True, the United States has a "first to invent" patent rule, but the government's definition of "invent" is bit tricky. The court precedents say an invention isn't really "invented" until the inventor either files a patent, practices the invention (that is, makes or sells something that uses the invention), or publishes a detailed description of it.
To oversimplfy that a bit: It's not legally an invention until the public knows about it. Inventing something in secret doesn't secure the inventor's rights.
And, as you point out, the WOTC patent was filed at least 5 months before WizKids demonstrated "Pirates" at a trade show. If WizKids wants to say they invented CSGs (which doesn't seem to be their argument, by the way), they need to prove that there was a public record of the invention (by anyone who isn't WOTC) before the patent was filed.
At the moment, WOTC has the prima facie evidence of invention, because they were the first to prove they were trying to invent something. Which sounds crazy when I phrase it like that, but that's the way it works.
Even if WizKids was working on the idea before it was patented, it wouldn't help them much. If 2 companies independently develop an idea whoever patents it (or gets it to market) first wins. That's just the way patents work in the United States, so the courts won't be swamped with "I invented that in secret!" lawsuits. (In some countries, it's worse: Whoever patents first wins, even if somebody else can prove they invented the idea.)
At the very least, WizKids would have to show that they (or anybody besides WOTC) published an explanation of CSGs before WOTC patented the idea. So far as I can find, the earliest public references to "Pirates" are from March 2004, several months after WOTC's patent application was filed. If that's true, WizKids is stuck hoping that somebody else wrote about CSGs, or produced a game that's close enough to invalidate the parts of WOTC's patents that WizKids is accused of violating.
If WizKids can't find enough prior art to undermine the patent, their options become increasingly more difficult: convincing a judge that the idea isn't innovative enough to deserve a patent, convincing a judge that WOTC didn't really develop the idea independently, or something even weirder. Those are much harder arguments to prove than prior art.
Yeah, what he said. In fact, I got a T-Mobile prepaid "phone in a box" (like they sell on Amazon, at Target, etc) that had to be activated through an automated 1-800 number. The 1-800 robot did ask if I wanted to transfer an old phone number to T-Mobile.
(T-Mobile's been working well for me, by the way. Once you've spent more than a $100, a "Gold Status" loyalty system kicks in, and gives you a 15% (in terms of minutes purchased) bonus -- that can actualy push the cost-per-minute under 9 cents/minute.)
I worked in GoDaddy's tech support department for a little while many years ago. They struck me as a little spineless when it comes to real controversy (as opposed to the manufactured controversy of some of their ads). GoDaddy's AUP is a lot tougher than their competitors, giving them permission to yank a domain for saying the wrong thing.
Go Daddy may also cancel the registration of a domain name, after thirty (30) days, if that name is being used, as determined by Go Daddy in its sole discretion, in association with spam or morally objectionable activities. Morally objectionable activities will include, but not be limited to: activities designed to defame, embarrass, harm, abuse, threaten, slander or harass third parties; activities prohibited by the laws of the United States and/or foreign territories in which You conduct business; activities designed to encourage unlawful behavior by others, such as hate crimes, terrorism and child pornography; activities that are tortious, vulgar, obscene, invasive of the privacy of a third party, racially, ethnically, or otherwise objectionable; activities designed to impersonate the identity of a third party; and activities designed to harm or use unethically minors in any way.
It's not exactly a free-speech-friendly contract, is it? You can lose your registration for embarrassing someone. This is why I never moved any of my domains to GoDaddy when I was working for them. You can't count on them to stay out of legal battles that other registrars would ignore. Instead, they'll kill your registration, and expect to be patted on the back for being good citizens.
Sometimes, I think their real problem is that they want everyone to like them.
A game/comic store owner in Toledo, Ohio told me that the free comics cost his store twenty-two cents each.
(He didn't seem very "into" the idea of Free Comics Day. Just a stack of comics on a table, and if he saw you looking at them, he said "Take one of those, they're free." The only reason he ordered them was that some his regular customers wanted them.)
The first two seasons the show was called simply "Enterprise". The reasoning was that they wanted to expand their audience beyond Star Trek.
You know, I've always thought that reasoning was the first sign that Enterprise's producers had no idea what they were doing. Who did they think they were going to fool?
The entire first episode was filled with Vulcans and Klingons! You don't kneed to be a Trekkie to know that Vulcans + Klingons = Star Trek. You just need to have been born in America. Jeez.
Of course, adding "Star Trek" to the title two years later was proof that producers were still idiots, because it means they still thought they were fooling people by leaving the words out. Jeez.
Not to defend UPN too strongly, but that argument seems to be a copout. Remember that Next Generation was syndicated and became very popular with even less promotion and demographic compatibility than UPN provides.
You make it sound like I'm saying it was just a promotion problem. I said in the last line of my post that Enterprise had its own problems as a show, in addition to UPN's inadequate promotion of it.
Anyway, I don't know if a direct comparison to the marketing of The Next Generation is appropriate. Sure, TNG ran in syndication, but it ran in before UPN and the WB existed, Fox was only a year old, and there was damn little original programming on cable (or in syndication, come to think of it). A show then didn't need as much promotion as a show needs now, because it had a lot less competition.
For what it's worth, my recollection is that Paramount promoted the hell out of Next Generation. There was a lot of magazine and newspaper coverage (which is part of television promotion -- studios can push certain shows by making actors and creative staff more available to the media), helped by the fact that TNG was the first new live-action Trek series since the original.
Also, although Paramount always had trouble getting syndicating stations to run enough commercials, they had a secret weapon: Paramount owned Entertainment Tonight. Back in the 1980s, that was the only "entertainment news" show around, and it mostly ran on a higher-rated network stations. Paramount was effectively able to give Next Generation free advertising on other networks. (Entertaiment Tonight is probably less influential now that's its got a lot of competition in the vapid news field.)
I think the main problem is that Star Trek fans aren't generic scifi fans nor are they generic young males or any other generic passive demographic.
I didn't say "young males", I said "white males". I feel completley confident in saying white males are Trek's core (not exclusive) audience, because I've met them... at Star Trek conventions.
I haven't been to a convention in a long time (Trek hasn't been fun for me since DS9 ended), but I strongly suspect the core audience is not young. If you want young males to follow something like Trek, you have to keep cycling new viewers into the viewer base. Unfortunately, Trek has been losing viewers (at a rate that suggests they're not cycling in new viewers) for years. At this point, I'd have to say that the only people watching Enterprise are old Trekkies who can't let go.
The producers know that, or they wouldn't have used a theme song written by Diane Warren. You just don't pick Diane Warren songs for shows aimed at young male viewers. You pick Diane Warren songs for shows aimed at Baby Boomers.
It was a thing that people actively sought out and tuned into, no matter where it was. That is why they got so many viewers for the Enterprise premiere, and is why that terrible Voyager episodes got 3 times the viewers of recent Enterprise episodes.
I'm not sure what your argument is here. Why do you think people would seek out Voyager "no matter where it was", but not Enterprise? The shows were in the same place -- UPN. Did Trekkies just get worse at finding things?
This indicates that people were just getting bored of the program.
I think the "boredom" argument is the real cop-out. As I've already pointed out, Law & Order is still sucessful, despite having almost as many episodes in syndication as Trek and sticking even closer to its formula. Americans
The article you mention is a joke. Not once does it mention Enterprise airing only on UPN, unlike previous Star Trek successes.
Uh, what?
Dude, Voyager was a UPN show. Not one of the great Star Treks, but it did better (ratings-wise) than Enterprise.
In the world of science, if something fails when it had always succeeded, we identify the differences, and hypothesize that the differences cause the failure.
Which only works, of course, if the differences are real.
Then it goes on to hypothesize things like saturation and a poor matchup with UPN content. If that was the problem, Enterprise wouldn't have started out with 12 million viewers.
I agree that the "saturation" argument is bogus. I think you're underestimating the "poor matchup with UPN content". Enterprises's premiere got 12 million viewers because UPN heavily promoted the show outside UPN -- Billboards, magazine stories, commercials on cable channels, etc.
After the premiere, however, they mostly depended on advertsing the show on UPN, which is where the "poor matchup" becomes a problem. As the NYT article points out, most UPN shows skew "young female" (Veronica Mars, America's Next Top Model). That's not an audience that can be turned Trekkie with mere commercial. (Another "mismatch" the NYT is too polite to mention -- UPN's entire sitcom line-up is aimed at urban African-Americans, another demographic that's less enthusiastic about science fiction than the white males who form Trek's (and Slashdot's) core audience.)
Never underestimate the power of a "network demographic". Unlike it advertises off-net, UPN can only market its shows to people who already watch UPN. That makes it hard to promote shows that don't match the existing viewers. Shows that aren't promoted well usually don't suceed. It becomes a vicious circle that's hard to escape. (Look at CBS. They've spent years trying to get a younger demographic, but they had trouble promoting "young" shows, when all the people watching their commericials are retirees.)
Considering that Enterprise was a bad show saddled with poor promotion, it's a wonder it lasted as long as it did.
Seriously, it seems like science-fiction fans start complaining about "soap operas" every time a show asks them to remember what happened the previous week. Continuing storylines aren't what hurts Star Trek with normal audiences. Normal audiences watch shows with continuing storylines all the time. Here's the current Nielsen Top 20:
1 CSI 2 DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES 3 AMERICAN IDOL-TUESDAY 4 AMERICAN IDOL-WEDNESDAY 5 CSI: MIAMI 6 SURVIVOR: PALAU 7 GREY'S ANATOMY ABC 8 HOUSE FOX 9 EVERYBODY LOVES RAYMOND 10 E.R. 11 TWO AND A HALF MEN 12 COLD CASE 13 WITHOUT A TRACE 14 LAW AND ORDER 15 EXTREME MAKEOVER:HM ED 16 APPRENTICE 3 17 60 MINUTES 18 CBS SUNDAY MOVIE 19 JUDGING AMY 20 REVELATIONS
Yeah, there are some procedural shows there, but there's also a bunch of shows with continuing storylines. And they're all getting better ratings than Enterprise, which has been hovering around a 2.0 rating all season. If continuing storylines are a problem for Trek, it's not because normal audiences are too lazy to keep up with the show, it's because Trekkies are too lazy to keep up with the show.
Highest-rated sci-fi show on TV right now? Battlestar Galactica. Continuing storylines can't be that bad for a show....
Just like Trek, every episode of Law & Order is "competing" with decades of its own reruns -- the original L&O is currently airing its 15th season, Special Victims Unit its 6th, and Criminal Intent its 4th. That means there's 22 (14 + 5 + 3) years of L&O reruns on cable right now.
Star Trek has 24 years of reruns in play at the moment -- 3 for the original, and 7 for each of three spin-offs. (Enterprise reruns aren't syndicated yet, and the cartoon isn't airing anywhere.)
I'm pretty sure L&O reruns air more often than Trek reruns, so let's consider it even -- Both franchises have an unhealthy number of old episodes to "compete" with. Yet Dick Wolf and NBC can get general audiences to watch four new episodes of Law & Order every week, while UPN and Berman/Braga can't get a fraction of the same audience to watch one episode of Enterprise.
See my point? If the problem was as simple as "general audiences" burning out on over-exposed franchises, they would have given up on L&O, too. But they didn't. The problem isn't in the audience. It's in the the show.
We could argue all night long about why L&O has longer legs than Trek. I figure L&O has two things going for it -- better marketing (NBC is just better at promotion than UPN) and consistency -- whether you like L&O or not, you have to admit that it's pretty much the same show it was 15 years ago. (The producers know their franchise's strengths, and stick to them.) The last ten years of Trek on the other hand, have been all over the place. Star Trek has no quality control.
Which is my long-winded way of agreeing with half the posters here: The problem isn't "too much Star Trek", it's "too much bad Star Trek". Trek's been going downhill since Voyager and it's not going to get better with hacks like Berman and Braga. Even letting the show "rest for a few years" won't help, unless they get some new, smarter producers.
Yeah, but science-fiction fans don't. The real problem with putting a science-fiction show on a Friday night in America? The science-fiction fans are watcthing the Sci-Fi Channel. When "Sci Fi Friday" isn't in reruns, it's the 800-pound gorilla of sci-fi TV.
In fact, Neilsen ratings for Enterprise started hitting all-time lows (below 2.0) this January, when the winter season started on the Sci Fi Channel. Believe it or not, Stargate SG-1 was the final nail in Enterprise's coffin. (The first nail, of course, was the fact that Enterprise wasn't a good show.)
Did every single trek series have episodes about space-nazi's?
Deep Space Nine managed to be Nazi-free, assuming you're talking literal Nazis (or at least, aliens dressed as literal Nazis). A quick Google search suggests a lot of people see allegorical Nazis in various DS9 aliens. Whatever.
But this actually reminds me of something I noticed myself: The longer a science-fiction show runs on television, the more likely the show's heroes will have to fight Nazis. Check these out if you don't belive me:
Screw it, I can't list them all. Search Google and you'll find Nazis in all sorts of science fiction and fantasy shows, including failed shows (or maybe I should say, especially failed shows) like "Brimstone", "Time Cop", and "The Burning Zone".
It's just like Godwin's Law: Eventually, every sci-fi series must have a "Nazi episode". And then it gets cancelled.
I blame this on lazy writers, and an unhealthy abundance of cheap Nazi costumes in Hollywood.
Your belief is incorrect. There is no federal law that unequivocally forbids requiring identifcation to vote, although many people (including, the ACLU ) insist an ID requirement should be considered a poll tax, just as you do. Many states forbid requiring ID.
But in fact, one federal law requires identification for some voters. The Help America Vote Act (passed in 2002) requires first-time voters to show identification if they registered by mail and didn't include a driver's license number (or the last 4 digits of their SSN -- at least SSNs are free) on the registration form.
(This weird rule was added at the behest of Congressional Republicans, who apparently think the Democrats make up voters. That's silly. Democracts don't use imaginary voters, they used dead voters.)
Two big problems with the HAVA identification requirement:
The whole carding scheme requires states to have a state-wide voter registration database. Not all states have this. (In fact, most don't.) If a state doesn't have the database ready for 2006, it will have to card people more often. Santa Cruz county thinks they'll have to card everyone. Won't that be fun for them?
Oh, and technically, Arizona requires ID for every voter. New Mexico is thinking about it. Some states require ID before they'll give someone a provisional ballot. And I don't even want to think about what happens when Republicans go around contesting people's voter registrations....
My PC's power supply is making a loud buzzing noise, so I've unbolted it from the case, sat it on the floor, and smothered it with a pillow. Actually replacing the power supply can wait until the next time I'm gainfully employed, or when the damn thing bursts into flames. Whichever comes first, you know?
(The power supply has done this a couple of times before, but I was always able to "repair" it by smacking the thing with a screwdriver handle. No such luck this time.)
1) The RSS-developer community has a completely irrational fear of MIME. They never completed the registration of the application/rss+xml media type, and they've shown no interest in doing so. Weiner and the gang want to use text/xml for everything, which makes it harder to separate RSS out of a newsgroup (or anything else; more on that below).
2) The RSS developer community can't picture themselves using anything except HTTP. I've tried mentioning other protocols to them; they don't respond.
3) NOBODY MAKES RSS READERS THAT WORK IN A PIPE!. Seriously. Is it really so hard to envisage somebody piping an RSS file in from the command line? Apparently, it is for the people who write RSS readers: they make you cut-and-paste URIs into a form before you can do anything with an RSS file.
Seriously, RSS over netnews wouldn't really require any new Big Ideas, just a smart re-application of the Old Ideas:
1) Post RSS files to Usenet with proper "Content-Type" and "Supersedes" headers to an appropriate newsgroup. (Maybe some new RSS-friendly newsgroups; maybe the old ones. We can figure that out later. The important thing is: This wouldn't be any more difficult than posting a FAQ is.)
2) Use newsgroup-capable RSS-readers to poll the newsgroups, and/or use regular newsreaders to pipe RSS files to dedicated RSS-readers.
3) Profit! Or at least, Fewer Accidental DDoS attaacks!
I could do Step 1 now, without significant effort. (It's no more difficult than posting a newsgroup FAQ.) Step 2 requires a real programmer, which I am not.
(In fact, you know what would be great? A combined newsgroup/RSS reader. It makes more sense than all those RSS readers patterned after e-mail programs. But I digress.)
Maybe I'm getting cynical in my old age, but I'm beginning to think this is the UNIX/Windows divide all over again. A lot of the RSS developer community comes from a Windows/Mac developer background, so they just don't see the potential of the toolbox approach, even while they're rambling about the extensibility of XML and it's "user-centric" design.
Take for example, the refusal to get a real media type for RSS: A unique MIME type would help web browsers, too, because browsers can use media types to decide which plug-in gets which file. Instead of making a user cut-and-paste URIs from his browser to his reader (which is a dreadfully Window-ish way of doing it), the user could just click on the RSS link and the web browser could launch the RSS reader by itself (which presumbably would do something smart, like ask the user if they want to subscribe to a new feed). Just like all those other plug-ins and non-HTML formats on the Web!
Makes sense, yes? But it doesn't register with anybody creating RSS readers. Some programmers still advocate the cutting-and-pasting of URIs. Some programmers advocated auto-discovery by reading HTML "link" elements. Some advocate complicated cloud/stream schemes. But nobody wants to talk about re-using basic, functional tools that we've had in the toolbox for 10, 15, or 25 years.
Some days, it's like the "RSS developers" are from another planet. And I want to send them all back.
The error in your thinking is that you assume TLD = Registry.
I assume that because it's true. Each TLD has exactly one registry, because you need a central registry to compile the TLD's zone file.
You do know the registries create zone files, don't you?
You're going to have to help me out here: In this parallel universe of yours, who is paying the bills for managing all these TLDs? Letting anybody create a TLD and dump the responsibility on a stranger seems to put all the burden of the system on people running the registries. That isn't really any more equitable than the current system; at best, it's just inequitable in a different manner.
Furthermore, it will devalue 2LDs so much, it will help end their use as the basis for frivolous lawsuits.
No, it won't. Frivolous people will continue to do frivolous things no matter how much you mangle the domain name system.
Also, not all domain-related legal actions are frivolous. (Look at the sex.com case, for example.) Running a TLD is going to involve legal expenses no matter what: somebody has to be able to pay for that.
An address should not be a brand!
Agreed, but that's a social/legal problem, not a technical one. DNS anarchy will not make people smarter.
Now that you mention it, I had considered comparing TLD-creators to newsgroups moderators, but I thought the comparison might be too obscure.
TLDs neglected by their creators would be a lot like newsgroups that have "lost" their moderators: Disappointing to people who wanted to use the TLD, and a minor nuisance to everyone involved in managing the DNS.
Would neglected TLDs just sit there forever, making people wonder what they're for? Or, would the abandoned TLDs just get dropped from the root servers? Or, would new TLD-managers be allowed to take over the TLD and retroactively set new policies for it? What happens when two different people want to take over an abandoned TLD?
A free-for-all DNS would not be a shiny happy anarchy free of bureaucratic procedures. It would be a loud, tedious anarchy full of ad hoc solutions and petty turf wars.
I don't think chaos is a clever solution to the current problems. Most countries regulate utilties (electricity, water, phone systems, etc.) because those utilities are important enough to society that stability is worth the paperwork. The domain name system is important, too.
Simple rule: If you wouldn't want your water company being run out of your neighbor's basement, you probably don't want your TLD run out of it, either.
If anyone was (easily and accessibly) able to create their own TLD and sell (or give away) names underneath them on their own terms, it would reduce the motivation for businesses to go and snap up every single variation of their name under every TLD.
Instead, it would encourage every lunatic and his brother to "create" as many TLDs as they can think of, in case they think of that accidentally becomes valuable. It would just move domain-speculation up the TLD level. We'd have TLDs being created nearly at random, not used, poorly managed, and dropped when "the registry" loses interest. Try to picture an Internet where an entire TLD can become nonresponsive just because the "anyone" who created it doesn't want the job anymore.
The Internet would not be served well by TLDs becoming as undependable as the average domain. While I'm not convinced that ICANN is perfect, I am pretty sure that we need some vetting and regulation of new TLDs to make sure that TLD registries are serious proposals, and not fly-by-night operations.
I was a tech support worker, I was rated more upon how many calls I took; I wasn't rated by how much I tought someone over the phone.
It could be worse: When I worked tech support, I was rated on how many domain names I sold to customers. Keep in mind, I was working for a domain registrar, so most people were calling to complain about their current domains, so few of them were really in a hurry to register new ones.
So, the worst explanation I've ever given would have been something like "You just need to wait a day for the DNS changes to propagate. By the way, to you want to protect your internet identity? We're having a special on.ws domains today."
That job didn't end well for me. I'm a good support tech, but a lousy telemarketer. Came into work one day and found out I been terminated for not meeting the secret sales quota. Fucking GoDaddy.
.xxx is once again one of the new TLDs being considered by ICANN, but everybody with a brain knows it won't work. Among other things, you'll never get a world-wide definition of "XXX content", let alone a world-wide law for keeping XXX content in a.xxx TLD. (The nations of the world still can't agree on the what's a "good war" and what's a "bad war"; there's no way they'll agree on the difference between "good nudity" and "bad nudity".)
I have heard of Gigablast, but I've never been impressed by it. (I wrote a review back in 2002.) Most search engine optimizers love Gigablast, however, because it's such an easy engine to game.
It's a fairly old-school engine: indexes whatever it can and favors pages that are keyword-heavy. It's almost too easy to spam. I don't think there's anything PageRank-like in the algorithm, otherwise, it wouldn't be able to add pages to the index "instantly". (PageRank is too computationally intensive for that.) Gigablast still thinks meta-tags are a great idea! While the hardware setup might be innovative (I'll leave that to the hardware experts to decide), the engine software itself seems about ten years behind the times.
Like many posters here, I doubt a one-man outfit is going to take down Google (although many search engine optimizers would like it to). Gigablast has had two years to make an impression, and it hasn't. A company on an acquisistion binge might be crazy enough to buy it, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
Instead, a push model should be used, where news is distributed when it arrives (kind of like it works with IHAVE feeds for NNTP). Latencies can be reduced to a minimum with no wasted bandwidth.
NNTP could be used now, if RSS aggregators were designed to play well with other programs. Feed providers could slap an application/rss+xml MIME header on their RSS file, post them to Usenet (maybe to dedicated RSS feed newsgroups, or maybe to regular topic newsgroups; we can figure that out later), and let netnews distribute the files. (With proper use of "Supersedes" headers, we wouldn't even have to worry about duplicate feeds; an RSS group would be like an *.answers group -- too scary for browsing, but easy to automate.)
End-users could subscribe to an RSS-feed newsgroup on their local news servers and filter the newsgroup so that RSS files go straight into an aggegator. Voila! RSS over Usenet, and the bandwidth pressure is taken off the feed originator.
(Hell, RSS could be distributed by e-mail, too, if everybody involved grokked MIME and plugins.)
The problem, of course, is that there aren't any aggregators that work in a pipe, because RSS development has been driven by people who learned to program in a Windows-based universe instead of the UNIX-based universe that produced netnews and the Web. It's all cut-and-paste or drag-and-drop. (Most RSS apps aren't even MIME-aware.)
You know, if feed reader authors made more flexible software, there might actually be some innovation in this field.
Slashdot Mirror
Time of application does factor into this.
True, the United States has a "first to invent" patent rule, but the government's definition of "invent" is bit tricky. The court precedents say an invention isn't really "invented" until the inventor either files a patent, practices the invention (that is, makes or sells something that uses the invention), or publishes a detailed description of it.
To oversimplfy that a bit: It's not legally an invention until the public knows about it. Inventing something in secret doesn't secure the inventor's rights.
And, as you point out, the WOTC patent was filed at least 5 months before WizKids demonstrated "Pirates" at a trade show. If WizKids wants to say they invented CSGs (which doesn't seem to be their argument, by the way), they need to prove that there was a public record of the invention (by anyone who isn't WOTC) before the patent was filed.
At the moment, WOTC has the prima facie evidence of invention, because they were the first to prove they were trying to invent something. Which sounds crazy when I phrase it like that, but that's the way it works.
Even if WizKids was working on the idea before it was patented, it wouldn't help them much. If 2 companies independently develop an idea whoever patents it (or gets it to market) first wins. That's just the way patents work in the United States, so the courts won't be swamped with "I invented that in secret!" lawsuits. (In some countries, it's worse: Whoever patents first wins, even if somebody else can prove they invented the idea.)
At the very least, WizKids would have to show that they (or anybody besides WOTC) published an explanation of CSGs before WOTC patented the idea. So far as I can find, the earliest public references to "Pirates" are from March 2004, several months after WOTC's patent application was filed. If that's true, WizKids is stuck hoping that somebody else wrote about CSGs, or produced a game that's close enough to invalidate the parts of WOTC's patents that WizKids is accused of violating.
If WizKids can't find enough prior art to undermine the patent, their options become increasingly more difficult: convincing a judge that the idea isn't innovative enough to deserve a patent, convincing a judge that WOTC didn't really develop the idea independently, or something even weirder. Those are much harder arguments to prove than prior art.
Yeah, what he said. In fact, I got a T-Mobile prepaid "phone in a box" (like they sell on Amazon, at Target, etc) that had to be activated through an automated 1-800 number. The 1-800 robot did ask if I wanted to transfer an old phone number to T-Mobile.
(T-Mobile's been working well for me, by the way. Once you've spent more than a $100, a "Gold Status" loyalty system kicks in, and gives you a 15% (in terms of minutes purchased) bonus -- that can actualy push the cost-per-minute under 9 cents/minute.)
Check out this excerpt from their Registration Agreement:
It's not exactly a free-speech-friendly contract, is it? You can lose your registration for embarrassing someone. This is why I never moved any of my domains to GoDaddy when I was working for them. You can't count on them to stay out of legal battles that other registrars would ignore. Instead, they'll kill your registration, and expect to be patted on the back for being good citizens.
Sometimes, I think their real problem is that they want everyone to like them.
A game/comic store owner in Toledo, Ohio told me that the free comics cost his store twenty-two cents each.
(He didn't seem very "into" the idea of Free Comics Day. Just a stack of comics on a table, and if he saw you looking at them, he said "Take one of those, they're free." The only reason he ordered them was that some his regular customers wanted them.)
What if all those pedophiles just buy Trek DVDs because pedophiles like Wesley Crusher?
As if being a child actor didn't suck enough....
You know, I've always thought that reasoning was the first sign that Enterprise's producers had no idea what they were doing. Who did they think they were going to fool?
The entire first episode was filled with Vulcans and Klingons! You don't kneed to be a Trekkie to know that Vulcans + Klingons = Star Trek. You just need to have been born in America. Jeez.
Of course, adding "Star Trek" to the title two years later was proof that producers were still idiots, because it means they still thought they were fooling people by leaving the words out. Jeez.
You make it sound like I'm saying it was just a promotion problem. I said in the last line of my post that Enterprise had its own problems as a show, in addition to UPN's inadequate promotion of it.
Anyway, I don't know if a direct comparison to the marketing of The Next Generation is appropriate. Sure, TNG ran in syndication, but it ran in before UPN and the WB existed, Fox was only a year old, and there was damn little original programming on cable (or in syndication, come to think of it). A show then didn't need as much promotion as a show needs now, because it had a lot less competition.
For what it's worth, my recollection is that Paramount promoted the hell out of Next Generation. There was a lot of magazine and newspaper coverage (which is part of television promotion -- studios can push certain shows by making actors and creative staff more available to the media), helped by the fact that TNG was the first new live-action Trek series since the original.
Also, although Paramount always had trouble getting syndicating stations to run enough commercials, they had a secret weapon: Paramount owned Entertainment Tonight . Back in the 1980s, that was the only "entertainment news" show around, and it mostly ran on a higher-rated network stations. Paramount was effectively able to give Next Generation free advertising on other networks. (Entertaiment Tonight is probably less influential now that's its got a lot of competition in the vapid news field.)
I didn't say "young males", I said "white males". I feel completley confident in saying white males are Trek's core (not exclusive) audience, because I've met them... at Star Trek conventions.
I haven't been to a convention in a long time (Trek hasn't been fun for me since DS9 ended), but I strongly suspect the core audience is not young. If you want young males to follow something like Trek, you have to keep cycling new viewers into the viewer base. Unfortunately, Trek has been losing viewers (at a rate that suggests they're not cycling in new viewers) for years. At this point, I'd have to say that the only people watching Enterprise are old Trekkies who can't let go.
The producers know that, or they wouldn't have used a theme song written by Diane Warren. You just don't pick Diane Warren songs for shows aimed at young male viewers. You pick Diane Warren songs for shows aimed at Baby Boomers.
I'm not sure what your argument is here. Why do you think people would seek out Voyager "no matter where it was", but not Enterprise? The shows were in the same place -- UPN. Did Trekkies just get worse at finding things?
I think the "boredom" argument is the real cop-out. As I've already pointed out, Law & Order is still sucessful, despite having almost as many episodes in syndication as Trek and sticking even closer to its formula. Americans
Uh, what?
Dude, Voyager was a UPN show. Not one of the great Star Treks, but it did better (ratings-wise) than Enterprise.
Which only works, of course, if the differences are real.
I agree that the "saturation" argument is bogus. I think you're underestimating the "poor matchup with UPN content". Enterprises's premiere got 12 million viewers because UPN heavily promoted the show outside UPN -- Billboards, magazine stories, commercials on cable channels, etc.
After the premiere, however, they mostly depended on advertsing the show on UPN, which is where the "poor matchup" becomes a problem. As the NYT article points out, most UPN shows skew "young female" (Veronica Mars, America's Next Top Model). That's not an audience that can be turned Trekkie with mere commercial. (Another "mismatch" the NYT is too polite to mention -- UPN's entire sitcom line-up is aimed at urban African-Americans, another demographic that's less enthusiastic about science fiction than the white males who form Trek's (and Slashdot's) core audience.)
Never underestimate the power of a "network demographic". Unlike it advertises off-net, UPN can only market its shows to people who already watch UPN. That makes it hard to promote shows that don't match the existing viewers. Shows that aren't promoted well usually don't suceed. It becomes a vicious circle that's hard to escape. (Look at CBS. They've spent years trying to get a younger demographic, but they had trouble promoting "young" shows, when all the people watching their commericials are retirees.)
Considering that Enterprise was a bad show saddled with poor promotion, it's a wonder it lasted as long as it did.
Seriously, it seems like science-fiction fans start complaining about "soap operas" every time a show asks them to remember what happened the previous week. Continuing storylines aren't what hurts Star Trek with normal audiences. Normal audiences watch shows with continuing storylines all the time. Here's the current Nielsen Top 20:
1 CSI
2 DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES
3 AMERICAN IDOL-TUESDAY
4 AMERICAN IDOL-WEDNESDAY
5 CSI: MIAMI
6 SURVIVOR: PALAU
7 GREY'S ANATOMY ABC
8 HOUSE FOX
9 EVERYBODY LOVES RAYMOND
10 E.R.
11 TWO AND A HALF MEN
12 COLD CASE
13 WITHOUT A TRACE
14 LAW AND ORDER
15 EXTREME MAKEOVER:HM ED
16 APPRENTICE 3
17 60 MINUTES
18 CBS SUNDAY MOVIE
19 JUDGING AMY
20 REVELATIONS
Yeah, there are some procedural shows there, but there's also a bunch of shows with continuing storylines. And they're all getting better ratings than Enterprise, which has been hovering around a 2.0 rating all season. If continuing storylines are a problem for Trek, it's not because normal audiences are too lazy to keep up with the show, it's because Trekkies are too lazy to keep up with the show.
Highest-rated sci-fi show on TV right now? Battlestar Galactica. Continuing storylines can't be that bad for a show....
I have three words that will reveal that any and all variations on the "too much Trek" argument as unequivocally wrong. Those three words?
Law and Order
Just like Trek, every episode of Law & Order is "competing" with decades of its own reruns -- the original L&O is currently airing its 15th season, Special Victims Unit its 6th, and Criminal Intent its 4th. That means there's 22 (14 + 5 + 3) years of L&O reruns on cable right now.
Star Trek has 24 years of reruns in play at the moment -- 3 for the original, and 7 for each of three spin-offs. (Enterprise reruns aren't syndicated yet, and the cartoon isn't airing anywhere.)
I'm pretty sure L&O reruns air more often than Trek reruns, so let's consider it even -- Both franchises have an unhealthy number of old episodes to "compete" with. Yet Dick Wolf and NBC can get general audiences to watch four new episodes of Law & Order every week, while UPN and Berman/Braga can't get a fraction of the same audience to watch one episode of Enterprise.
See my point? If the problem was as simple as "general audiences" burning out on over-exposed franchises, they would have given up on L&O, too. But they didn't. The problem isn't in the audience. It's in the the show.
We could argue all night long about why L&O has longer legs than Trek. I figure L&O has two things going for it -- better marketing (NBC is just better at promotion than UPN) and consistency -- whether you like L&O or not, you have to admit that it's pretty much the same show it was 15 years ago. (The producers know their franchise's strengths, and stick to them.) The last ten years of Trek on the other hand, have been all over the place. Star Trek has no quality control.
Which is my long-winded way of agreeing with half the posters here: The problem isn't "too much Star Trek", it's "too much bad Star Trek". Trek's been going downhill since Voyager and it's not going to get better with hacks like Berman and Braga. Even letting the show "rest for a few years" won't help, unless they get some new, smarter producers.
Yeah, but science-fiction fans don't. The real problem with putting a science-fiction show on a Friday night in America? The science-fiction fans are watcthing the Sci-Fi Channel. When "Sci Fi Friday" isn't in reruns, it's the 800-pound gorilla of sci-fi TV.
In fact, Neilsen ratings for Enterprise started hitting all-time lows (below 2.0) this January, when the winter season started on the Sci Fi Channel. Believe it or not, Stargate SG-1 was the final nail in Enterprise's coffin. (The first nail, of course, was the fact that Enterprise wasn't a good show.)
Battlestar Galactica actually gets better ratings than Enterprise! I'm almost embarassed for UPN, because they apparently turned down Battlestar Galactica four years ago.
Deep Space Nine managed to be Nazi-free, assuming you're talking literal Nazis (or at least, aliens dressed as literal Nazis). A quick Google search suggests a lot of people see allegorical Nazis in various DS9 aliens. Whatever.
But this actually reminds me of something I noticed myself: The longer a science-fiction show runs on television, the more likely the show's heroes will have to fight Nazis. Check these out if you don't belive me:
X-Files
Galactica 1980
Lois and Clark
Sliders
Lone Gunmen
Screw it, I can't list them all. Search Google and you'll find Nazis in all sorts of science fiction and fantasy shows, including failed shows (or maybe I should say, especially failed shows) like "Brimstone", "Time Cop", and "The Burning Zone".
It's just like Godwin's Law: Eventually, every sci-fi series must have a "Nazi episode". And then it gets cancelled.
I blame this on lazy writers, and an unhealthy abundance of cheap Nazi costumes in Hollywood.
Your belief is incorrect. There is no federal law that unequivocally forbids requiring identifcation to vote, although many people (including, the ACLU ) insist an ID requirement should be considered a poll tax, just as you do. Many states forbid requiring ID.
But in fact, one federal law requires identification for some voters. The Help America Vote Act (passed in 2002) requires first-time voters to show identification if they registered by mail and didn't include a driver's license number (or the last 4 digits of their SSN -- at least SSNs are free) on the registration form.
(This weird rule was added at the behest of Congressional Republicans, who apparently think the Democrats make up voters. That's silly. Democracts don't use imaginary voters, they used dead voters.)
Two big problems with the HAVA identification requirement:
"First time voter" actually means "first time voter in a given state", so if you move to another state, you'll need to be carded again. If that's not inconvienent enough, Oregon thinks people need to show ID every time they change counties.
The whole carding scheme requires states to have a state-wide voter registration database. Not all states have this. (In fact, most don't.) If a state doesn't have the database ready for 2006, it will have to card people more often. Santa Cruz county thinks they'll have to card everyone. Won't that be fun for them?
Oh, and technically, Arizona requires ID for every voter. New Mexico is thinking about it. Some states require ID before they'll give someone a provisional ballot. And I don't even want to think about what happens when Republicans go around contesting people's voter registrations....
My PC's power supply is making a loud buzzing noise, so I've unbolted it from the case, sat it on the floor, and smothered it with a pillow. Actually replacing the power supply can wait until the next time I'm gainfully employed, or when the damn thing bursts into flames. Whichever comes first, you know?
(The power supply has done this a couple of times before, but I was always able to "repair" it by smacking the thing with a screwdriver handle. No such luck this time.)
1) The RSS-developer community has a completely irrational fear of MIME. They never completed the registration of the application/rss+xml media type, and they've shown no interest in doing so. Weiner and the gang want to use text/xml for everything, which makes it harder to separate RSS out of a newsgroup (or anything else; more on that below).
2) The RSS developer community can't picture themselves using anything except HTTP. I've tried mentioning other protocols to them; they don't respond.
3) NOBODY MAKES RSS READERS THAT WORK IN A PIPE!. Seriously. Is it really so hard to envisage somebody piping an RSS file in from the command line? Apparently, it is for the people who write RSS readers: they make you cut-and-paste URIs into a form before you can do anything with an RSS file.
Seriously, RSS over netnews wouldn't really require any new Big Ideas, just a smart re-application of the Old Ideas:
1) Post RSS files to Usenet with proper "Content-Type" and "Supersedes" headers to an appropriate newsgroup. (Maybe some new RSS-friendly newsgroups; maybe the old ones. We can figure that out later. The important thing is: This wouldn't be any more difficult than posting a FAQ is.)
2) Use newsgroup-capable RSS-readers to poll the newsgroups, and/or use regular newsreaders to pipe RSS files to dedicated RSS-readers.
3) Profit! Or at least, Fewer Accidental DDoS attaacks!
I could do Step 1 now, without significant effort. (It's no more difficult than posting a newsgroup FAQ.) Step 2 requires a real programmer, which I am not.
(In fact, you know what would be great? A combined newsgroup/RSS reader. It makes more sense than all those RSS readers patterned after e-mail programs. But I digress.)
Maybe I'm getting cynical in my old age, but I'm beginning to think this is the UNIX/Windows divide all over again. A lot of the RSS developer community comes from a Windows/Mac developer background, so they just don't see the potential of the toolbox approach, even while they're rambling about the extensibility of XML and it's "user-centric" design.
Take for example, the refusal to get a real media type for RSS: A unique MIME type would help web browsers, too, because browsers can use media types to decide which plug-in gets which file. Instead of making a user cut-and-paste URIs from his browser to his reader (which is a dreadfully Window-ish way of doing it), the user could just click on the RSS link and the web browser could launch the RSS reader by itself (which presumbably would do something smart, like ask the user if they want to subscribe to a new feed). Just like all those other plug-ins and non-HTML formats on the Web!
Makes sense, yes? But it doesn't register with anybody creating RSS readers. Some programmers still advocate the cutting-and-pasting of URIs. Some programmers advocated auto-discovery by reading HTML "link" elements. Some advocate complicated cloud/stream schemes. But nobody wants to talk about re-using basic, functional tools that we've had in the toolbox for 10, 15, or 25 years.
Some days, it's like the "RSS developers" are from another planet. And I want to send them all back.
I assume that because it's true. Each TLD has exactly one registry, because you need a central registry to compile the TLD's zone file.
You do know the registries create zone files, don't you?
You're going to have to help me out here: In this parallel universe of yours, who is paying the bills for managing all these TLDs? Letting anybody create a TLD and dump the responsibility on a stranger seems to put all the burden of the system on people running the registries. That isn't really any more equitable than the current system; at best, it's just inequitable in a different manner.
No, it won't. Frivolous people will continue to do frivolous things no matter how much you mangle the domain name system.
Also, not all domain-related legal actions are frivolous. (Look at the sex.com case, for example.) Running a TLD is going to involve legal expenses no matter what: somebody has to be able to pay for that.
Agreed, but that's a social/legal problem, not a technical one. DNS anarchy will not make people smarter.
Now that you mention it, I had considered comparing TLD-creators to newsgroups moderators, but I thought the comparison might be too obscure.
TLDs neglected by their creators would be a lot like newsgroups that have "lost" their moderators: Disappointing to people who wanted to use the TLD, and a minor nuisance to everyone involved in managing the DNS.
Would neglected TLDs just sit there forever, making people wonder what they're for? Or, would the abandoned TLDs just get dropped from the root servers? Or, would new TLD-managers be allowed to take over the TLD and retroactively set new policies for it? What happens when two different people want to take over an abandoned TLD?
A free-for-all DNS would not be a shiny happy anarchy free of bureaucratic procedures. It would be a loud, tedious anarchy full of ad hoc solutions and petty turf wars.
I don't think chaos is a clever solution to the current problems. Most countries regulate utilties (electricity, water, phone systems, etc.) because those utilities are important enough to society that stability is worth the paperwork. The domain name system is important, too.
Simple rule: If you wouldn't want your water company being run out of your neighbor's basement, you probably don't want your TLD run out of it, either.
Instead, it would encourage every lunatic and his brother to "create" as many TLDs as they can think of, in case they think of that accidentally becomes valuable. It would just move domain-speculation up the TLD level. We'd have TLDs being created nearly at random, not used, poorly managed, and dropped when "the registry" loses interest. Try to picture an Internet where an entire TLD can become nonresponsive just because the "anyone" who created it doesn't want the job anymore.
The Internet would not be served well by TLDs becoming as undependable as the average domain. While I'm not convinced that ICANN is perfect, I am pretty sure that we need some vetting and regulation of new TLDs to make sure that TLD registries are serious proposals, and not fly-by-night operations.
It could be worse: When I worked tech support, I was rated on how many domain names I sold to customers. Keep in mind, I was working for a domain registrar, so most people were calling to complain about their current domains, so few of them were really in a hurry to register new ones.
So, the worst explanation I've ever given would have been something like "You just need to wait a day for the DNS changes to propagate. By the way, to you want to protect your internet identity? We're having a special on
That job didn't end well for me. I'm a good support tech, but a lousy telemarketer. Came into work one day and found out I been terminated for not meeting the secret sales quota. Fucking GoDaddy.
Huh. Guess I am still bitter about it.
.xxx is once again one of the new TLDs being considered by ICANN, but everybody with a brain knows it won't work. Among other things, you'll never get a world-wide definition of "XXX content", let alone a world-wide law for keeping XXX content in a .xxx TLD. (The nations of the world still can't agree on the what's a "good war" and what's a "bad war"; there's no way they'll agree on the difference between "good nudity" and "bad nudity".)
.xxx won't work as advertised. There's also RFC 3675.
.xxx, you'll notice a frightening progression: .xxx supporters say ".xxx will protect children." Saner people point out how it won't. Lusers respond with increasinly draconian suggestions for regulating the Internet, like blocking all connections between the United States and countries that don't abide by U.S. laws about adult content.
.xxx is support for Internet censorship. Please don't encourage those people.
In fact, the TimBL paper we're supposed to be talking about includes a link to one explanation of why
If you look at the recently closed public comment period on
Support for
Replying to myself to add: Matt Dwells just called me at home to complain about my review of Gigablast. He apparently thinks I wrote a negative review of his site because I was abused as a child. It's an interesting theory, to say the least.
I wonder if he's planning to call everybody who criticized Gigablast in this thread?
I have heard of Gigablast, but I've never been impressed by it. (I wrote a review back in 2002.) Most search engine optimizers love Gigablast, however, because it's such an easy engine to game.
It's a fairly old-school engine: indexes whatever it can and favors pages that are keyword-heavy. It's almost too easy to spam. I don't think there's anything PageRank-like in the algorithm, otherwise, it wouldn't be able to add pages to the index "instantly". (PageRank is too computationally intensive for that.) Gigablast still thinks meta-tags are a great idea! While the hardware setup might be innovative (I'll leave that to the hardware experts to decide), the engine software itself seems about ten years behind the times.
Like many posters here, I doubt a one-man outfit is going to take down Google (although many search engine optimizers would like it to). Gigablast has had two years to make an impression, and it hasn't. A company on an acquisistion binge might be crazy enough to buy it, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
Look at the page you linked to. ZoneAlarm isn't listed as compromised product. It's not even made by the same company as the compromised programs.
NNTP could be used now, if RSS aggregators were designed to play well with other programs. Feed providers could slap an application/rss+xml MIME header on their RSS file, post them to Usenet (maybe to dedicated RSS feed newsgroups, or maybe to regular topic newsgroups; we can figure that out later), and let netnews distribute the files. (With proper use of "Supersedes" headers, we wouldn't even have to worry about duplicate feeds; an RSS group would be like an *.answers group -- too scary for browsing, but easy to automate.)
End-users could subscribe to an RSS-feed newsgroup on their local news servers and filter the newsgroup so that RSS files go straight into an aggegator. Voila! RSS over Usenet, and the bandwidth pressure is taken off the feed originator.
(Hell, RSS could be distributed by e-mail, too, if everybody involved grokked MIME and plugins.)
The problem, of course, is that there aren't any aggregators that work in a pipe, because RSS development has been driven by people who learned to program in a Windows-based universe instead of the UNIX-based universe that produced netnews and the Web. It's all cut-and-paste or drag-and-drop. (Most RSS apps aren't even MIME-aware.)
You know, if feed reader authors made more flexible software, there might actually be some innovation in this field.