AFAIK, yeah, if they were using your authored content in some fashion without your permission, then it would be plagiarizing, a violoation of US copyright law. At the same time, anything you post to USENET might be considered public domain. IANAL.
I would hope this would be something run elsewhere, where the owner of the site using this software also runs a USENET server, so they don't hit the smaller guys like you. The thing to keep in mind is this wouldn't necessarilly be real-time (at least it shouldn't have to be.)
Either way, I don't use USENET enough to care all that much. I just thought this looked interesting and decided to comment.
Oh, my bad. I said I looked at it quick,:) (or I should have said) but I didn't find that. I'll have to go back and play more. See if I can make it useful or not.
Agreed, but keep in mind this isn't even V.1, this is just a proof of concept, as stated in the article. No unit at MS has begun development yet. While it's kludgy, and I probably wouldn't use it to browse regularly, I might use it to find a newsgroup when I have something in particular I'm looking for, for instance if I have a question on a particular product at work, I might look to see if there were an active/high-reply-rate newsgroup for that product. Then I'd hop into my normal browser to post.
I think this actually looks like a useful tool. If you actually read the article, there is a link to MS' research site, where you can find Netscan, a proof of concept that just tracks MS' groups. Check it out here, it's actually fairly interesting. I saw another poster commenting on how this bogs down USENET. Not so, from what I understand.
What would happen is you load all the posts into a database and perform analysis on that data. From there you draw conclusions on the pretext that, if there were a lot of replies and a lot of repeats last week on newsgroup X, then that should continue this week, so that might be a good one to go for info.
Once they get the ball rolling on this though, I'd be willing to bet they try to "update" USENET as they become a major player there. Maybe that's just pessimism on my part though.
Re:I've read the article. Here's a summary.
on
Build-to-Order Cars?
·
· Score: 1
Grr...forgot to add this.
It isn't just branded seats you're buying. From the sound of this article, the system allows you to customize virtually everything. If you're the type who fixes up and tunes your cars, etc. this might be a car that you buy and it's all set already, because you chose the rims, the exhaust system, the engine, (and various parts like headers, electrical, etc.) suspension, and who knows what else.
For those who like that sort of thing but don't have the know-how or time to mod their car like that, perhaps this would be a great way to go.
My afterthought here is how many people run linux on a Gateway computer? HP? Compaq? Now add them up, and I bet that's not even 10% of the Linux crowd, the rest of which are running boxes they bulit themselves. Better parts, you know what's in there, etc. Similar reasons the way I see it. Of course, when you build your own PC, you generally save money, which is very not the case here.
Re:I've read the article. Here's a summary.
on
Build-to-Order Cars?
·
· Score: 1
I don't think the attraction is that they'll be branded, but that they'll be different, in fabric, color, design, etc. It's a hefty price to pay for that sort of thing, but it's rather important to a lot of people out there. I think that's why you see little kitschy cars like the Mini becoming popular.
A lot of people will pay a lot of money to look original, and when the prices drop and everyone has them, those people will pay more money for something new.
Government is always an odd-duck in these sorts. If you are a federal or state employee, you are almost always not even allowed to accept a free lunch from a vendor, whether you have influence over purchasing decisions or not.
A coworker was given a portfolio with our SAN vendor's name on the cover and he just gave it to me and said "keep it away from work." Had the wrong person seen it, he could have easily been fired over that. Unpleasant? Yes. Essential from a civil service/financially accountable point of view? Yes. But don't forget holding a civil service job usually has other perks, namely a rediculously lax working environment. At least for a state gov't.
When is the last time you've had to gather 104 pieces of information to request a rebate? The only thing I have ever needed was receipt and UPC, and possibly the serial number, which is sometimes printed on the UPC/proof of purchase area anyway. And I've never heard of not getting a $100 rebate, as they are usually coming from large companies like digital camera, PC, or PDA manufacturers. Of course, anything is possible.
There supposedly safeguards put in place to both reduce misidentification (i.e. red-flagging someone with the same name as any person on the watch-list) and provide some form of appeal/correction into the system to avoid future misidentification. Whether this really changes anything is anyone's call.
Were this not a government fighter project, I would agree that it will remain 93% complete for two years. But I would imagine (hope!) that a software project like this would require a more structured software development cycle, such that when they say it's 93% done, it really is 93% done.
After the initial announcement of this plan, I wrote two letters, one to my Senator, Norm Coleman and the other to my Representative, Martin Sabo. I received a letter back from Sabo (ranking member of Homeland Security subcommittee) stating he had introduced an amendment requiring two reviews, one by the General Accounting Office before more funding can be appropriated, the other review directed the National Academy of Sciences to study the CAPPS II proposal to recommend modifications to minimize or eliminate adverse effects on civil liberties and privacy. Because of these, the bill was required to be considered by the full house, not just a committee.
Coleman's letter reported the bill has been reduced in the information utilized (as outline in the story) and information on any passenger is supposed to be purged from the system shortly after his travel is over. This should ideally minimize the amount of data at risk should the system be compromized.
I was glad to see Sabo actually concerned. Coleman's letter was worthless, basically saying "I agree, privacy=good, data collection=bad, but I'm not doing anything about it."
If something is easily reproducible, it no longer becomes a security feature. The whole basis of anything in security is that it is not easily forgeable. If you could just run a simple program to generate someone's private PGP key from the public key, PGP is now useless. Granted, it may be difficult to manufacture a credit card and get a forged Visa logo on it, but it is possible if you are resourceful enough. On that note, lets not forget that even now, you could purchase the equipment to print holograms, it's just prohibitively expensive if all you want to do is print holographic CD covers to forge MS software or something like that.
Now, for those countries that use holograms on their currency as a form of validity, this could open the door to forgers more so than now.
Re:I've read the article. Here's a summary.
on
Build-to-Order Cars?
·
· Score: 1
Dammit, I forgot to add, I want one. Maybe I'll have made my millions by the time this company rolls the first car off the line.
I've read the article. Here's a summary.
on
Build-to-Order Cars?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
They build you a car. It is highly customizable. You can choose things like Ralph Lauren seats, pretty much any radio on the market, , etc. There will also be multiple vendors for the same parts. So maybe Tommy Hilfiger seats too, or something along those lines. And you will purchase, configure, and finance the car online. So as others have said, this is NOT the Dell of automakers. This is the white-box PC store of automakers.
Yeah, Compuserve, Prodigy, and AOL all preceded the mass availability of the WWW. AOL started as a BBS in `83 with a GUI being introduced in `85. Case renamed the company America Online in `89. Still, AOL was not big on the scene. In `91 the series of Gopher, my alma mater's only claim to fame, (in CS at least) was introduced. 1991 also saw the first version of NCSA Mosaic. Delphi came online in `92 providing a link to the WWW for its customers. AOL, Prodigy, and Compuserve linked up to the WWW around `94. The rest is more or less history.
Yeah, because there's no way to defend myself apart from shooting someone. Being trained in hand-to-hand combat won't help. Nor will high-quality locks on your doors and windows. Keeping lights on in and around my house won't do anything. Security systems have never helped, either.
How many times has your house been broken into where you had to use deadly force? How many others have had to use deadly force to deter a criminal? How man of those criminals would have run off immediately had they not been shot? And if I can be sued for taking precautionary measures like tacks and razor blades inside windows to cut a would-be-burgalar, why can't I be sued for shooting him? And I know it is cliche, but how many children have been shot by firearms purchased for "self-defense?" I know of at least two myself.
Just because a piece of paper (albeit an important one, on which a lot in our country is based) says something is a right does not make it so. A "right" is something that every human being deserves. If HUMANS (NOT Americans) have the right to bear arms, then why are we disarming Iraq? They are human, and by the ideals set forth in our Bill of Rights, we are depriving the Iraqis of this right.
Carrying a weapon is a PRIVELEDGE set forth by our government. If you think otherwise, get off your high horse and think it over again.
As for self-defense/tyrannical government, I don't really care how many small arms you have, you'll lose against our army today. Vietnam was lost (yes, lost) because we were in a foreign nation in very hostile conditions which few American soldiers were prepared for. The same is not true of your back yard, should you decide to fight our tyrannical government.
Uh, you quoted me saying "No, not crime free." I'm not a complete moron, just a bit idealistic. And at least if I'm being beaten to death, I stand a slight chance. If someone pulls a gun on me and I move, chances are I'm dead (if they can shoot...)
I prefer those odds. And I prefer a reduced chance that someone around me at work is packing heat. I work with some crazy mofos, several of which have carry & conceal licenses.
Stop controlling them and eliminate them altogether. The only credible argument against this is rifles for hunting. Buy a bow. If you can't buy a gun legally, it becomes that much harder to buy one illegally. And in time, we would be able to eliminate more and more of the illegal weapons that were in the U.S.
One comment I've heard made against this is the whole "it's my right to carry a gun." Bull-shit. You were not born with a gun in your hand. You HAD a right to weapons to defend yourself from your tyrannical government. We A) no longer have a tyrannical government, (at least in the historical sense) and B) are now grossly underpowered against our government. If I want to actually defend myself, I'm gonna go shopping for a few SCUDs.
And as for people who think the gun provides them some self-defense, bull-shit. It gives you a self-inflated sense of confidence, makes you stupid, and thus makes you dangerous. The police exist to protect us, so let them do their job. Look at countries like Japan. No, not crime free. But from what I understand, there is less violent crime.
One of my coworkers likes the self-defense argument a lot. My only response is usually "well, if you're being mugged at gunpoint or someone has a knife to your throat, are you really stupid enough to reach down for your gun in your holster, and do you expect you'll get a shot off before him?" His answer is yes, he does think this. I reiterate, self-inflated confidence, stupidity, making him dangerous. NOT something I care to ever be around.
There were two pretty good articles in LinuxJournal written by Hans Reiser. Part II was published in May '03, but I'm not sure when Part I was published. The articles are high-level, for the most part, but has some interesting analysis of the algorithms used in Reiser4's design. The articles are available online to LJ subscribers.
But does it really matter? Would financially backing SCO's lawsuit with IBM/Linux violate any anti-trust/monopoly/anti-competetive/whatever laws? Or could MS have come and said right out that they are arming SCO's little war?
You also use bold instead of strong. Strong should be used in place of bold, and em in place of italics, as screen readers for the blind can interpret these tags and interpret the text appropriately. (Don't mean to nitpick, but as far as readability/design goes, these are things to look at to differentiate a good design from a great one. Incidentally, I do like the design of your site, for the most part.)
You should be specifying your fonts (and margins) using em's instead of px's. em's (in a compliant browser) will scale with the user's preference. And this works in IE too. Check westciv.com's CSS guide for more tips like this.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone have a list of all the employee's email addresses at SCO?
AFAIK, yeah, if they were using your authored content in some fashion without your permission, then it would be plagiarizing, a violoation of US copyright law. At the same time, anything you post to USENET might be considered public domain. IANAL.
Either way, I don't use USENET enough to care all that much. I just thought this looked interesting and decided to comment.
Oh, my bad. I said I looked at it quick, :) (or I should have said) but I didn't find that. I'll have to go back and play more. See if I can make it useful or not.
Agreed, but keep in mind this isn't even V.1, this is just a proof of concept, as stated in the article. No unit at MS has begun development yet. While it's kludgy, and I probably wouldn't use it to browse regularly, I might use it to find a newsgroup when I have something in particular I'm looking for, for instance if I have a question on a particular product at work, I might look to see if there were an active/high-reply-rate newsgroup for that product. Then I'd hop into my normal browser to post.
What would happen is you load all the posts into a database and perform analysis on that data. From there you draw conclusions on the pretext that, if there were a lot of replies and a lot of repeats last week on newsgroup X, then that should continue this week, so that might be a good one to go for info.
Once they get the ball rolling on this though, I'd be willing to bet they try to "update" USENET as they become a major player there. Maybe that's just pessimism on my part though.
It isn't just branded seats you're buying. From the sound of this article, the system allows you to customize virtually everything. If you're the type who fixes up and tunes your cars, etc. this might be a car that you buy and it's all set already, because you chose the rims, the exhaust system, the engine, (and various parts like headers, electrical, etc.) suspension, and who knows what else.
For those who like that sort of thing but don't have the know-how or time to mod their car like that, perhaps this would be a great way to go.
My afterthought here is how many people run linux on a Gateway computer? HP? Compaq? Now add them up, and I bet that's not even 10% of the Linux crowd, the rest of which are running boxes they bulit themselves. Better parts, you know what's in there, etc. Similar reasons the way I see it. Of course, when you build your own PC, you generally save money, which is very not the case here.
A lot of people will pay a lot of money to look original, and when the prices drop and everyone has them, those people will pay more money for something new.
A coworker was given a portfolio with our SAN vendor's name on the cover and he just gave it to me and said "keep it away from work." Had the wrong person seen it, he could have easily been fired over that. Unpleasant? Yes. Essential from a civil service/financially accountable point of view? Yes. But don't forget holding a civil service job usually has other perks, namely a rediculously lax working environment. At least for a state gov't.
When is the last time you've had to gather 104 pieces of information to request a rebate? The only thing I have ever needed was receipt and UPC, and possibly the serial number, which is sometimes printed on the UPC/proof of purchase area anyway. And I've never heard of not getting a $100 rebate, as they are usually coming from large companies like digital camera, PC, or PDA manufacturers. Of course, anything is possible.
There supposedly safeguards put in place to both reduce misidentification (i.e. red-flagging someone with the same name as any person on the watch-list) and provide some form of appeal/correction into the system to avoid future misidentification. Whether this really changes anything is anyone's call.
Were this not a government fighter project, I would agree that it will remain 93% complete for two years. But I would imagine (hope!) that a software project like this would require a more structured software development cycle, such that when they say it's 93% done, it really is 93% done.
Coleman's letter reported the bill has been reduced in the information utilized (as outline in the story) and information on any passenger is supposed to be purged from the system shortly after his travel is over. This should ideally minimize the amount of data at risk should the system be compromized.
I was glad to see Sabo actually concerned. Coleman's letter was worthless, basically saying "I agree, privacy=good, data collection=bad, but I'm not doing anything about it."
Now, for those countries that use holograms on their currency as a form of validity, this could open the door to forgers more so than now.
Dammit, I forgot to add, I want one. Maybe I'll have made my millions by the time this company rolls the first car off the line.
They build you a car. It is highly customizable. You can choose things like Ralph Lauren seats, pretty much any radio on the market, , etc. There will also be multiple vendors for the same parts. So maybe Tommy Hilfiger seats too, or something along those lines. And you will purchase, configure, and finance the car online. So as others have said, this is NOT the Dell of automakers. This is the white-box PC store of automakers.
And no, no one actually uses MSN.
Yeah, because there's no way to defend myself apart from shooting someone. Being trained in hand-to-hand combat won't help. Nor will high-quality locks on your doors and windows. Keeping lights on in and around my house won't do anything. Security systems have never helped, either.
How many times has your house been broken into where you had to use deadly force? How many others have had to use deadly force to deter a criminal? How man of those criminals would have run off immediately had they not been shot? And if I can be sued for taking precautionary measures like tacks and razor blades inside windows to cut a would-be-burgalar, why can't I be sued for shooting him? And I know it is cliche, but how many children have been shot by firearms purchased for "self-defense?" I know of at least two myself.
Just because a piece of paper (albeit an important one, on which a lot in our country is based) says something is a right does not make it so. A "right" is something that every human being deserves. If HUMANS (NOT Americans) have the right to bear arms, then why are we disarming Iraq? They are human, and by the ideals set forth in our Bill of Rights, we are depriving the Iraqis of this right.
Carrying a weapon is a PRIVELEDGE set forth by our government. If you think otherwise, get off your high horse and think it over again.
As for self-defense/tyrannical government, I don't really care how many small arms you have, you'll lose against our army today. Vietnam was lost (yes, lost) because we were in a foreign nation in very hostile conditions which few American soldiers were prepared for. The same is not true of your back yard, should you decide to fight our tyrannical government.
Uh, you quoted me saying "No, not crime free." I'm not a complete moron, just a bit idealistic. And at least if I'm being beaten to death, I stand a slight chance. If someone pulls a gun on me and I move, chances are I'm dead (if they can shoot...)
I prefer those odds. And I prefer a reduced chance that someone around me at work is packing heat. I work with some crazy mofos, several of which have carry & conceal licenses.
Stop controlling them and eliminate them altogether. The only credible argument against this is rifles for hunting. Buy a bow. If you can't buy a gun legally, it becomes that much harder to buy one illegally. And in time, we would be able to eliminate more and more of the illegal weapons that were in the U.S.
One comment I've heard made against this is the whole "it's my right to carry a gun." Bull-shit. You were not born with a gun in your hand. You HAD a right to weapons to defend yourself from your tyrannical government. We A) no longer have a tyrannical government, (at least in the historical sense) and B) are now grossly underpowered against our government. If I want to actually defend myself, I'm gonna go shopping for a few SCUDs.
And as for people who think the gun provides them some self-defense, bull-shit. It gives you a self-inflated sense of confidence, makes you stupid, and thus makes you dangerous. The police exist to protect us, so let them do their job. Look at countries like Japan. No, not crime free. But from what I understand, there is less violent crime.
One of my coworkers likes the self-defense argument a lot. My only response is usually "well, if you're being mugged at gunpoint or someone has a knife to your throat, are you really stupid enough to reach down for your gun in your holster, and do you expect you'll get a shot off before him?" His answer is yes, he does think this. I reiterate, self-inflated confidence, stupidity, making him dangerous. NOT something I care to ever be around.
There were two pretty good articles in LinuxJournal written by Hans Reiser. Part II was published in May '03, but I'm not sure when Part I was published. The articles are high-level, for the most part, but has some interesting analysis of the algorithms used in Reiser4's design. The articles are available online to LJ subscribers.
But does it really matter? Would financially backing SCO's lawsuit with IBM/Linux violate any anti-trust/monopoly/anti-competetive/whatever laws? Or could MS have come and said right out that they are arming SCO's little war?
You also use bold instead of strong. Strong should be used in place of bold, and em in place of italics, as screen readers for the blind can interpret these tags and interpret the text appropriately. (Don't mean to nitpick, but as far as readability/design goes, these are things to look at to differentiate a good design from a great one. Incidentally, I do like the design of your site, for the most part.)
You should be specifying your fonts (and margins) using em's instead of px's. em's (in a compliant browser) will scale with the user's preference. And this works in IE too. Check westciv.com's CSS guide for more tips like this.