"According the the FCC, as a tenant, you have a right to have satellite as a choice and your landlord/landlady has to comply or risk a fine."
According to property laws, the landlord does not have to give freely of their own property for the tenant to alter as they wish. The tenant can buy and install satellite equipment all day long, complying with the FCC, but if the owner doesn't want a dish nailed to the window frame, it's not going to be.
The specific fix will depend upon the specific cause. Try each suggestion here and elsewhere and see what works for you.
Switching to LCD if you haven't should be first. CRTs have more variance in output because LCDs are slower to darken. They flash.
Room lighting should be incandescent, rather than fluourescent, for the same reason: flash. Spectrum is, IMO, far less important than constancy.* If one thing flashing is bad, two things flashing at different rates is probably worse.
Work with room lighting and screen brightness to get it as comfortable as possible. You can't get around the problem of transmitted rather than reflected light, but you can minimize it.
The average optimal working attention time is around 25 minutes. Taking 5 minutes of every half hour off will keep you at a higher performance level as well as rest your eyes before you're forced to. Better to quit when you can find a good stopping point than when you can't see to read whether you've made mistakes.
Eye exercise to try while working: focus briefly on something far away. Outside if possible. Look at it for 30 second to stretch the muscles that had been set for close looking. Then look back and forth between something near and far, to "warm down" the eye muscles and keep them flexing. Then rest them by looking at something far again, for a few minutes.
Use paper when you can, especially for something you need to concentrate hard on. You'll lean forward and squint at the screen when trying to find a bug in code or something similar. That makes the transmitted light + flash (if applicable) problem all the worse, For reviewing something closely, print it. This especially for PDFs and such that are presented too small. If you'd have to have it wider than the screen (ie. use your bottom scroll bar to read across the page) in order to see it comfortably, print it.
Don't use WYSIWYG black-on-white skinny little letters for lots and lots of reading. I can read 4 or 5 pages of that stuff on my 15" LCD before my eyes get tired. I can read 10 times as much using light grey text on dark blue background in plain old DOS style monospace font.
I'm firmly convinced about the constancy thing. I've done experiments with incandescent vs. fluourescent lighting and found fluourescent to be worse (though I can only hypothesize why that is). About the only prior work I could find to reference was by a guy that also showed fluourescent light caused cavities, so it was kind of an iffy proposition. But my data replicated some of his other claims, so it's not completely bogus.
"Lahn found that the ASPM gene in humans has undergone 15 important mutations since we last shared a common ancestor with chimpanzees, about 5 million years ago."
One would think that the asymmetric laterality associated with language would be one of the important "human" mutations. It's not. Chimps have the same sort of asymmetry as humans in the "language" area of the brain: 'Demonstration of a human-like asymmetry of Wernicke's brain language area homolog in chimpanzee planum temporale.' (Gannon, et al., 1998). I suspect there's going to be far more than 15 mutations required to explain things, going back much, much farther than 5 million years.
I was hoping that was a misrepresentation. Apparently not. I'm looking forward to seeing life insurance companies refusing to pay off on the company employees who got involved in these raids and ran up against someone who protected themselves from a forced invasion into their home by other than law enforcement officers.
"Hey, this guy found a geeky kid he feels sorry for and possibly empathizes with, decides that he would like to *help* this kid, and you're dissing that he feels a need to get involved?"
You're damn right I am.
"What a fsked place the world would be if everyone thought like that."
The world is a fscked place because people think they have the right to make decisions for others, and force those decisions on others, just because they have what they perceive to be good intentions.
The world is a fscked place because the unusual, even if exceptionally GOOD, is labeled dysfunctional rather than appreciated as diversity, and the fostering of those exceptional talents gets ignored as people force attention instead on the problem that didn't exist until they declared it.
The world is a fscked place because people think they can socialize others, when all they can really do it teach someone how they THINK they ought to act. To truly socialize, a person must figure out for themselves how they themselves should BE, not just act, and that requires practice, and problem solving, and making mistakes and learning from them.
The site for display and archive of awards for kooks on usenet is at plonk.com. The associated newsgroup is alt.usenet.kooks (warning: excessive signal to noise ratio, even for usenet). The award relevant to the article, the finding of artifacts on Mars, would be the Victor Von Frankenstein Weird Science Award. The drawback here is the requirement that the kookishness be on usenet, a holdover from when that was pretty much the entire public part of the net (before WWW). Anything that appeared strictly on web sites wouldn't qualify.
First, this is not new. Grenoble is behind the curve. I've seen patients with implanted stimulators from years ago. These were for treatment of Parkinson's. It's hardly the optimal solution, but it's the best so far, even better than most of the drugs we use. Some day this will be "stone knives and bear claws". Right now it's cutting edge.
Second, it is trivial at best to foresee abuses. The trick is in recognizing the over-reaching fact that the abuses never have anything to do with the technology involved. Those who will abuse will do so whether they have an electrical stimulator or just the rubber hammer used to test your reflexes (corrective phrenology, anyone?). These people don't even need technology to do this; they will do it gladly with no technology at all. Focusing on the abuses the technology may be put to takes the focus away from the people who will do such things, allowing them to get on with their business.
Third, there are a lot of people out there who need something, and society in general dictates that there be someone to take care of them. Hopefully, trained specialists who can help them, but also the sad fact is because most people don't want to have to deal with it. They insist on, and are glad to have, someone fulfill the role required so they don't have to, including having to have the people with problems around them. Unfortunately these people also tend to feel guilty when they see others suffering, and rather than appreciate the fact that someone else is doing the best they can, they get upset because that person is not doing a better job. Sooner or later the people doing the helping get blamed for not being better than they are, ie. they're not perfect.
Believe it or not, lobotomy was a god send. It still can help many people. People decry electroshock therapy, but the fact is for a lot of people, it's their only hope of a normal life. People got upset that many mental patients were stuck in hospitals with no hope of improvement and so insisted that we let them out; now those same people are no better or worse than they were, but the are far better off, since many of them are the chronic homeless (you won't give them housing, but you won't let us keep them warm and fed).
If you want to help, aren't of the bent to help develop the tools and techniques to help people like I do, then at least keep your eye out for the kinds of people that will abuse, and get rid of them. They cause us who have to try to help people far more problems than they do others. They give us a bad name and make people suspect us. Root those people out and do something about them. Or else shut the hell up and stop repeating the painfully obvious paternalistic mantra "they might do bad things!". It's helping nothing and it's annoying.
Rant not off. I'm not done. Not until I stop trying to develop new ways to help people, and that'll probably happen when I die or need that kind of help myself. And it won't end then because I'll train every student of mine along the way to fight this same fight. You want us to do this. You NEED us to this this. Help us do this by focusing on finding abusers and getting rid of them, so we can get on with the role that society demands exist, and we have chosen to fulfill.
Then why are you making decisions regarding this person's social skills? Did someone ask you to decide if his social skills needed changing? Did his parents thell you they are and ask you to do so? I'm certain you're trying to be helpful, but helping someone who hasn't asked for it (or who didn't have someone in authority ask for it on their behalf) is called paternalism. It's disrespectful to the individual and/or the person's parent(s) or guardian(s).
If anyone needs to learn some social skills, it's the little bastards who won't leave the kid alone, as he obviously prefers. If he's that smart, he'll probably figure out just fine on his own how to behave around others, if he decides it's important enough for him to do so. If I were in your place I would simply serve as a role model for those other kids by accepting him as he is.
[If some goofball "publisher" were to reprint his work on paper without authorization, and didn't respond reasonably to complaints sent to the contact person listed at LoC (assuming one was), they'd be in exactly the same situation as AOL.]
"The difference is that a physical publisher is taking an active role in reprinting the work, whereas AOL, or any other ISP, is relatively passive; the data flows into and out of their servers without any specific action on the part of the ISP."
The difference is irrelevant with respect to having and appropriately using an infringement contact person/process.
"Furthermore, as applied to USENET, this is even more rediculous to sue any given ISP as, in most cases, the infringing data will remove itself in a day or two, probably before the ISP can respond to the e-mail."
Typically 2 to 5 days for binaries, 2 weeks for text (except the few long-carry systems and archives).
"Following this process one step further, what happens to the ISP when, after receiving a takedown notice, another goofball reposts the offending document two weeks later? Again the data is on the ISPs server, but unless the ISP pays somebody with a very good memory to read every usenet post that flows through their server, the ISP will not know of its reappearance."
The ISP is not responsible for monitoring. No one blamed AOL for not knowing it was there. AOL got blamed for not taking action once notified.
"One final thing... Somebody please correct me if I am wrong, but I seem to recall that one can send a cancel message to the USENET to remove a message automatically. Mr. Harlin could/should have sent such a cancellation and achieved a more effective solution, quicker."
Due to abuses, particularly by a few bot wielding twits working with script kiddies and spammers, many systems have shut off processing of 'cancel' and 'supersedes' notice in control.*. Some others process them only if they originated inside their own system, and others only if generated by an admin inside that system. Some systems that do propogate control messages out do not allow users to initiate them. IIRC, AOL was not honoring cancels from outside during this time.
"Is that a "biased" sample? Depends on what population you're comparing against."
You're right. A college's computer may have preceisely the same sort of user (in the respect of this article) as anywhere else. Perhaps my experience with college students was perfectly normal, and similar results should be expected everywhere.
If this is so, I have two things to add: 1. Oh, SHIT. 2. I should have said "The validity to the real world remains an empirical question."
I do some of my best hacking in the kitchen. I taste something somewhere, imagine how to improve it, dream up what should go in it, go buy the stuff, and hack away. I have it on good authority (a wife of good enough standing that she doesn't feel like she needs to lie to me anymore) that the results are excellent. Recipes are good for study material. But I trust the recipes written by the cooks about as much as a do the user manuals written by the programmers; not a lot. The only paper allowed in my kitchen is towels.
that Harlan is doing this is for other authors. Big names like Harlan can make their own contracts. Lesser known authors have to settle for what the publishers will offer. This invariably includes "e-print" rights, the right for the publisher to reprint it in e-book form at some time in the future should they choose to (with or without more payment at that time). If they want that book contract, they sign.
The problem is that although the publisher has rights to reprint the e-book, the copyright holder is still responsible for the work, and for seeing it isn't published in like form outside the contract. If the author went to someone else and had it done, they'd be liable. However, even if someone else does it without permission, the copyright holder is still responsible and liable. They must act is a reasonable manner to reverse that. Failure to do so could result in loss of the contract, demands for repayment of the money already paid, sued for damages for inability of the publisher to now make money on the e-book, etc.
Very few authors have the knowledge guts, money, and ornery it takes to track down (or have tracked down) the people doing the pirating and take action. Harlan does. After seeing how hard it has been for someone like him with a team full of intellectual property and computer specialists to protect his own work, it becomes obvious how hard a lesser known (and paid) author would have to work, and what their chances of success would be.
Has any publisher ever tried this yet? No. Are any ever likely to? Not anymore.
"When did it become acceptable to just e-mail someone as a legal means to serve notice?"
In this case, when AOL put the statement on their web page that said "for notice of copyright infringement, send email to:".
The law says they have to provide a contact. They did, with instructions. AOL had intended (apparently) to treat is as a valid method, because they saved all logs related to it.
No, it is not. It's about upholding existing laws, whether or not any computer is involved at all. In this case they happen to figure prominently.
"Harlan thinks of some turkey posts his book on USENET, he should then be able to attack all the zillions of people running a USENET server."
Harlan thinks no such thing. What Harlan thinks is that the law gives him (or his lawyer) a way to notify people with infringed material of his on their server that it's there, and ask them to remove it, and expect them to either do so, or give a good reason why not, in a reasonable amount of time. And he's right. That's the law, that's what he expected, and that's what AOL did not do.
Although I haven't spoken to him personally, I can be pretty confident that this is what Harlan thinks, because I know it's what his attorneys think, and I work for them. I was a material witness for them and am listed as expert witness, should it come to that.
"What we need to worry about is what the precedent means."
What it means, hopefully, is that the net will be held to exactly the same laws as the rest of the world, not more or less. Too many times real complaints get ignored by the law because the law doesn't understand the net well enough. Too often congresscritters out for good PR (or a pile of cash) bring out laws that demonize on the net what's treated less important off. This is a clear cut issue which happens to involve the net, but in which the actual issue does not necessarily. If some goofball "publisher" were to reprint his work on paper without authorization, and didn't respond reasonably to complaints sent to the contact person listed at LoC (assuming one was), they'd be in exactly the same situation as AOL. The net is not part of the issue, because this appeal result states that the DMCA does NOT apply.
"It is possible that this judgment could some way be construed to hold all ISPs who give subscribers access to USEnet liable for copyright infringement?"
No, nor is AOL being held liable for copyright infringement. Every ISP must register a valid contact person with the Library of Congress to handle infringement issues, and they much examine those issues, and handle them in a reasonable time if necessary. That's already law. AOL didn't, that's all. This case implies nothing other than ISPs have to do what the law tells them they have to do, or they get in trouble.
Re:7 is the number, and the number is 7, not 8 nor
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The number is not seven, it is seven plus or minus two. The originator is George Miller. The theory is information processing. The reference is: Miller, G.A. (1956). The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Some limits on our capacity for processing information. Psychological Review, 63, 81-97. [Available at http://www.well.com/user/smalin/miller.html]
The concept of putting more things together in groups to remember more than seven plus or minus two is called "chunking". The telcos paid close attention to this work. When it became obvious people would need more than 7 numbers for phones worldwide, they came up with "chunks" such as area codes and prefixes.
Although less famous, the work of Miller's to have more impact was the "test-operate-test-exit" processing theory developed with Galantner and (my teacher) Pribram. It was designed to directly replace the outmoded "stimulus-response" concept. They derived it from figuring out how their new PDP (a 3, I believe) calculated. Parallel neural processing was part of that theory. http://tip.psychology.org/miller.html
It's only being made an issue due to the increased use of out of state mail order. That's what buying stuff over the net is. States have always required people to declare out of state purchases if the person declared at the time it was for delivery out of state.
My father's TV shop was 3 miles from a state line. He regularly had people come to buy TV and such to be delivered 'out of state' and so didn't have to pay him sales tax. They were supposed to declare it on their state tax form. Sure, few did. Sure, far more are doing this now. But it's nothing something new specifically aimed at the net.
Re:Canaries in the coal mine baby!
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Three Headed Frog
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Hadean sez: "So when do we stop?"
At very latest, when there are so few left that we no longer can have a significant impact on the ecosphere. Frankly I doubt we'll stop until the situation ensures that outcome, although it hadn't occurred yet.
I had something very much like that, if not the same thing. One disk full of DOSs, another full of Locksmith, etc., and there wasn't much you couldn't do.
I've still got an original DOS 3.1.1 System Master. I doubt it boots. I don't think floppies were supposed to last 25 years.
At least in terms of the conclusion drawn: "One in twenty computers with an internet connection may be harbouring unwanted "spyware" programs..."
Their sample was computers at a college. You've got a highly wired place with people using them for all sorts of things, and comparatively little training on what and what not to do. Plus you've got younger users, many of which aren't old enough yet to not know everything, and feel free to ignore the warnings and admonishments (mark it flamebait if you like; I've taught such people and run a computerized lab. I know what they do and how they think, and so did I back then). Plus, you've got installs and re-installs (the common fix for everything Windozish) often being done by student workers with as comprehensive training in system security as they have in nuclear reactor operations.
How about a major ISP asking customers to allow them to scan for them? How about running a similar study on a large corporate system where downloading and installing external software is far more likely to be noticed, and results in far more than "Geez, we told you not to".
Biased sample, bad result. It may be right, but without better data, it's still bad.
"Who would ever want more than 16K?" He said it to Woz when Woz was designing the Apple II. Woz wanted to put socketing for 16, 32 or 48K on the motherboard, as opposed to the 16K limit of the Apple I. Jobs was also against the color capabilities. Woz built them in anyway.
When Jobs hoisted the pirate flag and built the Mac, he specifically left out expandability and color on purpose. It wasn't because of technical considerations, as the Apple IIgs was in design at the same time as the Mac. It was computer design by temper tantrum.
I don't use mobile phones. But I get calls from people who do. Not a one of them sounds good, and most sound poor. But by golly, now they've got technology to make them sound all the worse! I'm so pleased. It's another Sign of the End Times, folks. The marketoids are selling us things designed specifically to make life worse.
So, how about something that will degrade the picture on my TV too? That pesky clear picture is such a bother. Oh, hey, and traffic on the highway isn't bad enough! How about some robotic cars that will drive too slow and shift lanes without warning?
"Please tell me Mr. Sagan, are we ever gonna get out of this planet alive?" -- Paul Kantner, Planet Earth Rock-n-Roll Orchestra
On 60 Minutes Morely Safer interviewed Nan Davis, a student at Wright State University, who'd recently become paraplegic after an accident. They inserted electromyongram electrodes in her muscles, put her on a stationary exercise bike powered by a motor, and recorded her muscles' responses with an Apple II. They built a set of articifial legs and announced their intention to build a small controller and play the recordings back into the device while it was strapped to her, and she would walk. They said at the time they expected it to be ready in 6 to 12 months. She herself stated she was so certain she would walk again, that she refused to get married to her fiance until she could walk up the aisle herself, using this device. She refused to do it in a wheel chair.
Only a few weeks later, on the CBS Evening News, Dan Rather read the story of her wedding, with video footage showing her indeed walking up the aisle alone using this device. That was one of the two times I've seen Dan Rather cry on camera (the other being during Apollo 8's reading of Genisis during the first orbit of the moon). CBS made a TV movie based on this, called "First Steps".
I mean, more power to the troops. I carried enough gear enough miles during my enlistments to know how much this would be appreciated. But there's far better uses for this device, and I hope they'll focus as much on those.
I'm glad I didn't submit this as it was. I decided to try to find out what ever happened to Nan Davis. It was surprisingly easy, and came from a surprising source: http://jfs.ohio.gov/women/essayContest/essays2001/ ferrall.pdf
They want you to see them so they can collect advertising revenue. If the advertisters knew you weren't going to see the shows at all, they'd yank their ad money.
So, I wonder what it would take to build a box that detected the broadcast flag, and if present, blocked the program? Or at least notified you so you could turn the channel? If enough people refused to watch flagged broadcasts, they'd stop. It wouldn't even have to be a majority of watchers. It'd just have to be enough that the media could get ahold of it and spin it.
Slashdot Mirror
"According the the FCC, as a tenant, you have a right to have satellite as a choice and your landlord/landlady has to comply or risk a fine."
According to property laws, the landlord does not have to give freely of their own property for the tenant to alter as they wish. The tenant can buy and install satellite equipment all day long, complying with the FCC, but if the owner doesn't want a dish nailed to the window frame, it's not going to be.
The specific fix will depend upon the specific cause. Try each suggestion here and elsewhere and see what works for you.
Switching to LCD if you haven't should be first. CRTs have more variance in output because LCDs are slower to darken. They flash.
Room lighting should be incandescent, rather than fluourescent, for the same reason: flash. Spectrum is, IMO, far less important than constancy.* If one thing flashing is bad, two things flashing at different rates is probably worse.
Work with room lighting and screen brightness to get it as comfortable as possible. You can't get around the problem of transmitted rather than reflected light, but you can minimize it.
The average optimal working attention time is around 25 minutes. Taking 5 minutes of every half hour off will keep you at a higher performance level as well as rest your eyes before you're forced to. Better to quit when you can find a good stopping point than when you can't see to read whether you've made mistakes.
Eye exercise to try while working: focus briefly on something far away. Outside if possible. Look at it for 30 second to stretch the muscles that had been set for close looking. Then look back and forth between something near and far, to "warm down" the eye muscles and keep them flexing. Then rest them by looking at something far again, for a few minutes.
Use paper when you can, especially for something you need to concentrate hard on. You'll lean forward and squint at the screen when trying to find a bug in code or something similar. That makes the transmitted light + flash (if applicable) problem all the worse, For reviewing something closely, print it. This especially for PDFs and such that are presented too small. If you'd have to have it wider than the screen (ie. use your bottom scroll bar to read across the page) in order to see it comfortably, print it.
Don't use WYSIWYG black-on-white skinny little letters for lots and lots of reading. I can read 4 or 5 pages of that stuff on my 15" LCD before my eyes get tired. I can read 10 times as much using light grey text on dark blue background in plain old DOS style monospace font.
I'm firmly convinced about the constancy thing. I've done experiments with incandescent vs. fluourescent lighting and found fluourescent to be worse (though I can only hypothesize why that is). About the only prior work I could find to reference was by a guy that also showed fluourescent light caused cavities, so it was kind of an iffy proposition. But my data replicated some of his other claims, so it's not completely bogus.
"Lahn found that the ASPM gene in humans has undergone 15 important mutations since we last shared a common ancestor with chimpanzees, about 5 million years ago."
One would think that the asymmetric laterality associated with language would be one of the important "human" mutations. It's not. Chimps have the same sort of asymmetry as humans in the "language" area of the brain: 'Demonstration of a human-like asymmetry of Wernicke's brain language area homolog in chimpanzee planum temporale.' (Gannon, et al., 1998). I suspect there's going to be far more than 15 mutations required to explain things, going back much, much farther than 5 million years.
I was hoping that was a misrepresentation. Apparently not. I'm looking forward to seeing life insurance companies refusing to pay off on the company employees who got involved in these raids and ran up against someone who protected themselves from a forced invasion into their home by other than law enforcement officers.
"Hey, this guy found a geeky kid he feels sorry for and possibly empathizes with, decides that he would like to *help* this kid, and you're dissing that he feels a need to get involved?"
You're damn right I am.
"What a fsked place the world would be if everyone thought like that."
The world is a fscked place because people think they have the right to make decisions for others, and force those decisions on others, just because they have what they perceive to be good intentions.
The world is a fscked place because the unusual, even if exceptionally GOOD, is labeled dysfunctional rather than appreciated as diversity, and the fostering of those exceptional talents gets ignored as people force attention instead on the problem that didn't exist until they declared it.
The world is a fscked place because people think they can socialize others, when all they can really do it teach someone how they THINK they ought to act. To truly socialize, a person must figure out for themselves how they themselves should BE, not just act, and that requires practice, and problem solving, and making mistakes and learning from them.
"The 'Net really needs a kook hall of fame."
The site for display and archive of awards for kooks on usenet is at plonk.com. The associated newsgroup is alt.usenet.kooks (warning: excessive signal to noise ratio, even for usenet). The award relevant to the article, the finding of artifacts on Mars, would be the Victor Von Frankenstein Weird Science Award. The drawback here is the requirement that the kookishness be on usenet, a holdover from when that was pretty much the entire public part of the net (before WWW). Anything that appeared strictly on web sites wouldn't qualify.
First, this is not new. Grenoble is behind the curve. I've seen patients with implanted stimulators from years ago. These were for treatment of Parkinson's. It's hardly the optimal solution, but it's the best so far, even better than most of the drugs we use. Some day this will be "stone knives and bear claws". Right now it's cutting edge.
Second, it is trivial at best to foresee abuses. The trick is in recognizing the over-reaching fact that the abuses never have anything to do with the technology involved. Those who will abuse will do so whether they have an electrical stimulator or just the rubber hammer used to test your reflexes (corrective phrenology, anyone?). These people don't even need technology to do this; they will do it gladly with no technology at all. Focusing on the abuses the technology may be put to takes the focus away from the people who will do such things, allowing them to get on with their business.
Third, there are a lot of people out there who need something, and society in general dictates that there be someone to take care of them. Hopefully, trained specialists who can help them, but also the sad fact is because most people don't want to have to deal with it. They insist on, and are glad to have, someone fulfill the role required so they don't have to, including having to have the people with problems around them. Unfortunately these people also tend to feel guilty when they see others suffering, and rather than appreciate the fact that someone else is doing the best they can, they get upset because that person is not doing a better job. Sooner or later the people doing the helping get blamed for not being better than they are, ie. they're not perfect.
Believe it or not, lobotomy was a god send. It still can help many people. People decry electroshock therapy, but the fact is for a lot of people, it's their only hope of a normal life. People got upset that many mental patients were stuck in hospitals with no hope of improvement and so insisted that we let them out; now those same people are no better or worse than they were, but the are far better off, since many of them are the chronic homeless (you won't give them housing, but you won't let us keep them warm and fed).
If you want to help, aren't of the bent to help develop the tools and techniques to help people like I do, then at least keep your eye out for the kinds of people that will abuse, and get rid of them. They cause us who have to try to help people far more problems than they do others. They give us a bad name and make people suspect us. Root those people out and do something about them. Or else shut the hell up and stop repeating the painfully obvious paternalistic mantra "they might do bad things!". It's helping nothing and it's annoying.
Rant not off. I'm not done. Not until I stop trying to develop new ways to help people, and that'll probably happen when I die or need that kind of help myself. And it won't end then because I'll train every student of mine along the way to fight this same fight. You want us to do this. You NEED us to this this. Help us do this by focusing on finding abusers and getting rid of them, so we can get on with the role that society demands exist, and we have chosen to fulfill.
"I'm currently a Biotech undergrad..."
Then why are you making decisions regarding this person's social skills? Did someone ask you to decide if his social skills needed changing? Did his parents thell you they are and ask you to do so? I'm certain you're trying to be helpful, but helping someone who hasn't asked for it (or who didn't have someone in authority ask for it on their behalf) is called paternalism. It's disrespectful to the individual and/or the person's parent(s) or guardian(s).
If anyone needs to learn some social skills, it's the little bastards who won't leave the kid alone, as he obviously prefers. If he's that smart, he'll probably figure out just fine on his own how to behave around others, if he decides it's important enough for him to do so. If I were in your place I would simply serve as a role model for those other kids by accepting him as he is.
[If some goofball "publisher" were to reprint his work on paper without authorization, and didn't respond reasonably to complaints sent to the contact person listed at LoC (assuming one was), they'd be in exactly the same situation as AOL.]
"The difference is that a physical publisher is taking an active role in reprinting the work, whereas AOL, or any other ISP, is relatively passive; the data flows into and out of their servers without any specific action on the part of the ISP."
The difference is irrelevant with respect to having and appropriately using an infringement contact person/process.
"Furthermore, as applied to USENET, this is even more rediculous to sue any given ISP as, in most cases, the infringing data will remove itself in a day or two, probably before the ISP can respond to the e-mail."
Typically 2 to 5 days for binaries, 2 weeks for text (except the few long-carry systems and archives).
"Following this process one step further, what happens to the ISP when, after receiving a takedown notice, another goofball reposts the offending document two weeks later? Again the data is on the ISPs server, but unless the ISP pays somebody with a very good memory to read every usenet post that flows through their server, the ISP will not know of its reappearance."
The ISP is not responsible for monitoring. No one blamed AOL for not knowing it was there. AOL got blamed for not taking action once notified.
"One final thing... Somebody please correct me if I am wrong, but I seem to recall that one can send a cancel message to the USENET to remove a message automatically. Mr. Harlin could/should have sent such a cancellation and achieved a more effective solution, quicker."
Due to abuses, particularly by a few bot wielding twits working with script kiddies and spammers, many systems have shut off processing of 'cancel' and 'supersedes' notice in control.*. Some others process them only if they originated inside their own system, and others only if generated by an admin inside that system. Some systems that do propogate control messages out do not allow users to initiate them. IIRC, AOL was not honoring cancels from outside during this time.
"Is that a "biased" sample? Depends on what population you're comparing against."
You're right. A college's computer may have preceisely the same sort of user (in the respect of this article) as anywhere else. Perhaps my experience with college students was perfectly normal, and similar results should be expected everywhere.
If this is so, I have two things to add:
1. Oh, SHIT.
2. I should have said "The validity to the real world remains an empirical question."
I do some of my best hacking in the kitchen. I taste something somewhere, imagine how to improve it, dream up what should go in it, go buy the stuff, and hack away. I have it on good authority (a wife of good enough standing that she doesn't feel like she needs to lie to me anymore) that the results are excellent. Recipes are good for study material. But I trust the recipes written by the cooks about as much as a do the user manuals written by the programmers; not a lot. The only paper allowed in my kitchen is towels.
"I don't recall where, but I'd read that a couple of years ago."
I read it about 35 years ago. There were around 150 fires that night in various places around Wisconsin.
I *think* it was in "Mysterious Fires and Lights" by Jacques Vallee, but I may be mistaken. It was, after all, 35 years ago.
that Harlan is doing this is for other authors. Big names like Harlan can make their own contracts. Lesser known authors have to settle for what the publishers will offer. This invariably includes "e-print" rights, the right for the publisher to reprint it in e-book form at some time in the future should they choose to (with or without more payment at that time). If they want that book contract, they sign.
The problem is that although the publisher has rights to reprint the e-book, the copyright holder is still responsible for the work, and for seeing it isn't published in like form outside the contract. If the author went to someone else and had it done, they'd be liable. However, even if someone else does it without permission, the copyright holder is still responsible and liable. They must act is a reasonable manner to reverse that. Failure to do so could result in loss of the contract, demands for repayment of the money already paid, sued for damages for inability of the publisher to now make money on the e-book, etc.
Very few authors have the knowledge guts, money, and ornery it takes to track down (or have tracked down) the people doing the pirating and take action. Harlan does. After seeing how hard it has been for someone like him with a team full of intellectual property and computer specialists to protect his own work, it becomes obvious how hard a lesser known (and paid) author would have to work, and what their chances of success would be.
Has any publisher ever tried this yet? No.
Are any ever likely to? Not anymore.
"When did it become acceptable to just e-mail someone as a legal means to serve notice?"
In this case, when AOL put the statement on their web page that said "for notice of copyright infringement, send email to:".
The law says they have to provide a contact. They did, with instructions. AOL had intended (apparently) to treat is as a valid method, because they saved all logs related to it.
"And networks like it."
No, it is not. It's about upholding existing laws, whether or not any computer is involved at all. In this case they happen to figure prominently.
"Harlan thinks of some turkey posts his book on USENET, he should then be able to attack all the zillions of people running a USENET server."
Harlan thinks no such thing. What Harlan thinks is that the law gives him (or his lawyer) a way to notify people with infringed material of his on their server that it's there, and ask them to remove it, and expect them to either do so, or give a good reason why not, in a reasonable amount of time. And he's right. That's the law, that's what he expected, and that's what AOL did not do.
Although I haven't spoken to him personally, I can be pretty confident that this is what Harlan thinks, because I know it's what his attorneys think, and I work for them. I was a material witness for them and am listed as expert witness, should it come to that.
"What we need to worry about is what the precedent means."
What it means, hopefully, is that the net will be held to exactly the same laws as the rest of the world, not more or less. Too many times real complaints get ignored by the law because the law doesn't understand the net well enough. Too often congresscritters out for good PR (or a pile of cash) bring out laws that demonize on the net what's treated less important off. This is a clear cut issue which happens to involve the net, but in which the actual issue does not necessarily. If some goofball "publisher" were to reprint his work on paper without authorization, and didn't respond reasonably to complaints sent to the contact person listed at LoC (assuming one was), they'd be in exactly the same situation as AOL. The net is not part of the issue, because this appeal result states that the DMCA does NOT apply.
"It is possible that this judgment could some way be construed to hold all ISPs who give subscribers access to USEnet liable for copyright infringement?"
No, nor is AOL being held liable for copyright infringement. Every ISP must register a valid contact person with the Library of Congress to handle infringement issues, and they much examine those issues, and handle them in a reasonable time if necessary. That's already law. AOL didn't, that's all. This case implies nothing other than ISPs have to do what the law tells them they have to do, or they get in trouble.
The number is not seven, it is seven plus or minus two. The originator is George Miller. The theory is information processing. The reference is: Miller, G.A. (1956). The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Some limits on our capacity for processing information. Psychological Review, 63, 81-97.
[Available at http://www.well.com/user/smalin/miller.html]
The concept of putting more things together in groups to remember more than seven plus or minus two is called "chunking". The telcos paid close attention to this work. When it became obvious people would need more than 7 numbers for phones worldwide, they came up with "chunks" such as area codes and prefixes.
Although less famous, the work of Miller's to have more impact was the "test-operate-test-exit" processing theory developed with Galantner and (my teacher) Pribram. It was designed to directly replace the outmoded "stimulus-response" concept. They derived it from figuring out how their new PDP (a 3, I believe) calculated. Parallel neural processing was part of that theory. http://tip.psychology.org/miller.html
It's only being made an issue due to the increased use of out of state mail order. That's what buying stuff over the net is. States have always required people to declare out of state purchases if the person declared at the time it was for delivery out of state.
My father's TV shop was 3 miles from a state line. He regularly had people come to buy TV and such to be delivered 'out of state' and so didn't have to pay him sales tax. They were supposed to declare it on their state tax form. Sure, few did. Sure, far more are doing this now. But it's nothing something new specifically aimed at the net.
Hadean sez: "So when do we stop?"
At very latest, when there are so few left that we no longer can have a significant impact on the ecosphere. Frankly I doubt we'll stop until the situation ensures that outcome, although it hadn't occurred yet.
I had something very much like that, if not the same thing. One disk full of DOSs, another full of Locksmith, etc., and there wasn't much you couldn't do.
I've still got an original DOS 3.1.1 System Master. I doubt it boots. I don't think floppies were supposed to last 25 years.
At least in terms of the conclusion drawn: "One in twenty computers with an internet connection may be harbouring unwanted "spyware" programs..."
Their sample was computers at a college. You've got a highly wired place with people using them for all sorts of things, and comparatively little training on what and what not to do. Plus you've got younger users, many of which aren't old enough yet to not know everything, and feel free to ignore the warnings and admonishments (mark it flamebait if you like; I've taught such people and run a computerized lab. I know what they do and how they think, and so did I back then). Plus, you've got installs and re-installs (the common fix for everything Windozish) often being done by student workers with as comprehensive training in system security as they have in nuclear reactor operations.
How about a major ISP asking customers to allow them to scan for them? How about running a similar study on a large corporate system where downloading and installing external software is far more likely to be noticed, and results in far more than "Geez, we told you not to".
Biased sample, bad result. It may be right, but without better data, it's still bad.
"Who would ever want more than 16K?" He said it to Woz when Woz was designing the Apple II. Woz wanted to put socketing for 16, 32 or 48K on the motherboard, as opposed to the 16K limit of the Apple I. Jobs was also against the color capabilities. Woz built them in anyway.
When Jobs hoisted the pirate flag and built the Mac, he specifically left out expandability and color on purpose. It wasn't because of technical considerations, as the Apple IIgs was in design at the same time as the Mac. It was computer design by temper tantrum.
I don't use mobile phones. But I get calls from people who do. Not a one of them sounds good, and most sound poor. But by golly, now they've got technology to make them sound all the worse! I'm so pleased. It's another Sign of the End Times, folks. The marketoids are selling us things designed specifically to make life worse.
So, how about something that will degrade the picture on my TV too? That pesky clear picture is such a bother. Oh, hey, and traffic on the highway isn't bad enough! How about some robotic cars that will drive too slow and shift lanes without warning?
"Please tell me Mr. Sagan, are we ever gonna get out of this planet alive?" -- Paul Kantner, Planet Earth Rock-n-Roll Orchestra
On 60 Minutes Morely Safer interviewed Nan Davis, a student at Wright State University, who'd recently become paraplegic after an accident. They inserted electromyongram electrodes in her muscles, put her on a stationary exercise bike powered by a motor, and recorded her muscles' responses with an Apple II. They built a set of articifial legs and announced their intention to build a small controller and play the recordings back into the device while it was strapped to her, and she would walk. They said at the time they expected it to be ready in 6 to 12 months. She herself stated she was so certain she would walk again, that she refused to get married to her fiance until she could walk up the aisle herself, using this device. She refused to do it in a wheel chair.
/ ferrall.pdf
Only a few weeks later, on the CBS Evening News, Dan Rather read the story of her wedding, with video footage showing her indeed walking up the aisle alone using this device. That was one of the two times I've seen Dan Rather cry on camera (the other being during Apollo 8's reading of Genisis during the first orbit of the moon). CBS made a TV movie based on this, called "First Steps".
I mean, more power to the troops. I carried enough gear enough miles during my enlistments to know how much this would be appreciated. But there's far better uses for this device, and I hope they'll focus as much on those.
I'm glad I didn't submit this as it was. I decided to try to find out what ever happened to Nan Davis. It was surprisingly easy, and came from a surprising source: http://jfs.ohio.gov/women/essayContest/essays2001
They want you to see them so they can collect advertising revenue. If the advertisters knew you weren't going to see the shows at all, they'd yank their ad money.
So, I wonder what it would take to build a box that detected the broadcast flag, and if present, blocked the program? Or at least notified you so you could turn the channel? If enough people refused to watch flagged broadcasts, they'd stop. It wouldn't even have to be a majority of watchers. It'd just have to be enough that the media could get ahold of it and spin it.