Previously, senders of large volumes of paid-for (by the sender) yet unwanted (by the receiver) emails had to corral their own clouds of distributed, low-cost computing resources (a.k.a botnets). Amazon provides similar capabilities for pennies an hour. Both Amazon's and the emailers' business models work, and questionable penetration of third parties' computers is no longer required.
Somebody finally solved the ????? = Profit equation. What's everyone getting so worked up about?
My ISP (Rogers) did. Like any good economically rational consumer, I used it to grab while the grabbing was good. Last month I downloaded "Video Store 1.0 (beta)" and the bill they sent indicated I'd have been charged $1,000 in overages.
javascript is crappy scripting language for use with HTML. [...] Java is a full blown object oriented programming language I think you meant to say "Javascript is a full blown power-users' language, basically Lisp but with syntax problems, whereas Java is a crappy low-level language; the COBOL of the millenium."
In my experience, the companies people hate are the ones they have to pay periodically. Cableco, telco, airlines... It's that feeling of not having enough choice and being forced to pay. If they grow to hate a company which has never charged them one thin dime, that'll be quite the feat!
Whenever ANYONE says "We need a new law to cover this new technology", question them.
Most of the time, it's just that nobody wants to apply the old law. English common law is a wonderfully broad and malleable thing. Besides, a new law doesn't have a hope in hell of being passed, anyway; attitudes have changed drastically since the last time Americans had any fundamental, broadly respected rights. If this weren't the case, protections that (used to) apply to telephone conversations would also apply to Internet communications. You're either entitled to be free from unreasonable search and seizure, or you're now. It's not "OMG, they invented the typewriter/telegraph/radio/telephone/intertubes, EVERYTHING'S CHANGED!!!" time. It's "Think of the children/terrorists/illegal aliens/liberals!!!" time.
Did you miss the bit where BJB provided three jurisdictions ("California, the UK and Switzerland") and, rather than provide service info, Wikileaks continued to stall? This would've been brilliant legal strategy if Wikileaks was litigation-averse and trying to avoid service, or if it was judgment proof. However, given that their domain name was provided through a US based, (presumably) litigation-averse registrar, it was a dumb strategy indeed. Plaintiff now moves against the registrar, with documentation that attempts to serve the domain owner were met with several days of runaround and stalling.
If this were a story about someone calling up AOL to cancel, and AOL making it very clear that there's a lot of hassle and runaround involved, you'd probably be arguing the other way.
As you can see, when one party tries to get cute by delaying or flat out refusing to provide a service address, the result may well be an ex-parte order. A normal response would be "Send it to world headquarters, and we'll see that it gets to the right place, and let you know who'll be handling our litigation once we get it."
If you're not cooperative with the other side in a litigation, don't be surprised when you're painted as an obstructionist scofflaw in court.
They tried to serve Wikileaks with a notice [...] pulling the DNS was about all they had available to them.
That's bullshit. Over the years, I've been on the receiving end of a variety of notices, requests, and demands from lawyers, cops, and federal agents. Wikileaks was mildly jerky, but the lawyers were even more so. If they had a problem with particular documents and intended to sue in the US, they could have just said which documents and where they were planning to sue.
The lawyers started off by asking nicely (please, thank you, sincerely) for a service address. When they didn't get one, they reminded wikileaks of its obligation under the DMCA, and got more runaround. With that trail of emails, any judge is going to be sympathetic to BJB ("We tried to serve him, but he just climbed out the bathroom window and ran away, your honour!")
Wikileaks sums up by saying "Wikileaks received no further demands from BJB until the surprise ex-parte hearing." Well, when you refuse to provide a service address, any hearing involving you is going to be ex-parte, isn't it? If WL wanted to get SERVED with NOTICE, it knew what it needed to do. Apparently its legal strategy was to hope the plaintiff would go away.
I RTFA. It was lame. I don't see the half-truths or the lies, and of course BJB isn't going to affirm/deny the validity of the documents in question, as that would just disclose more info on their client's business.
They tried to serve Wikileaks with a notice, and Wikileaks was rude and evasive. So the nuclear option, pulling the DNS was about all they had available to them. This isn't censorship, as the government isn't doing it. Nor ir it prior restraint on publication. What's the big deal? Do the haters think people have the right to publish anything on the 'net, no matter how false or scurrilous, without any repercussions whatsoever??
DJB said it best at http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/ipv6mess.html
Why switch from an Internet with a billion people on it to one that has nobody on it that can't be reached by IPv4?
Say he had contacted each embassy individually. Best case, a mid-level functionary would have fixed the one specific problem and not reported it. This way, media in the affected countries will be asking pointed questions, politicians will be asking questions in parliament, and many countries will improve their security policies at all their embassies worldwide, rather than just at the one with the known exposure. Why, though, do all recent articles seem to be click-throughs to other articles scant on details, ad infinitum. Would a link to the original article, rather than a pointer to another parrot really be so hard? WHERE'S THE BEEF?
Too bad its gone all supermodel (skinny, that is), but it had a story about a Lisp app to process billions of call detail records months ago. And you don't get billions of records by spying on a selected group, even if it numbers thousands of people.
Man, if the only memory of me is a comment in some obscure early twenty-first century software written in a language not built to last (*ahem* unlike Lisp), then I've really failed to make my mark here on earth.
>> Why would I trust it as a starting point if I can't trust it as a source?
> You shouldn't trust any single source.
This is just crap. If I ask a cop for directions, should I ask another one, even if the first one seemed sure? Do you carry two companies maps of the same area in your car? Do slashdotters advise other slashdotters to consult two lawyers independently for legal advice? How many households own multiple dictionaries? How many people have the time to read two daily newspapers, or watch two channels' weather forecasts on TV?
Get bent! If a doc says you've got cancer and have six months, a second opinion is probably wise. But dog help me if I were to go through life double checking every supposed fact from supposed sources of information.
When I use a dictionary, I use it as a source, not a starting point. Most peoples' use of encyclopaedias is as a reference, not a starting point. I agree that senior or college students writing theses or essays would be well advised to look further than one encyclopaedia entry, but for the vast majority of uses, most people want to go to one place and find the answer, AND THAT'S WHAT ENCYCLOPAEDIAS WERE DESIGNED FOR!
Alas, I see Wikipaedia as the strange case of the mediocre being the enemy of the good. It (and the 'net in general) is killing off the other mass-market compilations of information, and the quality will never be as good, for fundamentally structural reasons.
When Google did its homage to the Winter Olympics, it did a bunch of winter sports, rather than the perhaps more obvious trick of rearranging the five rounded letters in its name into the Olympic Rings logo. I wonder why?
The obvious conclusion is that Google knows which IP holders not to mess with, and which ones it can probably mess with.
Thomas Jefferson, the original formulator of what is and is not patentable in America would disagree with you somewhat.
WTF do I care what some guy who's been dead for a few centuries *may* have thought? I've got two centuries of history on him, in a field (human innovation) which has evolved beyond his possible imaginings. If you want to resurrect him and get him up to speed opn what he missed, I'd love to talk it over with him. But speculating on what he may have thought absent such knowledge, and worse yet, giving his thoughts the weight of some sort of prophet? Pathetic. Think for yourself about what's changed. That's what he'd have done, I'm sure.
Who invented Morse code over wireless? Morse code with signal lights? Who 'invented' putting Usenet articles on magtape to ship them to Australia, before the cables went that far?
I get steamed when people suggest that every new combination of communications channel and message format is an invention. A new communications channel is an invention, and a new communication format is an invention, but merely thinking "hey, we could do that over this"?
If RIM were to say, on a Monday morning, "Due to patent litigation in the US, all Blackberry service will be turned off immediately, indefinitely" we'd see patent reform by Wednesday.
Just as "hard cases make bad law," sometimes there's a confluence of defendant and public (uh, congresional) interest which cause a certain set of facts to be uniquely positioned as a spur to reform. I don't want exclusions for federal workers, I want this case to be used as a blunt instrument to get congress to address the problem. UNFORTUNATELY, what would be best for everyone (IMHO) isn't what's best for RIM, and I doubt they'd take one for the team.
I wish we'd be more honest with ourselves. I'm going to die, and I know it. If I don't die of a heart attack, maybe I'll get cancer. Money spent on helping a retiree get two more marginal, high cost years might, perhaps, be better spent elsewhere -- maybe on poor children?
> If you're using Mambo currently, do you need to switch to Joomla? The answer is no, as far as my research for this article shows.
Hmmm... You don't have to do much research to see that the future lies with Joomla.
Heck, lookit all the people still using Apache 1.3. I don't think it's a great thing that sloth/"if it ain't broke" means legacy code is legacy forever and anything more than incremental change has a tough time getting adopted, but it's human nature.
Slashdot Mirror
Somebody finally solved the ????? = Profit equation. What's everyone getting so worked up about?
My ISP (Rogers) did. Like any good economically rational consumer, I used it to grab while the grabbing was good. Last month I downloaded "Video Store 1.0 (beta)" and the bill they sent indicated I'd have been charged $1,000 in overages.
If your "whipped cream" comes out of a can, that's your first mistake right there.
In my experience, the companies people hate are the ones they have to pay periodically. Cableco, telco, airlines... It's that feeling of not having enough choice and being forced to pay. If they grow to hate a company which has never charged them one thin dime, that'll be quite the feat!
Most of the time, it's just that nobody wants to apply the old law. English common law is a wonderfully broad and malleable thing. Besides, a new law doesn't have a hope in hell of being passed, anyway; attitudes have changed drastically since the last time Americans had any fundamental, broadly respected rights. If this weren't the case, protections that (used to) apply to telephone conversations would also apply to Internet communications. You're either entitled to be free from unreasonable search and seizure, or you're now. It's not "OMG, they invented the typewriter/telegraph/radio/telephone/intertubes, EVERYTHING'S CHANGED!!!" time. It's "Think of the children/terrorists/illegal aliens/liberals!!!" time.
Did you miss the bit where BJB provided three jurisdictions ("California, the UK and Switzerland") and, rather than provide service info, Wikileaks continued to stall? This would've been brilliant legal strategy if Wikileaks was litigation-averse and trying to avoid service, or if it was judgment proof. However, given that their domain name was provided through a US based, (presumably) litigation-averse registrar, it was a dumb strategy indeed. Plaintiff now moves against the registrar, with documentation that attempts to serve the domain owner were met with several days of runaround and stalling.
As you can see, when one party tries to get cute by delaying or flat out refusing to provide a service address, the result may well be an ex-parte order. A normal response would be "Send it to world headquarters, and we'll see that it gets to the right place, and let you know who'll be handling our litigation once we get it."
If you're not cooperative with the other side in a litigation, don't be surprised when you're painted as an obstructionist scofflaw in court.
That's bullshit. Over the years, I've been on the receiving end of a variety of notices, requests, and demands from lawyers, cops, and federal agents. Wikileaks was mildly jerky, but the lawyers were even more so. If they had a problem with particular documents and intended to sue in the US, they could have just said which documents and where they were planning to sue.
The lawyers started off by asking nicely (please, thank you, sincerely) for a service address. When they didn't get one, they reminded wikileaks of its obligation under the DMCA, and got more runaround. With that trail of emails, any judge is going to be sympathetic to BJB ("We tried to serve him, but he just climbed out the bathroom window and ran away, your honour!")
Wikileaks sums up by saying "Wikileaks received no further demands from BJB until the surprise ex-parte hearing." Well, when you refuse to provide a service address, any hearing involving you is going to be ex-parte, isn't it? If WL wanted to get SERVED with NOTICE, it knew what it needed to do. Apparently its legal strategy was to hope the plaintiff would go away.
Yeah? And who would you serve that order on, since Wikileaks won't tell you who their lawyer is or how/where to serve them?
This was pretty predictable. If the defendant won't divulge who or where they are, you go to the defendant's ISP or domain provider.
They tried to serve Wikileaks with a notice, and Wikileaks was rude and evasive. So the nuclear option, pulling the DNS was about all they had available to them. This isn't censorship, as the government isn't doing it. Nor ir it prior restraint on publication. What's the big deal? Do the haters think people have the right to publish anything on the 'net, no matter how false or scurrilous, without any repercussions whatsoever??
DJB said it best at http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/ipv6mess.html Why switch from an Internet with a billion people on it to one that has nobody on it that can't be reached by IPv4?
Say he had contacted each embassy individually. Best case, a mid-level functionary would have fixed the one specific problem and not reported it.
This way, media in the affected countries will be asking pointed questions, politicians will be asking questions in parliament, and many countries will improve their security policies at all their embassies worldwide, rather than just at the one with the known exposure.
Why, though, do all recent articles seem to be click-throughs to other articles scant on details, ad infinitum. Would a link to the original article, rather than a pointer to another parrot really be so hard? WHERE'S THE BEEF?
Lisp wins again; too bad freedom loses. http://www.franz.com/resources/educational_resourc es/white_papers/
Man, if the only memory of me is a comment in some obscure early twenty-first century software written in a language not built to last (*ahem* unlike Lisp), then I've really failed to make my mark here on earth.
> You shouldn't trust any single source.
This is just crap. If I ask a cop for directions, should I ask another one, even if the first one seemed sure? Do you carry two companies maps of the same area in your car? Do slashdotters advise other slashdotters to consult two lawyers independently for legal advice? How many households own multiple dictionaries? How many people have the time to read two daily newspapers, or watch two channels' weather forecasts on TV?
Get bent! If a doc says you've got cancer and have six months, a second opinion is probably wise. But dog help me if I were to go through life double checking every supposed fact from supposed sources of information.
Alas, I see Wikipaedia as the strange case of the mediocre being the enemy of the good. It (and the 'net in general) is killing off the other mass-market compilations of information, and the quality will never be as good, for fundamentally structural reasons.
The obvious conclusion is that Google knows which IP holders not to mess with, and which ones it can probably mess with.
WTF do I care what some guy who's been dead for a few centuries *may* have thought? I've got two centuries of history on him, in a field (human innovation) which has evolved beyond his possible imaginings. If you want to resurrect him and get him up to speed opn what he missed, I'd love to talk it over with him. But speculating on what he may have thought absent such knowledge, and worse yet, giving his thoughts the weight of some sort of prophet? Pathetic. Think for yourself about what's changed. That's what he'd have done, I'm sure.
I get steamed when people suggest that every new combination of communications channel and message format is an invention. A new communications channel is an invention, and a new communication format is an invention, but merely thinking "hey, we could do that over this"?
I think not.
"Officer, I'm not speeding. As you can see, we're both here at the side of the highway, at a dead stop."
If RIM were to say, on a Monday morning, "Due to patent litigation in the US, all Blackberry service will be turned off immediately, indefinitely" we'd see patent reform by Wednesday.
Just as "hard cases make bad law," sometimes there's a confluence of defendant and public (uh, congresional) interest which cause a certain set of facts to be uniquely positioned as a spur to reform. I don't want exclusions for federal workers, I want this case to be used as a blunt instrument to get congress to address the problem. UNFORTUNATELY, what would be best for everyone (IMHO) isn't what's best for RIM, and I doubt they'd take one for the team.
I wish we'd be more honest with ourselves. I'm going to die, and I know it. If I don't die of a heart attack, maybe I'll get cancer. Money spent on helping a retiree get two more marginal, high cost years might, perhaps, be better spent elsewhere -- maybe on poor children?
Hmmm... You don't have to do much research to see that the future lies with Joomla.
Heck, lookit all the people still using Apache 1.3. I don't think it's a great thing that sloth/"if it ain't broke" means legacy code is legacy forever and anything more than incremental change has a tough time getting adopted, but it's human nature.
Yeah, it shows. I think I've read some of the pages you contributed to.