cheapest, smallest data pipes, leading to decreased internet usage in these communities and a drop (or rather lack of increase) in the "online literacy" of the residents.
The internet will become another spike to widen the increasing divide between the "haves" and the "have nots" if we're not careful in the next few years.
there's no limit to how fast these things could get going in space! Yes, there would be, even if they had some means of propulsion that allowed them to travel at all in space. They could only approach light speed.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm. The tech specs say its maximum operating temperature is 104 F. Does this mean very sick people with high fever could break this by wearing it?
and... cspan.tv is not available? huh? :)
.tv for their citizens. Besides, there are about 10,600 of them and they have their own language; what do you want to bet that they could each still register a personal .tv address (fullname.tv) without any overlap with DotTV's real estate?
.tv back and can either use it for themselves or broker a new deal with DotTV (or perhaps a competitor? WebTV?) So they get a guaranteed annual income which has a great effect on their bottom line, plus retain ownership of .tv, an asset whose worth will not decrease with usage. Better than renting out real estate!
.tv for a tenth of that figure shows great foresight on their part. Assigning Tuvalu the .tv TLD almost seems like a humanitarian gesture on the part of Network Solutions -- they just handed the nation free money. Maybe Tuvalu and a few others will turn out like some of the Middle Eastern nations after crude oil suddenly became worth money. Instead of OPEC we'll have STOC -- the Sensical TLD-Owning Countries.
I think this is because C-SPAN is funded and operated by a consortium of cable providers as a public service, and therefore the cspan.tv domain will not be charged for (or at least I would hope not).
Separate issue: I can understand Tuvalu selling their TLD as opposed to operating it themselves.
1) They don't have the population or technology to use
2) Appointing even a single person to broker individual deals with television broadcasters would take away a significant portion of the manpower available in their economy.
3) After about a decade or two, the Tuvaluans get
4) I seriously doubt any individual businessman or governor in Tuvalu will try to swindle the country out of this money. "Bob stole our money!" "Dang! Okay, everyone help us find Bob." "He's over here." Even if "Bob" got off the islands, he's still going to be the only person abroad with a Tuvalu passport and thus very conspicuous and easy to track.
These people live without the Net like most people in the world. They have no reliable source of water, only what food they can catch and grow, certainly no television; relatively few of them have telephones or electricity. Of course they jumped at a chance to make $50 million off of something as meaningless to them as a TLD! I think the fact that they didn't permanently sign away their rights to
Jake
Off the top of my head, I'd guess that there COULD be no mention of the "missionary position" since missionaries came about to spread the religion which the Bible defined. In other words, there were no missionaries to have sex in the missionary position when the Bible was assembled and published (in those days, copied by hand).
Sure we can. Didn't you see "Futurama" this weekend? Even on planets where a pillow weighs 150 pounds, humans (and aliens too :P ) can walk around just fine. We'll move slower and our hair will be flat, but we'll be just fine. Oh, and watch your girdles.
"...dark matter, each pound of which weighs over ten thousand pounds!"
Yes, but isn't your name just a collection of sounds that identify you?
:P
Your name is what makes you turn and look at whoever said it. Most people's names aren't meaningful in any other way than as proper names, at least in the languages I've studied. You can be 'Suzy' or 'Carlos' or 'Viktor' but there is no dictionary definition for those names other than as proper names. In that context, then, it would seem that your name would more properly be pronounced as you yourself (or perhaps your parents) pronounce it, regardless of the language context.
Also, think of animals. My dog's name is Bubba. If my friend from Russia called to my dog with a different pronunciation (probably by evening out the vowels so they sound the same), Bubba wouldn't be so likely to recognize his name and come as called. Pets recognize the sounds that comprise their names, not any given pronunciation of the written forms of their names. ('Bubba' isn't the best example of this in terms of a name whose pronunciation would change significantly between Russian and English; I just wanted to make my dog known on Slashdot!
I work at a large university in Texas (no, the other one) where I interact with many people from Africa, South and Central America, Asia, etc. None of them have ever told me, "My name is X, but you should pronounce it Y." On the other hand, I'm certainly no linguistics expert.
Offtopic threads -- wrong but sooooo tempting.
Agreed -- glasses are a pain in sports. I've got soft contacts as well and I can do most sports with no problem, but there are a couple of exceptions.
Swimming: It feels like my contacts are going to float out of my eyes if I open them under water, esp. if I'm moving or there's a current.
Boxing / Sparring: I've been hit in the face a few times while boxing. I was wearing headgear and my opponent was wearing big gloves. Getting hit in the vicinity of the eye tended to knock the contacts out of my eyes, which resulted in me forfeiting the match. It's very difficult to hit your opponent if you can't see him! This hasn't happened while sparring (with no gloves or headgear), so I wonder if the headgear scrunching up my face or the soft padding in the boxing glove that could conform to my face's contours might have had a large effect. The possibility still makes me nervous when I spar, though.
So as far as I know, you need good natural or surgically corrected vision to swim underwater comfortably or box.
Note that the problem with boxing / sparring could potentially be a safety issue, not just a sports issue. If I get attacked (at a bar, for example), I don't want to lose my ability to see my attacker just because he lands a quick blow to the face. That could be the first step to getting killed.
Hmm, on second thought, ignore me, I'm just paranoid.
I'm getting corrective surgery as soon as I have the money, my prescription stabilizes and I've thoroughly researched the different types available.
I need one of these for the next time I go see a movie at the theater. Now if only there were a "crying baby killer." Well, one that won't get you put on death row.
We in Texas say "y'all." We are for the most part not retarded or inbred. I would wager that the per capita rate of retardation and productive incestuous relationships in New England and Texas are very similar.
We Texans are most definitely not southerners, with the possible exception of East Texans. Texans are Texans. Other categorizations ill suit us.
Therefore, when you hear someone use "y'all," you should not assume that the person is a "retard inbred southerner." There is a similar chance that the speaker is a retard inbred Texan, or a retard inbred yankee who has come to the realization that making a contraction of "you" and "all" is much more in line with accepted rules of English than pluralizing the already-plural "you" to yield "youse."
Please come up with a better argument for our next debate, which will concern "ain't."
>>Yes, I've got a device that shoots out particles at damn near the speed of light - a torch ;)
Er, your torch emits photons AT the speed of light. A flashlight would do the same thing.
From what I know of this type of setup, 1 NIC connects the proxy-masq-firewall box to the cable modem (which outputs on an Ethernet line) and the other connects the box to the hub, which all your local machines plug into as well. At least, that's how I'm going to set mine up.
One high-flying balloon (like a weather balloon), one medium-power portable transmitter activated by an altimeter and one pre-recorded message. It would be fun to see their initial reactions.
Problems:
properly targeting the Bent Space dish
positioning the balloon directly over the dish
justifying the waste of all that money for a stupid stunt like this
Of course, the last could be said of the Bent Space "service" as well.
______________________________
Back in high school, the neighbor kid and I used to take one of those backyardyard insecticide sprayers and fill it with gasoline to make a flame thrower. The device was a 5-gallon drum with a hand-operated pump on top to pressurize the liquid and a short tube connecting to a metal wand about 1' long with a garden-hose-style trigger on it to release the liquid. We'd fill up the drum, pump for pressure, squirt a bit to get a slow drip going on the end to light, then write our names in the grass by his house.
Oddly enough, I never died a fiery death.
=============
What Universal wants is akin to requiring a person to read every part of a magazine from the front cover to the end of the article they're interested in.
I'm certainly free to recommend in my own writings that the reader look at the second paragraph on the first page of the first article in the Forum section of this month's Playboy, for example. Universal would like to make it illegal for me to provide a hyperlink to the comparable web page. In print, I give the reader the page number, article title, magazine title and issue number in order to point him to the text I would like him to read. The information I have given him is just a "real-world URL." It is simply the location at which the text I am referring to can be found. On a web site, I could provide the same information to "link" to a printed article, or if referring to a web page I could write out a URL for the reader to cut-and-paste into his browser's location bar, or I could take out the cut-and-paste work by using tags to make the link automatic with the click of a button.
The only problem I can see with linking to a deep page is if the referring page represents the content behind the link as its own property. I can't photocopy the first article in the Playboy Forum and include it in my writings; that would be obvious plagarism. Likewise, I shouldn't link to the article without providing some indication that the material behind the link is Playboy's property. This may even include simply ensuring that the page I'm linking to is readily identifiable as Playboy's website and not mine (I'm still undecided on this point, and anyway it's more polite to make it clear at the link).
Advertising revenue, which I can understand is a concern for Universal, must not be considered as an issue in the law. Universal is free to publish a web site and charge advertisers to put banners there, but cannot require people to look at the advertisements. That's why those annoying blow-in cards that fall out of magazines are so widely used. It's practically the only way to guarantee a reader will see that ad. Otherwise, most people quickly scan a page to identify the ads on it and then ignore them, focusing on the article they are interested in. The web equivalent is the annoying pop-up window advertisements on GeoCities member sites and elsewhere.
I think of a website as like a magazine or newspaper. Newspapers derive a negligible income from per-issue price; most of their money comes from advertising. Yet I may still refer someone to a particular article on a particular page without telling them to read the whole paper until they figure out which article I'm talking about. Universal would like to think of a website as a house. You come in the front door, not a window, and pay attention to everything your host tells you.
Legally requiring every visitor at a web site to read the main pages before reading the article they came for is as ridiculous as selling a magazine with the requirement that the reader read every page of the magazine that precedes the article he is interested in.
=========================
AntiOnline recently published a review (http://www.antionline.com/cgi-bin/News?type=antio nline&date=07-12-1999&story=abuse.news) of several ISPs' willingness to look into crack attempts as reported by private citizens.
Interestingly, while AOL rolls over for the government, they seem to have little interest in helping the net community keep the neighborhood a nice place to live. Of course, any particular individual can't do much to hurt AOL, while falling in the government's bad graces might possibly be fatal to its financial health.
Jake96
Each area of a city would be responsible for funding and maintaining its own network. The area networks of a city would connect together, and the state governments would maintain the intercity lines. States would handle connexions to neighboring states.
I can think of one problem with this approach. In order for an area of a city or community to pay for this infrastructure, some sort of tax or tax-equivalent would have to be set up among the residents to raise money for the installation and maintenance of the lines. We would then begin to see the same regional effects that we see with the public school system. Affluent communities (such as Sugar Land in Houston) would have residents who would be willing and able to pay hefty taxes, fees, etc. to support installation of fiber optics, while economically depressed communities (such as Houston's Fifth Ward) would end up with maybe enough to upgrade existing phone lines. Then we would see a call for a "Robin Hood" style of redistributing the broadband taxes or fees more equally among the communities. Even if this were based on privately collected fees, which I suspect could not support building a broadband infrastructure anyway, there would still be a push for government intervention, though it would stand less chance of being successful. A "Robin Hood" scheme would be of no help, though, if what we have seen in Texas of "Robin Hood" as applied to the school system is any indication.
In any case, I would hate to see the school-system style of community taxation used to fund community broadband access because I think we would see the same effect on broadband access that we do with public schools. Exacerbating a current problem with net access, I think we would see poor (and disproportionately minority) communities unable to afford more than the cheapest, smallest data pipes, leading to decreased internet usage in these communities and a drop (or rather lack of increase) in the "online literacy" of the residents.
The internet will become another spike to widen the increasing divide between the "haves" and the "have nots" if we're not careful in the next few years.
there's no limit to how fast these things could get going in space!
Yes, there would be, even if they had some means of propulsion that allowed them to travel at all in space. They could only approach light speed.
Jake the Humorless