>... 'legal' and 'illegal' aren't necessarily synonymous with 'right' and 'wrong,'... >... >... Parents do their best to teach kids right and wrong and to give them that moral compass, > but in the end... it's just not enough because that moral compass isn't sufficiently complex > to cover... copyright.
As you said, legal/illegal isn't necessarily right/wrong.
Copying audio files might be illegal, but only according to laws that were meant to prevent the mass copying of books (and then selling the copies).
The RIAA/MPAA lawsuits demanding $150,000 for each single infringement found is perhaps legal, but is very wrong. The law is clearly based on an assumption of the legislator that the existence of a single copy proves that copies are being mass produced and that they are probably produced to sell them. Otherwise how is this pricetag justified? The existence of a single printed book proves that someone has operated a printing press to produce that book, and can serve as clear evidence that illegal copies are being mass produced. This justifies the pricetag in the law. This is clearly not the case when files, even thousands of them, are made available by individuals over their narrow uplink connections. Even having thousands of files "available" is immterial here since they cannot be accessed simultaneaously from the individual's computer. And the individual is certainly not running a business whose purpose is to illegally profit from mass producing illegal copies and selling them. It is WRONG to apply this law in this case, even if it's legal.
And in the particular case being discussed here the individual that is being sued wasn't even aware that there was anything illegal going on. It was a friend of the woman's child using the computer. So the RIGHT thing to do might have been for the copyright holder to ask the individual to secure her system... They prefered to sue based on the evidence that she was served to a certain IP address by a certain DHCP server. So now they are facing two mothers whose kids are using the internet (one defendant, one judge...).
You might want to ask your question also at the forums at emaildiscussions.com. There is a subforum there for "setting up an email service" and there are several active participants that are email admins running operations like yours or bigger (or smaller) that can give you good advice.
Of course we know that men are more intelligent than women, and we know the reason!
Men have little brain appendages hidden in their pants. Under the right circumstances these appendages grow bigger allowing men to act far more intelligently than women in similar circumstances...
If you really want to bet on future climate being warmer, just invest in real-estate in near arctic regions (I bet even if it doesn't get warmer, technologycan still make northern Canada or Siberia much more inhabitable than in hte past.)
> In Fortune-100-America, everything possible must be stamped with a (c) or (tm) or patent#.
Fortune-100-America includes a few small corporations (E.G. IBM) that find it useful to contribute to open source. They don't do it because they "feel like giving away their property". They do it because they figured out it would produce more money for them.
So the first thing one should tell one's boss is "See, it's good for IBM!".
The point is not that if it's good for IBM it must be good for you. The point is that Releasing the code that you don't intend to sell as proprietary software might save you in development and maintenance (even if you do have a product that might be sellable, you still might gain more from releasing it and getting IBM to contribute in its development).
If your boss understands the reasoning behind IBM's contribution to to "free software", then the boss's reasoning would become "reasonable, as in evauating savings in costs. (Actually the experience emplyees would obtain in one open source project can save indirectly when it applies later to incorporating "someone else's" open source project into your company's infrastructure).
> My son has been fluent with a mouse for about a year, since he was 3 1/2.
That's about the same age my younger son Jonatan started using the computer intensively. The older one (Daniel) started a bit later (about 4 1/2). But we had a laptop with only a touchpad back then so it was more difficult for him. Last year the children's demand for the computer became so high that I set them up with their own computers (photo of their room, that my wife would never have allowed me to publish if she could prevent it...).
Whatever they play, on the computer or not on the computer, the most important thing is that it should be a tool to aid their creativity, not to limit it. In "Hardware toys" it means things like Lego basic constrution sets (and other manufacturers. Both quality and quantity are mportant factors here: lack of each limits the child's creativity).
With Daniel we started with some cheap commercial games from Office Depot clearance. I don't think it's the right way. These quite limit the child to following instructions.
With Jonatan, we didn't make the effort to look for things to buy. He's a second child... So it was more like finding whatever we have that can occupy him so he doesn't bother us, and it worked better. M$ Paint turned out to be really great for him. It was simple enough to use, and he was very creative with it. Then he discovered Google: he uses Google images to look for pictures, then he cpopies and pastes them into his own works (He got a bit addicted to Google, and when we went on a 3 weeks vacation and he didn't have acess to the computer he was drawing pictures of the Google logo with his crayons... A few months ago when he wanted to find something his granfather told him it cannot be found on Google. So he said to his Grandpa: "Grandpa, anything can be found on Google if you know how to look for it!". Even searching Google requires creativity).
Another good piece of Children's software that encourages creativity is Drape (Drawing Programming Environment). It is a sort of programming environment similar to to Logo in some respect, but not exactly the same. One advantage is that it allows for very easy mouse interaction, so a child can create things that "work" quite easily (i.e., with just a bit of adult intervention). Form the same source, Game Maker is more suitable for older children. It is a programming environment to create games, either by using drag and drop or a builtin programming language. I've seen nice cooperation between the younger and older brother here: the young one chooses the objects and graphics, and drwas the levels of the games. The older one completes the game by adding the more abstract parts: actions and interactions. Logo is of course a very good thing for children. For the smaller ones the online r-logo is very easy and fun to use. For more serious Logo programming MSWlogo is a much more powerful implementation (including 3-dimensionality and multi-tasking). There's no need to "choose one". My son Daniel first thinks of an idea he wants to implement, then chooses the most appropriate tool, just like a programmer choosing the most appropriate programming languge for the job (he has several flavors of Logo and choses the one that has what he needs for a project. He also uses Visual Basic that he learned at school).
What else? For several months my kids were addicted to Enigma. It's "just a game", but actually it involved loads of creativity in solving an entirely different puzzle in each level, and has the right balance between sing the brain and coordinating mo
Enigma is an open source game based on a programming language. Creating a level in Enigma is actually writing a program. I'm not sure it's the right tool for learning to program, but it can help Slashdotters pass their spare time (both playing and designing levels).
Game Maker is actually a programming environment. It is free as in beer (or milk if it is for kids) unless you want the extras. It is used by Prof.dr. M.H. Overmars of Universiteit Utrecht as the basis of course on game design. The students think they are learning how to make games but what they are actually learning is event driven programming. It might be more fun to learn to program in this environment, especially for kids, and not just for boys.
My kids are right now quite addicted to GameMaker. Even 5 years old Jonatan can design a bit with the help of 11 years old Daniel. Daniel is just making games most of the time this summer, and learning programming on the way (last year he learned Logo, and also VB at school, but Game Maker is much more fun...).
Perhaps you should tell them about future maintenance costs: revising or rewriting everything with each new IE release (at least with IE7 that is supposed to "break things" by partially following standards). Then about the cost of making the system accessible, and rewirting it from time to time when regulations about "what is accessible" change. Then about possible legal costs because of not being accessible. Or because of having to provide alternative way to get the info to non-M$ customers (such as manually collecting and sending the info). Do they need to insure themselves against possible law suits relating to unavailability of the info they are supposed to serve? (at least unavailability to the few US citizens that are not customers of M$).
Is there a partnership between the US government and M$? Are US citizens required to also be M$ customers?
Amazon has already patented "highlighting", i.e., applying markup to search results (Google and various old text browsers have been doing that years ago).
The M$ patent described here refers to applying markup to the search results provided by one particular search pattern. To use it M$ should probably get a license from Amazon.
It seems that the only thing that is "innovative" here is a list of search strings that together should act as a search for "Numbers". The rest is just the highlighting of search results that is already in the Amazon patent. And M$ main thing here is probably to prevent Google from patenting a similar list of search strings that collectively approximate "being a number". I count on Google to find a better way that does'nt need a list of search terms but instead uses AI to recognize numbers. (Another motivation is to prevent word processors other than M$ Word or web browsers other than IE from including "search for numbers" functionality, or at least the functionality of displaying them all at once, and not using "find next" to see them one by one... Is there a separate patent on finding numbers that doesn't include "highlighting"?))
> I can pick up a book from the 18th century and still read it. >... what is to say that someone from the 23rd century will be able to read our works
If they are math textbooks, that someone can just pick-up the book from the 18th century (well... perhaps from mid 20th century). Most of those books are just recycled material. I'd bet that if you took any calculus textbook you'd find that at least 50% of the excercises appear in exactly the same form in previously published text (or at least if someone had the spare money to finance such an undertaking). Most of what is published in textbooks is not exactly original work. It's more like collections of what a teacher (professor) has accumulated over the years, and most of it is stuff that came from various sources (probably mostly limited to the few books the author used over the years as sources of teaching material, and whatever notes the author took when the author was a student, that represents the author's teacher collection of sources). Almost all of these sources would probably still be copyrighted (I don't think 70 years has passed since the death of the authors of most early 20th century classic math books, and almost all of the good problems were already there.
Once upon a time copyright infringement meant only the reprinting without permision of complete newly published books. But now it has transformed in a way that makes derivative work based on a portion of a text infringement of copyright, and not only from a recently published work. The way textbooks are created, they are mostly collections of copyright infringing material, created in two steps: step 1: Fair use. Using published materials for teaching in a classroom. step 2: Collecting classroom material and tranforming it into a textbook.
I think that less exixted well before Google. Perhaps even before Google founders were born?
What code needs to be "developed" for highlighting? Inserting and tags around certain strings? There's nothing innovative or non-trivial here. Emphsizing portions of text by applying different formating is something that was used hundreds of years ago. Is there any reason that any government give anyone exclusive rights to it, even if only in the case of searching for matching strings over the web? Even if that someone developed the two or three lines of code needed to apply it, I don't see why it should prevent anyone else from doing it freely. It's an obvious concept that's trivial to implement. Is there any reason that any developer, before applying different formatting to portions of output, would stop and think "Aha, that's extremely clever! I can apply markup here!, Perhaps I should pay $10000 to a patent expert to see if anyone else happened to think of applying this kind of markup to this kind of text before?"
> Why does the authority need to be given to someone? Well... that's because politicians want authrity to do... whatever. Anything goes... It gives them bargaining power.
> Just pass a law... This finally happened this year. The compromise they reached includes starting on a day determined by the Gregorian calender and the end day by the Hebrew calendar. Both happen on 2AM on Friday or Sunday preceding the fixed date. So at least it's predictable.
> I guess it's just another example of things that would work better if the geeks were in charge! About 200 years ago one geek named Carl Friedrich Gauss publish the conversion formula between the two calendars.
> I was planning to read your tutorial, but alas, Hebrew is not a language I can read
Almost everything is in my previous post. About the only thing missing is the reference to Time Zone Editor (http://www.softshape.com/cham/manual/tzedit.htm) that allows one to change the default settings of times zones in Windows (but it expects start and end dates to be in the Gregorian calendar, like "Start Day: Last Friday of March at 2:00:00").
> Why is Israel in this mysterious temporal anomaly?
I guess that's because of politicians. The authority on setting the duration of Daylight Savings Time in Israel is given to the minister of interior. Over the past 30 years or so the politicians have been constantly changing the duration of daylight savings time to suit the needs of different political parties (or to comply with supreme court decisions when the court ruled the changes exceeded the minister's authority set in the law). Often it happened on "last minute". On Windows 95 we still had the "daylight savings time" checkbox in the time zone control panel thing. On WinXP (and perhaps earlier versions) it is grayed out, so I guess M$ gave up on trying to follow all the changes in policy, and now the only option in our timezone is to set things up manually (at least on Windows systems that are the most common system).
I wrote a tutorial on setting the time correctly in Israel during summertime (in Hebrew in http://guides.co.il/wiki). Basically it says to choose Bagdad (UTC+0300) as timezone and uncheck the daylight savings time. However, I think most system administrators think that they don't need a tutorial: if they know how to set their wristwatch to daylight savings time it means they can do it the same way on a computer... Well actually I looked there now and saw that someone added a section on how to enable the automatic DST adjustment in Windows and how to setup the start and end days. However, she(?) says these should be updated because the dates change each year (because they correspond to Hebrew calendar dates), so I don't see the point in doing it automatically... What a mess...
>... being an expert programmer doesn't mean you have the slightest clue about the patent system?
And this is EXACTLY why patents should not be applied to software. If an expert programmer is not close to being able to understand or have the slightest clue about a system he has to follow about 100 times a day, that system should not apply to him. How can a programmer be expected not to infringe on patents if for every few lines of code he has to understand millions of pages he hasn't a clue how to read? does he have to emply a hundred IP lawyers?
This is before even considering the possibility of finding relevant patents to everything included in a piece of software assuming readability of the patents. I'm quite sure that if someone would try to analize it using tools of computability or complexity theory it could be proved impossible using something like the Turing Halting problem, or at least having complexity so high to make it impossible in real life.
>... the patent industry... And that sums it up: it used to be a government service helping the industry. It became a competing industry. The need was for a service and not for a competitor. So the competition should be eliminated. There is no need for a government run industry whose main role is making it difficult to run private industry.
> Yahoo and Hotmail just assume any home user with their own server is a spammer.
Not exactly. What they assume is that email coming directly from a home user's IP number is spam, and this assumption is 99.9% correct (probably even closer to 100%). Most spam nowadays come from "Zombie PCs" and this means that almost all email being sent directly from home users PCs is spam. Avoiding this email means avoiding most spam. And also avoiding some legetimate, but not much legitimate mail from the point of view of Hotmail or Yahoo.
>... he gave his email address as slashdot@chrisbartle.com. > That's obviously one that he created for the occasion and will discard > as soon as the conversation is over. Can't do stuff like that with most ISPs.
Perhaps he didn't plan to discard it, but he would have to. It takes about 2-3 days for an address posted on Slashdot to be picked up by spammers (from my own experience). Much faster than any other place I know of on the web. Much faster than places like Cnet talkbacks, for instance.
Anyway, being able to use different addresses for receiving email has nothing to do with outgoing mail configuration. The domain is his domain (http://www.dnsstuff.com/tools/whois.ch?ip=chrisba rtle.com) and not the ISP's domain. Many hosting companies would accept all email for a domain or allow the domain owner to control which addresses in a domain are accepted. But there's no doubt that you get absolute control by controling your own incoming mail server. However, Chris's problem is not related to incoming email but only to outgoing email. He can run his incoming server on his PC and use another machine to send his email out to the internet (relay it though a service provider).
I host my domain (hadaso _d0t_ net ) with fastmail.fm . I can use any email address in that domain or any subdomain. I can filter incoming email on the server so that I can discard or reject or forward to different addres or file separately email coming to certain addresses. And I can set it up so I receive only at a limited small number of addresses. But I don't come even close to what Chris can do with his own incoming server. Chris has absolute control on what's accepted and what rejected. (For instance, I choose to receive all incoming email and only then filter it, because otherwise I have to resort to at most 10 addresses/subdomains or pay additional fees for more. That's also why I don't use my domain address in Slashdot. I don't have the control I need to block the spam where I want it blocked, or to greylist as Chris does)
>... in some geographic areas... the only broadband provider... > does not provide conforming internet mail service to residential customers.
I wouldn't like to live in that area... It's a monoply. Monopolies should be regulated. A minimum requirement from a monopolistic Internet service provider should be to provide standard compliant access. There are ways to find the spammers in your network without denying service from customers (like reading spam complaints sent to your abuse team. Like not refusing "munged" SpamCop reports that usually point exactly to the IP address sending spam).
> How much does SMTP AUTH + TLS smarthosting cost per month That would probably depend on how much mail you need to send. One time payment of $15 gives you lifetime SMTP AUTH (and lots of other things you don't have to use) but is limited monthly bandwidth of 30MB. For $20/yr (~$1.67/month) or $40/yr (~$3.33/month) you get 300MB/month, 1GB/month respectively and additional BW can be purchased (see http://www.fastmail.fm/pages/fastmail/docs/pricing tbl.html). Maybe a hosting service can give better MB/$ ratio for higher bandwidth requirements.
Maybe the folks at emaildiscussions.com would know more than me about possibilities to host outgoing mail. And actually it's a good place to ask the question aked here. There are several people there administering email on different levels - from managing email for a few friends/family to running full scale email services.
In one college I teach in they have an internal time server, and that server is one hour off... The way they set it to daylight savings time is by adding one hour to UTC... (And by inspecting email headers I think that's the way most IT departments in Israel do it. Then of course they cannot sync to an external time server because then everything is one hour off what they think is correct. But it might be the common knowledge of all system admins in Israel that time syncing is "broken" and cannot be used at summertime...).
> You're at the mercy of the ISP. It their mail server goes down...
If your PC+broadband connection is more reliable than your ISP's mail servers, then you should not use this ISP. Why would their connectivity be any better than their mail server? The ISP's mail server shold be running all the time, and should be backed up. If your ISP cannot provide SMTP email 24h a day it is a good indication that you cannot trust their reliability on anything.
> Maybe it's your overly permissive SPF record?... You have "-mx all"...
SPF specifically says that the result of the SPF test is "pass" in this case. The same for SenderID when comparing to the "purported whatever(TM)". The problem with SPF is that people want to use the record but not follow the standard. Instead of checking if the email comes from an IP address authorised by the domain owner, people want to limit what domain owners can authorise.
This is a very bad side effect of SPF, and eventually it would mean that all email users that are not limited to a single or a few sending IP addresses would have to relay their email using authenticated SMTP to one of a few servers of a service provider that would be listed in the SPF record for their domain. SPF claims to not require huge changes in infrastructure, but its side effects do require a change in infrastructure that collectively would cost a lot. Perhaps it's not bad, but it's also not cheap... (at least not as cheap as running everything on your home PC).
I can tell you what's Hotmail reply would be: the same form every one gets: "Delete your Temporary Internet files". Doesn't matter what you ask... Then later they might answer to the point, but I doubt that they would whitelist an IP address the resolves to a broadband connection.
There might be very good reasons to run your own mail server on your own PC, but I don't see any advantage on using this approach for direct delivery of outgoing email. Relaying through your ISP's mail server would almost certainly be more reliable, and if not it is a good indication that you should switch ISPs. Probably using an ISP's server for relaying incoming email would also be more reliable (it would cache your email uwhen your PC is not available on broadband) but it might be trickier to set up. (as in your ISP's mail server would have to be the MX for your domain, and would have to be configured to accept all email for your domain and redirect it to your server, which would not allow you to do SMTP session rejects. There are no such complications I can think of for relaying your outgoing email through your ISP if they are following standards and not using dirty tricks like header rewriting.)
An ISP that does this is not a provider of internet mail. So anyone that wants to use internet mail should not subscribe to such ISP. If your contract specifies that email service is included you should ask for the money back. Internet mail has quite precise definitions in RFC 2821 and RFC 2822, and rewriting the "From" header is not part of this. It actually contradicts RFC2822 that says the "From:" identifies the author (and not the link from the author's PC to the mail server).
The real reason why "ask slashdot" is better than "search google" is that we are also discussing current pracices and contemplating what's right and what's wrong.
Rewriting headers is wrong, unless the user specifically asks for this service. And if an ISP wants to reflect the userid of the sending user for some reason they can use one of the "resent-..." headers fields (though I doubt that this would be correct RFC-wise, and morraly its wrong. If they need to put a stamp on outgoing email to help their abuse team locate offending users they should put it in an encrypted form in a non standard header, like the "X-sasl-enc:" header used by FastMail.FM on all outgoing name. Every single piece of outgoing mail has unique identification without compromising the sender's privacy).
> What I don't understand,... why is it so difficult ?
One reason: arrogance!
Both sides are correct: Astronomers and others running systems that need precise synchronization with the sun (or actually with the rotation of the earth) need the existing time system (or perhaps a better one...) Everyone else doesn't, and is better of with a system that is off sync by a few minutes every century and is easier to maintain. There is absolutely no need that all the people maintaining computers for any purpose have to use a complicated system of measuring time that is only needed by astronomers or operators of spacecraft (that seem not to be able to keep their foam in place nowadays...)
The argument is stupid because there is absolutely no reason why two systems representing time cannot co-exist, with precise conversion functions where necessary. Astronomers would sync their telescopes using "Time PRO(TM)" and write their papers an a PC synced to NIST and displaying time using "Time HOME(TM)". Where's the problem. Overall costs would be lower because almost all software and hardware around the world has no need for the complication of syncing with earth rotation to within a second. reliability of time-critic software/hardware would be better because whoever makes them would have to learn more about what time is and not take it for granted. And finally: freeing precise time protocols from the need to be usable by beaurocrats all around the world would probably result later in a protocol that syncs time with earth movement much more often than a second every few years (how about a thousands of a second every few hours, and how about a time representation that divides an earth day to exactly a million equal parts? would be much more practical for controling telescopes or spaceships or sattelites).
The Jewish callendar has 12 months totaling 354 days, so it's not in sync with the solarn year. Every 2 or 3 years a leap month is added. It used to be done ad-hoc by a body similar to NIST. But about 2 millenia ago the system changed by fixing a 19 year cycle. The Muslim calendar is the same without leap months, so every solar year it gains 11 days over the solar calendar, and it cycles every 365/11 solar years. So Muslim holidays are not in sync with the seasons, and muslims celebrating Ramadan in the summer can discuss how it was different when they were children and celebrated it in the winter. There is no problem with all those calendars coexisting, and there are precise functions for converting dates from one calendar to another.
I don't see any problem. I think the US proposition will be adopted in some form without making the old time keeping system go away, the two time systems will coexist, and eventually those who really "need" the old system would devise a new and better system for their needs that doesn't have to make compromises for ease of use by others who don't need it.
>... keep in perspective just how two-faced Bezos is...
I don't see a problem. He can say that the situation is not good and should be changed, but he still lives in this world and not in an imaginary one where there are no software or business method patents. And he has to run a business in the real world, so he has to act accordingly, and that means grab as much as he can. Amazon is not a human being. It's a legal person whose only responsibility is to make money, and it has to do it to survive, just like IBM, M$(TM) etc.
> "Business method patents" are especially > problematic, since virtually any business method > can be transferred to the Internet, often with > trivial effort, and treated as an "invention."
I think that it is wrong to grant patent on anything just because it is being implemented on a computer is wrong. A computer is a universal machine. That was known before it was invented. Turing proved the possibility of a universal computer that is able to follow any finite set of instructions in 1936. It took a few years and in the 1940's it was implemented in the invention of the "electronic computer". We are still using them. The fact that ANYTHING that can be described using an alphabet can be done with this machine (equipped with the right I/O hardware if real world results are to be achieved) was known when it was invented: it was invented exactly for that purpose - because it was an appratus that can be substitute anywhere where a relation between input and output can be finitely described in a precise way. So there is absolutely nothing innovative in replacing anything by a computer. This is just doing the obvious thing that was what the inventors of the computer expected its users to do with it.
So if Amazon wants to patent the business method of being a middleman forweb services that brings users and collects a commision (takes it off what the customers pay and transfer the rest of the payment, like phone compnies do on the phone bill), then this patent must be interpreted as including any kind of such business' not just a digital computer. A group of people ("employees") following instructions and doing the same things for operators of "services" (not just "web services" are a universal computer in exactly the same way that a digital computer is: they are capable of following precisely the same sets of instructions as a digital computer can, if presented to them in the right language, and if they are provided with the right hardware to interact with the outside world.
IMO, a patent should not be granted on anything tied to computers if the only innovation in it is that it is based oncomputers. If it is the same thing that can be done without a computer and is then obvious, there is no innovation. If the only reason the same thing cannot be done without a computer is the faster processing time a computer provides: there is no innovation. It is just an obvios use of a computer to speed things up. If it is just achiving functionality by sticking a computer instead of some other element in a system, were the added functionality is achieved only because a computer can map input to output in more diverse way than the element it replaced (because that element was not a universal computer, then it is still an obvious use of a computer: it is obvious that when a piece of hardware with limited functionality is replaced by a piece of hardware with universal functionality then there are new possibilities. This shouldn't be patentable unless this new possibilities are not easily derived once replacing an element of a system by a computer is considered.
The mere fact that nobody has considered replacing some element by a computer running software to mimick the element or do something better than the element is makes it new but not innovative. The fact that any alement in any system can be replaced by a computer running software to simulate the replaced element is an abvious use of a computer. And the fact that by replacing the simulation software by software doing something else a better result might be achieved is also an obvious use of a computer. Patents, if any, shouldbe granted only if there is an additional innovation involved.
Slashdot Mirror
> ... 'legal' and 'illegal' aren't necessarily synonymous with 'right' and 'wrong,' ... ... ... Parents do their best to teach kids right and wrong and to give them that moral compass, ... it's just not enough because that moral compass isn't sufficiently complex ... copyright.
>
>
> but in the end
> to cover
As you said, legal/illegal isn't necessarily right/wrong.
Copying audio files might be illegal, but only according to laws that were meant to prevent the mass copying of books (and then selling the copies).
The RIAA/MPAA lawsuits demanding $150,000 for each single infringement found is perhaps legal, but is very wrong. The law is clearly based on an assumption of the legislator that the existence of a single copy proves that copies are being mass produced and that they are probably produced to sell them. Otherwise how is this pricetag justified? The existence of a single printed book proves that someone has operated a printing press to produce that book, and can serve as clear evidence that illegal copies are being mass produced. This justifies the pricetag in the law. This is clearly not the case when files, even thousands of them, are made available by individuals over their narrow uplink connections. Even having thousands of files "available" is immterial here since they cannot be accessed simultaneaously from the individual's computer. And the individual is certainly not running a business whose purpose is to illegally profit from mass producing illegal copies and selling them. It is WRONG to apply this law in this case, even if it's legal.
And in the particular case being discussed here the individual that is being sued wasn't even aware that there was anything illegal going on. It was a friend of the woman's child using the computer. So the RIGHT thing to do might have been for the copyright holder to ask the individual to secure her system... They prefered to sue based on the evidence that she was served to a certain IP address by a certain DHCP server. So now they are facing two mothers whose kids are using the internet (one defendant, one judge...).
You might want to ask your question also at the forums at emaildiscussions.com. There is a subforum there for "setting up an email service" and there are several active participants that are email admins running operations like yours or bigger (or smaller) that can give you good advice.
Of course we know that men are more intelligent than women, and we know the reason!
Men have little brain appendages hidden in their pants. Under the right circumstances these appendages grow bigger allowing men to act far more intelligently than women in similar circumstances...
If you really want to bet on future climate being warmer, just invest in real-estate in near arctic regions (I bet even if it doesn't get warmer, technologycan still make northern Canada or Siberia much more inhabitable than in hte past.)
> In Fortune-100-America, everything possible must be stamped with a (c) or (tm) or patent#.
Fortune-100-America includes a few small corporations (E.G. IBM) that find it useful to contribute to open source. They don't do it because they "feel like giving away their property". They do it because they figured out it would produce more money for them.
So the first thing one should tell one's boss is "See, it's good for IBM!".
The point is not that if it's good for IBM it must be good for you. The point is that Releasing the code that you don't intend to sell as proprietary software might save you in development and maintenance (even if you do have a product that might be sellable, you still might gain more from releasing it and getting IBM to contribute in its development).
If your boss understands the reasoning behind IBM's contribution to to "free software", then the boss's reasoning would become "reasonable, as in evauating savings in costs. (Actually the experience emplyees would obtain in one open source project can save indirectly when it applies later to incorporating "someone else's" open source project into your company's infrastructure).
That's about the same age my younger son Jonatan started using the computer intensively. The older one (Daniel) started a bit later (about 4 1/2). But we had a laptop with only a touchpad back then so it was more difficult for him. Last year the children's demand for the computer became so high that I set them up with their own computers (photo of their room, that my wife would never have allowed me to publish if she could prevent it...).
Whatever they play, on the computer or not on the computer, the most important thing is that it should be a tool to aid their creativity, not to limit it. In "Hardware toys" it means things like Lego basic constrution sets (and other manufacturers. Both quality and quantity are mportant factors here: lack of each limits the child's creativity).
With Daniel we started with some cheap commercial games from Office Depot clearance. I don't think it's the right way. These quite limit the child to following instructions.
With Jonatan, we didn't make the effort to look for things to buy. He's a second child... So it was more like finding whatever we have that can occupy him so he doesn't bother us, and it worked better. M$ Paint turned out to be really great for him. It was simple enough to use, and he was very creative with it. Then he discovered Google: he uses Google images to look for pictures, then he cpopies and pastes them into his own works (He got a bit addicted to Google, and when we went on a 3 weeks vacation and he didn't have acess to the computer he was drawing pictures of the Google logo with his crayons... A few months ago when he wanted to find something his granfather told him it cannot be found on Google. So he said to his Grandpa: "Grandpa, anything can be found on Google if you know how to look for it!". Even searching Google requires creativity).
Another good piece of Children's software that encourages creativity is Drape (Drawing Programming Environment). It is a sort of programming environment similar to to Logo in some respect, but not exactly the same. One advantage is that it allows for very easy mouse interaction, so a child can create things that "work" quite easily (i.e., with just a bit of adult intervention). Form the same source, Game Maker is more suitable for older children. It is a programming environment to create games, either by using drag and drop or a builtin programming language. I've seen nice cooperation between the younger and older brother here: the young one chooses the objects and graphics, and drwas the levels of the games. The older one completes the game by adding the more abstract parts: actions and interactions. Logo is of course a very good thing for children. For the smaller ones the online r-logo is very easy and fun to use. For more serious Logo programming MSWlogo is a much more powerful implementation (including 3-dimensionality and multi-tasking). There's no need to "choose one". My son Daniel first thinks of an idea he wants to implement, then chooses the most appropriate tool, just like a programmer choosing the most appropriate programming languge for the job (he has several flavors of Logo and choses the one that has what he needs for a project. He also uses Visual Basic that he learned at school).
What else?
For several months my kids were addicted to Enigma. It's "just a game", but actually it involved loads of creativity in solving an entirely different puzzle in each level, and has the right balance between sing the brain and coordinating mo
Game Maker is actually a programming environment. It is free as in beer (or milk if it is for kids) unless you want the extras. It is used by Prof.dr. M.H. Overmars of Universiteit Utrecht as the basis of course on game design. The students think they are learning how to make games but what they are actually learning is event driven programming. It might be more fun to learn to program in this environment, especially for kids, and not just for boys. My kids are right now quite addicted to GameMaker. Even 5 years old Jonatan can design a bit with the help of 11 years old Daniel. Daniel is just making games most of the time this summer, and learning programming on the way (last year he learned Logo, and also VB at school, but Game Maker is much more fun...).
Perhaps you should tell them about future maintenance costs: revising or rewriting everything with each new IE release (at least with IE7 that is supposed to "break things" by partially following standards). Then about the cost of making the system accessible, and rewirting it from time to time when regulations about "what is accessible" change. Then about possible legal costs because of not being accessible. Or because of having to provide alternative way to get the info to non-M$ customers (such as manually collecting and sending the info). Do they need to insure themselves against possible law suits relating to unavailability of the info they are supposed to serve? (at least unavailability to the few US citizens that are not customers of M$).
Is there a partnership between the US government and M$? Are US citizens required to also be M$ customers?
Amazon has already patented "highlighting", i.e., applying markup to search results (Google and various old text browsers have been doing that years ago).
The M$ patent described here refers to applying markup to the search results provided by one particular search pattern. To use it M$ should probably get a license from Amazon.
It seems that the only thing that is "innovative" here is a list of search strings that together should act as a search for "Numbers". The rest is just the highlighting of search results that is already in the Amazon patent. And M$ main thing here is probably to prevent Google from patenting a similar list of search strings that collectively approximate "being a number". I count on Google to find a better way that does'nt need a list of search terms but instead uses AI to recognize numbers. (Another motivation is to prevent word processors other than M$ Word or web browsers other than IE from including "search for numbers" functionality, or at least the functionality of displaying them all at once, and not using "find next" to see them one by one... Is there a separate patent on finding numbers that doesn't include "highlighting"?))
> I can pick up a book from the 18th century and still read it. ... what is to say that someone from the 23rd century will be able to read our works
>
If they are math textbooks, that someone can just pick-up the book from the 18th century (well... perhaps from mid 20th century). Most of those books are just recycled material. I'd bet that if you took any calculus textbook you'd find that at least 50% of the excercises appear in exactly the same form in previously published text (or at least if someone had the spare money to finance such an undertaking). Most of what is published in textbooks is not exactly original work. It's more like collections of what a teacher (professor) has accumulated over the years, and most of it is stuff that came from various sources (probably mostly limited to the few books the author used over the years as sources of teaching material, and whatever notes the author took when the author was a student, that represents the author's teacher collection of sources). Almost all of these sources would probably still be copyrighted (I don't think 70 years has passed since the death of the authors of most early 20th century classic math books, and almost all of the good problems were already there.
Once upon a time copyright infringement meant only the reprinting without permision of complete newly published books. But now it has transformed in a way that makes derivative work based on a portion of a text infringement of copyright, and not only from a recently published work. The way textbooks are created, they are mostly collections of copyright infringing material, created in two steps:
step 1: Fair use. Using published materials for teaching in a classroom.
step 2: Collecting classroom material and tranforming it into a textbook.
I think that less exixted well before Google. Perhaps even before Google founders were born?
What code needs to be "developed" for highlighting? Inserting and tags around certain strings? There's nothing innovative or non-trivial here. Emphsizing portions of text by applying different formating is something that was used hundreds of years ago. Is there any reason that any government give anyone exclusive rights to it, even if only in the case of searching for matching strings over the web? Even if that someone developed the two or three lines of code needed to apply it, I don't see why it should prevent anyone else from doing it freely. It's an obvious concept that's trivial to implement. Is there any reason that any developer, before applying different formatting to portions of output, would stop and think "Aha, that's extremely clever! I can apply markup here!, Perhaps I should pay $10000 to a patent expert to see if anyone else happened to think of applying this kind of markup to this kind of text before?"
> Why does the authority need to be given to someone?
...
Well... that's because politicians want authrity to do... whatever. Anything goes... It gives them bargaining power.
> Just pass a law
This finally happened this year. The compromise they reached includes starting on a day determined by the Gregorian calender and the end day by the Hebrew calendar. Both happen on 2AM on Friday or Sunday preceding the fixed date. So at least it's predictable.
> I guess it's just another example of things that would work better if the geeks were in charge!
About 200 years ago one geek named Carl Friedrich Gauss publish the conversion formula between the two calendars.
> I was planning to read your tutorial, but alas, Hebrew is not a language I can read
Almost everything is in my previous post. About the only thing missing is the reference to Time Zone Editor (http://www.softshape.com/cham/manual/tzedit.htm) that allows one to change the default settings of times zones in Windows (but it expects start and end dates to be in the Gregorian calendar, like "Start Day: Last Friday of March at 2:00:00").
> Why is Israel in this mysterious temporal anomaly?
I guess that's because of politicians. The authority on setting the duration of Daylight Savings Time in Israel is given to the minister of interior. Over the past 30 years or so the politicians have been constantly changing the duration of daylight savings time to suit the needs of different political parties (or to comply with supreme court decisions when the court ruled the changes exceeded the minister's authority set in the law). Often it happened on "last minute". On Windows 95 we still had the "daylight savings time" checkbox in the time zone control panel thing. On WinXP (and perhaps earlier versions) it is grayed out, so I guess M$ gave up on trying to follow all the changes in policy, and now the only option in our timezone is to set things up manually (at least on Windows systems that are the most common system).
I wrote a tutorial on setting the time correctly in Israel during summertime (in Hebrew in http://guides.co.il/wiki). Basically it says to choose Bagdad (UTC+0300) as timezone and uncheck the daylight savings time. However, I think most system administrators think that they don't need a tutorial: if they know how to set their wristwatch to daylight savings time it means they can do it the same way on a computer... Well actually I looked there now and saw that someone added a section on how to enable the automatic DST adjustment in Windows and how to setup the start and end days. However, she(?) says these should be updated because the dates change each year (because they correspond to Hebrew calendar dates), so I don't see the point in doing it automatically... What a mess...
> ... being an expert programmer doesn't mean you have the slightest clue about the patent system?
... the patent industry ...
And this is EXACTLY why patents should not be applied to software. If an expert programmer is not close to being able to understand or have the slightest clue about a system he has to follow about 100 times a day, that system should not apply to him. How can a programmer be expected not to infringe on patents if for every few lines of code he has to understand millions of pages he hasn't a clue how to read? does he have to emply a hundred IP lawyers?
This is before even considering the possibility of finding relevant patents to everything included in a piece of software assuming readability of the patents. I'm quite sure that if someone would try to analize it using tools of computability or complexity theory it could be proved impossible using something like the Turing Halting problem, or at least having complexity so high to make it impossible in real life.
>
And that sums it up: it used to be a government service helping the industry. It became a competing industry. The need was for a service and not for a competitor. So the competition should be eliminated. There is no need for a government run industry whose main role is making it difficult to run private industry.
> Yahoo and Hotmail just assume any home user with their own server is a spammer.
... he gave his email address as slashdot@chrisbartle.com.
a rtle.com) and not the ISP's domain. Many hosting companies would accept all email for a domain or allow the domain owner to control which addresses in a domain are accepted. But there's no doubt that you get absolute control by controling your own incoming mail server. However, Chris's problem is not related to incoming email but only to outgoing email. He can run his incoming server on his PC and use another machine to send his email out to the internet (relay it though a service provider).
Not exactly. What they assume is that email coming directly from a home user's IP number is spam, and this assumption is 99.9% correct (probably even closer to 100%). Most spam nowadays come from "Zombie PCs" and this means that almost all email being sent directly from home users PCs is spam. Avoiding this email means avoiding most spam. And also avoiding some legetimate, but not much legitimate mail from the point of view of Hotmail or Yahoo.
>
> That's obviously one that he created for the occasion and will discard
> as soon as the conversation is over. Can't do stuff like that with most ISPs.
Perhaps he didn't plan to discard it, but he would have to. It takes about 2-3 days for an address posted on Slashdot to be picked up by spammers (from my own experience). Much faster than any other place I know of on the web. Much faster than places like Cnet talkbacks, for instance.
Anyway, being able to use different addresses for receiving email has nothing to do with outgoing mail configuration. The domain is his domain (http://www.dnsstuff.com/tools/whois.ch?ip=chrisb
I host my domain (hadaso _d0t_ net ) with fastmail.fm . I can use any email address in that domain or any subdomain. I can filter incoming email on the server so that I can discard or reject or forward to different addres or file separately email coming to certain addresses. And I can set it up so I receive only at a limited small number of addresses. But I don't come even close to what Chris can do with his own incoming server. Chris has absolute control on what's accepted and what rejected. (For instance, I choose to receive all incoming email and only then filter it, because otherwise I have to resort to at most 10 addresses/subdomains or pay additional fees for more. That's also why I don't use my domain address in Slashdot. I don't have the control I need to block the spam where I want it blocked, or to greylist as Chris does)
> ... in some geographic areas ... the only broadband provider ...
g tbl.html). Maybe a hosting service can give better MB/$ ratio for higher bandwidth requirements.
> does not provide conforming internet mail service to residential customers.
I wouldn't like to live in that area...
It's a monoply. Monopolies should be regulated. A minimum requirement from a monopolistic Internet service provider should be to provide standard compliant access. There are ways to find the spammers in your network without denying service from customers (like reading spam complaints sent to your abuse team. Like not refusing "munged" SpamCop reports that usually point exactly to the IP address sending spam).
> How much does SMTP AUTH + TLS smarthosting cost per month
That would probably depend on how much mail you need to send. One time payment of $15 gives you lifetime SMTP AUTH (and lots of other things you don't have to use) but is limited monthly bandwidth of 30MB. For $20/yr (~$1.67/month) or $40/yr (~$3.33/month) you get 300MB/month, 1GB/month respectively and additional BW can be purchased (see http://www.fastmail.fm/pages/fastmail/docs/pricin
Maybe the folks at emaildiscussions.com would know more than me about possibilities to host outgoing mail. And actually it's a good place to ask the question aked here. There are several people there administering email on different levels - from managing email for a few friends/family to running full scale email services.
> IT departments are there to provide services ...
In one college I teach in they have an internal time server, and that server is one hour off... The way they set it to daylight savings time is by adding one hour to UTC... (And by inspecting email headers I think that's the way most IT departments in Israel do it. Then of course they cannot sync to an external time server because then everything is one hour off what they think is correct. But it might be the common knowledge of all system admins in Israel that time syncing is "broken" and cannot be used at summertime...).
> You're at the mercy of the ISP. It their mail server goes down ...
If your PC+broadband connection is more reliable than your ISP's mail servers, then you should not use this ISP. Why would their connectivity be any better than their mail server? The ISP's mail server shold be running all the time, and should be backed up. If your ISP cannot provide SMTP email 24h a day it is a good indication that you cannot trust their reliability on anything.
> Maybe it's your overly permissive SPF record? ... You have "-mx all" ...
SPF specifically says that the result of the SPF test is "pass" in this case. The same for SenderID when comparing to the "purported whatever(TM)". The problem with SPF is that people want to use the record but not follow the standard. Instead of checking if the email comes from an IP address authorised by the domain owner, people want to limit what domain owners can authorise.
This is a very bad side effect of SPF, and eventually it would mean that all email users that are not limited to a single or a few sending IP addresses would have to relay their email using authenticated SMTP to one of a few servers of a service provider that would be listed in the SPF record for their domain. SPF claims to not require huge changes in infrastructure, but its side effects do require a change in infrastructure that collectively would cost a lot. Perhaps it's not bad, but it's also not cheap... (at least not as cheap as running everything on your home PC).
I can tell you what's Hotmail reply would be: the same form every one gets: "Delete your Temporary Internet files". Doesn't matter what you ask... Then later they might answer to the point, but I doubt that they would whitelist an IP address the resolves to a broadband connection.
There might be very good reasons to run your own mail server on your own PC, but I don't see any advantage on using this approach for direct delivery of outgoing email. Relaying through your ISP's mail server would almost certainly be more reliable, and if not it is a good indication that you should switch ISPs. Probably using an ISP's server for relaying incoming email would also be more reliable (it would cache your email uwhen your PC is not available on broadband) but it might be trickier to set up. (as in your ISP's mail server would have to be the MX for your domain, and would have to be configured to accept all email for your domain and redirect it to your server, which would not allow you to do SMTP session rejects. There are no such complications I can think of for relaying your outgoing email through your ISP if they are following standards and not using dirty tricks like header rewriting.)
> ... some ISPs rewrite the From: header ...
An ISP that does this is not a provider of internet mail. So anyone that wants to use internet mail should not subscribe to such ISP. If your contract specifies that email service is included you should ask for the money back. Internet mail has quite precise definitions in RFC 2821 and RFC 2822, and rewriting the "From" header is not part of this. It actually contradicts RFC2822 that says the "From:" identifies the author (and not the link from the author's PC to the mail server).
The real reason why "ask slashdot" is better than "search google" is that we are also discussing current pracices and contemplating what's right and what's wrong.
Rewriting headers is wrong, unless the user specifically asks for this service. And if an ISP wants to reflect the userid of the sending user for some reason they can use one of the "resent-..." headers fields (though I doubt that this would be correct RFC-wise, and morraly its wrong. If they need to put a stamp on outgoing email to help their abuse team locate offending users they should put it in an encrypted form in a non standard header, like the "X-sasl-enc:" header used by FastMail.FM on all outgoing name. Every single piece of outgoing mail has unique identification without compromising the sender's privacy).
> What I don't understand, ... why is it so difficult ?
One reason: arrogance!
Both sides are correct: Astronomers and others running systems that need precise synchronization with the sun (or actually with the rotation of the earth) need the existing time system (or perhaps a better one...) Everyone else doesn't, and is better of with a system that is off sync by a few minutes every century and is easier to maintain. There is absolutely no need that all the people maintaining computers for any purpose have to use a complicated system of measuring time that is only needed by astronomers or operators of spacecraft (that seem not to be able to keep their foam in place nowadays...)
The argument is stupid because there is absolutely no reason why two systems representing time cannot co-exist, with precise conversion functions where necessary. Astronomers would sync their telescopes using "Time PRO(TM)" and write their papers an a PC synced to NIST and displaying time using "Time HOME(TM)". Where's the problem. Overall costs would be lower because almost all software and hardware around the world has no need for the complication of syncing with earth rotation to within a second. reliability of time-critic software/hardware would be better because whoever makes them would have to learn more about what time is and not take it for granted. And finally: freeing precise time protocols from the need to be usable by beaurocrats all around the world would probably result later in a protocol that syncs time with earth movement much more often than a second every few years (how about a thousands of a second every few hours, and how about a time representation that divides an earth day to exactly a million equal parts? would be much more practical for controling telescopes or spaceships or sattelites).
The Jewish callendar has 12 months totaling 354 days, so it's not in sync with the solarn year. Every 2 or 3 years a leap month is added. It used to be done ad-hoc by a body similar to NIST. But about 2 millenia ago the system changed by fixing a 19 year cycle. The Muslim calendar is the same without leap months, so every solar year it gains 11 days over the solar calendar, and it cycles every 365/11 solar years. So Muslim holidays are not in sync with the seasons, and muslims celebrating Ramadan in the summer can discuss how it was different when they were children and celebrated it in the winter. There is no problem with all those calendars coexisting, and there are precise functions for converting dates from one calendar to another.
I don't see any problem. I think the US proposition will be adopted in some form without making the old time keeping system go away, the two time systems will coexist, and eventually those who really "need" the old system would devise a new and better system for their needs that doesn't have to make compromises for ease of use by others who don't need it.
> ... keep in perspective just how two-faced Bezos is ...
I don't see a problem. He can say that the situation is not good and should be changed, but he still lives in this world and not in an imaginary one where there are no software or business method patents. And he has to run a business in the real world, so he has to act accordingly, and that means grab as much as he can. Amazon is not a human being. It's a legal person whose only responsibility is to make money, and it has to do it to survive, just like IBM, M$(TM) etc.
> "Business method patents" are especially
> problematic, since virtually any business method
> can be transferred to the Internet, often with
> trivial effort, and treated as an "invention."
I think that it is wrong to grant patent on anything just because it is being implemented on a computer is wrong. A computer is a universal machine. That was known before it was invented. Turing proved the possibility of a universal computer that is able to follow any finite set of instructions in 1936. It took a few years and in the 1940's it was implemented in the invention of the "electronic computer". We are still using them. The fact that ANYTHING that can be described using an alphabet can be done with this machine (equipped with the right I/O hardware if real world results are to be achieved) was known when it was invented: it was invented exactly for that purpose - because it was an appratus that can be substitute anywhere where a relation between input and output can be finitely described in a precise way. So there is absolutely nothing innovative in replacing anything by a computer. This is just doing the obvious thing that was what the inventors of the computer expected its users to do with it.
So if Amazon wants to patent the business method of being a middleman forweb services that brings users and collects a commision (takes it off what the customers pay and transfer the rest of the payment, like phone compnies do on the phone bill), then this patent must be interpreted as including any kind of such business' not just a digital computer. A group of people ("employees") following instructions and doing the same things for operators of "services" (not just "web services" are a universal computer in exactly the same way that a digital computer is: they are capable of following precisely the same sets of instructions as a digital computer can, if presented to them in the right language, and if they are provided with the right hardware to interact with the outside world.
IMO, a patent should not be granted on anything tied to computers if the only innovation in it is that it is based oncomputers. If it is the same thing that can be done without a computer and is then obvious, there is no innovation. If the only reason the same thing cannot be done without a computer is the faster processing time a computer provides: there is no innovation. It is just an obvios use of a computer to speed things up. If it is just achiving functionality by sticking a computer instead of some other element in a system, were the added functionality is achieved only because a computer can map input to output in more diverse way than the element it replaced (because that element was not a universal computer, then it is still an obvious use of a computer: it is obvious that when a piece of hardware with limited functionality is replaced by a piece of hardware with universal functionality then there are new possibilities. This shouldn't be patentable unless this new possibilities are not easily derived once replacing an element of a system by a computer is considered.
The mere fact that nobody has considered replacing some element by a computer running software to mimick the element or do something better than the element is makes it new but not innovative. The fact that any alement in any system can be replaced by a computer running software to simulate the replaced element is an abvious use of a computer. And the fact that by replacing the simulation software by software doing something else a better result might be achieved is also an obvious use of a computer. Patents, if any, shouldbe granted only if there is an additional innovation involved.
I think some of the unix text file browsers (less?) used highliting of searched strings long before google.
I don't think they are patenting fucking smileys. That would be animated gifs. Doesn't the patent refers to 19x19 pngs?