IF we insist that website contact is not a "business relationship" in connection with faxes, 'fax-trapping' becomes a profitable pasttime for a certain segment of the population. In slashdot-ese:
1) Post fax number on web to attract victims (and they are the victims here),
2) Wait for the junk faxes (which were, in fact, solicited if you think about it),
3) ??? --> Sue sender for issuing "junk faxes" (which aren't junk faxes),
4) PROFIT!!!
If, OTOH, we conclude that website contact is a "business relationship" in connection with faxes, 'fax-trapping' becomes rather like trying to think yourself to orgasm - certainly entertaining, but unlikely to produce any useful results.
So . . . the first option results in a mechanism for illicit financial gain, while the second option results in inconvenience (and some small but manageable expense) for a large number of people. Our legislators probably felt they had a higher calling to prevent future crimes than they did to preserve our privacy and personal convenience.
I don't believe either of these is an acceptable condition; however, I can't see an immediate solution to the problem. Anybody out there got any good ideas?
On the whole, the United States of America represents several political experiments and ideologies simultaneously, one of the more intriguing of which is the Free Market. The idea is that economic forces will ultimately (if not instantly) bring the best to the top while relegating the worst to the trash heap.
Now, this legislation comes. To be sure, a two-tiered internet just plain sounds like a bad idea to me. If I understand aright what I have read here, that would seem to be a common sentiment among those of us with technical expertise in this area. Well and good - the implication is that the market forces which we can bring to bear should eventually cause an equilibrium, wherein the businesses which most effectively meet consumer needs will be more successful than those which don't.
All those in favor of more government regulation, please raise your hands? And, yes - I'm a firm advocate of the Laissez Faire principal of governance - "Let the market bear what it will" (put another way, "That government which governs the least, governs best").
Oh, a sidebar question - how 'bout setting up a 'net which circumvents the cable/telephone companies? Any HAM operators out there got any ideas how we can do this? I'd really love to see big business supplanted by a grassroots activity such as this. Imaging the CEO of AT&T/Charter/Verizon/etc. when he learns that people can communicate without all his copper! I'll bet he'd be mad enough to chew raw neutronium!
Tumbling to the back of the airplane may result in some broken bones among the passengers, but it'll also move the aircraft's C/G aft, possibly too far for the pilot to retain control.
No, the real pain will come when you all tumble to the front of the airplane as it's augering into the ground like a lawn dart!
I don't want pr0n relegated to some.xxx ghetto on the internet - I want it freely mixed in with the.com and.net network denizens. That way, it's easier for me to get without raising a red flag!
What the religious right is saying is "we can't discriminate against pr0n" - a remarkably level-headed, fair-minded kind of assertion for these folks. I say, kudos to the religious right!
For the MANY of you who are frothing at the mouth-
on
Sun's Open Source DRM
·
· Score: 1
DRM is inevitible - get over it. The major players in the field have already decreed that it shall be so, and have taken steps to ensure that their will is done.
So-o-o-o...would you rather have a nice little Microsoft/Intel closed source and proprietary system, performing at the whims of the industry masters who control it, or an open-source solution with predetermined abilities, intents and uses?
I know how I'm voting! Hint - it isn't with the wonderful folks who (tried to) bring you Palladium.
That said, it sure ain't worth anything remotely like the price I'll need to pay to update my video equipment. There's the television itself, the *VD player and oh, by the way, how do I get my VHS VCR to work with the new HDTV? (I've got a lot of home movies on VHS which I personally couldn't care less about, but my wife'll kill me if I lose 'em!)
I'm not even going to mention my PC with the ATI All-in-wonder TV card in it. Well, since I just did, yes I will. How 'bout TiVO? All those M$ Multimedia PC's that're being sold even as I type?
This looks less and less like the VHS-Betamax or audiotape-CD situation, and more and more like the US effort to convert to metric - it seems like a big step forward and a good idea until you actually try to do it. Incidentally, I still drink beer in pints, drive in miles per hour (for some number of miles), I stand just under six feet tall and weigh (a small amount) more than two-hundred pounds (before I get flamed, I'm fully conversant with the metric system).
Blu-ray and DVD-HD both sound like fine propositions, until you realize how much collateral technology has to be upgraded/scrapped/replaced to get that (IMHO) somewhat superior picture reproduction. Me and my old NTSC? I find that if the material is interesting enough, I don't even notice that the video quality delivered to my home is considerably lower than NTSC (typically, expect 250-300 lines of resolution due to signal degradation, etc., VHS is even worse. Unless you're watching a monitor in a soundstage in Hollywood, you ain't gettin' everything). While there are technologies which can deliver all the resolution of whatever video standard is in place (think: digital), the fact of the matter is that the overwhelming majority of viewers in the United States are watching analog signals (BTW, the local cable company digitizing their analog feeds to pump them to set-top digital receivers doesn't count).
A mere drop in the bucket compared with, say, our MILITARY budget.
And . . . the priorities are being forced upon NASA by our government. "Drop all the science for science sake research, such as the Voyager probes passing the heliopause. Forget the Hubble - it can only show us pictures of places we can't go. We need to go to to Mars. It's the new space race!"
Assign the blame where it belongs and the reasons become clear. Unfortunately, the culture at NASA is essentially that of our fifth defense force (Marines, Navy, Army, Air Force, NASA).
So . . . what do you expect from a quasi-military operation?
. . . Celera (the private genome effort) initially kept a large portion of their data private . ..
Uh-huh. And what matter all of the patented genomic sequences if Google publishes them?
Put another way . . . if all this data is already considered public domain, why the fuss about Google publishing it? Can you suggest a better motive than profit for such an activity, or is there a simpler explanation than greed?
Occam's razor - for the best shave of your life, or your money back!
I wasn't intentionally trolling, merely making an observation. Fortunately, I have karma to burn.
Unrepentant, and proud of it. I still think that all US Government employees and data centers should use computers with the Trusted Computing Platform present - after all, they are right along with Microsoft et. al. in pushing this technology on the rest of us.
Use your points. I am unarmed. Mod me down and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
The United States Government, that same stalwart agency that wanted to cap all civilian encryption at 56-bits, that wanted escrow technology built into every hardware encryption device, that prosecuted (persecuted?) the author of PGP for posting his work on the WWW - the same staunch defenders of freedom, champions of fairness and all that is good and right in the world; now they must contend with the possibility of somebody pissing in their soup!
Is it just me, or does anybody else feel the urge to shout "The circle is complete"?
Lenovo oughtta incorporate a fritz chip in all PC sales to the U. S. government - it should be tuned to permit only the manufacturer pre-loaded OS to boot, and to reject all attempts at modification of the encryption protocols. They should further lock the homepages on such machines to "www.whitehouse.com" and actively refuse to load any encryption technologies such as PGP, insisting instead that the hardware encryption kindly included by Lenovo be used for all security purposes. Of course, Lenovo would never install escrow technology on these machines, so the U. S. government should trust them implicitly.
Evidently, somebody felt their future revenue stream being threatened by publication of this data - hence the 'piracy' tag. It seems little more than a cynical ploy to preserve the closed-for-profit model that has been the rule in most research lately.
The Human Genome Project was a collaborative effort, largely funded by government and public sources. The agencies involved in the research, however, seem to have a vested interest in keeping the data private, even going so far as to patent genetic sequences (isn't there "prior art" for all of my DNA? I call them "parents"). Freely available information, while often valuable, has no resale value. Can this be the true cause of The "Coalition Against Biopiracy" issueing what seems more like a political slander campaign than a genuine warning of wrongdoing?
Perhaps we should ask:
IPBN - Indigenous Peoples Biodiversity Network
P.O. Box 567
Cusco, Peru
Phone: +51 84 24-5021
email: ipbn@web.net
SEARICE - South East Asia Regional Inititiaves in Community Empowerment
No biggie, as this isn't even pre-release software; it seems to be more like a CVS/nightly to me. Still, it'd be nice to know that the Mozilla foundation are working towards that greatly to be desired goal.
The rule was that if the information was at all legible, we data enter the application. Security/fraud were somebody else's problem (hence invisible to us).
If the information was truly illegible, show the app around the office and make a consensus "best guess" at the illegible content.
Not because of any windows functionality per se, but rather because our chosen mail client is Blotus Notes.
And, yes, some of my co-workers use WINE to run their mail client, but I'm not up for doing that at work (at home, use OpenSuSE 10 x86_64 and Solaris SPARC for all computing), but I can't afford to fight the good fight at work; I'm too busy trying to bring home the big evil!
Still, between efforts like this, Linspire and a whole bevy of others, I suspect that Microsoft's dominance of the desktop is becoming less of a carved-in-stone given and more of simply being the way it is now.
After all, Intel has strong-armed virtually all the major PC manufacturers to feature Intel chips or face their wrath.
Threats such as retroactively withdrawing rebates and removing future discounts on chip purchases have ensured that the major PC manufacturers in the US push Intel chips. To do otherwise would increase the cost of a given manufacturer's PCs to the point where the manufacturer couldn't be competitive.
Illegal? I'm not sure, but I don't think so (IANAL). Immoral? Duh (IAAHB)!
The central tenet of the story is that virus' posess and are part of an emergent "hive mind", that all evolution on Earth has occurred at the unconscious direction of virus' attempting to modify the environment enough for the virus' to achieve sufficient numbers and complexity to consciously express their hive mind - all while we poor, benighted humans insist on viewing ourselves as the pinnacle of the evolutionary mountain. The author writing lead me to believe that he was strongly influenced by the works of Michael Crighton.
With appropriate apologies to proponents of Intelligent design - namely, none.
Slashdot Mirror
1) Post fax number on web to attract victims (and they are the victims here),
2) Wait for the junk faxes (which were, in fact, solicited if you think about it),
3) ??? --> Sue sender for issuing "junk faxes" (which aren't junk faxes),
4) PROFIT!!!
If, OTOH, we conclude that website contact is a "business relationship" in connection with faxes, 'fax-trapping' becomes rather like trying to think yourself to orgasm - certainly entertaining, but unlikely to produce any useful results.
So . . . the first option results in a mechanism for illicit financial gain, while the second option results in inconvenience (and some small but manageable expense) for a large number of people. Our legislators probably felt they had a higher calling to prevent future crimes than they did to preserve our privacy and personal convenience.
I don't believe either of these is an acceptable condition; however, I can't see an immediate solution to the problem. Anybody out there got any good ideas?
There must be others - this one just came to mind.
Now, this legislation comes. To be sure, a two-tiered internet just plain sounds like a bad idea to me. If I understand aright what I have read here, that would seem to be a common sentiment among those of us with technical expertise in this area. Well and good - the implication is that the market forces which we can bring to bear should eventually cause an equilibrium, wherein the businesses which most effectively meet consumer needs will be more successful than those which don't.
All those in favor of more government regulation, please raise your hands? And, yes - I'm a firm advocate of the Laissez Faire principal of governance - "Let the market bear what it will" (put another way, "That government which governs the least, governs best").
Oh, a sidebar question - how 'bout setting up a 'net which circumvents the cable/telephone companies? Any HAM operators out there got any ideas how we can do this? I'd really love to see big business supplanted by a grassroots activity such as this. Imaging the CEO of AT&T/Charter/Verizon/etc. when he learns that people can communicate without all his copper! I'll bet he'd be mad enough to chew raw neutronium!
No, the real pain will come when you all tumble to the front of the airplane as it's augering into the ground like a lawn dart!
What the religious right is saying is "we can't discriminate against pr0n" - a remarkably level-headed, fair-minded kind of assertion for these folks. I say, kudos to the religious right!
So-o-o-o...would you rather have a nice little Microsoft/Intel closed source and proprietary system, performing at the whims of the industry masters who control it, or an open-source solution with predetermined abilities, intents and uses?
I know how I'm voting! Hint - it isn't with the wonderful folks who (tried to) bring you Palladium.
Is it a Blue Gene (just a stock picture so that the average reader will get the idea that this is something BIG), or is this actually Hector?
"So this'll make my VHS tapes HDTV? How come they don't look or sound better?"
That said, it sure ain't worth anything remotely like the price I'll need to pay to update my video equipment. There's the television itself, the *VD player and oh, by the way, how do I get my VHS VCR to work with the new HDTV? (I've got a lot of home movies on VHS which I personally couldn't care less about, but my wife'll kill me if I lose 'em!)
I'm not even going to mention my PC with the ATI All-in-wonder TV card in it. Well, since I just did, yes I will. How 'bout TiVO? All those M$ Multimedia PC's that're being sold even as I type?
This looks less and less like the VHS-Betamax or audiotape-CD situation, and more and more like the US effort to convert to metric - it seems like a big step forward and a good idea until you actually try to do it. Incidentally, I still drink beer in pints, drive in miles per hour (for some number of miles), I stand just under six feet tall and weigh (a small amount) more than two-hundred pounds (before I get flamed, I'm fully conversant with the metric system).
Blu-ray and DVD-HD both sound like fine propositions, until you realize how much collateral technology has to be upgraded/scrapped/replaced to get that (IMHO) somewhat superior picture reproduction. Me and my old NTSC? I find that if the material is interesting enough, I don't even notice that the video quality delivered to my home is considerably lower than NTSC (typically, expect 250-300 lines of resolution due to signal degradation, etc., VHS is even worse. Unless you're watching a monitor in a soundstage in Hollywood, you ain't gettin' everything). While there are technologies which can deliver all the resolution of whatever video standard is in place (think: digital), the fact of the matter is that the overwhelming majority of viewers in the United States are watching analog signals (BTW, the local cable company digitizing their analog feeds to pump them to set-top digital receivers doesn't count).
Or do you just work there?
And . . . the priorities are being forced upon NASA by our government. "Drop all the science for science sake research, such as the Voyager probes passing the heliopause. Forget the Hubble - it can only show us pictures of places we can't go. We need to go to to Mars. It's the new space race!"
Assign the blame where it belongs and the reasons become clear. Unfortunately, the culture at NASA is essentially that of our fifth defense force (Marines, Navy, Army, Air Force, NASA).
So . . . what do you expect from a quasi-military operation?
Uh-huh. And what matter all of the patented genomic sequences if Google publishes them?
Put another way . . . if all this data is already considered public domain, why the fuss about Google publishing it? Can you suggest a better motive than profit for such an activity, or is there a simpler explanation than greed?
Occam's razor - for the best shave of your life, or your money back!
I wasn't intentionally trolling, merely making an observation. Fortunately, I have karma to burn.
Unrepentant, and proud of it. I still think that all US Government employees and data centers should use computers with the Trusted Computing Platform present - after all, they are right along with Microsoft et. al. in pushing this technology on the rest of us.
Use your points. I am unarmed. Mod me down and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
The United States Government, that same stalwart agency that wanted to cap all civilian encryption at 56-bits, that wanted escrow technology built into every hardware encryption device, that prosecuted (persecuted?) the author of PGP for posting his work on the WWW - the same staunch defenders of freedom, champions of fairness and all that is good and right in the world; now they must contend with the possibility of somebody pissing in their soup!
Is it just me, or does anybody else feel the urge to shout "The circle is complete"?
Lenovo oughtta incorporate a fritz chip in all PC sales to the U. S. government - it should be tuned to permit only the manufacturer pre-loaded OS to boot, and to reject all attempts at modification of the encryption protocols. They should further lock the homepages on such machines to "www.whitehouse.com" and actively refuse to load any encryption technologies such as PGP, insisting instead that the hardware encryption kindly included by Lenovo be used for all security purposes. Of course, Lenovo would never install escrow technology on these machines, so the U. S. government should trust them implicitly.
</rant>
The Human Genome Project was a collaborative effort, largely funded by government and public sources. The agencies involved in the research, however, seem to have a vested interest in keeping the data private, even going so far as to patent genetic sequences (isn't there "prior art" for all of my DNA? I call them "parents"). Freely available information, while often valuable, has no resale value. Can this be the true cause of The "Coalition Against Biopiracy" issueing what seems more like a political slander campaign than a genuine warning of wrongdoing?
Perhaps we should ask:
IPBN - Indigenous Peoples Biodiversity Network
P.O. Box 567
Cusco, Peru
Phone: +51 84 24-5021
email: ipbn@web.net
SEARICE - South East Asia Regional Inititiaves in Community Empowerment
Unit 331, Eagle Court Condominium
26 Matalino Street, Central District
Diliman, Quezon City, Philippines
Phone: (63 2) 433-7182, 433-2067
Fax: (63 2) 922-6710
email: searice@searice.org.ph
web: http://www.searice.org.ph/
ETC Group - Action Group on Erosion, Technology and Concentration
431 Gilmour St, Second Floor,
Ottawa, ON Canada K2P 0R5
Tel: 1(613)241-2267
Fax: 1(613)241-2506
email: etc@etcgroup.org
web: http://www.etcgroup.org/
HAHAHAHAHA!
Trust me - you'll thank me later!
In a related news item, a recent survey shows that four out of five people don't care about recent surveys.
No biggie, as this isn't even pre-release software; it seems to be more like a CVS/nightly to me. Still, it'd be nice to know that the Mozilla foundation are working towards that greatly to be desired goal.
The rule was that if the information was at all legible, we data enter the application. Security/fraud were somebody else's problem (hence invisible to us).
If the information was truly illegible, show the app around the office and make a consensus "best guess" at the illegible content.
Frightening, eh?
There's more than just mail to be considered here. Databases, availability/scheduling. Our lockin is to Lotus Notes - not the Lotus Notes mail client.
Eat any good books lately?
Not because of any windows functionality per se, but rather because our chosen mail client is Blotus Notes.
And, yes, some of my co-workers use WINE to run their mail client, but I'm not up for doing that at work (at home, use OpenSuSE 10 x86_64 and Solaris SPARC for all computing), but I can't afford to fight the good fight at work; I'm too busy trying to bring home the big evil!
Still, between efforts like this, Linspire and a whole bevy of others, I suspect that Microsoft's dominance of the desktop is becoming less of a carved-in-stone given and more of simply being the way it is now.
She calls them "rice cakes", though.
Threats such as retroactively withdrawing rebates and removing future discounts on chip purchases have ensured that the major PC manufacturers in the US push Intel chips. To do otherwise would increase the cost of a given manufacturer's PCs to the point where the manufacturer couldn't be competitive.
Illegal? I'm not sure, but I don't think so (IANAL). Immoral? Duh (IAAHB)!
The central tenet of the story is that virus' posess and are part of an emergent "hive mind", that all evolution on Earth has occurred at the unconscious direction of virus' attempting to modify the environment enough for the virus' to achieve sufficient numbers and complexity to consciously express their hive mind - all while we poor, benighted humans insist on viewing ourselves as the pinnacle of the evolutionary mountain. The author writing lead me to believe that he was strongly influenced by the works of Michael Crighton.
With appropriate apologies to proponents of Intelligent design - namely, none.