I've developed a stock market theory that will earn anyone a million dollars in a month.
Purchase Corel stock on the even days.
Sell it on the odd days.
If you look at its performance charts, the damn stock bounces up and down more than a hooker on an over-inflated airbed.
Every even day, it soars 10%.
Every odd day, it drops 10%.
So, basically, you're increasing your money at 10% a day, if you buy low and sell high. Doesn't take long to parlay your initial $500 investment into a million!
Disclaimer: I have no money invested in Corel, I am not an investment analyst, and I haven't performed adequate research into this stock market theory. However, a quick eyeball of the charts seems to indicate that Corel stock just may be the ideal day-trader's pick.:-)
How curious. I just ordered the Ventura demo CD from them. Their 1-800 service was beyond excellent. I also had an EMail exchange with someone in the training department, concerning a bug on one of their web pages. His response, too, was professional, polite and helpful. Finally, I've cruised their private newsgroups: their CS reps in those groups are also providing excellent service.
What leads you to say that their customer service is poor?
Er, no. Amaya, the W3C browser, and Opera get closer than anyone else. I believe that at this point, even Mozilla gets more right in some areas than MSIE.
MSIE is, however, undoubtedly more compliant than anything Netscape has done recently.
I'd like to suggest that everyone who is a web author, and certainly everyone who makes any claim to be a web designer, should read Steve McConnell's "Rapid Development: Taming Wild Software Schedules" and "Software Development Survival Guide." They are recognized as authorative, leading texts on Best Practices in software design.
Web design is similar to software design, and you will learn how to do your work faster, better and with fewer mistakes. You will learn the importance of emphasizing up-front design (it's a minimum twenty times cheaper to catch your errors early than later) and how to control risks, client change demands and schedules.
You can visit Steve's site [here], where you'll find some outtakes from his books, his columns on software development best practices, and other good stuff.
I'm quite astounded by a few things in this discussion.
One, that so many people are so rational about it. A lot of people really do seem to appreciate that the restriction enables parents to gain more control over their ability to effectively parent their children. It makes the purchase/rental decision an adult's decision, not a child's.
Two, that there seem to be a fair number of people who simply can not have had much interaction with children. Anyone who says that "hey, you can teach them the difference" isn't talking about very young children! Up to a moderate age (I'd say about 9ish), kids are simply incapable of completely differentiating between reality and fantasy. I don't believe any child under the age of ten-ish should be experiencing extremely violent, abusive or sexual material.
Three: I'm completely astounded that someone thought BC is in Britain. My god.
Four: Look up "Temple Grandin" on the web. She designs the enclosures and systems that lead cattle to death in the slaughter yard. Take note that she very carefully designs these structures to keep the cows relaxed and happy as they meet their doom. Frightened meat isn't very good meat.
For what it's worth, I believe we're rapidly entering a Dark Ages of our own.
The Internet had the potential to be the greatest tool ever invented for the sharing of knowledge and ideas.
The current governments are hellbent on restricting its use. Look to Britain's RIP, USA's Carnivore, Singapore's and China's filtering, Australia's restrictions and so on.
Look at the use of patents to repress development of competing technologies.
Look at the use of lawsuits to destroy information-sharing, including music, business reporting and political reporting.
Our newspapers are public mindset manipulation tools for big business, television is a pacifier for the masses, and Hollywood is hellbent on rewriting history.
The public, and the American public in particular, is becoming massively misinformed and ever more ignorant of history, business practices and the proper role of government.
The product won't be free-as-in-beer... but is anyone whinging on about that?
Hell, no. It's exciting, it's going to be great, whoo look at the speed!
How very different from the response to other products that aren't free-as-in-beer.
Corel releases powerful, useful software... and all they get is a kick in the goolies from the Slashdot crowd. Endless bitching about it being closed-source, about it costing money, about it coming from a Windows platform.
More and more, I develop the opinion that the majority of Linux users are jackasses. They want the world to come to Linux, but they don't want Linux to be truly useful to the majority of people. In their opinion "if it's not a development tool, it's shite!"
Linux won't be used by the general population until it has easy-to-use, general-purpose tools, like word processors, checkbook managers and a few games. With this current attitude toward practical popular tools, it'll be a loooong time before it gets there.
But, hey, Kylix will help you spooge your 133T H4X0R sK1Llz!
Everyone and their dog is going to say that you know lots about your car.
What they're ignoring is the validity in what you say. Instead of focusing on your point, which I think was very well made, they're going to nitpick at the illustration you used to carry the concept.
Well, then, let's change the illustration:
I know bugger all about how my microwave works. If it went on the fritz, I wouldn't know the first thing to do. It'd hit the garbage, and I'd buy a new one. There's enough scary things in it that I *don't* want to muck about trying to repair it!
I don't know how my television works. There's a couple of lines into it, and a couple buttons on it, and it works. If anything goes wonky, it's off to the repair shop.
Same goes for the VCR. If it ate a tape, I'd recognize that that's a different sort of problem than a wobbly picture. In both cases, it'd go to a technician.
There a people who see their computer the same way I see a microwave: a scary black box that does magic.
I can't blame them for not wanting to dink around with it. After all, if you let the smoke out, it stops working!
The public is becoming informed -- and will become a lot more informed as more artists speak out -- about the abusive accounting system of the big music publishers.
There is no way in hell that I will *EVER* pay Sony $3-5 a song for an MP3 that I'm downloading over an Internet connection that *I* have to pay for.
Internet distribution effectively eliminates all the costs of delivery *for the publisher* and places that cost entirely on the consumer. And the consumer then carries *all* the cost of creating a permanent record of the music, either as an MP3 chewing up HD space, a CDROM or a minidisc.
The publishers gain huge advantage. The consumer is put over a barrel and takes it up the bum.
And the artists? They're right there with us consumers, getting buggered for their labour, going broke for being driven to make music.
No *FUCKING* way will Sony see me pay $3-5 a song over the Internet.
But would I pay an artist a buck a song? Damn straight I would, if I knew that the majority of my payment was going to the artist and not a sleazebag that's put her over a barrel.
I've no problem exchanging my money for products of fair value. A song that I listen to frequently -- that's worth a buck.
But only when that buck is making a difference to someone who really counts. And in my books, promoters, DJs, managers and Sony's CEO *DO NOT* count.
Those are good points, and they have precedence in the previous information revolution.
For a phenomenally good overview of the furor created when printing presses made publishing inexpensive, and thus threatened the profits and power of the traditional publishing houses, see [The Copyright Story].
You'll certainly be able to see the parallels: - how the publishers told tales of hardship and despair at the loss of their licensing control - how publishers owned the works, not the authors - how book piracy increased the popularity of books (and literacy) in Germany - how authors eventually came to own their own works, instead of the damned publishers - how copyright was originally intended to promote the development and spread of ideas, and came to be bastardized into mere corporate profits.
This is only one chapter of the fellow's dissertation. Give it a go!
If you earn little enough, you don't pay taxes. Of course, you'll want to finangle it so that taxes aren't being taken off at source, so that you're not effectively loaning the government your money interest-free for the year.
The benefit to having spammers junk-print Internet printers is that *FINALLY* businesses will pressure governments to make spamming illegal.
'cause it'll cost them real dollars, in real goods, to print the junkmail. Right now, it's all just airy-fairy "virtual" spam, which they somehow don't consider to have a real cost.
People rag on patents that are overly broad or are obvious.
Several of the Rambus patents are dead obvious. Like using the leading and falling edge -- they weren't the first to think of it, by a looooong shot: they merely happened to be the first to patent - note, patent, not apply it - to memory.
Likewise, the Amazon one-click. AFAIK, they didn't invent it: they just managed to patent it, and no one who did do it as prior art wishes to invest resources in trying to prove it. Especially as applies web design: it's a bitch to prove that your work was dated '94 and not '99.
Patents aren't bad.
But they are being put to bad use. Patenting obvious methods that you didn't invent is bad.
If you snailmail your wishlist to Santa Claus North Pole Canada H0H 0H0 you will receive a reply back. Tho' perhaps you need to enclose a SASE.
It's run by Santa's elves, in the form of retired postmen/mistresses and a ton of other volunteers.
Please don't Slashdot 'em!
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Re:My Suggested Solution:
on
Pirate DNS?
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· Score: 2
A multinational company is registered for business trade in multiple countries. The guy in the Azores would require a branch office in the USA to be considered multinational.
Yes, the fansite is conducting business. The money that the owner of the site is making is supposed to be reported to the tax authorities, as it is considered income. The owner may wish to formally register it as a business, for the tax advantages.
Re: Slashdot, yes. It is a hassle, I know.
No, I don't plan to rape you. Yes, your associate program means that you are conducting business. If your tax authority finds out that you're not paying taxes on that money, you'll regret not having formally set it up as a business!
If you start tying flies, you'll probably get a www.lickmyfly.mytown.bs.cc domain; it'll probably be a state-registered business, not a nationally-registered one. Of course, if you never do any business, the tax authorities will be conducting a hostile investigation: they frown on businesses-as-a-tax-dodge.
The challenge you're having understanding/accepting my proposal is that you don't think you're doing business on your site, despite the fact that it's designed to make money for you.
I assure you, your tax authorities will penalize you if they find out. They expect you to report your income from your site, no matter how piddling the amount is.
You don't have to register your business (as long as you're doing business under your own name, with no extra bits of fluff attached to it), but this means you have to pay taxes at personal income taxation levels.
If your site is making you any decent amounts of money, it's worth spending the fifty-odd dollars it will cost you to get a business license. You'll then be able to write off some business expenses (the portion of your home used for business, ditto for electricity, hardware, travel, etc, and your hosting costs). You'll pay less tax.
Now, back to your flies. Sure, you might try to sell your flies on a.personal website. But if someone comes along and decides that they want the www.lickmyfly.personal.mytown.bb website, they'll have it: just whinge to your ISP that you're carrying on business, and you'll have lost it.
Oh, yah, that's some rough and tough and unfair.
But it solves a helluva lot more problems that it creates. Toe the line for the rules, and you don't get in trouble: register your business and you own the www.lickmyfly.bc.cc domain.
Find a friend in Australia who'll go in with you, set him up as a branch office, pay up the registration fees and you can even have www.lickmyfly.com domain.
And your yearly AGM can be held on the beaches of Galapogos Island, and entirely written off as a business expense!
If you'd like to really make a difference, you might cruise over to [Heifer.org] and take a gander at their charity system.
They set villages up with livestock. They're used for labour, for their eggs/milk/fleece/whatever, or they're bred (for food).
Most impressive is the ratio of administration-to-assistance. Only about 8% of your donation goes toward administring the charity; another 16% goes to fundraising. The remaining 75% goes to the people that are being helped.
It's a lot better than most programs, where the ratios are often quite the reverse (most of the money going to paycheques for fatcat administrators).
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Re:My Suggested Solution:
on
Pirate DNS?
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· Score: 2
Whoops. One flaw: some trademarks are shared by companies.
In which case, they'll have to have a redirection web page. They can co-operate to list their homepage links on the homepage.
They'll have to argue about who gets top billing and so on, but what the hell.
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My Suggested Solution:
on
Pirate DNS?
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· Score: 2
Part of the problem with the current DNS system is that the TLDs weren't developed with the idea that soon there'd be umpteen billion websites. None of the growth of the Internet was adequately planned for.
MY PROPOSAL:
The.com TLD goes to multinational companies, and can only be registered for their tradename and trademarks. They can only register domains for products (www.slimfast.com), trademarks (www.therealthing.com) and tradenames (www.exxon.com). If they don't own the words, they don't get to register them.
The country code TLDs go to big businesses with national registration. Same rules apply as for the.com domain.
The state/province domains go to small businesses, ones that are not nationally registered. Same rules as above.
City/county-specific domains go to businesses as well. This allows franchises and such to deal with their local community.
You can't register a name that's being used more broadly than your use of it: you can't get a state name if someone has the national registration.
This exactly matches the real-world rules for registering your business with the government. There can be no domain name conflicts, because the government doesn't allow real-world name conflicts. Where there are, the domain solution will exactly match the real-world, government/court solutions.
New TLDs are created for other uses.
A.xxx/.sex domain is needed, without a doubt. It's open for businesses and people, with no rules about names: you can register phrases, words, tradenames and trademarks that you own, what-have-you. No country/state/city codes are mandated. If you want them, you can have them (allowing www.goatsluts.redmond.wa.us to list prices for the locals).
The.org domain goes to registered non-profits. The big user groups and so on will have to get a bit more formal. Non-profits that operate as a business (Oxfam & such) will probably also want to register their.com/.cc domain.
International non-profits get a plain.org; national/state/provincial ones will be in the appropriate form of www.goatsluts.city.state.cc.
The naming rules of the.coms applies to.orgs. Note that a lot of community groups (ARSTechnica, PlanetNameYourGame) are profitable ventures and would be registered as.com/.cc entities. If they want to the TLD entry, they'll have to provide proof of international business registrations!
Where do personal pages fit in? As sub-domains of a country code. I suggest www.goatsluts.personal.cc. There are no naming rules: you can use tradenames, trademarks, phrases, words, whatever. And, no, companies can't shut you down for using a trademark or tradename: the "personal" subdomain makes it very clear that this is *not* a business page.
I'm not stuck on naming it "personal," but it does have to make it clear that the page isn't a business-authorized one. An internationally-recognized word would be good.
ISPs will be responsible for not allowing business to be conducted on personal pages. No ad banners, no shopping carts, no promoting one's business. The enforcement rule: if someone wants your domain name and discovers that you're doing business, they'll report you to your ISP, and you'll lose your domain.
Ergo, you *can* sneakily do business on a.personal.cc page, but you're at risk of losing it if you're successful. 'cause if you're successful, you should be a registered business (otherwise you take the far greater risk of having your ass nailed to the wall for tax evasion!)
And, of course, if you do business using someone's trademark or tradename, then you're going to get into hot legal water when they discover you.
Most registrations will be handled by the country represented by the.cc TLD, however they see fit (could be a government service; could be privatized; could be contracted to NSI, even).
The international domains will be handled by NSI.
The key advantage to all this is that it opens up the domain name space.
It sensibly restricts what names businesses can use, while opening up all possibilities for private users.
It eliminates camping: businesses own their trademarks/tradenames, and.personal users aren't going to cough up big bucks.
It recognizes that non-competing businesses (ie. businesses in different states/countries) may want to register the same name (and differentiates them by the.state.cc postfix).
It recognizes that big businesses own their names/marks, and that little businesses don't get to name themselves after a national/international business.
In short, it seems to work very well, and for that reason alone will probably never come to pass...
Part of the problem is that the TLDs weren't developed with the idea that soon there'd be umpteen billion websites. None of the growth of the Internet was adequately planned for.
I like the system Canada is using. If you are publishing a personal web page, your address is www.[whatever].city.province.ca.
The only way you get provincial or national domains is if you are a registered business. National domains go to businesses that are federally registered (do business in more than one province).
There can not be name collisions with this system. If a company has a federal registration, no other business can register the same name. A smart company will also trademark their name, offering further protection against infringement.
As well, owners of a national domain own all the provincial domains as well. There will never be a www.[whatever].ca and www.[whatever].bc.ca. I suspect provincial owners also own all the city domains.
The result is that for a person/company in BC: a) for the personal webpage "goatsluts," your domain will be www.goatsluts.mytown.bc.ca. b) for a business offering goatslut services as a BC-registered company, it'll be www.goatsluts.bc.ca. c) for a national goatsluts business, it'll be www.goatsluts.ca.
The only flaw in this system so far is that those people who own web pages that use a company tradename may risk losing their domain if the company registers its domain (national > provincial > city).
MY PROPOSAL:
The.com TLD goes to multinational companies, and can only be registered for their tradename and trademarks. They can not register generic domains (www.loseweight.com), only domains for products (www.slimfast.com), trademarks (www.therealthing.com) and tradenames (www.exxon.com).
The country code TLDs go to big businesses with national registration. Same rules apply as for the.com domain.
The state/province domains go to small businesses, ones that are not nationally registered. Same rules as above.
City/county-specific domains go to businesses as well. This allows franchises and such to deal with their local community.
New TLDs are created for other uses.
A.xxx/.sex domain is needed, without a doubt. It's open for businesses and people, with no rules about names: you can register phrases, words, tradenames, trademarks, what-have-you. No country/state/city codes are mandated. If you want them, you can have them (allowing www.goatsluts.mytown.bc.ca to list prices for the locals).
The.org domain goes to registered non-profits. The big user groups and so on will have to get a bit more formal. Non-profits that operate as a business (Oxfam & such) will probably also want to register their.com/.cc domain.
International non-profits get a plain.org; national/state/provincial ones will be in the appropriate form of www.goatsluts.city.state.cc.
The naming rules of the.coms applies to.orgs.
Note that a lot of community groups (ARSTechnica, PlanetNameYourGame) are profitable ventures and would be registered as.com/.cc entities. If they want to the TLD entry, they'll have to provide proof of international business registrations!
Where do personal pages fit in? As sub-domains of a country code. I suggest www.goatsluts.personal.cc. There are no naming rules: you can use tradenames, trademarks, phrases, words, whatever. And, no, companies can't shut you down for using a trademark or tradename: the "personal" subdomain makes it very clear that this is *not* a business page.
I'm not stuck on naming it "personal," but it does have to make it clear that the page isn't a business-authorized one. An internationally-recognized word would be good.
ISPs will be responsible for not allowing business to be conducted on personal pages. No ad banners, no shopping carts, no promoting one's business.
The enforcement rule: if someone wants your domain name and discovers that you're doing business, they'll report you to your ISP, and you'll lose your domain. Ergo, you *can* sneakily do business on a.personal.cc page, but you're at risk of losing it if you're successful. 'cause if you're successful, you should be a registered business (otherwise you take the far greater risk of having your ass nailed to the wall for tax evasion!)
Most registrations will be handled by the country represented by the.cc TLD, however they see fit (could be a government service; could be privatized; could be contracted to NSI, even). The international domains will be handled by NSI. The key advantage to all this is that it opens up the domain name space.
It sensibly restricts what names businesses can use, while opening up all possibilities for private users.
It eliminates camping: businesses own their trademarks/tradenames, and.personal users aren't going to cough up big bucks.
It recognizes that non-competing businesses (ie. businesses in different states/countries) may want to register the same name (and differentiates them by the.state.cc postfix).
It recognizes that big businesses own their names/marks, and that little businesses don't get to name themselves after a national/international business.
In short, it seems to work very well, and for that reason alone will probably never come to pass...
Based on the senior engineer job posting that someone else mentioned, some of the discussion here and a bit of creative thinking, here's what I believe they are doing:
They are developing localized web advertising. They are working to resolve IP addresses to physical locations: cities and neighbourhoods.
Once they've built a map that translates virtual space to realspace, they can sell advertising services that are far more effective.
Your local retailers, for instance, can advertise to you. Just like they do in your newspaper, only in banner format.
Further, they will be able to target your demographic specifically. Some neighbourhoods are richer than others. No point in selling you McDonald's advertising if you're of La Maison Rouge quality.
The traceroute information is a useful tool in narrowing the location. Plot a traceroute on a map, and you'll intuitively start guessing what part of the country it's going to end up in. At some point it resolves to your local ISP, which gives them your county or city.
Where ping fits in, I dunno, other than perhaps it provides the IP addresses for traceroute to digest. And there is useful information in being able to ping a machine and identify that it's still online in the dead of night: that implies it's a full-time connection, which means you're a cut above the average dial-up user.
What we'd all better hope is that there's no way for them to patent the map. Doing so would be the equivalent of having the patent for the map of all the roads in the country.
ooooh... and tie the IP addresses to DoubleClick's personal database, and they'll be able to do targeted snailmail advertising. If you've got a fulltime connect, your IP is as good as your street address. If you're dialup, the number is shared with others in your locale... but all of you are a distinctly different demographic than the population that doesn't access the Internet.
And, tied to the DC's database, they can really get into the psychographic stuff. "This IP reads a lot of pr0n; this one is a snowboarding junkie; here's one that's been researching home decorating..."
I'm more and more positive that this is their goal!
It's redundent because it follows up a message that has exactly the same link.
Unfortunately, whoever wrote the original message wrote it to be so damned boring and uninformative that it wasn't getting the attention it deserved.
I don't moderate, so I decided that the best way to get people to realize that the brochure is based on a Microsoft site was to write a more detailed, more attractive message.
So the moderator is technically correct, but stupid. Way to go. Nothing like making Slashdot discussions *LESS* informative than they already are.
"Links to pages that have not been seen by the user are blue; links to previously seen pages are purple or red. Don't mess with these colors since the ability to understand what links have been followed is one of the few navigational aides that is standard in most web browsers. Consistency is key to teaching users what the link colors mean."
"Continues to be a problem since users rely on the link colors to understand what parts of the site they have visited. I often see users bounce repeatedly among a small set of pages, not knowing that they are going back to the same page again and again. (Also, because non-standard link colors are unpleasantly frequent, users are now getting confused by any underlining of text that is not a link.)"
Anyway, I think blue and red are the correct colours, as I originally stated. I'd have to reinstall an ancient Netscape to verify that I (and Jakob) are right, though...
Microsoft really has gone off the deep end! They've actually created a [Freedom to Innovate] website -- they're actually trying to create a grassroots movement to support their monopoly!
Their [FAQ] deals with a whopping six questions, including "Why is it important that I join the Freedom to Innovate Network?" (because prosecuting Microsoft for monopoly practices "could severely impact... the technology industry "!?!).
There are links to [Bill G TV] (arrrgh!) and silly-assed statements like "Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates is the most admired man among information technology executives."
And then there are the pull-quotes: "I have Microsoft products because they are the BEST" (at what? abusing their monopoly powers?) and "Microsoft has been one of the innovators to realize the American Dream."
The only thing one can find to agree with on the site is in the homepage comment that appeared when I viewed it: "I fully intend to e-mail my representatives, and I hope they realize the important impact that Microsoft has had on the computing industry alone, and ALL the other industries as well."
I gotta agree: every American who has a clue should be writing their representative and expressing their support for the punishment of Microsoft for abusing their monopoly powers.
(footnote: why the heck has Slashdot buggered with the link colours? It's damnably difficult to tell what words are links without using []s to mark them out. Unviewed links should be bright blue: visited links should be red. It's the freaking de facto standard, and changing it is just a PITA for everyone.)
Slashdot Mirror
I got a sunburn this morning, around 10am to noon. I don't think I was in the sun long enough to have normally been burned.
And this two days after my doctor nagged me about being careful with sunburn.
I'm currently hunting for a UV index chart. I wanna see if I just experienced really bad timing...
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I've developed a stock market theory that will earn anyone a million dollars in a month.
:-)
Purchase Corel stock on the even days.
Sell it on the odd days.
If you look at its performance charts, the damn stock bounces up and down more than a hooker on an over-inflated airbed.
Every even day, it soars 10%.
Every odd day, it drops 10%.
So, basically, you're increasing your money at 10% a day, if you buy low and sell high. Doesn't take long to parlay your initial $500 investment into a million!
Disclaimer: I have no money invested in Corel, I am not an investment analyst, and I haven't performed adequate research into this stock market theory. However, a quick eyeball of the charts seems to indicate that Corel stock just may be the ideal day-trader's pick.
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How curious. I just ordered the Ventura demo CD from them. Their 1-800 service was beyond excellent. I also had an EMail exchange with someone in the training department, concerning a bug on one of their web pages. His response, too, was professional, polite and helpful. Finally, I've cruised their private newsgroups: their CS reps in those groups are also providing excellent service.
What leads you to say that their customer service is poor?
Their marketing... now *that* I'd agree is poor!
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Er, no. Amaya, the W3C browser, and Opera get closer than anyone else. I believe that at this point, even Mozilla gets more right in some areas than MSIE.
MSIE is, however, undoubtedly more compliant than anything Netscape has done recently.
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Bravo, bravo, bravo!
I'd like to suggest that everyone who is a web author, and certainly everyone who makes any claim to be a web designer, should read Steve McConnell's "Rapid Development: Taming Wild Software Schedules" and "Software Development Survival Guide." They are recognized as authorative, leading texts on Best Practices in software design.
Web design is similar to software design, and you will learn how to do your work faster, better and with fewer mistakes. You will learn the importance of emphasizing up-front design (it's a minimum twenty times cheaper to catch your errors early than later) and how to control risks, client change demands and schedules.
You can visit Steve's site [here], where you'll find some outtakes from his books, his columns on software development best practices, and other good stuff.
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I'm quite astounded by a few things in this discussion.
:-)
One, that so many people are so rational about it. A lot of people really do seem to appreciate that the restriction enables parents to gain more control over their ability to effectively parent their children. It makes the purchase/rental decision an adult's decision, not a child's.
Two, that there seem to be a fair number of people who simply can not have had much interaction with children. Anyone who says that "hey, you can teach them the difference" isn't talking about very young children! Up to a moderate age (I'd say about 9ish), kids are simply incapable of completely differentiating between reality and fantasy. I don't believe any child under the age of ten-ish should be experiencing extremely violent, abusive or sexual material.
Three: I'm completely astounded that someone thought BC is in Britain. My god.
Four: Look up "Temple Grandin" on the web. She designs the enclosures and systems that lead cattle to death in the slaughter yard. Take note that she very carefully designs these structures to keep the cows relaxed and happy as they meet their doom. Frightened meat isn't very good meat.
Five: Plants are what food eat.
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For what it's worth, I believe we're rapidly entering a Dark Ages of our own.
The Internet had the potential to be the greatest tool ever invented for the sharing of knowledge and ideas.
The current governments are hellbent on restricting its use. Look to Britain's RIP, USA's Carnivore, Singapore's and China's filtering, Australia's restrictions and so on.
Look at the use of patents to repress development of competing technologies.
Look at the use of lawsuits to destroy information-sharing, including music, business reporting and political reporting.
Our newspapers are public mindset manipulation tools for big business, television is a pacifier for the masses, and Hollywood is hellbent on rewriting history.
The public, and the American public in particular, is becoming massively misinformed and ever more ignorant of history, business practices and the proper role of government.
If this isn't a Dark Ages, what is?
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The product won't be free-as-in-beer... but is anyone whinging on about that?
Hell, no. It's exciting, it's going to be great, whoo look at the speed!
How very different from the response to other products that aren't free-as-in-beer.
Corel releases powerful, useful software... and all they get is a kick in the goolies from the Slashdot crowd. Endless bitching about it being closed-source, about it costing money, about it coming from a Windows platform.
More and more, I develop the opinion that the majority of Linux users are jackasses. They want the world to come to Linux, but they don't want Linux to be truly useful to the majority of people. In their opinion "if it's not a development tool, it's shite!"
Linux won't be used by the general population until it has easy-to-use, general-purpose tools, like word processors, checkbook managers and a few games. With this current attitude toward practical popular tools, it'll be a loooong time before it gets there.
But, hey, Kylix will help you spooge your 133T H4X0R sK1Llz!
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Everyone and their dog is going to say that you know lots about your car.
What they're ignoring is the validity in what you say. Instead of focusing on your point, which I think was very well made, they're going to nitpick at the illustration you used to carry the concept.
Well, then, let's change the illustration:
I know bugger all about how my microwave works. If it went on the fritz, I wouldn't know the first thing to do. It'd hit the garbage, and I'd buy a new one. There's enough scary things in it that I *don't* want to muck about trying to repair it!
I don't know how my television works. There's a couple of lines into it, and a couple buttons on it, and it works. If anything goes wonky, it's off to the repair shop.
Same goes for the VCR. If it ate a tape, I'd recognize that that's a different sort of problem than a wobbly picture. In both cases, it'd go to a technician.
There a people who see their computer the same way I see a microwave: a scary black box that does magic.
I can't blame them for not wanting to dink around with it. After all, if you let the smoke out, it stops working!
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Sony is out to lunch.
The public is becoming informed -- and will become a lot more informed as more artists speak out -- about the abusive accounting system of the big music publishers.
There is no way in hell that I will *EVER* pay Sony $3-5 a song for an MP3 that I'm downloading over an Internet connection that *I* have to pay for.
Internet distribution effectively eliminates all the costs of delivery *for the publisher* and places that cost entirely on the consumer. And the consumer then carries *all* the cost of creating a permanent record of the music, either as an MP3 chewing up HD space, a CDROM or a minidisc.
The publishers gain huge advantage. The consumer is put over a barrel and takes it up the bum.
And the artists? They're right there with us consumers, getting buggered for their labour, going broke for being driven to make music.
No *FUCKING* way will Sony see me pay $3-5 a song over the Internet.
But would I pay an artist a buck a song? Damn straight I would, if I knew that the majority of my payment was going to the artist and not a sleazebag that's put her over a barrel.
I've no problem exchanging my money for products of fair value. A song that I listen to frequently -- that's worth a buck.
But only when that buck is making a difference to someone who really counts. And in my books, promoters, DJs, managers and Sony's CEO *DO NOT* count.
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Those are good points, and they have precedence in the previous information revolution.
For a phenomenally good overview of the furor created when printing presses made publishing inexpensive, and thus threatened the profits and power of the traditional publishing houses, see [The Copyright Story].
You'll certainly be able to see the parallels:
- how the publishers told tales of hardship and despair at the loss of their licensing control
- how publishers owned the works, not the authors
- how book piracy increased the popularity of books (and literacy) in Germany
- how authors eventually came to own their own works, instead of the damned publishers
- how copyright was originally intended to promote the development and spread of ideas, and came to be bastardized into mere corporate profits.
This is only one chapter of the fellow's dissertation. Give it a go!
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If you earn little enough, you don't pay taxes. Of course, you'll want to finangle it so that taxes aren't being taken off at source, so that you're not effectively loaning the government your money interest-free for the year.
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The benefit to having spammers junk-print Internet printers is that *FINALLY* businesses will pressure governments to make spamming illegal.
'cause it'll cost them real dollars, in real goods, to print the junkmail. Right now, it's all just airy-fairy "virtual" spam, which they somehow don't consider to have a real cost.
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People rag on patents that are overly broad or are obvious.
Several of the Rambus patents are dead obvious. Like using the leading and falling edge -- they weren't the first to think of it, by a looooong shot: they merely happened to be the first to patent - note, patent, not apply it - to memory.
Likewise, the Amazon one-click. AFAIK, they didn't invent it: they just managed to patent it, and no one who did do it as prior art wishes to invest resources in trying to prove it. Especially as applies web design: it's a bitch to prove that your work was dated '94 and not '99.
Patents aren't bad.
But they are being put to bad use. Patenting obvious methods that you didn't invent is bad.
--
If you snailmail your wishlist to
Santa Claus
North Pole
Canada
H0H 0H0
you will receive a reply back. Tho' perhaps you need to enclose a SASE.
It's run by Santa's elves, in the form of retired postmen/mistresses and a ton of other volunteers.
Please don't Slashdot 'em!
--
A multinational company is registered for business trade in multiple countries. The guy in the Azores would require a branch office in the USA to be considered multinational.
.personal website. But if someone comes along and decides that they want the www.lickmyfly.personal.mytown.bb website, they'll have it: just whinge to your ISP that you're carrying on business, and you'll have lost it.
Yes, the fansite is conducting business. The money that the owner of the site is making is supposed to be reported to the tax authorities, as it is considered income. The owner may wish to formally register it as a business, for the tax advantages.
Re: Slashdot, yes. It is a hassle, I know.
No, I don't plan to rape you. Yes, your associate program means that you are conducting business. If your tax authority finds out that you're not paying taxes on that money, you'll regret not having formally set it up as a business!
If you start tying flies, you'll probably get a www.lickmyfly.mytown.bs.cc domain; it'll probably be a state-registered business, not a nationally-registered one. Of course, if you never do any business, the tax authorities will be conducting a hostile investigation: they frown on businesses-as-a-tax-dodge.
The challenge you're having understanding/accepting my proposal is that you don't think you're doing business on your site, despite the fact that it's designed to make money for you.
I assure you, your tax authorities will penalize you if they find out. They expect you to report your income from your site, no matter how piddling the amount is.
You don't have to register your business (as long as you're doing business under your own name, with no extra bits of fluff attached to it), but this means you have to pay taxes at personal income taxation levels.
If your site is making you any decent amounts of money, it's worth spending the fifty-odd dollars it will cost you to get a business license. You'll then be able to write off some business expenses (the portion of your home used for business, ditto for electricity, hardware, travel, etc, and your hosting costs). You'll pay less tax.
Now, back to your flies. Sure, you might try to sell your flies on a
Oh, yah, that's some rough and tough and unfair.
But it solves a helluva lot more problems that it creates. Toe the line for the rules, and you don't get in trouble: register your business and you own the www.lickmyfly.bc.cc domain.
Find a friend in Australia who'll go in with you, set him up as a branch office, pay up the registration fees and you
can even have www.lickmyfly.com domain.
And your yearly AGM can be held on the beaches of Galapogos Island, and entirely written off as a business expense!
Now, let's hear your bright ideas.
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If you'd like to really make a difference, you might cruise over to [Heifer.org] and take a gander at their charity system.
They set villages up with livestock. They're used for labour, for their eggs/milk/fleece/whatever, or they're bred (for food).
Most impressive is the ratio of administration-to-assistance. Only about 8% of your donation goes toward administring the charity; another 16% goes to fundraising. The remaining 75% goes to the people that are being helped.
It's a lot better than most programs, where the ratios are often quite the reverse (most of the money going to paycheques for fatcat administrators).
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Whoops. One flaw: some trademarks are shared by companies.
In which case, they'll have to have a redirection web page. They can co-operate to list their homepage links on the homepage.
They'll have to argue about who gets top billing and so on, but what the hell.
--
Part of the problem with the current DNS system is that the TLDs weren't developed with the idea that soon there'd be umpteen billion websites. None of the growth of the Internet was adequately planned for.
.com TLD goes to multinational companies, and can only be registered for their tradename and trademarks. They can only register domains for products (www.slimfast.com), trademarks (www.therealthing.com) and tradenames (www.exxon.com). If they don't own the words, they don't get to register them.
.com domain.
.xxx/.sex domain is needed, without a doubt. It's open for businesses and people, with no rules about names: you can register phrases, words, tradenames and trademarks that you own, what-have-you. No country/state/city codes are mandated. If you want them, you can have them (allowing www.goatsluts.redmond.wa.us to list prices for the locals).
.org domain goes to registered non-profits. The big user groups and so on will have to get a bit more formal. Non-profits that operate as a business (Oxfam & such) will probably also want to register their .com/.cc domain.
.org; national/state/provincial ones will be in the appropriate form of www.goatsluts.city.state.cc.
.coms applies to .orgs. .com/.cc entities. If they want to the TLD entry, they'll have to provide proof of international business registrations!
.personal.cc page, but you're at risk of losing it if you're successful. 'cause if you're successful, you should be a registered business (otherwise you take the far greater risk of having your ass nailed to the wall for tax evasion!)
.cc TLD, however they see fit (could be a government service; could be privatized; could be contracted to NSI, even).
.personal users aren't going to cough up big bucks.
.state.cc postfix).
MY PROPOSAL:
The
The country code TLDs go to big businesses with national registration. Same rules apply as for the
The state/province domains go to small businesses, ones that are not nationally registered. Same rules as above.
City/county-specific domains go to businesses as well. This allows franchises and such to deal with their local community.
You can't register a name that's being used more broadly than your use of it: you can't get a state name if someone has the national registration.
This exactly matches the real-world rules for registering your business with the government. There can be no domain name conflicts, because the government doesn't allow real-world name conflicts. Where there are, the domain solution will exactly match the real-world, government/court solutions.
New TLDs are created for other uses.
A
The
International non-profits get a plain
The naming rules of the
Note that a lot of community groups (ARSTechnica, PlanetNameYourGame) are profitable ventures and would be registered as
Where do personal pages fit in? As sub-domains of a country code. I suggest www.goatsluts.personal.cc. There are no naming rules: you can use tradenames, trademarks, phrases, words, whatever. And, no, companies can't shut you down for using a trademark or tradename: the "personal" subdomain makes it very clear that this is *not* a business page.
I'm not stuck on naming it "personal," but it does have to make it clear that the page isn't a business-authorized one. An internationally-recognized word would be good.
ISPs will be responsible for not allowing business to be conducted on personal pages. No ad banners, no shopping carts, no promoting one's business.
The enforcement rule: if someone wants your domain name and discovers that you're doing business, they'll report you to your ISP, and you'll lose your domain.
Ergo, you *can* sneakily do business on a
And, of course, if you do business using someone's trademark or tradename, then you're going to get into hot legal water when they discover you.
Most registrations will be handled by the country represented by the
The international domains will be handled by NSI.
The key advantage to all this is that it opens up the domain name space.
It sensibly restricts what names businesses can use, while opening up all possibilities for private users.
It eliminates camping: businesses own their trademarks/tradenames, and
It recognizes that non-competing businesses (ie. businesses in different states/countries) may want to register the same name (and differentiates them by the
It recognizes that big businesses own their names/marks, and that little businesses don't get to name themselves after a national/international business.
In short, it seems to work very well, and for that reason alone will probably never come to pass...
--
I like the system Canada is using. If you are publishing a personal web page, your address is www.[whatever].city.province.ca.
The only way you get provincial or national domains is if you are a registered business. National domains go to businesses that are federally registered (do business in more than one province).
There can not be name collisions with this system. If a company has a federal registration, no other business can register the same name. A smart company will also trademark their name, offering further protection against infringement.
As well, owners of a national domain own all the provincial domains as well. There will never be a www.[whatever].ca and www.[whatever].bc.ca. I suspect provincial owners also own all the city domains.
The result is that for a person/company in BC: a) for the personal webpage "goatsluts," your domain will be www.goatsluts.mytown.bc.ca. b) for a business offering goatslut services as a BC-registered company, it'll be www.goatsluts.bc.ca. c) for a national goatsluts business, it'll be www.goatsluts.ca.
The only flaw in this system so far is that those people who own web pages that use a company tradename may risk losing their domain if the company registers its domain (national > provincial > city).
MY PROPOSAL:
The .com TLD goes to multinational companies, and can only be registered for their tradename and trademarks. They can not register generic domains (www.loseweight.com), only domains for products (www.slimfast.com), trademarks (www.therealthing.com) and tradenames (www.exxon.com).
The country code TLDs go to big businesses with national registration. Same rules apply as for the .com domain.
The state/province domains go to small businesses, ones that are not nationally registered. Same rules as above.
City/county-specific domains go to businesses as well. This allows franchises and such to deal with their local community.
New TLDs are created for other uses.
A .xxx/.sex domain is needed, without a doubt. It's open for businesses and people, with no rules about names: you can register phrases, words, tradenames, trademarks, what-have-you. No country/state/city codes are mandated. If you want them, you can have them (allowing www.goatsluts.mytown.bc.ca to list prices for the locals).
The .org domain goes to registered non-profits. The big user groups and so on will have to get a bit more formal. Non-profits that operate as a business (Oxfam & such) will probably also want to register their .com/.cc domain.
International non-profits get a plain .org; national/state/provincial ones will be in the appropriate form of www.goatsluts.city.state.cc.
The naming rules of the .coms applies to .orgs.
Note that a lot of community groups (ARSTechnica, PlanetNameYourGame) are profitable ventures and would be registered as .com/.cc entities. If they want to the TLD entry, they'll have to provide proof of international business registrations!
Where do personal pages fit in? As sub-domains of a country code. I suggest www.goatsluts.personal.cc. There are no naming rules: you can use tradenames, trademarks, phrases, words, whatever. And, no, companies can't shut you down for using a trademark or tradename: the "personal" subdomain makes it very clear that this is *not* a business page.
I'm not stuck on naming it "personal," but it does have to make it clear that the page isn't a business-authorized one. An internationally-recognized word would be good.
ISPs will be responsible for not allowing business to be conducted on personal pages. No ad banners, no shopping carts, no promoting one's business.
The enforcement rule: if someone wants your domain name and discovers that you're doing business, they'll report you to your ISP, and you'll lose your domain. Ergo, you *can* sneakily do business on a .personal.cc page, but you're at risk of losing it if you're successful. 'cause if you're successful, you should be a registered business (otherwise you take the far greater risk of having your ass nailed to the wall for tax evasion!)
Most registrations will be handled by the country represented by the .cc TLD, however they see fit (could be a government service; could be privatized; could be contracted to NSI, even). The international domains will be handled by NSI. The key advantage to all this is that it opens up the domain name space.
It sensibly restricts what names businesses can use, while opening up all possibilities for private users.
It eliminates camping: businesses own their trademarks/tradenames, and .personal users aren't going to cough up big bucks.
It recognizes that non-competing businesses (ie. businesses in different states/countries) may want to register the same name (and differentiates them by the .state.cc postfix).
It recognizes that big businesses own their names/marks, and that little businesses don't get to name themselves after a national/international business.
In short, it seems to work very well, and for that reason alone will probably never come to pass...
--
Based on the senior engineer job posting that someone else mentioned, some of the discussion here and a bit of creative thinking, here's what I believe they are doing:
They are developing localized web advertising. They are working to resolve IP addresses to physical locations: cities and neighbourhoods.
Once they've built a map that translates virtual space to realspace, they can sell advertising services that are far more effective.
Your local retailers, for instance, can advertise to you. Just like they do in your newspaper, only in banner format.
Further, they will be able to target your demographic specifically. Some neighbourhoods are richer than others. No point in selling you McDonald's advertising if you're of La Maison Rouge quality.
The traceroute information is a useful tool in narrowing the location. Plot a traceroute on a map, and you'll intuitively start guessing what part of the country it's going to end up in. At some point it resolves to your local ISP, which gives them your county or city.
Where ping fits in, I dunno, other than perhaps it provides the IP addresses for traceroute to digest. And there is useful information in being able to ping a machine and identify that it's still online in the dead of night: that implies it's a full-time connection, which means you're a cut above the average dial-up user.
What we'd all better hope is that there's no way for them to patent the map. Doing so would be the equivalent of having the patent for the map of all the roads in the country.
ooooh... and tie the IP addresses to DoubleClick's personal database, and they'll be able to do targeted snailmail advertising. If you've got a fulltime connect, your IP is as good as your street address. If you're dialup, the number is shared with others in your locale... but all of you are a distinctly different demographic than the population that doesn't access the Internet.
And, tied to the DC's database, they can really get into the psychographic stuff. "This IP reads a lot of pr0n; this one is a snowboarding junkie; here's one that's been researching home decorating..."
I'm more and more positive that this is their goal!
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But the entire idea of web-browsing parrots is a joke. What kind of serious discussion did you expect to find here?!
--
It's redundent because it follows up a message that has exactly the same link.
Unfortunately, whoever wrote the original message wrote it to be so damned boring and uninformative that it wasn't getting the attention it deserved.
I don't moderate, so I decided that the best way to get people to realize that the brochure is based on a Microsoft site was to write a more detailed, more attractive message.
So the moderator is technically correct, but stupid. Way to go. Nothing like making Slashdot discussions *LESS* informative than they already are.
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"Links to pages that have not been seen by the user are blue; links to previously seen pages are purple or red. Don't mess with these colors since the ability to understand what links have been followed is one of the few navigational aides that is standard in most web browsers. Consistency is key to teaching users what the link colors mean."
He [revisits the problems] a few years later, and miscoloured links are still a problem:
"Continues to be a problem since users rely on the link colors to understand what parts of the site they have visited. I often see users bounce repeatedly among a small set of pages, not knowing that they are going back to the same page again and again. (Also, because non-standard link colors are unpleasantly frequent, users are now getting confused by any underlining of text that is not a link.)"
Anyway, I think blue and red are the correct colours, as I originally stated. I'd have to reinstall an ancient Netscape to verify that I (and Jakob) are right, though...
--
Microsoft really has gone off the deep end! They've actually created a [Freedom to Innovate] website -- they're actually trying to create a grassroots movement to support their monopoly!
Their [FAQ] deals with a whopping six questions, including "Why is it important that I join the Freedom to Innovate Network?" (because prosecuting Microsoft for monopoly practices "could severely impact ... the technology industry "!?!).
There are links to [Bill G TV] (arrrgh!) and silly-assed statements like "Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates is the most admired man among information technology executives."
And then there are the pull-quotes: "I have Microsoft products because they are the BEST" (at what? abusing their monopoly powers?) and "Microsoft has been one of the innovators to realize the American Dream."
The only thing one can find to agree with on the site is in the homepage comment that appeared when I viewed it: "I fully intend to e-mail my representatives, and I hope they realize the important impact that Microsoft has had on the computing industry alone, and ALL the other industries as well."
I gotta agree: every American who has a clue should be writing their representative and expressing their support for the punishment of Microsoft for abusing their monopoly powers.
(footnote: why the heck has Slashdot buggered with the link colours? It's damnably difficult to tell what words are links without using []s to mark them out. Unviewed links should be bright blue: visited links should be red. It's the freaking de facto standard, and changing it is just a PITA for everyone.)
--