One might speculate that he was using the connection to troll for Internet kiddie porn
Yes, one might speculate that. Of course, without some sort of evidence of that, it would be pure speculation.
There's also a thousand other things he could be doing. I know several people who don't pay for internet access at all -- they just take a laptop and bring it to a place with free WiFi. Now, they do normally go inside and buy a cup of coffee or something, but either way, there's no reason he has to be looking for kiddie porn. (Maybe it was regular porn? Or Ebay? Or/.?)
And as the other poster suggested, `sex offender' can mean many different things -- it could mean you raped a 3 year old girl, or it could mean you, at age 17, had sex with your age 16 girlfriend. It could even mean you got caught peeing in a bush -- laws vary. Or perhaps you remember the case of the guy who grabbed a girl's arm and yelled at her after she walked in front of his car in traffic and almost got hit? -- he had to register as a sex offender too.
Last I checked, even sex offenders were innocent (of new crimes) until proven guilty.
I always figured that if they were going to arrest you, they should have some sort of charges, right then. But perhaps I'm just naive...
In any event, criminal tresspass probably works. If he was asked to leave, especially by the police, and then he came back, I imagine that qualifies. The physical aspects of the law would probably apply if he parked in their parking lot, but if he's parking out on the street, I imagine that the courts could find that the wireless AP was their property too and could be treated like physical property.
Of course, I'm not a lawyer.
As for being a sex offender, well, that's really totally irrelevant, but I'm waiting for some lawmaker to decide that we need legislation prohibiting the use of open wireless APs by sex offenders, for the children.
Most theaters have some kind of curtain all over the walls. Embed wires in the cloth to create a faraday cage.
It's easy to cover 99% of the places where a signal could get in. I believe there's even special paints that will block the signal. The problem is getting that last 1% -- and even if you let in 1% of the signal, that 99% reduction in signal strength might only translate to one or two bars on your cell phone. To really stop the phones, you'd have to block like 99.999% of the signal, which corresponds to no gaps at all, not even in the doors or ventilation system.
Really, my point was that jammers are illegal, and for good reason. If you want to block the signal legally, you'll have to do it another way. Though really, I don't understand what the big deal is. I've been to the movies perhaps ten times in the last year, and I don't recall being disturbed by anybody talking on the phone or even by a ringing phone. As for people taking in restaurants, well, they're already full of people talking, so who cares if they're talking to somebody who's not actually there? (Unless they're there with me but that's another issue.)
What bugs me are people walking around with headsets on, especially ones that are tricky to see, and it looks like they're just talking to themselves, and when they get close to me, I tend to think they're talking to me. But it's only mildly annoying, and even if it was really annoying, I'd not want to ban it or somehow break their phones.
Personally, I'd rather see cell phone jammers become more common--in restaurants and theaters, especially.
Of course, these devices are generally illegal in the US, and probably most other countries.
You can block the signal, but you can't actively jam it. If you want your movie theater to block cell phone signals, you make it into a faraday cage (which is probably going to be difficult when you need to block microwaves -- just a few inches open is all you need for a signal to get in) and then cell phones won't work.
If you wanted some extra flexibility in that setup, you could set up some dipole antennas for the various cell phone bands in and out of the shielded movie theater, and set up circuits to connect them inbetween movies and break the connections when the movie starts. That way you could turn it on and off...
I'm not saying that this is a good idea, only that it would be legal. (But being able to turn it on and off like that? I'd say it qualifies as clever if nothing else.)
Personally, I think that technological solutions (jammers, faraday cages) to etiquette problems (talking on your cell phone and disturbing others) are a mistake, and I feel that people who advocate such drastic measures just to prevent themselves from being inconvenienced are more rude than the people they complain about. You don't like the person next to you talking on his cell phone? Don't ask the owners/government to make it so it won't work -- instead, ask the guy to stop, and remind him how rude he's being.
I'd be mighty angry if I was at the movies, and the babysitter couldn't call me and let me know that my children had hurt themselves and was in ICU at the hospital. Sure, I set the phone to vibrate, but beyond that, if somebody calls me, I want to know about it.
maybe some people have just made an executive decision to not accept mail coming from sendmail sites. Guess what? I'm one of them
Considering that sendmail still has at least 20% of the market share out there, with probably only Exchange having more, that seems like a pretty good way of isolating yourself from the rest of the world.
50 personal questions sounds way beyond overkill. I've downloaded plenty of export controlled software, with merely a few questions.
Well, first of all, it's exactly 25 questions (or fields anyways. Note that the address takes eight fields by itself, and your name three, so it's not even 25 questions.) Not 50. Yes, Theo said 50. I assume he can count, so making a batant misrepresentation like that makes me question his honesty. And if you remove the fields that don't require answers, the number of fields that must be filled out drops down to 15.
Since you seen to care about the number of questions being asked, just how many personal questions do you feel are OK to ask before giving documentation out? 1? 5? 10? 15?
This is entirely beside the point. The driver writers are not customers.
Well, technically, they are. They do have the devices to test with, do they not? They're using them, at least in a lab environment, right?
In any event, while I understand Theo's sticking to his guns on the issue (though I do think he burns bridges when there's no need to do so), I'm sort of surprised that he didn't just do what the rest of the world does when they find a registration form that they don't want to fill out -- lie. Personally, I'm a 98 year old woman from Nigeria. Or am I a 3 year old girl from Buffalo this week? I forget.
Documentation of a product is not restricted by export licenses pertaining to that product...only the product itself is restricted.
And how long have you been practicing law now?
(And if you're not actually practicing law, you might want to add the usual IANAL disclaimer to statements like that. It may be accurate, it may not be -- I don't know -- but it certainly looks like something I'd want to check with a lawyer before I gave out documentation on a product to a place that I couldn't give the product itself to.)
What we're dealing with is a land-grab of people who have no reasonable claim for any of these zones, but buy them all up to keep others from grabbing them.
What you think about the situation is irrelevant. They have the domain, and you don't. If you want it, you can't just go up to them and tell them how unfair it is -- you have to give them money. (Though if you have a trademark on the domain, you might be able to pick option C -- get the ICANN to give it to you. But that's another matter.)
(However, often a little thought will find you a domian that's almost as good without feeding the parasites. vegashotels.com is taken? Perhaps vegas-hotels.com is available? How about hotelvegas.com? etc.)
If Stub Hub had an arrangement with Pearl Jam to buy those floor seats to resell at a higher price, so be it, but otherwise they're just scalpers.
Strange statement. If Pearl Jam says it's ok, it's ok, but if not, he's a scalper?
What it really means is that Pearl Jam didn't properly price their tickets correctly in the first place. Their goal is to maximize profits, right?, which would mean that they should strive to sell every ticket for as much as somebody will pay for it. To achieve that goal, every ticket should have a different price based on how desireable it is, ranging perhaps from thousands of dollars for the front row to $30 for the very back. It might alienate the customers though, so they should be careful. Perhaps they should give all the good tickets to Stub Hub (some company? Guy with no legs?) to resell (with most of the money going back to Pearl Jam), so that way Stub Hub can be the bad guy rather than Pearl Jam?
Either way, economics will make it so that unless you're lucky, you'll pay more for the better tickets. Like it or not, if you want good concert tickets, you can either get your band and be first in line at 8am and hope for the best, or pay a scalper.
Some states have outlawed ticket scalping. But attempting to thrwart a free market like this doesn't always work, and the scalpers will skirt the law, and if the law is really effective (and it rarely is), it just means that you might not be able to get a ticket, no matter how much you want to pay, which isn't quite right either.
Are you sure about that? if I recall correctly, at first domains were free, and then they were about $35/year, and then the price dropped as other registrars became available. I don't recall the price ever being $99/year.
I keep seeing comments like this, but you know exactly what I and the others in this thread mean.
Sure, but the statement that `All domains are worth precisely $12. No more, no less' totally ignores reality. In fact, it ignores reality so blatantly that I'm amazed that anybody would dare make such a claim.
Fair or not, right or wrong, good domain names are not an unlimited resource, and all of the single dictionary word dot com domains have been gone for quite some time, and they do have value beyond the $12 (though you can pay less) that somebody spent to register them.
We're discussing names that aren't being used for any practical purpose, but merely squatted to try to make a buck off of someone else that really does want to use it.
Something is worth what somebody else will pay for it. Nothing less, nothing more. It's simple economics.
Also note that the claim was not `unused domains'. It was `all domains'. If you look at specific domains, some are worth may more than $12 (google.com) and some probably aren't worth anything (2435346sdgdfgeryu42t43g.tv.)
People squat on domains because it makes them money (or at least they think it will.) Like it or not, it's life.
Saying `all domains are worth $12, no more, no less' is like saying that `All pennies are worth $0.01. No more, no less' -- it totally ignores the fact that some pennies (and domains) are worth more. Like this one, which some have sold for as much as $82,000.
... turns out I was wrong. Somebody saw this post, emailed me, I put them in contact with my friend, and now the domain is sold, for a nice chunk of change.
Of course, now I have 50 mailing lists to update... *grumble grumble grumble*
OpenBSD doesn't have any blobs because the project's leaders will not consider using them.
It's not like the Linux kernel ships with binary blobs (note that I'm talking about drivers here, not firmwares) either. Or FreeBSD either, for that matter.
Or am I missing some cases where it does?
What's the point of having an open source, audited, secure operating system if you allow arbitrary blocks of binary code into the kernel?
I'm not arguing with this point, but last I checked there's nothing built into OpenBSD that would absolutely prevent you from using a driver that was compiled on another system (and anything that makes it difficult can be worked around by including a buffer-layer that is open source.) It's not like Linus goes around stuffing binary drivers into Linux.
(Now, if a certain distribution includes binary-only drivers, that's a different matter. I'm talking about the kernel here.)
The OpenBSD developers don't really get to decide what the end users use. If a hardware developer decides to ship a driver in compiled form with no source (or just enough source to bypass any protections) for OpenBSD, then the users could use that, and it's not up to the OpenBSD developers at all. It's just that they don't, because 1) the market share is small, 2) the users generally wouldn't use them anyways. Take away either factor, and binary-only drivers would probably appear for OpenBSD.
The reason OpenBSD doesn't have blobs is not because of their size -- they could port FreeBSD blobs in easilly
Sure, the OpenBSD developers aren't going out of their way to bring binary-only drivers (blob sounds more insulting though) to OpenBSD, but if somebody else decides to make one, they really don't get to stop it. Besides pointing and laughing, of course.
Of course, you can't find any bugs in Intel's driver because you can't see the source code. Not because the Intel driver is bug free.
Oh, you can find bugs in something without the source code. It's just harder, and almost impossible to find all of them, and they're generally almost impossible to fix once found.
I'm not arguing that open source drivers aren't better -- not at all, because I believe they are. My point is that 1) they could appear for OpenBSD if people wanted to make them, and 2) the kernel developers don't really get to stop it, besides adding support for these items themselves (yay!) and ridiculing anybody who tries providing or using a binary-only driver.
Of course not. It doesn't involve boobies or bad words.
That *is* what the FCC regulates nowadays, right? (Well, it sells off the airwaves too, but that's a different matter. But a CB/Freebander with 20KW of power? No worries...)
OpenBSD folks want open unencumbered drivers (hence the 3.9 blob theme) while the Linux folks have NDIS wrappers, blobs and other such hacks. it's fact.
There is no single standard `OpenBSD folk' and no single standard `Linux folk'. Both camps are made up of large numbers of people who each want something different.
Of course, OpenBSD is a much smaller market than the Linux market, which is probably part of why binary blobs just aren't availble for it at all -- the hardware developers just ignore OpenBSD entirely rather than throwing them a bone in the form of a binary blob.
Personally, I use Linux most of all, but I don't want binary blobs for my drivers if I can avoid them, and I'll generally replace the hardware rather than muck with ndiswrapper.
There are TOTALLY UNUSED domains that people are unwilling to sell me for even as high as $5000.
A fried of mine has a domain. It's a five letter common dictionary word dot com. He gets occasional offers to buy it -- people have even offered as much as $15,000 for it.
We don't use it for a business, but we have our mail and web stuff and such on it, so it's certainly not unused, and it would be a big drag to replace it. So he's not going to sell it for some small amount of change. But $15k? Sure, why not?
He's gotten several offers over $10k, and they never pan out. I'm not sure what their purpose was, but they never follow through. Perhaps they found out how much spam this domain gets?:)
So now we just ignore email offers to buy the domain, because we assume they're not serious. Perhaps if somebody were to send a snail mail letter we'd take it more seriously?
In any event, there's still very much of a goldrush mentality when it comes to domain names. The professionals want $5k for their crappy domains, so we ought to be able to get more for our good one? (In reality, the professionals only get $5k if they find a real sucker, but people don't see it that way.)
My advice? The domain name doesn't matter that much. Get something new, don't pay a squatter for it. And when you pick a name, buy it immediately, as the registrars are known to watch the queries for domain names, and if they see a good one, they'll grab the domain themselves and then offer to sell for a lot more. So today you find reallygooddomainname.com and it's available, but tomorrow it might not be -- tomorrow they want $1000 for it.
Why would they hate it? Unless the xxx TLD were horribly expensive, I think they'd just register their domain name and go about their business.
It implies that there's something wrong with sex and pornography, for starters.
Also, if you had a good.com domain name, and were forced to give it up, would that not piss you off? It would cost you money, and if you couldn't get an equally good.xxx domain name, it would keep costing you money. If you couldn't use your.com domain anymore, some existing customers would probably lose track of you and stop being customers.
If you owned sex.com, would not being allowed to use it anymore not piss you off? Considering how much money that domain was supposed to be worth? Perhaps, maybe you could get sex.xxx, but I don't see that happening.
Also, if you type a word into your browser URL, it'll probably try appending a.com to it and going to that site. So you put in `sex', and it takes you to sex.com. If you have to give up your.com address, you've lost that way of getting customers.
Well, porn pushers who actually want to avoid filtering so they could get at kids would hate it, but I don't think anyone really cares about their opinion.
I don't think this category is very big. Porn is a business, big business, and while going out of your way to help kids access it might make you some money in the short run, in the long run it's going to run you out of business, as the law will not be on your side. Nobody who takes their business seriously is going to go want it to even look like it's for children.
The only people who would hate it are the ones who *don't* consider their site pornographic, and have an objection to having their site associated with pornography, but whose sites meet whatever legal definition were developed.
Yes, they would hate it. But they wouldnt' be alone.
Kindly name two species on animals that can survive in the vacuum of deep space for an extended period without our help. We can overcome the challenges of our environment in ways which other species simply can't. End of debate.
If you've ended the debate here, it's only by forgetting what the debate was about in the first place. The original claim that I was refuting was this --
Humans, like a very small few other species, have the capacity to adapt our environment to suit us, rather than the other way around.
And it's still just as wrong now as it was when it was first said. I've said several times in this thread that man is better at adapting his environment than any animal... but it's not a `very small few other species' that can also adapt their environment -- MANY animals do this. Just not as well as we do.
But please, if we want to stick with your `end of debate' argument, tell me which `very small few other species' can adapt their envionment enough to survive in a vacuum. I can't think of any (at least outside of the realm of some bacteria (not really animals) or science fiction.
How do you want to block a top level domain? At the end, you'll find out that those sites will be accessed via the IP address.
You're making inappropriate assumptions here.
As lots of others have pointed out,.xxx would either be 1) compulsory for porn sites, or 2) voluntary for porn (and possibly other, probably vanity) sites. The two positions are VERY different.
#1 would require that `porn site' be carefully defined, and laws created to force this in the big Internet using countries. The anit-porn people would probably like this (except that it doesn't actually stamp out porn), and the pro-porn people would absolutely hate it.
#2 would mean that anybody who wanted to register a.xxx domain could, though it's possible that it might actually be restricted to porn sites (which seems unlikely, so you could still register your vanity.xxx site.) Porn sites would rush to register their chosen names on the new TLD, but they may or not actually move their sites to it. If they did move to it, they'd redirect their old.com/.net addresses to it, and if they didn't, they'd redirect their new.xxx address to their old addresses.
In any event, the benefit to them is that 1).xxx is known to be porn, and 2) they could rest assured that if they moved their entire site to.xxx, net-Nanny software would always block them.
The only time people would move to IP addresses would be if #1 happened, and even then the laws would probably be rewritten for them to not give out their IP address instead of a domain name.
Okay, maybe several hundred, if you count each nesting species of bird separately.
But it's not just birds, beavers, spiders and chimps. A large percentage of animals
(including birds, mammals, fish, insects, reptiles) create some sort of nest or similar shelter, either to sleep in or lay eggs in.
Ants and termites create
mounds, bees creates hives, etc. There's thousands of different examples of how animals adapt their environment to suit themselves.
My point is simply that your `like a very small few other species' statement really isn't correct -- it's not a `very small
The vast majority of life on Earth is at the mercy of the elements, and that's where a great deal of evolutionary force comes from.
Well, even man is at the mercy of the elements. Only our very strongest structures (or things underground) can survive a strong tornado, for example, and as for animals, nests and hives and such provide protection against typical weather, but not always extraordinary weather.
In any event, if some animals create a nest and this nest is effective at protecting them against the elements and allows them to breed more effectively, and another animal is similar but doesn't create the nest, which species do you think will be more succesful evolutionarily?
Evolution may happen by making strong turtles... or it may happen by making weak turtles that create nests. Or weak, hairless apes that create nests and hunt in packs (or cultivate crops) and create tools...
Humans, like a very small few other species, have the capacity to adapt our environment to suit us, rather than the other way around.
That's hardly true. Many animals adapt their environment. Birds create nests, beavers create dams, etc. Even chimps are known to create and use tools (though that might not precisely qualify as `adapting one's environment'.)
It's just that we do it a whole lot more (and to a larger scale) than any other animal -- but we're not the only ones that do it.
So, by saying `a very small few other species', I'm guessing that you're not counting animals that do things like create nests or places to lay their eggs (because there's zillions of them.) So which species exactly are you counting?
Any parent with small children will know the importance of making copies of their favourite CDs and DVDs etc, as small children find it hard to remember to be careful with stuff and they tend to scratch the hell out of them.
My kids (3 and 5) don't get to play with CDs and DVDs at all -- not even copies. Even making copies is too labor intensive, as the kids destroy them in very short order.
Daemon Tools and Daemonscript and a big hard drive are my friends in that regard. The kid's computer has all their games and movies copied to the hard drive, with Daemonscript set up to make icons to mount the images with Daemon Tools and then run the program itself (or the DVD player for the movies.) Much better.
Previously, I was a sysadmin at a small company. Sure, my job was to take care of the company's computers, but I spent a certain amount of time fixing the home computers of the other employees too. It wasn't even really too hard to justify it -- people would sometimes work from home on these computers, so having them working was in the company's interests.
I never really worried about liability. I just assumed that it was part of my job (after all, my boss's computer was one of the ones I'd occasionally fix, though he was good at it himself so I only got involved if it was tricky.)
In your (the person asking) case, I'd just suggest doing your job. You're the IT guy, and you were told to fix the computer, so fix the computer. It's the legal department's job to work out any legal issues (and it's management's job to know if legal needs to get involved and to involve them.) If you think legal should be involved, send your boss (and maybe the legal department) an email, keep a copy of it for your records, and leave it be -- you've done your job, brought up your concerns, and so if somebody doesn't listen to you and it blows up (which seems unlikely, I might add) -- you've got proof right there that you did mention it.
It is preferable to use these types over plain text types, because these types offer input error checking and several specialized operators and functions
Excellent! You've just saved the writer of the application 8 minutes of time in writing code that does the error checking itself and saves it in a more common data type. (Of course, he spent two hours setting up PostgreSQL rather than using his existing Oracle or MySQL server, so maybe it wasn't so great after all.)
In case my sarcasm wasn't quite clear, just because your database has data types designed for holding IP addresses specifically, that doesn't mean it makes your application easier to write in any signifigant way. You're better off just using whatever database you already have and/or are familiar with.
Slashdot Mirror
There's also a thousand other things he could be doing. I know several people who don't pay for internet access at all -- they just take a laptop and bring it to a place with free WiFi. Now, they do normally go inside and buy a cup of coffee or something, but either way, there's no reason he has to be looking for kiddie porn. (Maybe it was regular porn? Or Ebay? Or
And as the other poster suggested, `sex offender' can mean many different things -- it could mean you raped a 3 year old girl, or it could mean you, at age 17, had sex with your age 16 girlfriend. It could even mean you got caught peeing in a bush -- laws vary. Or perhaps you remember the case of the guy who grabbed a girl's arm and yelled at her after she walked in front of his car in traffic and almost got hit? -- he had to register as a sex offender too.
Last I checked, even sex offenders were innocent (of new crimes) until proven guilty.
In any event, criminal tresspass probably works. If he was asked to leave, especially by the police, and then he came back, I imagine that qualifies. The physical aspects of the law would probably apply if he parked in their parking lot, but if he's parking out on the street, I imagine that the courts could find that the wireless AP was their property too and could be treated like physical property.
Of course, I'm not a lawyer.
As for being a sex offender, well, that's really totally irrelevant, but I'm waiting for some lawmaker to decide that we need legislation prohibiting the use of open wireless APs by sex offenders, for the children.
Really, my point was that jammers are illegal, and for good reason. If you want to block the signal legally, you'll have to do it another way. Though really, I don't understand what the big deal is. I've been to the movies perhaps ten times in the last year, and I don't recall being disturbed by anybody talking on the phone or even by a ringing phone. As for people taking in restaurants, well, they're already full of people talking, so who cares if they're talking to somebody who's not actually there? (Unless they're there with me but that's another issue.)
What bugs me are people walking around with headsets on, especially ones that are tricky to see, and it looks like they're just talking to themselves, and when they get close to me, I tend to think they're talking to me. But it's only mildly annoying, and even if it was really annoying, I'd not want to ban it or somehow break their phones.
You can block the signal, but you can't actively jam it. If you want your movie theater to block cell phone signals, you make it into a faraday cage (which is probably going to be difficult when you need to block microwaves -- just a few inches open is all you need for a signal to get in) and then cell phones won't work.
If you wanted some extra flexibility in that setup, you could set up some dipole antennas for the various cell phone bands in and out of the shielded movie theater, and set up circuits to connect them inbetween movies and break the connections when the movie starts. That way you could turn it on and off ...
I'm not saying that this is a good idea, only that it would be legal. (But being able to turn it on and off like that? I'd say it qualifies as clever if nothing else.)
Personally, I think that technological solutions (jammers, faraday cages) to etiquette problems (talking on your cell phone and disturbing others) are a mistake, and I feel that people who advocate such drastic measures just to prevent themselves from being inconvenienced are more rude than the people they complain about. You don't like the person next to you talking on his cell phone? Don't ask the owners/government to make it so it won't work -- instead, ask the guy to stop, and remind him how rude he's being.
I'd be mighty angry if I was at the movies, and the babysitter couldn't call me and let me know that my children had hurt themselves and was in ICU at the hospital. Sure, I set the phone to vibrate, but beyond that, if somebody calls me, I want to know about it.
But hey, your site, your rules, right?
Yes, I believe so.Since you seen to care about the number of questions being asked, just how many personal questions do you feel are OK to ask before giving documentation out? 1? 5? 10? 15?
And how long have you been practicing law now?In any event, while I understand Theo's sticking to his guns on the issue (though I do think he burns bridges when there's no need to do so), I'm sort of surprised that he didn't just do what the rest of the world does when they find a registration form that they don't want to fill out -- lie. Personally, I'm a 98 year old woman from Nigeria. Or am I a 3 year old girl from Buffalo this week? I forget.
(And if you're not actually practicing law, you might want to add the usual IANAL disclaimer to statements like that. It may be accurate, it may not be -- I don't know -- but it certainly looks like something I'd want to check with a lawyer before I gave out documentation on a product to a place that I couldn't give the product itself to.)
What you think about the situation is irrelevant. They have the domain, and you don't. If you want it, you can't just go up to them and tell them how unfair it is -- you have to give them money. (Though if you have a trademark on the domain, you might be able to pick option C -- get the ICANN to give it to you. But that's another matter.)
(However, often a little thought will find you a domian that's almost as good without feeding the parasites. vegashotels.com is taken? Perhaps vegas-hotels.com is available? How about hotelvegas.com? etc.)
Strange statement. If Pearl Jam says it's ok, it's ok, but if not, he's a scalper?What it really means is that Pearl Jam didn't properly price their tickets correctly in the first place. Their goal is to maximize profits, right?, which would mean that they should strive to sell every ticket for as much as somebody will pay for it. To achieve that goal, every ticket should have a different price based on how desireable it is, ranging perhaps from thousands of dollars for the front row to $30 for the very back. It might alienate the customers though, so they should be careful. Perhaps they should give all the good tickets to Stub Hub (some company? Guy with no legs?) to resell (with most of the money going back to Pearl Jam), so that way Stub Hub can be the bad guy rather than Pearl Jam?
Either way, economics will make it so that unless you're lucky, you'll pay more for the better tickets. Like it or not, if you want good concert tickets, you can either get your band and be first in line at 8am and hope for the best, or pay a scalper.
Some states have outlawed ticket scalping. But attempting to thrwart a free market like this doesn't always work, and the scalpers will skirt the law, and if the law is really effective (and it rarely is), it just means that you might not be able to get a ticket, no matter how much you want to pay, which isn't quite right either.
Or is this domain not
Something is worth what somebody else will pay for it. Nothing less, nothing more. It's simple economics.Fair or not, right or wrong, good domain names are not an unlimited resource, and all of the single dictionary word dot com domains have been gone for quite some time, and they do have value beyond the $12 (though you can pay less) that somebody spent to register them.
Also note that the claim was not `unused domains'. It was `all domains'. If you look at specific domains, some are worth may more than $12 (google.com) and some probably aren't worth anything (2435346sdgdfgeryu42t43g.tv.)
People squat on domains because it makes them money (or at least they think it will.) Like it or not, it's life.
Saying `all domains are worth $12, no more, no less' is like saying that `All pennies are worth $0.01. No more, no less' -- it totally ignores the fact that some pennies (and domains) are worth more. Like this one, which some have sold for as much as $82,000.
Of course, now I have 50 mailing lists to update ... *grumble grumble grumble*
Or am I missing some cases where it does?
I'm not arguing with this point, but last I checked there's nothing built into OpenBSD that would absolutely prevent you from using a driver that was compiled on another system (and anything that makes it difficult can be worked around by including a buffer-layer that is open source.) It's not like Linus goes around stuffing binary drivers into Linux.(Now, if a certain distribution includes binary-only drivers, that's a different matter. I'm talking about the kernel here.)
The OpenBSD developers don't really get to decide what the end users use. If a hardware developer decides to ship a driver in compiled form with no source (or just enough source to bypass any protections) for OpenBSD, then the users could use that, and it's not up to the OpenBSD developers at all. It's just that they don't, because 1) the market share is small, 2) the users generally wouldn't use them anyways. Take away either factor, and binary-only drivers would probably appear for OpenBSD.
Sure, the OpenBSD developers aren't going out of their way to bring binary-only drivers (blob sounds more insulting though) to OpenBSD, but if somebody else decides to make one, they really don't get to stop it. Besides pointing and laughing, of course. Oh, you can find bugs in something without the source code. It's just harder, and almost impossible to find all of them, and they're generally almost impossible to fix once found.I'm not arguing that open source drivers aren't better -- not at all, because I believe they are. My point is that 1) they could appear for OpenBSD if people wanted to make them, and 2) the kernel developers don't really get to stop it, besides adding support for these items themselves (yay!) and ridiculing anybody who tries providing or using a binary-only driver.
That *is* what the FCC regulates nowadays, right? (Well, it sells off the airwaves too, but that's a different matter. But a CB/Freebander with 20KW of power? No worries ...)
Of course, OpenBSD is a much smaller market than the Linux market, which is probably part of why binary blobs just aren't availble for it at all -- the hardware developers just ignore OpenBSD entirely rather than throwing them a bone in the form of a binary blob.
Personally, I use Linux most of all, but I don't want binary blobs for my drivers if I can avoid them, and I'll generally replace the hardware rather than muck with ndiswrapper.
We don't use it for a business, but we have our mail and web stuff and such on it, so it's certainly not unused, and it would be a big drag to replace it. So he's not going to sell it for some small amount of change. But $15k? Sure, why not?
He's gotten several offers over $10k, and they never pan out. I'm not sure what their purpose was, but they never follow through. Perhaps they found out how much spam this domain gets? :)
So now we just ignore email offers to buy the domain, because we assume they're not serious. Perhaps if somebody were to send a snail mail letter we'd take it more seriously?
In any event, there's still very much of a goldrush mentality when it comes to domain names. The professionals want $5k for their crappy domains, so we ought to be able to get more for our good one? (In reality, the professionals only get $5k if they find a real sucker, but people don't see it that way.)
My advice? The domain name doesn't matter that much. Get something new, don't pay a squatter for it. And when you pick a name, buy it immediately, as the registrars are known to watch the queries for domain names, and if they see a good one, they'll grab the domain themselves and then offer to sell for a lot more. So today you find reallygooddomainname.com and it's available, but tomorrow it might not be -- tomorrow they want $1000 for it.
Once I've acquired google.com, I'd also like business.com, sex.com, apple.com and microsoft.com. That's five domains -- how about 5/$50?
Also, if you had a good .com domain name, and were forced to give it up, would that not piss you off? It would cost you money, and if you couldn't get an equally good .xxx domain name, it would keep costing you money. If you couldn't use your .com domain anymore, some existing customers would probably lose track of you and stop being customers.
If you owned sex.com, would not being allowed to use it anymore not piss you off? Considering how much money that domain was supposed to be worth? Perhaps, maybe you could get sex.xxx, but I don't see that happening.
Also, if you type a word into your browser URL, it'll probably try appending a .com to it and going to that site. So you put in `sex', and it takes you to sex.com. If you have to give up your .com address, you've lost that way of getting customers.
I don't think this category is very big. Porn is a business, big business, and while going out of your way to help kids access it might make you some money in the short run, in the long run it's going to run you out of business, as the law will not be on your side. Nobody who takes their business seriously is going to go want it to even look like it's for children. Yes, they would hate it. But they wouldnt' be alone.But please, if we want to stick with your `end of debate' argument, tell me which `very small few other species' can adapt their envionment enough to survive in a vacuum. I can't think of any (at least outside of the realm of some bacteria (not really animals) or science fiction.
As lots of others have pointed out, .xxx would either be 1) compulsory for porn sites, or 2) voluntary for porn (and possibly other, probably vanity) sites. The two positions are VERY different.
#1 would require that `porn site' be carefully defined, and laws created to force this in the big Internet using countries. The anit-porn people would probably like this (except that it doesn't actually stamp out porn), and the pro-porn people would absolutely hate it.
#2 would mean that anybody who wanted to register a .xxx domain could, though it's possible that it might actually be restricted to porn sites (which seems unlikely, so you could still register your vanity .xxx site.) Porn sites would rush to register their chosen names on the new TLD, but they may or not actually move their sites to it. If they did move to it, they'd redirect their old .com/.net addresses to it, and if they didn't, they'd redirect their new .xxx address to their old addresses.
In any event, the benefit to them is that 1) .xxx is known to be porn, and 2) they could rest assured that if they moved their entire site to .xxx, net-Nanny software would always block them.
The only time people would move to IP addresses would be if #1 happened, and even then the laws would probably be rewritten for them to not give out their IP address instead of a domain name.
Ants and termites create mounds, bees creates hives, etc. There's thousands of different examples of how animals adapt their environment to suit themselves.
My point is simply that your `like a very small few other species' statement really isn't correct -- it's not a `very small
Well, even man is at the mercy of the elements. Only our very strongest structures (or things underground) can survive a strong tornado, for example, and as for animals, nests and hives and such provide protection against typical weather, but not always extraordinary weather.In any event, if some animals create a nest and this nest is effective at protecting them against the elements and allows them to breed more effectively, and another animal is similar but doesn't create the nest, which species do you think will be more succesful evolutionarily? Evolution may happen by making strong turtles ... or it may happen by making weak turtles that create nests. Or weak, hairless apes that create nests and hunt in packs (or cultivate crops) and create tools ...
It's just that we do it a whole lot more (and to a larger scale) than any other animal -- but we're not the only ones that do it.
So, by saying `a very small few other species', I'm guessing that you're not counting animals that do things like create nests or places to lay their eggs (because there's zillions of them.) So which species exactly are you counting?
Daemon Tools and Daemonscript and a big hard drive are my friends in that regard. The kid's computer has all their games and movies copied to the hard drive, with Daemonscript set up to make icons to mount the images with Daemon Tools and then run the program itself (or the DVD player for the movies.) Much better.
I'd mod you up if I had points, but I do not, so I'll just have to do this post instead :)
I never really worried about liability. I just assumed that it was part of my job (after all, my boss's computer was one of the ones I'd occasionally fix, though he was good at it himself so I only got involved if it was tricky.)
In your (the person asking) case, I'd just suggest doing your job. You're the IT guy, and you were told to fix the computer, so fix the computer. It's the legal department's job to work out any legal issues (and it's management's job to know if legal needs to get involved and to involve them.) If you think legal should be involved, send your boss (and maybe the legal department) an email, keep a copy of it for your records, and leave it be -- you've done your job, brought up your concerns, and so if somebody doesn't listen to you and it blows up (which seems unlikely, I might add) -- you've got proof right there that you did mention it.
In case my sarcasm wasn't quite clear, just because your database has data types designed for holding IP addresses specifically, that doesn't mean it makes your application easier to write in any signifigant way. You're better off just using whatever database you already have and/or are familiar with.