>ther services are quite different. IM programs communicate between computers,
So will they refund this fee if all the phone calls I make are vonage to vonage, thus eliminating any POTS infrastructure? Or pro-rate a discount?
This is more complex than regulatory fees can address. In fact, ask yourself what is being regulated here? Vonage uses (mostly) the public internet, so they're not a real phone company as much as a quasi-phone company.
For instance, will we pay if we use our IM to send an SMS? Or if I dial-up to use a SIP phone? The intermingling of technology moves faster than regulation law and the congressional credo to "keep hands (taxes) off the internet as possible" is a socially and economically positive policy until things settle down (if they ever will).
The real problem here is that the feds have been getting lobbied by the other phone companies in a way to hurt Vonage. Its this kind of in-fighting we don't need, either compete or get out of the way. Nothing is stopping AT&T or Verizon from going VoIP.
Just as a side note, 25% of my cell phone bill is taxes. That is simply wrong so many ways. This mentality to tax anything remotely new because it challenges the older established businesses is simply wrong.
Yes, lost tax revenue must come from somewhere, but the dirty games that big business plays only hurts small companies and new technologies.
Last I heard there was a free market there (as free as the US at least) and the government didn't own all the means of production.
If you were you trying to say, "They have national healthcare and a few other big social programs thus that makes them a socialist government!!!!" I suggest you read up on what socialism is.
>Who could reccomend this to their CTO without a PIM?
The working assumption is that this will replace Office on the desktop without getting rid of the Outlook/Exchange, Lotus Notes, etc infrastructure.
Its a double edged sword, some will question why there isn't a PIM/Email program and others will not like the fact that they're "forced" to use whatever Sun might hobble together to replace the PIM/Email solution that is already working at your organization.
internetseer.com - the newest web scam/spam. Here's something a little bit interesting on the web. This company, internetseer.com, is constantly hitting my site and others ostensibly to get web uptime statistics. Seems pretty harmless, but it does tend to fill up web logs pretty quickly. I don't know why their bot is set to visit this site 20 times a day, so I ended up blocking it. Yesterday, I received an email from one of their sales reps more or less saying, "Hi, we noticed your site was down last night, for x amount of dollars we can monitor it and sell you uptime statistics!!!" Which of course can be done for free locally. This is spam, these people are spammers. May google seaches with sitecheck.internetseer.com end up here. Avoid these bandwidth wasting spammers.
What will it take before we get more money for watching the skies and funding for technologies that can divert a disaster? I think inciting panic or fear without exagerating the risks or facts can have a positive social change.
Right now, most of the sky is ignored and there is no solution to moving a huge asteroid just a little bit to avoid collision with the Earth or the moon. If Joe Sixpack demanded some kind of plan eventually something would be debated in Congress. The alternative is to watch a small part of the sky and do nothing if a real threat is detected.
>I would like to see just one online petition that has carried any weight.
There was a success with webtv, its probably still linked at the petition site, but unless someone prints these damn things out and hands them to the politicos (like in this photo from moveon.org) its a waste of bits.
>So Bush vowing to veto basically means he's disdainfully ignoring the will of the population he was supposedly elected to represent.
The pocket veto is viewed by many as a too powerful tool for the executive branch and this is another glaring example. A hard-fought legislature win is meaningless because the president won't sign it? I have yet to see the pocket-veto be a force of democracy as much as its supposed to be a check on Congress, yet there's enough diversity in Congress that the pocket veto simply isn't needed.
Seems to be a powerful tool for a marginalized ideologues like the Bush admin is. I doubt there will enough votes to over-ride the veto. Oh well, another win for big business. I really hope, assuming Bush does this, this becomes a big part of the election rhetoric from the dems.
The 'fog machine meets projector' tech is not stereoscopic 3D so its limited to generated CGI. So there's no "Help me Obi-Wan" type 3D image recording that could be done with two or more cameras, just digital avatars at best. 3D videoconferencing will have to look elsewhere.
There have been a few articles on/. regarding steroscopic 3D screens and projectors and frankly the term 3D is just misused too much. Maybe we need something like CG3D to clarify.
Lets see a couple chubby out of touch computer monopolists trying to handle a 500+ HP car? Something tells me Apple and Linux are going to have a bright future after a certain firey crash.
Exactly, if the laws prohibiting these drugs were lifted we could take the "nicer" form of speed. Don't laught this off too quickly, in a controlled environment or in minor doses, say, to compete with caffiene based drinks it could very well be sold without a prescription.
The Sidekick is getting OS 1.1 this month sent via wireless to all devices. It will finally give us a download manager, copy and paste, and some minor but needed tweaks. The lack of influx of third-party software is really going to make it look bad if the treo launches before the SK has a chance to update and give us a download app. You can see the sneak preview here:
>they are now practically being treated as fashion accessories rather than technology.
Lets not start bashing the phone companies, consumers want this and whether or not you realize it you love this also. How many case modding articles have been posted to slashdot? That's fashion too.
Every phone has some wacky design because the standard screen plus keys is fairly boring and been done many times before. There are no conservative looking phones out there, no standard designs. Everything is over designed in some way.
Actually my phone is probably the more boring of them all, I have a sidekick and all it is is a micro-micro-laptop with a swivel screen. No swooping bright orange pieces of plastic. No real over design, just a plain grey nano-computer, but its more feature rich than most phones on the market. When you have to pack in a full keyboard, buttons, a scroll wheel, and nice sized screen there just isn't room for flashy design considerations, but with the old cell phone template there's a lot of play allowed.
Also, back when ma bell first offered colored phones people went crazy over them. All they were were the standard black phones dyed a different color and ma bell wanted 2 more dollars a month for them (you didnt own a phone back then you leased one). Its human nature to want something flashy or do something creative with a tired template, but of course that's a knife that cuts both ways. As long as it has decent HCI/Usability and design comes second most people are pleased.
1. After lots of exposition and some introspection Neo resets the Matrix for the 7th time for the good of humanity. The movie ends by showing the scene from the first movie of Neo the 7th waking up in front of his PC.
2. After lots of program infighting (I love how this movie is more or less Tron) Neo defeats something/someone (with the help of persephone) and the machines and humans have a stalemate/symbiosis that gives the humans more autonomy.
3. Neo wins by defeating the programs or getting the humans off-planet - say Mars and they live in their little VR world while protected from the elements.
4. Mindfuck: the matrix is nothing like we've been shown or its a box in a box within a box type of thing thus the ideas of escape, liberty, etc are non-applicable and the movie ends with a long winded explanation - this time from Persephone and her speech and the architect's speech put together makes a sort of free will/dualism statement that may end in either of the above scenarios.
> MS update downloaded the patch and it's already installed.
Win2K requires a reboot so we're still in the same place we were last year. "Whats that funny globe doing down there?" It won't autoinstall if a reboot is required. It would be nice if it did install and put up a warning box that you should reboot the machine.
>These damage figures really don't seem very unreasonable
Skallas's law: All legal damages are unreasonable.
That's why its left up to the jury to decide damages and for them to decide whether the prosecution is being honest, for the most part. In a trial the defense could bring its own expert to testify that the damages are inflated.
>EMusic [emusic.com] is owned by Vivendi Universal and is a full-fledged, card-carrying member of the RIAA.
So what? People have been asking for DRM free MP3 downloads for ages. In fact this is the root problem of whats wrong with the music industry - too expensive, afraid of change, etc.
Sorry, if its not owned by Mom and Pop but its a good service at a great price.
Person1: Christ man, she lives in a housing project.
Person2: Hmm that may be a problem.
Person1: You bet your ass it is!
Person2: Well we can always reintroduce child labor prisons, tattoo the names of our newest manufactured stars on her forehead, have her clean up the mess Aguilara leaves. Heck, the possibilities are endless. And she can't afford a lawyer, this is awesome.
Person1: I like what I'm hearing... give me more...
> Well, I would hardly call even President Bush "a member of the radical right wing". I think this term is usually reserved for the folks who let religious beliefs be their primary guide in their political views
This is a great ruling, because if it went the other way it could be a serious precedent against ad-blocking or rendering HTML the way you like it on YOUR computer you bought with your own money on your internet connection.
The problem, as usual, is shady companies and non-vigilant consumers. Its amazing how many tech managers still don't understand the dangers of spyware: non-trivial information being sent to third-parties. This is nothing compared to a virus, especially if you work in an industry where privacy is to be expected and legally protected like law or medicine. I'm smelling the class actions that will one day wake these clueless managers from their slumber when private information about a case or a disease makes it to the hands of doubleclick or gator.
If anything spyware itself should be under the gun through better warnings (like the big ass warning google gives you when you try to install their toolbar). That's good business and respects the consumer.
> same valid points without implicating a "right-wing agenda"
Let me guess, you voted for Bush.
Everything he wrote is more or less true, the war on drugs cost us civil liberties, "tough on crime" conservtive lawmakers cost us civil liberties, and now we've reached a breaking point where the individual is not only ignorant of his or her rights but is afraid to assert them because of how everyone one else acts and how the media portrays people e.g. only criminals ask for warrants, nice people let the police right on in.
Oh come on, lets not be so alarmist. Comcast/AT&T has been blocking MS file sharing and printer sharing for quite some time. And we all know what these worms target - MS products and the consensus here and elsewhere is that these products are very insecure.
What would be so wrong about blocking 135-139 on the WAN connection? These ports are made for LANs and networking not for internet connections. Really now, how many people print through their WAN connection? Not many. Want to share files - use ftp, http, IM, P2P, etc.
If the ISP was to limit itself to blocking only 135-139 and only to residential customers it would stop a lot of abuse and we would all be better for it. Its either this or Tom Ridge and his buddies are going to freak out after the next big worm (especially if its written in the middle east) and force DRM firewalls and OS patching down our throats with the blessings of MS. Err, no thanks. The vector is MS's products, attack them.
>They never call it that, but that's what all of the teachings really are.
And this is different from mainstream religion because...?
I'm not one to defend Scientology or its methods but at its core is the concept of faith, the belief of things without proof or belief from authority. ALL religions share that, thus they are very much the same e.g. authoritarian, traditional, unquestionable, abusive, controlling, etc.
A cult may be more intense but the e-meter and its wielders have nothing on days on end of meditation of the buddhist, the player schedule and diet of the muslim, or the passion of the revival christian.
The good news is that as scientology gets criticized people start to ask the question what is a cult and find it hard to rationally come to a conclusion without hurting their own faith. The more agnostics and atheists the better. Keep up the lousy work Scientology, you're acting just like Rome and your other peers except you don't have quite the backing they do. Lawyers help, but billions of believers put a million lawyers to shame.
Slashdot Mirror
>ther services are quite different. IM programs communicate between computers,
So will they refund this fee if all the phone calls I make are vonage to vonage, thus eliminating any POTS infrastructure? Or pro-rate a discount?
This is more complex than regulatory fees can address. In fact, ask yourself what is being regulated here? Vonage uses (mostly) the public internet, so they're not a real phone company as much as a quasi-phone company.
For instance, will we pay if we use our IM to send an SMS? Or if I dial-up to use a SIP phone? The intermingling of technology moves faster than regulation law and the congressional credo to "keep hands (taxes) off the internet as possible" is a socially and economically positive policy until things settle down (if they ever will).
The real problem here is that the feds have been getting lobbied by the other phone companies in a way to hurt Vonage. Its this kind of in-fighting we don't need, either compete or get out of the way. Nothing is stopping AT&T or Verizon from going VoIP.
Just as a side note, 25% of my cell phone bill is taxes. That is simply wrong so many ways. This mentality to tax anything remotely new because it challenges the older established businesses is simply wrong.
Yes, lost tax revenue must come from somewhere, but the dirty games that big business plays only hurts small companies and new technologies.
>socialist Canada
Last I heard there was a free market there (as free as the US at least) and the government didn't own all the means of production.
If you were you trying to say, "They have national healthcare and a few other big social programs thus that makes them a socialist government!!!!" I suggest you read up on what socialism is.
>Who could reccomend this to their CTO without a PIM?
The working assumption is that this will replace Office on the desktop without getting rid of the Outlook/Exchange, Lotus Notes, etc infrastructure.
Its a double edged sword, some will question why there isn't a PIM/Email program and others will not like the fact that they're "forced" to use whatever Sun might hobble together to replace the PIM/Email solution that is already working at your organization.
>So did the Tibetans.
Yeah, nothing spells freedom and happiness like living in an oppressive theocracy.
From here
internetseer.com - the newest web scam/spam. Here's something a little bit interesting on the web. This company, internetseer.com, is constantly hitting my site and others ostensibly to get web uptime statistics. Seems pretty harmless, but it does tend to fill up web logs pretty quickly. I don't know why their bot is set to visit this site 20 times a day, so I ended up blocking it. Yesterday, I received an email from one of their sales reps more or less saying, "Hi, we noticed your site was down last night, for x amount of dollars we can monitor it and sell you uptime statistics!!!" Which of course can be done for free locally. This is spam, these people are spammers. May google seaches with sitecheck.internetseer.com end up here. Avoid these bandwidth wasting spammers.
What will it take before we get more money for watching the skies and funding for technologies that can divert a disaster? I think inciting panic or fear without exagerating the risks or facts can have a positive social change.
Right now, most of the sky is ignored and there is no solution to moving a huge asteroid just a little bit to avoid collision with the Earth or the moon. If Joe Sixpack demanded some kind of plan eventually something would be debated in Congress. The alternative is to watch a small part of the sky and do nothing if a real threat is detected.
>I would like to see just one online petition that has carried any weight.
There was a success with webtv, its probably still linked at the petition site, but unless someone prints these damn things out and hands them to the politicos (like in this photo from moveon.org) its a waste of bits.
>So Bush vowing to veto basically means he's disdainfully ignoring the will of the population he was supposedly elected to represent.
The pocket veto is viewed by many as a too powerful tool for the executive branch and this is another glaring example. A hard-fought legislature win is meaningless because the president won't sign it? I have yet to see the pocket-veto be a force of democracy as much as its supposed to be a check on Congress, yet there's enough diversity in Congress that the pocket veto simply isn't needed.
Seems to be a powerful tool for a marginalized ideologues like the Bush admin is. I doubt there will enough votes to over-ride the veto. Oh well, another win for big business. I really hope, assuming Bush does this, this becomes a big part of the election rhetoric from the dems.
The 'fog machine meets projector' tech is not stereoscopic 3D so its limited to generated CGI. So there's no "Help me Obi-Wan" type 3D image recording that could be done with two or more cameras, just digital avatars at best. 3D videoconferencing will have to look elsewhere.
/. regarding steroscopic 3D screens and projectors and frankly the term 3D is just misused too much. Maybe we need something like CG3D to clarify.
There have been a few articles on
Lets see a couple chubby out of touch computer monopolists trying to handle a 500+ HP car? Something tells me Apple and Linux are going to have a bright future after a certain firey crash.
>However when you get down to it speed is speed.
Exactly, if the laws prohibiting these drugs were lifted we could take the "nicer" form of speed. Don't laught this off too quickly, in a controlled environment or in minor doses, say, to compete with caffiene based drinks it could very well be sold without a prescription.
Yes, this is all well and fine, but I want to see Spider Dan or that crazy french fellow try to climb it.
The Sidekick is getting OS 1.1 this month sent via wireless to all devices. It will finally give us a download manager, copy and paste, and some minor but needed tweaks. The lack of influx of third-party software is really going to make it look bad if the treo launches before the SK has a chance to update and give us a download app. You can see the sneak preview here:
http://www.danger.com/developers_peek.php
>they are now practically being treated as fashion accessories rather than technology.
Lets not start bashing the phone companies, consumers want this and whether or not you realize it you love this also. How many case modding articles have been posted to slashdot? That's fashion too.
Every phone has some wacky design because the standard screen plus keys is fairly boring and been done many times before. There are no conservative looking phones out there, no standard designs. Everything is over designed in some way.
Actually my phone is probably the more boring of them all, I have a sidekick and all it is is a micro-micro-laptop with a swivel screen. No swooping bright orange pieces of plastic. No real over design, just a plain grey nano-computer, but its more feature rich than most phones on the market. When you have to pack in a full keyboard, buttons, a scroll wheel, and nice sized screen there just isn't room for flashy design considerations, but with the old cell phone template there's a lot of play allowed.
Also, back when ma bell first offered colored phones people went crazy over them. All they were were the standard black phones dyed a different color and ma bell wanted 2 more dollars a month for them (you didnt own a phone back then you leased one). Its human nature to want something flashy or do something creative with a tired template, but of course that's a knife that cuts both ways. As long as it has decent HCI/Usability and design comes second most people are pleased.
>. "I spent $29.95 on Kazaa and thought I could download thousands of dollars of CDs, movies, software and pr0n." Riiiight.
I spent 14.99 a month on emusic and thought I could download thousands of dollars of music. Riiiight.
Oh right, that's exactly what I'm doing and its legal.
Its all about determinism: Newton, Laplace, etc.
A few possible outcomes:
1. After lots of exposition and some introspection Neo resets the Matrix for the 7th time for the good of humanity. The movie ends by showing the scene from the first movie of Neo the 7th waking up in front of his PC.
2. After lots of program infighting (I love how this movie is more or less Tron) Neo defeats something/someone (with the help of persephone) and the machines and humans have a stalemate/symbiosis that gives the humans more autonomy.
3. Neo wins by defeating the programs or getting the humans off-planet - say Mars and they live in their little VR world while protected from the elements.
4. Mindfuck: the matrix is nothing like we've been shown or its a box in a box within a box type of thing thus the ideas of escape, liberty, etc are non-applicable and the movie ends with a long winded explanation - this time from Persephone and her speech and the architect's speech put together makes a sort of free will/dualism statement that may end in either of the above scenarios.
> MS update downloaded the patch and it's already installed.
Win2K requires a reboot so we're still in the same place we were last year. "Whats that funny globe doing down there?" It won't autoinstall if a reboot is required. It would be nice if it did install and put up a warning box that you should reboot the machine.
>These damage figures really don't seem very unreasonable
Skallas's law: All legal damages are unreasonable.
That's why its left up to the jury to decide damages and for them to decide whether the prosecution is being honest, for the most part. In a trial the defense could bring its own expert to testify that the damages are inflated.
>EMusic [emusic.com] is owned by Vivendi Universal and is a full-fledged, card-carrying member of the RIAA.
So what? People have been asking for DRM free MP3 downloads for ages. In fact this is the root problem of whats wrong with the music industry - too expensive, afraid of change, etc.
Sorry, if its not owned by Mom and Pop but its a good service at a great price.
>>Truly a battle of titans.
RIAA meeting:
Person1: Christ man, she lives in a housing project.
Person2: Hmm that may be a problem.
Person1: You bet your ass it is!
Person2: Well we can always reintroduce child labor prisons, tattoo the names of our newest manufactured stars on her forehead, have her clean up the mess Aguilara leaves. Heck, the possibilities are endless. And she can't afford a lawyer, this is awesome.
Person1: I like what I'm hearing... give me more...
> Well, I would hardly call even President Bush "a member of the radical right wing". I think this term is usually reserved for the folks who let religious beliefs be their primary guide in their political views
Read up on some of his appointees. How about more lead for children and the healing power of Jesus to start you off? He's a self-proclaimed born-again, reads the bible every morning, thinks hes doing gods work in the middle east, etc.
This is a great ruling, because if it went the other way it could be a serious precedent against ad-blocking or rendering HTML the way you like it on YOUR computer you bought with your own money on your internet connection.
The problem, as usual, is shady companies and non-vigilant consumers. Its amazing how many tech managers still don't understand the dangers of spyware: non-trivial information being sent to third-parties. This is nothing compared to a virus, especially if you work in an industry where privacy is to be expected and legally protected like law or medicine. I'm smelling the class actions that will one day wake these clueless managers from their slumber when private information about a case or a disease makes it to the hands of doubleclick or gator.
If anything spyware itself should be under the gun through better warnings (like the big ass warning google gives you when you try to install their toolbar). That's good business and respects the consumer.
> same valid points without implicating a "right-wing agenda"
Let me guess, you voted for Bush.
Everything he wrote is more or less true, the war on drugs cost us civil liberties, "tough on crime" conservtive lawmakers cost us civil liberties, and now we've reached a breaking point where the individual is not only ignorant of his or her rights but is afraid to assert them because of how everyone one else acts and how the media portrays people e.g. only criminals ask for warrants, nice people let the police right on in.
Oh come on, lets not be so alarmist. Comcast/AT&T has been blocking MS file sharing and printer sharing for quite some time. And we all know what these worms target - MS products and the consensus here and elsewhere is that these products are very insecure.
What would be so wrong about blocking 135-139 on the WAN connection? These ports are made for LANs and networking not for internet connections. Really now, how many people print through their WAN connection? Not many. Want to share files - use ftp, http, IM, P2P, etc.
If the ISP was to limit itself to blocking only 135-139 and only to residential customers it would stop a lot of abuse and we would all be better for it. Its either this or Tom Ridge and his buddies are going to freak out after the next big worm (especially if its written in the middle east) and force DRM firewalls and OS patching down our throats with the blessings of MS. Err, no thanks. The vector is MS's products, attack them.
>They never call it that, but that's what all of the teachings really are.
And this is different from mainstream religion because...?
I'm not one to defend Scientology or its methods but at its core is the concept of faith, the belief of things without proof or belief from authority. ALL religions share that, thus they are very much the same e.g. authoritarian, traditional, unquestionable, abusive, controlling, etc.
A cult may be more intense but the e-meter and its wielders have nothing on days on end of meditation of the buddhist, the player schedule and diet of the muslim, or the passion of the revival christian.
The good news is that as scientology gets criticized people start to ask the question what is a cult and find it hard to rationally come to a conclusion without hurting their own faith. The more agnostics and atheists the better. Keep up the lousy work Scientology, you're acting just like Rome and your other peers except you don't have quite the backing they do. Lawyers help, but billions of believers put a million lawyers to shame.