I've never used Facebook but made the mistake of creating this account with Slashdot. When I later created an account on LinkedIn I tried to be more diligent in learning their terms of agreement beforehand. Of the three entities, LinkedIn seems to be the only one to have a relatively painless way to completely remove one's account. That means a lot to me because it means they've put user priorities ahead of their own (e.g. making their coding task easier).
If Slashdot wants to continue draw users like myself so it can sell ad space, then they might wish to rethink some of their policies.
I believe there are laws in many jurisdictions around the world whose underlying axiom is that if a police person concludes you may have a criminal intent in mind, then you are in fact guilty of a crime if you do not successfully remove that perception. I presume this is what happened in that case. True, in some cases it takes the interaction of several laws to yield that result, but there it is. Indeed, it is clear that a number of posters to Slashdot agree with that axiom: if you appear threatening then you forfeit your rights. They only differ in the measure of the perception - not the underlying axiom.
It should be noted that, with a few clearly defined exceptions in some jurisdictions, the average citizen does not appear to be allowed to employ that axiom. Those who believe in the idea should press to have the law changed so we can all be allowed to constrain the rights of anyone we feel is an immediate threat. (E.g. Right now you can't legally preemptively attack the person approaching you who you think is dressed and acts like a mugger while out on your 1:00 AM stroll.)
Of course a variant of the axiom is to contrain the "threatening" person's rights only long enough to determine whether the threat is real. In this case that would have meant the woman would have been let on her way and she would be under no threat of further legal peril.
The earlier drafts of the IPv6 RFCs had limited the Type 0 routing addresses to 23 per extension header. The current limit is theoretically 128, though maximum packet size through any one link will tend to get in the way.
The number of times an IPv6 packet may ping-pong is limited by the Hop Limit field, which is an 8 but unsigned integer (i.e. 255 times).
While it is true that a very permissive router or host may process a packet with more than one Type 0 routing header, RFC 2460 strongly recommends that a router or host only process one such extension header.
One product that has been designed to locate implementation problems with IPv6 stacks (it can't do anything about design flaws!) is the Maxwell product from http://www.iwl.com/. Truth in advertising requires that I point out I helped create some of the test cases for that product (however, I am not an employee of IWL or own any equity or options on equity in the company).
If no comparable climate changes have been observed on Venus, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune I would presume the sun as the causal element would be reduced or eliminated.
So have any trends (or lack thereof) been observed on the other planets with substantial atmospheres?
According to one English-language translation of the Brazilian constitution, under: "TITLE II - FUNDAMENTAL RIGHTS AND GUARANTEES CHAPTER I - INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE RIGHTS AND DUTIES Article 5 IV - the expression of thought is free, anonymity being forbidden;"
Propane is a nice alkane between ethane and butane whose properties are very useful in certain applications. Nothing is accomplished by converting it to hydrogen. Go pick on water or methane!
Sidestepping the copyright issue for the moment, if the ads on the news sites also appear in the cached material, then it is hard to see what loss there is to the news sites or their advertisers.
And if that is the case (I don't know that the above is the case, though that has been my experience reading cached Google material) then it seems likely that the load on the news servers is also reduced, which may cut their bandwidth expenses while still getting their material in front of more eyeballs.
Also, if people on the net are paying the news sites $0 (or 0) per visit or view, isn't the multiplied loss still a flat zero? If you give your copyrighted material away, how can you claim a loss when someone else does the same thing with your material?
I admit those are all pragmatic issues and perhaps not legal ones (except maybe the last one) but I guess I'm in the group of people who wonders what these sites are thinking? Looks like they'll lose the war by winning the wrong battle. It all seems like a classic case of spitting into the wind to curse the storm, in my humble opinion.
My list of non-signing states and territories is Guam, Indiana, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Northern Marianas, Palau, and Virginia.
If I got this right, it appears the attorney generals who didn't sign were in Guam, Indiana, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Northern Marianas, Palua, and Virginia. Okay - you say some of those aren't states? Well, neither are American Samoa, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, or the Virgin Islands, yet those were included in the list of alleged "49 state attorney generals" who signed the letter.
Source: http://www.atg.wa.gov/releases/2006/Documents/DRLe tter.pdf
You are probably better off growing Mexican Sage and other flowering plants - hummingbirds seem to love the stuff. We got them all the time around the plants in our yard in Aptos in California (we've moved out of California to someplace nicer;-)).
(By the way, I've never used your web site, though my wife has a couple times.)
So what do you think of the article under discussion?
I understand libertarian philosophy better than you. You are arguing points that the Libertarian party doesn't hold.
First, the issue under discussion isn't about companies restricting access via technical means - they've had that right since the establishment of the U.S. You as an individual have that right too. The issue under discussion is the government taking away a right people previously had. The Libertarian party position on this bill is pretty clear - it would be against the bill.
Sex. Vote Libertarian and not only can you download porn, you'll be able to pay women for sex without risk of being arrested - even when you aren't in Nevada!
Money. Vote Libertarian and you can keep more of your earnings.
Drugs. Vote Libertarian and you can do what you want with your own body.
And that's not all you get!....
I'm sorry, but that site doesn't criticize Libertarian party positions - it is Mike Huben criticising Mike Huben's ideas of libertarian thought. He even says as much. Consider for example:
"This diversity of libertarian viewpoints can make it quite difficult to have a coherent discussion with them...." "They are utopian because there has never yet been a libertarian society (though one or two have come close to some libertarian ideas.)."
Substitute "liberal" or "conservative" for "libertarian" in the above and one would have statements neither more nor less valid than the original. If Huben were criticising Libertarian party platform positions, or specific Libertarian candidates, then the link to his web page might have been legitimate. But he's doesn't. Or at least I couldn't find anything in his long winded diatribes.
Marketing expenses taken in perspective:
on
Vonage IPO
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
A few items to keep in mind with regard to Vonage's marketing expenses:
Vonage can cut way back on them without losing existing customers. They are not unavoidable operating expenses.
If a company intends to be as large as the incumbents, they'll need equivalent marketing - regardless of their current number of customers.
Vonage could "grow" its revenue so that its relatively fixed high-profile national marketing expense becomes a much smaller fraction of its expenses without reducing its actual marketing expenses a dime. Remember that the amortized cost for the first customer of a startup company that spent $100 million developing its products is $100 million per customer. If the customer growth is exponential while the marketing expenses are linear, the amortized cost declines rapidly with time.
The more important numbers to worry about are the operating costs per customer, not necessarily the acquisition cost for the earliest customers, which can be misleading.
Yes, an old and fair organization does exist. The ITU (previously CCITT) seems to have no problem handling telecommunication standards and telephone country code assignments relatively fairly.
The ITU is one of the world's oldest international organizations:
The ICANN and VeriSign dispute about the content of the root domain name servers makes about as much sense as a dispute between Fred and Joe over which of them can park their car in Bob's driveway.
What contractual or legal obligations exist between ICANN, VeriSign, or any of the registrars and the owners of the traditionally accepted root domain name servers? Just how do ICANN or VeriSign intend to force the owners of the root DNS systems to sync their databases to the registrar's if they decide to cut out the middle man? What contractual or legal obligations requires ISPs to resolve DNS queries using the traditionally accepted root DNSs?
I'd sure like to know what these missing links are. Seems to me they are fundamental....
Here's a couple of analogies that I think may highlight some of the absurdities and some of the hazards. Consider these two restatements of a line from the summary:
The resolution, introduced by two Republicans and one Democrat, aims to line up Congress firmly behind the Bush administration as it heads for a showdown with much of the rest of the world over control of the global road network.
The resolution, introduced by two Republicans and one Democrat, aims to line up Congress firmly behind the Bush administration as it heads for a showdown with much of the rest of the world over control of the radio frequency spectrum.
And guess which organization handles international conflicts and allocations of the radio frequency spectrum?
As you all know, there are 13 generally accepted root name servers (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_nameserver for a list and explanation for those who need a refresher). They are well dispersed both physically around the globe and with regard to fiscal control. As a result, the U.S. claim to root DNS control is neither more nor less strong than European or Asian claims. ICANN, a U.S. based organization, ironically has no direct control over the root name servers. So far as I know, ICANN acts as a central control for the contents of the root name servers mostly by accepted convention - there are no contractual or legal obligations between ICANN and the root servers.
Karl Auerbach, who served on the ICANN board as the first (and last) North American representative for the short period that ICANN allowed elected representatives on their board, basically (with the help of the Electronic Frontier Foundation) had to sue ICANN to get access to ICANN records so he could perform his board duties. Archives on that legal fight are here:
While I don't agree with Karl on several issues, I agree with his general assessment that ICANN is not looking after your (or my) interests. Karl has written on ICANN's abuse and misuse of their status many times - browse his blog. So long as the U.S. government, and the root name servers it controls, continues the accepted convention in following ICANN there is no good end in sight to its misuse of its position.
Now compare ICANN with the ITU. The ITU (International Telecommunications Union, formerly CCITT) has been around over 100 years and has members from just about every country on the globe. (ITU lineage predates the UN by many decades.) The ITU define standards (a.k.a. "recommendations") that have made it possible for you to pick up your phone and be able to call anyone else anywhere in the world who has a dialable phone number. Without them, the global telephone system and the global Internet almost certainly wouldn't exist as we know it.
If no harm or censor of content has come to the global telephone system under the gentle auspices of the ITU, then I think fretting over ITU control of the Internet root domain name servers is probably misplaced.
Forbidden Planet The Day the Earth Stood Still The Time Machine (George Pal version) The War of the Worlds (George Pal version) Destination Moon (I'm a fan of Heinlein)
Since existing laws and regulations appear to have been ineffective, more laws seem unlikely to reduce the problem, so the best recommendations would appear to make it part of the standard training of pilots on how to handle the incidents (if that is not already the case). All in my humble opinion, of course.
Slashdot Mirror
I've never used Facebook but made the mistake of creating this account with Slashdot. When I later created an account on LinkedIn I tried to be more diligent in learning their terms of agreement beforehand. Of the three entities, LinkedIn seems to be the only one to have a relatively painless way to completely remove one's account. That means a lot to me because it means they've put user priorities ahead of their own (e.g. making their coding task easier).
If Slashdot wants to continue draw users like myself so it can sell ad space, then they might wish to rethink some of their policies.
I believe there are laws in many jurisdictions around the world whose underlying axiom is that if a police person concludes you may have a criminal intent in mind, then you are in fact guilty of a crime if you do not successfully remove that perception. I presume this is what happened in that case. True, in some cases it takes the interaction of several laws to yield that result, but there it is. Indeed, it is clear that a number of posters to Slashdot agree with that axiom: if you appear threatening then you forfeit your rights. They only differ in the measure of the perception - not the underlying axiom.
It should be noted that, with a few clearly defined exceptions in some jurisdictions, the average citizen does not appear to be allowed to employ that axiom. Those who believe in the idea should press to have the law changed so we can all be allowed to constrain the rights of anyone we feel is an immediate threat. (E.g. Right now you can't legally preemptively attack the person approaching you who you think is dressed and acts like a mugger while out on your 1:00 AM stroll.)
Of course a variant of the axiom is to contrain the "threatening" person's rights only long enough to determine whether the threat is real. In this case that would have meant the woman would have been let on her way and she would be under no threat of further legal peril.
ARIN didn't exist, and neither did that clause, when some of those IP blocks were handed out. For example, Karl Auerbach got a block pre-ARIN: http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jh tml?articleID=199700668
Some history and information:
The earlier drafts of the IPv6 RFCs had limited the Type 0 routing addresses to 23 per extension header. The current limit is theoretically 128, though maximum packet size through any one link will tend to get in the way.
The number of times an IPv6 packet may ping-pong is limited by the Hop Limit field, which is an 8 but unsigned integer (i.e. 255 times).
While it is true that a very permissive router or host may process a packet with more than one Type 0 routing header, RFC 2460 strongly recommends that a router or host only process one such extension header.
One product that has been designed to locate implementation problems with IPv6 stacks (it can't do anything about design flaws!) is the Maxwell product from http://www.iwl.com/. Truth in advertising requires that I point out I helped create some of the test cases for that product (however, I am not an employee of IWL or own any equity or options on equity in the company).
If no comparable climate changes have been observed on Venus, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune I would presume the sun as the causal element would be reduced or eliminated.
So have any trends (or lack thereof) been observed on the other planets with substantial atmospheres?
According to one English-language translation of the Brazilian constitution, under:
t ml )
"TITLE II - FUNDAMENTAL RIGHTS AND GUARANTEES
CHAPTER I - INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE RIGHTS AND DUTIES
Article 5
IV - the expression of thought is free, anonymity being forbidden;"
(Quoted from http://www.v-brazil.com/government/laws/titleII.h
Propane is a nice alkane between ethane and butane whose properties are very useful in certain applications. Nothing is accomplished by converting it to hydrogen. Go pick on water or methane!
Sidestepping the copyright issue for the moment, if the ads on the news sites also appear in the cached material, then it is hard to see what loss there is to the news sites or their advertisers.
And if that is the case (I don't know that the above is the case, though that has been my experience reading cached Google material) then it seems likely that the load on the news servers is also reduced, which may cut their bandwidth expenses while still getting their material in front of more eyeballs.
Also, if people on the net are paying the news sites $0 (or 0) per visit or view, isn't the multiplied loss still a flat zero? If you give your copyrighted material away, how can you claim a loss when someone else does the same thing with your material?
I admit those are all pragmatic issues and perhaps not legal ones (except maybe the last one) but I guess I'm in the group of people who wonders what these sites are thinking? Looks like they'll lose the war by winning the wrong battle. It all seems like a classic case of spitting into the wind to curse the storm, in my humble opinion.
My list of non-signing states and territories is Guam, Indiana, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Northern Marianas, Palau, and Virginia.
If I got this right, it appears the attorney generals who didn't sign were in Guam, Indiana, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Northern Marianas, Palua, and Virginia. Okay - you say some of those aren't states? Well, neither are American Samoa, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, or the Virgin Islands, yet those were included in the list of alleged "49 state attorney generals" who signed the letter. Source: http://www.atg.wa.gov/releases/2006/Documents/DRLe tter.pdf
Oops - the AG of Oregon did sign. I missed it because I thought all the states were listed alphabetically - not the case on the first signature page.
Here's the link to that letter: http://www.atg.wa.gov/releases/2006/Documents/DRLe tter.pdf
Oregon and Minnesota appear to be missing (but I have only done a quick scan). They got to 49 by including several territories.
You are probably better off growing Mexican Sage and other flowering plants - hummingbirds seem to love the stuff. We got them all the time around the plants in our yard in Aptos in California (we've moved out of California to someplace nicer ;-)).
(By the way, I've never used your web site, though my wife has a couple times.)
So what do you think of the article under discussion?
I understand libertarian philosophy better than you. You are arguing points that the Libertarian party doesn't hold.
First, the issue under discussion isn't about companies restricting access via technical means - they've had that right since the establishment of the U.S. You as an individual have that right too. The issue under discussion is the government taking away a right people previously had. The Libertarian party position on this bill is pretty clear - it would be against the bill.
Sex. Vote Libertarian and not only can you download porn, you'll be able to pay women for sex without risk of being arrested - even when you aren't in Nevada! Money. Vote Libertarian and you can keep more of your earnings. Drugs. Vote Libertarian and you can do what you want with your own body. And that's not all you get!....
I'm sorry, but that site doesn't criticize Libertarian party positions - it is Mike Huben criticising Mike Huben's ideas of libertarian thought. He even says as much. Consider for example:
"This diversity of libertarian viewpoints can make it quite difficult to have a coherent discussion with them...."
"They are utopian because there has never yet been a libertarian society (though one or two have come close to some libertarian ideas.)."
Substitute "liberal" or "conservative" for "libertarian" in the above and one would have statements neither more nor less valid than the original. If Huben were criticising Libertarian party platform positions, or specific Libertarian candidates, then the link to his web page might have been legitimate. But he's doesn't. Or at least I couldn't find anything in his long winded diatribes.
A few items to keep in mind with regard to Vonage's marketing expenses:
Vonage can cut way back on them without losing existing customers. They are not unavoidable operating expenses.
If a company intends to be as large as the incumbents, they'll need equivalent marketing - regardless of their current number of customers.
Vonage could "grow" its revenue so that its relatively fixed high-profile national marketing expense becomes a much smaller fraction of its expenses without reducing its actual marketing expenses a dime. Remember that the amortized cost for the first customer of a startup company that spent $100 million developing its products is $100 million per customer. If the customer growth is exponential while the marketing expenses are linear, the amortized cost declines rapidly with time.
The more important numbers to worry about are the operating costs per customer, not necessarily the acquisition cost for the earliest customers, which can be misleading.
He resides in a different state and uses their infrastructure and has to do jury duty in that state, not New York.
Yes, an old and fair organization does exist. The ITU (previously CCITT) seems to have no problem handling telecommunication standards and telephone country code assignments relatively fairly.
m munication_Union
The ITU is one of the world's oldest international organizations:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Teleco
The ICANN and VeriSign dispute about the content of the root domain name servers makes about as much sense as a dispute between Fred and Joe over which of them can park their car in Bob's driveway.
What contractual or legal obligations exist between ICANN, VeriSign, or any of the registrars and the owners of the traditionally accepted root domain name servers? Just how do ICANN or VeriSign intend to force the owners of the root DNS systems to sync their databases to the registrar's if they decide to cut out the middle man? What contractual or legal obligations requires ISPs to resolve DNS queries using the traditionally accepted root DNSs?
I'd sure like to know what these missing links are. Seems to me they are fundamental....
Here's a couple of analogies that I think may highlight some of the absurdities and some of the hazards. Consider these two restatements of a line from the summary:
The resolution, introduced by two Republicans and one Democrat, aims to line up Congress firmly behind the Bush administration as it heads for a showdown with much of the rest of the world over control of the global road network.
The resolution, introduced by two Republicans and one Democrat, aims to line up Congress firmly behind the Bush administration as it heads for a showdown with much of the rest of the world over control of the radio frequency spectrum.
And guess which organization handles international conflicts and allocations of the radio frequency spectrum?
Karl Auerbach, who served on the ICANN board as the first (and last) North American representative for the short period that ICANN allowed elected representatives on their board, basically (with the help of the Electronic Frontier Foundation) had to sue ICANN to get access to ICANN records so he could perform his board duties. Archives on that legal fight are here:
http://www.eff.org/Infrastructure/DNS_control/ICAN N_IANA_IAHC/Auerbach_v_ICANN/
Karl's opinions (and blog) may be found on his web site:
http://www.cavebear.com/
While I don't agree with Karl on several issues, I agree with his general assessment that ICANN is not looking after your (or my) interests. Karl has written on ICANN's abuse and misuse of their status many times - browse his blog. So long as the U.S. government, and the root name servers it controls, continues the accepted convention in following ICANN there is no good end in sight to its misuse of its position.
Now compare ICANN with the ITU. The ITU (International Telecommunications Union, formerly CCITT) has been around over 100 years and has members from just about every country on the globe. (ITU lineage predates the UN by many decades.) The ITU define standards (a.k.a. "recommendations") that have made it possible for you to pick up your phone and be able to call anyone else anywhere in the world who has a dialable phone number. Without them, the global telephone system and the global Internet almost certainly wouldn't exist as we know it.
If no harm or censor of content has come to the global telephone system under the gentle auspices of the ITU, then I think fretting over ITU control of the Internet root domain name servers is probably misplaced.
How could they miss these gems:
Forbidden Planet
The Day the Earth Stood Still
The Time Machine (George Pal version)
The War of the Worlds (George Pal version)
Destination Moon (I'm a fan of Heinlein)
Sorry the second link is broken. It should be: http://purl.access.gpo.gov/GPO/LPS14005 (Figure 4 is interesting.)
Since existing laws and regulations appear to have been ineffective, more laws seem unlikely to reduce the problem, so the best recommendations would appear to make it part of the standard training of pilots on how to handle the incidents (if that is not already the case). All in my humble opinion, of course.