Ah! but I think that this is aimed at environments that are unsafe for employees. If you're working a chicken processing line in a small town in the rust-belt where there's no other work you can't just quit and find another job - and if 10% of all the people working on the line come down with an RSI then it's patently unsafe.
I think that these regulations are targetted at 2 sorts of workplaces - large ones where there is a known history of RSI-related problems (like the aforementioned poultry place) - these will have to make proactive changes to protect their employees - just like say a coal mine where people suffer from black lung disease would be required to provide clean air.
The second are small places where individuals come down with particular problems - for example if I come down with tendonitis (as I have for the past 10 years) because I'm a programmer then my employer will be required to take reasonable steps to protect me from health problems resulting from me performing my job - in my case a chair that comes to the right height and a trackball instead of a mouse seems to do the trick.
I think that one of the more general problems with RSIs is that they've only recently been recognised as something real - primarily because a bunch of white collar workers like me started coming down with them - before that induestry quietly burned through the chicken workers of the world without a big stink being raised
Might be time to set up that Cryptomiconon-style offshore anonymizing data haven.... and run everything thru there
Seriously though I think there's going to be a need for anonymized access to web sites and other net resources - so we can give away our email address without getting spam, our credit card information without getting ripped off, our home address to get something shipped without getting paper spam, our IP address so we're not being tracked around the net, use our SSN without it being being passed around, use our DNA without it affecting our medical insurance rates etc etc
And it has to be done a way that's proactive from our point of view - ie we don't depend on other people that we have to business with, (like the medical insurers, or the retailers or....) who don't put our best interest ahead of theirs, to be nice to us and respect our confidentiality - gotta start using protocols (net, commercial, social,...) that don't give them any option
These are difficult technical and social problems.
I suspect that what it comes down to is that we're going to need some reputable 3rd parties (those datahavens) to proxy our transactions for us.
At some levels we already have these - the big companies that sell financial (credit) and medical information about us - today they don't have our interests at heart either - somehow we have to find a way to take back ownership of our data.
I know Europe has stricter privacy laws than the US - anyone want to enlighten us on how they work?
actually I think the German situation is somewhat unique - one of scientology's stated aims is world domination [they even have their own version of the 'final solution' that I've been told apparently includes me.... but i digress]. Anyway after WW2 the Allies left Germany with a constitution that banned German organizations that seek world domination.....
He is a bit off topic but, even so, I think he should be moderated up - the whole point of this thread is about the evil of censorship - the rest of his compatriots are being censored (through mostly no fault of their own) - we should encourage speech on all sides, EVEN IF WE DON'T LIKE IT. If I had any moderator points (and hadn't already posted) I'd bump him up.
Otherwise we're just as bad as the $cientology lawyers who are trying to silence xenu.net, or their recent attempts to drown out postings in alt.religion.scientology with 100s of thousands of garbage messages.
Real dialog is good - I hope everyone will read Dr. Pepper's postings - and that he'll go and read postings from $cientology critics too.
The more I think about it the more I like/.'s moderation software - it's wonderfully decentralized... and encourages all sides of an issue to get air-time
Or rather my kids - they picketted my kids (7 and 5) as they arrived home from school - because I'd had the temerity to stand up pubicly and protest their actions.
Before the whole scientology vs. the Net thing blew up in their faces co$ could force their critics (mostly ex-members) into silence by harrassing and sueing. But once they tried to rmgroup alt.religion.scientology and raided Dennis Erlich and took away his computer it roused the ire of a lot of net free-speech people (like me - I was never a member of co$) - there's safety in numbers, and semi-anononymity - you CAN speak out - and if you feel the heat's got a little too high just step back and let someone else take it for a while.
But the most important thing is that whole "the internet routes around censorship like a fault" thing - the best thing to do when you are being censored is to tell as many people as you can about it - not just on line - but everywhere, friends, family, at work, neighbors, a bumper sticker on your car, etc
I think that healthy democracies work the same way - secrets find a way out eventually - the net's just helping it happen faster!
Actually even though I'm a serious long-time scientology critic - I think that it is a religion - simply because some people beleive in it. It doesn't matter that Hubbard or the current leaders like (*) were/are just in it for the power and money.
One of the problems with our society's current take on religion is that things are either religions or they are not - I think that scientology's a religion, a scam, a cult, but mostly a business. And we have a view of religion that something can't be all those things - I have no problem with scientologists beleiving in space aliens - that's their 1st amendment right - but others shouldn't be able to hide behind those people's honest beleifs to abuse them and make money hand-over-fist.
Scientology's made me think about this a lot - I think that the seperation of church and state thing has been developed all wrong - the 1st amendment sais that the govt may not establish a state religion (or religions) [to be fair this clause was slipped in to make sure that the feds didn't try and change the then established official religions that some of the states had at the time - yup it's the antidisesthablishmentarianism clause] - I think that the act of deciding that something is a religion and giving it a tax break is in it self an act of reconising a religion and giving it state backing - something that the feds are not allowed to do according to the constitution. So a simple change - I think the govt. should get out of the business of deciding whish organisation is a religion and which is not - that means no tax breaks which are unfair on the people who don't beleive in a particular religion because they amount to a subsidy on their part.
I think that this is one reason why there are no pro-scientology voices here - the scientologists who use the censoring software have found that they can't even view the main slashdot page because their browser chokes at the word 'xenu'
They have no idea that this discussion is going on, and won't so long as that word appears anywhere on the slashdot main page - by which time it will be too late.
To be fair their censoring software only works on Windows platforms - any Linux-using scientologists are welcome to jump in and give their point of view
They can't read this slashdot page, or the main one at the moment..... really.... when they try and access this page their TCP stack shuts down because their 'church' has had them install (mostly without their knowledge) software that blanks out certain words [like my nick 'taniwha' for example] or when they see words like 'xenu' shuts down a socket connection altogether
This software, described in http://www.xenu.net/archive/events/c ensorship/ (www.xenu.net is back on the air BTW), has been variously dubbed 'clamnanny' or 'scienositter'. It only works on Windows systems and is believed to be a purloined copy of CyberSitter (who's owners denied any knowledge of it). Co$ members had it slipped into their systems under the guise of a tool to help them create personalised web pages - as part of a larger attempt to create so many 'scientology' web sites that the critical sites like xenu.net would be drowned out in the search engines.
I was one of the scientology critics that cracked the encryption on the work lists (with help from some of the other anti-censorware people) and produced the list of words and names that are banned. Who knows maybe slashdot will be on the next list:-)
Well Hubbard was an SF writer not a geologist (he also claimed the Canary islands)...... he was also going cold turkey from a booze and pills problem (in the Canary islands not suprisingly).... hence the skin crawling with little tiny murdered space aliens thing
Actually I beleive the story goes that LRH calimed that "the easiest way to make a million dollars is to start your own religion".... of course he'd never heard of internet startups:-)
anon.penet.fi - a Scientologist in the US posted about his own 'church' anonymously - they sued to get his name (and did!) - the anon-remailer was shut down because the person who ran it felt he could no longer maintain his promise of confidentiality
One of Scientology's main goals is 'to clear the planet' which basicly means world domination and installation of a Scientology civil government - at which time they plan to "get rid of the SPs - the 2%" in otherwords they have advocated a 'final solution' for those of us who have spoken out and wont go along with the plan [this by the way is why they are in such trouble in Germany - the Allies left Germany with a constitution that doesn't allow German groups to advocate taking over the world....]
Xenu.net has been THE best resource of documentation about Scientology on the net period. And that's including the Scientology site.
A large part of this site is a collection of court and govermental enquiry transcripts combined with personal accounts of their experience
Behaviour like this by Scientology is par for the course their lawyers have atacked free speech at every turn in their war against the net - remember this started with one of their lawyers forging an rmgroup to remove a newsgroup - and was quickly followed with a police raid on one of the poster's houses where they hauled away all his computers - then searched them for evidence for a subsequent civil court case against him.
Anyway - the answer to censorship (or speech you don't like) is more speech - so tell your friends the things about Scientology that were (are) on xenu.net that Scientology doesn't want you to know:
It's a mind-control cult that attenpts to squeeze as much money out of its members as possible
It costs at least $360,000 to 'receive salvation'
The basic tenent of their faith which they wont tell you untill you have paid at least $100k is that 7 million years ago intergallactic tyrant Xenu shipped billions of people to earth, tied them to the top of volcanos and nuked them. All the worlds troubles are caused by us being haunted by the tourtured souls of these murdered space aliens - for large amounts of money Scientology will teach you how to exorcise yourself
abuse and occasional deaths of members have been reported - they run their own prison labor camps called 'RPF' at several places within the US (xenu.net contains a number accounts by people forced into RPF who had to do things like run around a pole in the desert each day)
They have their own paramilitary wing called the 'sea-org'
Xenu.net will be back - it's censored, not gone - in the mean time help do the work it was doing - tell all your friends and family about Scientology - make sure they know what it's about so they won't get sucked in
(from personal experience writing a number of patents)
It's really strange - patentese is a unique dialect of english with it's own internal consistancy.
In many ways it is very like a sort of strangely restricted programming language. It has variables (you name something XYZ to create an instance then refer to it as 'the XYZ'), arrays of variables ('the first XYZ', 'the second XYZ', etc), limited subtoutine calling (you can refer to previous claims). And finally bizarre boolean logic (I'm not going to explain 'and' and 'or' because I don't really understand them and always end up arguing with the patent attorney - but they don't mean what you think [hint I think 'or' means exlusive or and sometimes 'and' means or])
Instead, I would propose the following: your $2520 (or most of it) is refunded to you if the patent (or some of its claims) is invalidated upon reexamination. If the patent holds up, you're out the full fee.
An excelent idea! - though I'd still argue for the ability of a public deluge of some patent office e-mail box to also be a trigger - I think that the patent office has to hold itself responsible for the times that it screws up - after all they're the ones who are supposed to judge prior art etc even though we know that they really don't have the time or resources to handle all of it.
actually I think that a key element of the claims is that you can choose the order in which the things that you order are embedded in the result.
The first part of the first claim seems to say that the user is given a list of things they can order and then they specify which things and in which order - this is frankly the only vaguely novel feature in this patent.... but it also decribes how I order chinese food around the corner and how they produce it for me and put it on the table:-)
interestingly enough if Slashdot included an option where you got to specify the order you want to see articles come back to you it's conceivable that yes this patent could be applied to/.:-)
Read the patent yourself, taniwha, this time keeping in mind that it is the claims, and nothing else in the patent, that describes what is legally protected by the patent
And where in the claims does it mention music? the internet? CDs? it doesn't it mentions "entering orders" "transactions" "media" etc etc
For example a 'recording medium' could be a person with a pencil and paper, 'verifying a finacial transaction' could be picking up the phone and calling the bank, or writing them a letter
It does however include a claim involving an "electronic recipt" but that just means they sent you e-mail once they got the order - there's no mention of the order being done electronically
you're right - I should have said "the claims don't even mention the internet" since they're what's actually being patented
It's a strange patent.... usually the prefered embodyment is actually called out in the claims something along the lines of a claim with "The method of claim 1 where the order information is transmitted to the remote location using the TCP/IP internet protocol" - but there's none of that there - just these 7 very generic claims
This one's a doozy.... I believe it even covers calling up your local radio station and asking them to play some songs in aparticular order.
The basic patent has nothing about CDs, music or the internet.... just the ability to communicate the order of some objects to a remote place and have them fixed into an unspecified medium.
it doesn't even mention the internet.... you could be doing all this by mail - all it sais is that there's a way to communicate the order of what you want - not how it's communicated.
actually I believe that this patent is so broad that it's worthless - it only takes one piece of prior art to invalidate it.
If I can prove that in 30BC one could write off a local scribe and ask him to produce a volume containg the works of Ovid and Plato in a certain order then this is prior art..... I'm sure there's prior art down the centuries for this one
(to the classics geeks - before you flame me I only guessed at 30BC OK?)
Slashdot Mirror
I think that these regulations are targetted at 2 sorts of workplaces - large ones where there is a known history of RSI-related problems (like the aforementioned poultry place) - these will have to make proactive changes to protect their employees - just like say a coal mine where people suffer from black lung disease would be required to provide clean air.
The second are small places where individuals come down with particular problems - for example if I come down with tendonitis (as I have for the past 10 years) because I'm a programmer then my employer will be required to take reasonable steps to protect me from health problems resulting from me performing my job - in my case a chair that comes to the right height and a trackball instead of a mouse seems to do the trick.
I think that one of the more general problems with RSIs is that they've only recently been recognised as something real - primarily because a bunch of white collar workers like me started coming down with them - before that induestry quietly burned through the chicken workers of the world without a big stink being raised
Seriously though I think there's going to be a need for anonymized access to web sites and other net resources - so we can give away our email address without getting spam, our credit card information without getting ripped off, our home address to get something shipped without getting paper spam, our IP address so we're not being tracked around the net, use our SSN without it being being passed around, use our DNA without it affecting our medical insurance rates etc etc
And it has to be done a way that's proactive from our point of view - ie we don't depend on other people that we have to business with, (like the medical insurers, or the retailers or ....) who don't put our best interest ahead of theirs, to be nice to us and respect our confidentiality - gotta start using protocols (net, commercial, social, ...) that don't give them any option
These are difficult technical and social problems.
I suspect that what it comes down to is that we're going to need some reputable 3rd parties (those datahavens) to proxy our transactions for us.
At some levels we already have these - the big companies that sell financial (credit) and medical information about us - today they don't have our interests at heart either - somehow we have to find a way to take back ownership of our data.
I know Europe has stricter privacy laws than the US - anyone want to enlighten us on how they work?
actually I think the German situation is somewhat unique - one of scientology's stated aims is world domination [they even have their own version of the 'final solution' that I've been told apparently includes me .... but i digress]. Anyway after WW2 the Allies left Germany with a constitution that banned German organizations that seek world domination .....
Otherwise we're just as bad as the $cientology lawyers who are trying to silence xenu.net, or their recent attempts to drown out postings in alt.religion.scientology with 100s of thousands of garbage messages.
Real dialog is good - I hope everyone will read Dr. Pepper's postings - and that he'll go and read postings from $cientology critics too.
The more I think about it the more I like /.'s moderation software - it's wonderfully decentralized ... and encourages all sides of an issue to get air-time
Before the whole scientology vs. the Net thing blew up in their faces co$ could force their critics (mostly ex-members) into silence by harrassing and sueing. But once they tried to rmgroup alt.religion.scientology and raided Dennis Erlich and took away his computer it roused the ire of a lot of net free-speech people (like me - I was never a member of co$) - there's safety in numbers, and semi-anononymity - you CAN speak out - and if you feel the heat's got a little too high just step back and let someone else take it for a while.
But the most important thing is that whole "the internet routes around censorship like a fault" thing - the best thing to do when you are being censored is to tell as many people as you can about it - not just on line - but everywhere, friends, family, at work, neighbors, a bumper sticker on your car, etc
I think that healthy democracies work the same way - secrets find a way out eventually - the net's just helping it happen faster!
One of the problems with our society's current take on religion is that things are either religions or they are not - I think that scientology's a religion, a scam, a cult, but mostly a business. And we have a view of religion that something can't be all those things - I have no problem with scientologists beleiving in space aliens - that's their 1st amendment right - but others shouldn't be able to hide behind those people's honest beleifs to abuse them and make money hand-over-fist.
Scientology's made me think about this a lot - I think that the seperation of church and state thing has been developed all wrong - the 1st amendment sais that the govt may not establish a state religion (or religions) [to be fair this clause was slipped in to make sure that the feds didn't try and change the then established official religions that some of the states had at the time - yup it's the antidisesthablishmentarianism clause] - I think that the act of deciding that something is a religion and giving it a tax break is in it self an act of reconising a religion and giving it state backing - something that the feds are not allowed to do according to the constitution. So a simple change - I think the govt. should get out of the business of deciding whish organisation is a religion and which is not - that means no tax breaks which are unfair on the people who don't beleive in a particular religion because they amount to a subsidy on their part.
They have no idea that this discussion is going on, and won't so long as that word appears anywhere on the slashdot main page - by which time it will be too late.
To be fair their censoring software only works on Windows platforms - any Linux-using scientologists are welcome to jump in and give their point of view
This software, described in http://www.xenu.net/archive/events/c ensorship/ (www.xenu.net is back on the air BTW), has been variously dubbed 'clamnanny' or 'scienositter'. It only works on Windows systems and is believed to be a purloined copy of CyberSitter (who's owners denied any knowledge of it). Co$ members had it slipped into their systems under the guise of a tool to help them create personalised web pages - as part of a larger attempt to create so many 'scientology' web sites that the critical sites like xenu.net would be drowned out in the search engines.
I was one of the scientology critics that cracked the encryption on the work lists (with help from some of the other anti-censorware people) and produced the list of words and names that are banned. Who knows maybe slashdot will be on the next list :-)
Well Hubbard was an SF writer not a geologist (he also claimed the Canary islands) ...... he was also going cold turkey from a booze and pills problem (in the Canary islands not suprisingly) .... hence the skin crawling with little tiny murdered space aliens thing
Actually I beleive the story goes that LRH calimed that "the easiest way to make a million dollars is to start your own religion" .... of course he'd never heard of internet startups :-)
anon.penet.fi - a Scientologist in the US posted about his own 'church' anonymously - they sued to get his name (and did!) - the anon-remailer was shut down because the person who ran it felt he could no longer maintain his promise of confidentiality
A large part of this site is a collection of court and govermental enquiry transcripts combined with personal accounts of their experience
Behaviour like this by Scientology is par for the course their lawyers have atacked free speech at every turn in their war against the net - remember this started with one of their lawyers forging an rmgroup to remove a newsgroup - and was quickly followed with a police raid on one of the poster's houses where they hauled away all his computers - then searched them for evidence for a subsequent civil court case against him.
Anyway - the answer to censorship (or speech you don't like) is more speech - so tell your friends the things about Scientology that were (are) on xenu.net that Scientology doesn't want you to know:
- It's a mind-control cult that attenpts to squeeze as much money out of its members as possible
- It costs at least $360,000 to 'receive salvation'
- The basic tenent of their faith which they wont tell you untill you have paid at least $100k is that 7 million years ago intergallactic tyrant Xenu shipped billions of people to earth, tied them to the top of volcanos and nuked them. All the worlds troubles are caused by us being haunted by the tourtured souls of these murdered space aliens - for large amounts of money Scientology will teach you how to exorcise yourself
- abuse and occasional deaths of members have been reported - they run their own prison labor camps called 'RPF' at several places within the US (xenu.net contains a number accounts by people forced into RPF who had to do things like run around a pole in the desert each day)
- They have their own paramilitary wing called the 'sea-org'
Xenu.net will be back - it's censored, not gone - in the mean time help do the work it was doing - tell all your friends and family about Scientology - make sure they know what it's about so they won't get sucked inon the pros and cons of M$ sponsership: "we can buy more beer with the money" heh:-)
will be the spammers ..... :-)
It's really strange - patentese is a unique dialect of english with it's own internal consistancy.
In many ways it is very like a sort of strangely restricted programming language. It has variables (you name something XYZ to create an instance then refer to it as 'the XYZ'), arrays of variables ('the first XYZ', 'the second XYZ', etc), limited subtoutine calling (you can refer to previous claims). And finally bizarre boolean logic (I'm not going to explain 'and' and 'or' because I don't really understand them and always end up arguing with the patent attorney - but they don't mean what you think [hint I think 'or' means exlusive or and sometimes 'and' means or])
just a minute ...... I just read your post ...... now they're watching me too ....
An excelent idea! - though I'd still argue for the ability of a public deluge of some patent office e-mail box to also be a trigger - I think that the patent office has to hold itself responsible for the times that it screws up - after all they're the ones who are supposed to judge prior art etc even though we know that they really don't have the time or resources to handle all of it.
actually I think that a key element of the claims is that you can choose the order in which the things that you order are embedded in the result.
The first part of the first claim seems to say that the user is given a list of things they can order and then they specify which things and in which order - this is frankly the only vaguely novel feature in this patent .... but it also decribes how I order chinese food around the corner and how they produce it for me and put it on the table :-)
And where in the claims does it mention music? the internet? CDs? it doesn't it mentions "entering orders" "transactions" "media" etc etc
For example a 'recording medium' could be a person with a pencil and paper, 'verifying a finacial transaction' could be picking up the phone and calling the bank, or writing them a letter
It does however include a claim involving an "electronic recipt" but that just means they sent you e-mail once they got the order - there's no mention of the order being done electronically
It's a strange patent .... usually the prefered embodyment is actually called out in the claims something along the lines of a claim with "The method of claim 1 where the order information is transmitted to the remote location using the TCP/IP internet protocol" - but there's none of that there - just these 7 very generic claims
The basic patent has nothing about CDs, music or the internet .... just the ability to communicate the order of some objects to a remote place and have them fixed into an unspecified medium.
it doesn't even mention the internet .... you could be doing all this by mail - all it sais is that there's a way to communicate the order of what you want - not how it's communicated.
If I can prove that in 30BC one could write off a local scribe and ask him to produce a volume containg the works of Ovid and Plato in a certain order then this is prior art ..... I'm sure there's prior art down the centuries for this one
(to the classics geeks - before you flame me I only guessed at 30BC OK?)