I had thought about asking if a third book (following The Smoke Ring) would ever come out; that book, as I recall, doesn't just leave things open for a sequel, it begs for one.
However, as someone pointed out, oen shouldn't ask questions that the answers are googl- err, I mean, locatable using a fine internet search engine such as Google(R).
So, I checked. Evidently, a third book has been in the works, but isn't working out well, and isn't likely to come out in the immediate future (too many other projects to work on).
One reading of the article could be that the new proposition would, in essence, make organizations selling over state lines responsible for collecting the "use taxes" that (most? all?) states have on their books, but that are in essence unenforceable.
If this is the case, then (ultimately) all the states stand to gain equal benefit (except those that have no use taxes).
Yes, the on-line businesses stand to lose money, in that they would have to spend money to track the sales, to make the payments, etc. However, what if that were made deductible on their state/federal income taxes? Businesses would be able to implement this at what would amount to no cost. Yes, the states would get screwed moderately (or the opposite, if they have few companies the do business out of state).
However, if you look at the numbers on the map at the end of the article, I suspect that most states would be willing to take the short-term risk of allowing such exemptions in order to get the long-term gains of suddenly being able to actually collect all those use taxes.
If it's the one I'm thinking of, it may have been a duplicate. I think I saw the article in question on the home page, and that's what I thought when it disappeared.
I guess that'll teach them to try to pull a "fast one" on us, huh?:-)
Heck, if you really want domain names to follow strict hierarchies, just follow the same mechanism used by Usenet to create new news groups. There are dozens of people who would gladly police the creation of new domains on the basis that they don't follow "the rules".
Of course, it's been 8-9 years since I was a Usenet news admin. Maybe things have changed.
> Just observing: McGrath pointed out that the > students themselves are not paying for their > Internet connection.
I don't know about ASU, but when I lived in a dorm, I paid money to live in that dorm. I find it difficult to believe that the university does not include money in that dorm fee to provide Internet access. Yes, some of the funding comes from state tax money; but students pay their share, too (and, if it's a normal state university, out-of-state students pay more!).
Is it fair that out-of-state students have limited Internet access, in spite of paying additional fees? If not, do out-of-state students get unlimited access? Unlikely. And in-state students are usually considered to be "in-state" because their parents live in the state, and have presumably been paying state taxes which support the university; maybe the parents should choose whether their kid has access to an unfiltered Internet....
As someone else mentioned, who decides what's educational and what isn't? Filters have been known to prevent access to both big_breasts.com and breast cancer sites.
What a mess. I say, if there's a cost issue involved, charge more for unlimited net access dorms than limited net access; supply and demand should deal with the situation, and provide the additional money to add more bandwidth. However, it doesn't sound like that's the issue.
By the time people are in college, we generally assume they're capable of acting as adults. Most college classes don't take attendance; students are assumed to be capable to decide when and if they should be in class. Treat students like the adults they are. Or, at least, allow those who pay the bills (the parents, usually) to make these calls....
"a program deliberately designed to spread a virus" - AKA a virus.
Technically, this could be a virus, a trojan horse, or possibly even a worm.
Why anyone would give a virus a 'slightly nasty payload' without malicious intent I have no idea.
One needs some way to tell that the virus worked; something, ideally, that would not be trivially duplicated through normal circumstances.
It isn't much more a 'natural hazard' than a bullet flying toward a crowd is a 'natural hazard'.
On a firing range, bullets flying is a natural hazard. On a street, it is not. Intent matters, in many cases; location can as well. If someone accidentally shot someone else in the foot at a firing range, it would be more understandable than someone accidentally shooting someone else in the foot at a bus stop.
Actually, to carry out that analogy, a virus written for educational purposes spreading to co-workers' machines by mistake would be closest to a gun accidentally going off when it was being cleaned at home or something; it's not an environment where one would expect to encounter the problem, but it is still clearly a mistake and an accident.
Obviously, comparing guns to viruses is not completely accurate; you don't shoot one person in the foot, and wind up with hundreds of people with foot wounds, after all.
My opinions on the subject? Most hacking tools can have legitimate uses; if nothing else, to test your own security. Once a method is known, codifying it into a tool does allow "script kiddie" types to use it, but also allows busy administrators to check their own security; even if no tool is created, the method itself is known, after all.
Even virii have potential uses (upgrading software through virii is only a couple of steps past the Live Update stuff available now in the Mac and Windows worlds).
However, it's hard to say what a court would decide regarding liability. A person writing a virus just to develop an understanding for how that works should probably take care to avoid any deliberate effects that would destroy a user's data or ability to use their machine. (Note that, in the Macintosh world at least, most viruses up to about two years ago appeared not to be deliberately malicious; rather, the problems they caused were probably, for want of a better word, bugs in the virus)
I lean heavily in the direction that it is the user's responsibility for the use to which any piece of code is put. I add that someone running a Trojan horse, or unknowingly passing a virus along, is not really the user; the person who knew about the Trojan or virus and made them deliberately available is the user.
Sort of like how the user might type in "rm -rf", but the tech support guy who got frustrated and told them to do it is the one who would get in trouble:-)
R David Francis
Copyright vs. TM - Superman
on
Copyright!
·
· Score: 1
Don't have any links handy right now, so I'll do this off memory. Try Comicon.com's Splash Page had details, but a quick glance shows no info there now.
A few months ago, it came out that (due to the fact that Siegel and Shuster were not working under a work for hire contract, but had allowed what is now DC Comics to copyright their material), the family of Jerry Siegel (if memory serves; I don't think Shuster has any family left) has reclaimed the copyright on the original Superman stories.
Presumably, they and DC Comics will come to some sort of settlement on this; however, there has been speculation on what they can do based on this material, if they choose to do anything.
The general opinion is that they are limited in what they can do, in large part because DC Comics has a firmly established trademark on the Superman property. Marketing non-DC comic books, movies, etc. and labeling them as being about Superman could violate DC's trademark. That doesn't mean that it can't be done; simply that the material, while including the Superman character, couldn't be labeled using the Superman name, or the distinctive likeness of Superman.
Of course, they are also limited to the portion of the Superman history that is in the works in question. That would include Clark Kent, Lois Lane, maybe even Jimmy Olsen; but would not include, for example, kryptonite.
Anyway, my point is that trademarks are more powerful than copyrights, in that they only expire through lack of use, and that they protect the holder in a different way.
Most of the properties that corporations want to protect are source material for their trademarked characters; why doesn't that provide enough protection? No one can go out and make the Mickey Mouse Amusement Park, even if Steamboat Willie were public domain, without Disney's permission, because Mickey Mouse is their trademark. The amount of income that comes in from Steamboat Willie itself has to be neglible; the income from Mickey Mouse licensed products would not be reduced, as someone else producing anything not taken directly from Steamboat Willie would be violating Disney's trademark. Heck, I'm not sure that selling a shirt depicting a scene from Steamboat Willie wouldn't be a violation of Disney's trademark; the picture itself is in the public domain, but it still has Mickey(TM) on it....
Do copyrights still need to be renewed? I know they used to require renewal, and that even Disney and Warner Brothers allowed some old cartoons (mostly WWII-related US propaganda material) to enter the public domain. I've got some of the tapes, which were inexpensive to purchase.
The deal seemed to be that they could state that the tape contained a Daffy Duck or Donald Duck cartoon, but they had to be very careful not to look like an actual Disney/WB product.
So, are renewals still needed under current law?
Oz - an example of copyrights working well
on
Copyright!
·
· Score: 1
Over the past twenty years or so, most (if not all) of L. Frank Baum's "Oz" books have entered the public domain.
There have been a variety of works based on the books; new books, graphic novels and comic books, even an animated movie. Those works have been unable to use certain characters from the books, until those characters' first appearances moved into the public domain.
Few works from 75-100 years ago have the staying power to maintain the public interest today, and to do so in a fashion that allows the copyright holders to continue to make a profit.
This (I believe) may not have been grandfathered into the "life plus 50" ruling, since all of the books would have entered the public domain at the same time.
Note that there have also been derivative works based on the MGM movie; that is not in the public domain, and presumably those works (including a (IMHO) fairly bad Saturday morning cartoon) have had to pay royalties.
When I worked at Ohio State, we had about 15 file servers, each of which served 20 diskless clients in the student labs and faculty offices. Each server had a category name, and each client had a name that fell into that category. For instance, for most of my time there, my machine was styracosaur, served by dinosaur. A good naming convention allows this type of grouping, which is what NTPA gives you now.
The "NTPA01" scheme has its own problems. If there are only a few machines per state and OS, it's tolerable; however, if you need to be able to track down something on a particular machine, and you have NTPA01 - NTPA20, you'll have problems. Not to mention that many people have difficulty remembering the two-letter state abbreviations (especially the M* ones).
And, as someone else mentioned, the more mnemonic the server name, the easier it is to work with; if the NT01 server is always the primary DNS, consider NT-DNS....
Slashdot Mirror
I had thought about asking if a third book (following The Smoke Ring) would ever come out; that book, as I recall, doesn't just leave things open for a sequel, it begs for one.
However, as someone pointed out, oen shouldn't ask questions that the answers are googl- err, I mean, locatable using a fine internet search engine such as Google(R).
So, I checked. Evidently, a third book has been in the works, but isn't working out well, and isn't likely to come out in the immediate future (too many other projects to work on).
One reading of the article could be that the new proposition would, in essence, make organizations selling over state lines responsible for collecting the "use taxes" that (most? all?) states have on their books, but that are in essence unenforceable.
If this is the case, then (ultimately) all the states stand to gain equal benefit (except those that have no use taxes).
Yes, the on-line businesses stand to lose money, in that they would have to spend money to track the sales, to make the payments, etc. However, what if that were made deductible on their state/federal income taxes? Businesses would be able to implement this at what would amount to no cost. Yes, the states would get screwed moderately (or the opposite, if they have few companies the do business out of state).
However, if you look at the numbers on the map at the end of the article, I suspect that most states would be willing to take the short-term risk of allowing such exemptions in order to get the long-term gains of suddenly being able to actually collect all those use taxes.
I have a board game I was given when I was a kid, featuring wacky US patents (not recent ones even then, as I recall) called THE INVENTORS.
Haven't played it in years, so i don't recall all the inventions. I definitely remember the automatic hat tipper, though.
If it's the one I'm thinking of, it may have been a duplicate. I think I saw the article in question on the home page, and that's what I thought when it disappeared.
:-)
I guess that'll teach them to try to pull a "fast one" on us, huh?
Heck, if you really want domain names to follow strict hierarchies, just follow the same mechanism used by Usenet to create new news groups. There are dozens of people who would gladly police the creation of new domains on the basis that they don't follow "the rules".
Of course, it's been 8-9 years since I was a Usenet news admin. Maybe things have changed.
...
Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha! Su-u-ur-r-re they have....
> Just observing: McGrath pointed out that the
> students themselves are not paying for their
> Internet connection.
I don't know about ASU, but when I lived in a dorm, I paid money to live in that dorm. I find it difficult to believe that the university does not include money in that dorm fee to provide Internet access. Yes, some of the funding comes from state tax money; but students pay their share, too (and, if it's a normal state university, out-of-state students pay more!).
Is it fair that out-of-state students have limited Internet access, in spite of paying additional fees? If not, do out-of-state students get unlimited access? Unlikely. And in-state students are usually considered to be "in-state" because their parents live in the state, and have presumably been paying state taxes which support the university; maybe the parents should choose whether their kid has access to an unfiltered Internet....
As someone else mentioned, who decides what's educational and what isn't? Filters have been known to prevent access to both big_breasts.com and breast cancer sites.
What a mess. I say, if there's a cost issue involved, charge more for unlimited net access dorms than limited net access; supply and demand should deal with the situation, and provide the additional money to add more bandwidth. However, it doesn't sound like that's the issue.
By the time people are in college, we generally assume they're capable of acting as adults. Most college classes don't take attendance; students are assumed to be capable to decide when and if they should be in class. Treat students like the adults they are. Or, at least, allow those who pay the bills (the parents, usually) to make these calls....
"a program deliberately designed to spread a virus" - AKA a virus.
:-)
Technically, this could be a virus, a trojan horse, or possibly even a worm.
Why anyone would give a virus a 'slightly nasty payload' without malicious intent I have no idea.
One needs some way to tell that the virus worked; something, ideally, that would not be trivially duplicated through normal circumstances.
It isn't much more a 'natural hazard' than a bullet flying toward a crowd is a 'natural hazard'.
On a firing range, bullets flying is a natural hazard. On a street, it is not. Intent matters, in many cases; location can as well. If someone accidentally shot someone else in the foot at a firing range, it would be more understandable than someone accidentally shooting someone else in the foot at a bus stop.
Actually, to carry out that analogy, a virus written for educational purposes spreading to co-workers' machines by mistake would be closest to a gun accidentally going off when it was being cleaned at home or something; it's not an environment where one would expect to encounter the problem, but it is still clearly a mistake and an accident.
Obviously, comparing guns to viruses is not completely accurate; you don't shoot one person in the foot, and wind up with hundreds of people with foot wounds, after all.
My opinions on the subject? Most hacking tools can have legitimate uses; if nothing else, to test your own security. Once a method is known, codifying it into a tool does allow "script kiddie" types to use it, but also allows busy administrators to check their own security; even if no tool is created, the method itself is known, after all.
Even virii have potential uses (upgrading software through virii is only a couple of steps past the Live Update stuff available now in the Mac and Windows worlds).
However, it's hard to say what a court would decide regarding liability. A person writing a virus just to develop an understanding for how that works should probably take care to avoid any deliberate effects that would destroy a user's data or ability to use their machine. (Note that, in the Macintosh world at least, most viruses up to about two years ago appeared not to be deliberately malicious; rather, the problems they caused were probably, for want of a better word, bugs in the virus)
I lean heavily in the direction that it is the user's responsibility for the use to which any piece of code is put. I add that someone running a Trojan horse, or unknowingly passing a virus along, is not really the user; the person who knew about the Trojan or virus and made them deliberately available is the user.
Sort of like how the user might type in "rm -rf", but the tech support guy who got frustrated and told them to do it is the one who would get in trouble
R David Francis
Don't have any links handy right now, so I'll do this off memory. Try Comicon.com's Splash Page had details, but a quick glance shows no info there now.
A few months ago, it came out that (due to the fact that Siegel and Shuster were not working under a work for hire contract, but had allowed what is now DC Comics to copyright their material), the family of Jerry Siegel (if memory serves; I don't think Shuster has any family left) has reclaimed the copyright on the original Superman stories.
Presumably, they and DC Comics will come to some sort of settlement on this; however, there has been speculation on what they can do based on this material, if they choose to do anything.
The general opinion is that they are limited in what they can do, in large part because DC Comics has a firmly established trademark on the Superman property. Marketing non-DC comic books, movies, etc. and labeling them as being about Superman could violate DC's trademark. That doesn't mean that it can't be done; simply that the material, while including the Superman character, couldn't be labeled using the Superman name, or the distinctive likeness of Superman.
Of course, they are also limited to the portion of the Superman history that is in the works in question. That would include Clark Kent, Lois Lane, maybe even Jimmy Olsen; but would not include, for example, kryptonite.
Anyway, my point is that trademarks are more powerful than copyrights, in that they only expire through lack of use, and that they protect the holder in a different way.
Most of the properties that corporations want to protect are source material for their trademarked characters; why doesn't that provide enough protection? No one can go out and make the Mickey Mouse Amusement Park, even if Steamboat Willie were public domain, without Disney's permission, because Mickey Mouse is their trademark. The amount of income that comes in from Steamboat Willie itself has to be neglible; the income from Mickey Mouse licensed products would not be reduced, as someone else producing anything not taken directly from Steamboat Willie would be violating Disney's trademark. Heck, I'm not sure that selling a shirt depicting a scene from Steamboat Willie wouldn't be a violation of Disney's trademark; the picture itself is in the public domain, but it still has Mickey(TM) on it....
Do copyrights still need to be renewed? I know they used to require renewal, and that even Disney and Warner Brothers allowed some old cartoons (mostly WWII-related US propaganda material) to enter the public domain. I've got some of the tapes, which were inexpensive to purchase.
The deal seemed to be that they could state that the tape contained a Daffy Duck or Donald Duck cartoon, but they had to be very careful not to look like an actual Disney/WB product.
So, are renewals still needed under current law?
Over the past twenty years or so, most (if not all) of L. Frank Baum's "Oz" books have entered the public domain.
There have been a variety of works based on the books; new books, graphic novels and comic books, even an animated movie. Those works have been unable to use certain characters from the books, until those characters' first appearances moved into the public domain.
Few works from 75-100 years ago have the staying power to maintain the public interest today, and to do so in a fashion that allows the copyright holders to continue to make a profit.
This (I believe) may not have been grandfathered into the "life plus 50" ruling, since all of the books would have entered the public domain at the same time.
Note that there have also been derivative works based on the MGM movie; that is not in the public domain, and presumably those works (including a (IMHO) fairly bad Saturday morning cartoon) have had to pay royalties.
When I worked at Ohio State, we had about 15 file servers, each of which served 20 diskless clients in the student labs and faculty offices. Each server had a category name, and each client had a name that fell into that category. For instance, for most of my time there, my machine was styracosaur, served by dinosaur. A good naming convention allows this type of grouping, which is what NTPA gives you now.
The "NTPA01" scheme has its own problems. If there are only a few machines per state and OS, it's tolerable; however, if you need to be able to track down something on a particular machine, and you have NTPA01 - NTPA20, you'll have problems. Not to mention that many people have difficulty remembering the two-letter state abbreviations (especially the M* ones).
And, as someone else mentioned, the more mnemonic the server name, the easier it is to work with; if the NT01 server is always the primary DNS, consider NT-DNS....
R David Francis