What I blame are the traffic laws that force me to choose between driving safely (with the average speed of faster traffic) or obeying the law [...] The cops are the ones at fault here, and/or the legislation that they're enforcing. I'm being forced by their bad laws to choose the lesser evil.
I don't have any mod points, and we're so far off-topic it won't matter how insightful this might be. However, I'd like to emphasize your point that many have missed in the flurry of name-calling here.
Indeed, poor enforcement of the (speed limit) law is the root problem. Either the law needs to be fixed (to increase the speed limits to something reasonable) or the enforcement needs to be significantly more strict. Either way, all drivers should be driving within the legal limits (and that includes minimums as well as maximums, although lots of clueless drivers don't even realize there is a minimum). However, we certainly can't have it both ways, as it necessarily creates hazardous conditions, which happens to be the very thing the law was intended to avoid (it's odd how often that happens).
Without proper enforcement (especially coupled with ridiculously low limits in places) lots of drivers feel they can get away with going well beyond the legal limits. The "flow of traffic" inevitably becomes higher than the posted speed limit. This puts us all in an awkward position; we must go over the limit to stay safely within the flow, or honor the limit thus creating unsafe conditions due to a large relative speed difference.
Note the almost comical (if it weren't so very dangerous) irony in the arguments against you. The vast majority of the folks who are complaining are citing here how the law compels you to pull over so that you may be passed. Yet that very same law compels them not to speed in order to pass you, if you're already at (or above) the posted limit!
As far as I'm concerned, the burden lies squarely on the speeders to adapt and cope (civilly, ideally) with all the law-abiding drivers who are driving at any speed between the minimum and maximum permitted speeds.
I'll state again for emphasis to your detractors: The laws defining the speed limits may be terrible, but you are just as obligated to follow these laws as the left-lane drivers are obligated to follow the laws that allow you to pass. You cannot have it both ways; you can't selectively ignore some laws then try to enforce others as you see convenient.
After watching the video, I'd hardly say it was an "attack" given that it seemed more like the octopus was simply checking out the ROV. I'm not a marine animal behaviorist, but there certainly didn't seem to be anything malicious or even dangerous. At best it seemed actively curious.
It's always easier when it's not your expensive toy down there, but it seems the operator was in panic mode. I'd like to think that if it were my ROV, I'd have held off on that little counter-offensive stunt a little longer, until I saw at least some indication of hostility. In the video, the octopus has barely started reaching toward the ROV by the time its starts getting pelted by the gravel. My guess is that the encounter would have ended quite peacefully, without any aggression on either side, and we would have had even more footage of this interesting interaction.
Why can't we take group tests? In the real world, if you don't know something, you ask someone who does know.
Well, that works just fine for when you don't "know something" such as a fact, figure, or definition. However, what about when you don't "understand something" such as a complex concept or how to apply a theory in practice? Do you just go ask somebody else?
Sure, you could try, but you probably won't simply find it with a quick Google search as you suggest. Consider how long it might take for somebody who does happen to understand it (well enough to teach it to you) to teach you this concept. That time is well spent for you, but not for your employer (nor necessarily your "teacher" in this case). This assumes, of course, that you know how to recognize somebody who actually does understand the concept, which is non-trivial at best; otherwise you'll still get it all wrong.
In the real world, if I want to hire you and you have a degree, I expect you to have been through that drill already for certain complex concepts, with professors (and indeed classmates) who are nominally proficient in their respective fields. If you haven't, you'll inevitably become a burden to your team.
Following a link already reveals precisely the same information
No, it's not really that simple. This is much like the difference between first-party cookies and third-party cookies. In fact, I'd be happy if they decided to limit them at that level of granularity. I honestly wouldn't mind first-party pings. This provides--as you correctly note--nothing more than they can already collect now. It does, however, significantly enhance the developers' ability to directly collect stateful click-through information.
On the other hand, I'd say third-party pings are no less (and no more) evil than third-party cookies in terms of privacy. It seems to be a fairly common practice to disable third-party cookies while leaving first-party cookies enabled. I would certainly like the option to specify my preferences at that level.
Do not a single one of you idiots understand a binary file format?
Well, on the admittedly limited chance that you're not trolling, and that instead you'll actually consider a reasoned response with an open mind, I'll try one more time. First, yes, we "idiots" do know exactly what we're talking about, so I honestly hope you'll bother to read and possibly even learn something.
The fine example you gave is a trivially simple and quite static format, similar to an image. It is far from complex and dynamic enough to describe any useful arbitrary document. If you'd actually re-read the post to which you replied, you'd find a much more relevant example, that of HTML. HTML can't be described as a basic C-style structure like your example, but a formal grammar such as BNF (or a DTD for XHTML) could be used. However, you can very easily omit many optional flags/features when describing how to write a valid document in any such format. As noted, I might only tell you only about the head, title, and body tags, and perhaps the h1-h7 tags as well.
Is it possible for me to neglect to tell you about all the other formatting tags (like b and i and friends) and even "forget" to mention the whole hyperlink concept with the "a" tag? Sure it is. Can you write a valid document? Sure you can. Now, can you really read all possible documents, including those that use the tags I so conveniently neglected to describe? No.
Let's even use your own example, with a modification:
long version 0x0100
long number of strings 0x0002
long string length
string
long string length
string long number of options 0x0001
int option_num
int option_length
byte [] option_data
EOF
Here you see that I've told you how and where to add multiple options. However, I've not told you what options are valid. I might only tell you about some of the options and not others. You can always still write a document given that format, but you can't read all documents unless you've been told all the possible valid options.
So, really I hope this hasn't been a waste of time, and that you can see that Microsoft can choose to give out any arbitrary amount of detail for how to write a proper and valid document, without giving sufficient tools with which to parse all possible valid documents.
Please. If you know the format stream to write documents, you know the stream to read them.
Right, then. Let me teach you how to write an HTML document. First, you have one "html" tag, then enclose one "title" tag first and one "body" tag second, then put some text into the title and a bunch of text into the body. There, you now know how to write a perfectly valid HTML document.
Now, let's try a quick experiment. Click the View Source on the browser for page you are reading right now. Can you make any meaningful sense of that document, given only the description above about how to write a document? I hope you can see the point. Please indeed.
You're right. But look, I think it's even worse than you suggest. Look at this gem FTFA:
Within about 18 months, customers, competitors and developers should be able to download detailed files from Ecma on how to create a Microsoft Word, Powerpoint or Excel document.
This is going expose only a way to write to these formats. It says absolutely nothing about how to read documents created by their proprietary packages. It's much easier to say "here's how to create a valid document" without giving away all of the keys to the kingdom than it is to explain fully "here's how to read any document created by our suite" (and you have to presume they'll intentionally leave out the good stuff).
That's a great point, although I suspect the reality will be even more bleak.
Sony won't need to install a rootkit, because the Microsoft DRM will be designed specifically to help enforce things like Sony's EULA. Why should Sony bother with a rootkkit when the OS itself will impose the limits by design?
Typically if one converts (technically the wrong term, but that's not important here) from AC to DC in a centralized manner, then the batteries can be fed directly.
If main power fails in an AC data center, the UPS systems need to take the DC from the batteries and convert to AC, then distribute, then each machine needs to convert back to DC. That's terribly wasteful, since neither of these conversions is anywhere near perfect efficiency. In a DC data center, the UPS systems are just the batteries, so they can hold much longer.
Now, of course there's a counter to this; the problem is that batteries don't handle the load very long, and you typically need to switch to a generator, and typical mechanical generators inherently provide AC rather than DC (because it is mechanically more efficient).
Just for a moment, consider a hypothetical universe where everything is free, not just software. Now it's getting more interesting, eh?
Of course; it's easy to recognize the future that Roddenberry (and countless others) have vividly described. As an end game, it's great! The only problem is during that pesky (and highly non-trivial) "transitional" period, when lots of stuff is free and lots of other stuff is not. We have to solve some basics first--starting at the lowest tier of the Maslow hierarchy of needs--before we can realize the potential. Some may argue that software may help satisfy some of these basic needs, but certainly software alone can't do it. And to bring this back on topic, it's debatable whether a limited monopoly would encourage or discourage the fundamental research required to satisfy these needs.
These folks are just doing their jobs according to the laws in place.
So because child porn wasn't outlawed in the US until only half a century ago or so, exploiting children was peachy keen because the photographers and participants were obeying "the laws in place"?
Just because something is legal doesn't make it right.
Well no, of course not. It seems like a non-sequitur troll, but let's examine it, just in case you're serious. The idea here is that, if you disagreed at the time, you'd have two choices. I suggest that society would be better off in the long term working to enact laws to make such exploitation illegal. The alternative is simply to point blame directly to the exploiters. Pointing blame doesn't carry much weight, and doesn't really address the fundamental problem now, does it?
So, what exactly would you propose? Take the law in your own hands and shoot all the exploiters? Well, that might work once or twice, but soon you'll find yourself on the wrong side of the law ("right" or otherwise for stopping the exploitation). Murder has been illegal for quite some time.
As a relatively civilized society, we tend to create criminal laws for just this purpose; to allow reasonable enforcement of reasonable standards. Of course it's not a perfect world where right==legal, and I still don't see how you jumped to that conclusion from my posting in the first place.
They'd go out of business first, because everyone would be free to copy their software too. Moreover, any source code that managed to leak (e.g. Windows 2000, etc.) would be fair game to include in open-source projects.
Great point; the whole software industry could feasibly collapse in this scenario. Currently our laws treat software like a recipe; nothing more than an expression of a set of instructions. But here, it's as if we'd have the ability to perfectly recreate any arbitrarily tasty dish (say, the perfect egg salad). New software would become literally worthless, because you'd have instant arbitrage down to zero cost. Oh, by the way, the same would hold for other digital content (think movies, music, etc.).
Still, I can't see such a hypothetical universe would be necessarily better in all respects. However it's highly intriguing to consider the vast ramifications.
I know it's popular to hate lawyers, so what I'm about to say will probably burn my karma to cinders. But, the simple truth is, it's not the fault of lawyers. They're working within the system, getting paid by clients to do what they do. You want less patent lawsuits? Reform the patent system. Don't burn lawyers at the stake.
This is absolutely true. Every time something gets posted here about patents, somebody inevitably brings up failings of the system, and blames either the lawyers or the examiners. These folks are just doing their jobs according to the laws in place. If you don't like it, talk to the legislators, not the implementors. Blame the broken system; cure the disease at its source.
(...and you're probably right about the karma thing, too!)
Because where I come from, America, the larger our corporations get, the better they get at avoiding taxation.
True enough, but that's clearly a problem with the tax law (or perhaps tax law enforcement) rather than intellectual property law. GP is correct that, in theory, the limited monopoly of a patent is intended to enhance economic growth, not hinder it.
Don't most government-endowed monopolies have chilling unintended consequences on the markets they're supposed to protect?
Yes, I agree they do. However, I think your major premise goes a bit too far:
For our society to grow, we need to accept that monopolies are always bad, and only government can create them.
Consider for a moment copyright law, which you noted (negatively) "gives incredible power" to the holder. Indeed this is true, but how exactly would you propose to ever enforce any type of open source licenses (such as GPL) without copyright law granting a limited monopoly to the original author? Are you suggesting that copyrights in this context are bad? Perhaps so, but if copyrights magically never existed, the world of open source would almost immediately crumble. Your favorite software giants would totally absorb any "free" software into their own.
I think we can't just go from one extreme to the other, and expect all the earlier problems to vanish.
Yes, I can feel the karma slipping away just from the one-word subject...
Why do you think organizations around the planet all take it all so seriously? I think all of you saying that "it's just a game" or "it's just virtual" have been missing the point. This is intellectual property we're talking about. As noted above, we have nothing more than our identities when online. My name is indeed my proverbial passport.
International laws allow names to be protected. If I were you, I'd seriously consider applying for trademark and/or service mark protection. The use of "CmdrTaco" can be considered a valuable commodity (more karma gone, I'm sure) which can be formalized.
Now, will this help in the game? Maybe not; in fact you'll possibly be banned from using it, unless they bother to ensure that you are the rightful owner. Their rules; their game. Can you at least prevent others from using your name? Well, it really depends how much you care. You do have an obligation to defensively protect a registered mark, but you certainly have the right to choose your fights. If somebody does use your mark in a game, you can probably stop them from doing so (assuming again that you care enough).
However, such protection is not universal; you must declare specific uses (and classes) of your mark. For example, you might choose to protect software you distribute, but not bother to protect against somebody marketing "CmdrTaco fabric softener" of other unrelated goods/services. The concept technically only covers commerce (interstate commerce, to be exact, in the US) but the concept is broadly defined. And "advertising" on the Internet counts as international commerce, which trumps any more localized commerce.
So what's the bottom line? I suggest to those of you who have a vested interest (meaning you've spent real-world time and real-world effort) in your "virtual" identity, to seriously consider protection. I'm sure my last remaining bit of karma wil go away with one last analogy: you'd not think twice about protecting your "virtual" credentials with proper encryption, so don't be so quick to allow your virtual identity to be freely used by others for any purpose.
I wonder how that is enforced. I suppose every merchant site has to submit source code and database schemas for review before being allowed to process payments?
I am all for Space Exploration, but a country like China needs to focus its money on feeding and clothing its population first. Millions are homeless and have no chance at a better life. People need to straighten out their priorities.
Well, you're off topic, so I hope I don't get modded into oblivion for responding, but I think you should reconsider your logic. Let's reword your statement just a bit, for the sake of argument:
I am all for Space Exploration, but a country like U.S. needs to focus its money on feeding and clothing its population first. Hundreds of thousands are homeless and have no chance at a better life. People need to straighten out their priorities.
Given the relative populations, and uncertainty of the statistics, I'm not sure which country has a bigger homeless problem. But I sure wouldn't argue that the U.S. should adjust its priorities and send all NASA's funding to care for the homeless.
These people aren't stupid losers- they are fluent in another operating system, where they can achieve whatever it is they want.
Actually that's not true in all case. If you dig through TFA it shows how the participants self-rated their experience level with computers in general on a 1-10 scale. At least a few participants in some of the grouping were at 1/10 ("no experience"). Note that this is self-reported, so I expect all the experience scores are somewhat inflated. Even a participant claiming to be at 8/10 may still not be what we consider "fluent" in this context.
The availability grid for the past 4 hours shows ~40% and the grid for the past 1 hour shows 100%. As noted by "Cally" below, I honestly have no idea how exactly this grid has been generated (hence my original disclaimer) but this certainly seems to indicate, from a practical standpoint, that the L3/Cogent issue has been very recently resolved. Indeed, from my (single-homed) L3 server I can now traceroute directly to a (single-homed) Cogent host.
I found this site while trying to research the problem. I wish I had known of it earlier; it provides a very nice (near) real-time snapshot of all the Tier 1 peering:
Do they expect people to just plug in to someone else's monitor whenever they want to use it?
Apparently so. They also expect you to pay the same amount as the lowest-end Dell desktop (which, a few months ago, actually shipped with a 15-inch CRT monitor and an inkjet printer).
Slashdot Mirror
I don't have any mod points, and we're so far off-topic it won't matter how insightful this might be. However, I'd like to emphasize your point that many have missed in the flurry of name-calling here.
Indeed, poor enforcement of the (speed limit) law is the root problem. Either the law needs to be fixed (to increase the speed limits to something reasonable) or the enforcement needs to be significantly more strict. Either way, all drivers should be driving within the legal limits (and that includes minimums as well as maximums, although lots of clueless drivers don't even realize there is a minimum). However, we certainly can't have it both ways, as it necessarily creates hazardous conditions, which happens to be the very thing the law was intended to avoid (it's odd how often that happens).
Without proper enforcement (especially coupled with ridiculously low limits in places) lots of drivers feel they can get away with going well beyond the legal limits. The "flow of traffic" inevitably becomes higher than the posted speed limit. This puts us all in an awkward position; we must go over the limit to stay safely within the flow, or honor the limit thus creating unsafe conditions due to a large relative speed difference.
Note the almost comical (if it weren't so very dangerous) irony in the arguments against you. The vast majority of the folks who are complaining are citing here how the law compels you to pull over so that you may be passed. Yet that very same law compels them not to speed in order to pass you, if you're already at (or above) the posted limit!
As far as I'm concerned, the burden lies squarely on the speeders to adapt and cope (civilly, ideally) with all the law-abiding drivers who are driving at any speed between the minimum and maximum permitted speeds.
I'll state again for emphasis to your detractors: The laws defining the speed limits may be terrible, but you are just as obligated to follow these laws as the left-lane drivers are obligated to follow the laws that allow you to pass. You cannot have it both ways; you can't selectively ignore some laws then try to enforce others as you see convenient.
Sadly, it's more like 0.1% (although most citizens seem to be pretty familiar with the Simpsons).
Think of it as the beta release.
It's always easier when it's not your expensive toy down there, but it seems the operator was in panic mode. I'd like to think that if it were my ROV, I'd have held off on that little counter-offensive stunt a little longer, until I saw at least some indication of hostility. In the video, the octopus has barely started reaching toward the ROV by the time its starts getting pelted by the gravel. My guess is that the encounter would have ended quite peacefully, without any aggression on either side, and we would have had even more footage of this interesting interaction.
Well, that works just fine for when you don't "know something" such as a fact, figure, or definition. However, what about when you don't "understand something" such as a complex concept or how to apply a theory in practice? Do you just go ask somebody else?
Sure, you could try, but you probably won't simply find it with a quick Google search as you suggest. Consider how long it might take for somebody who does happen to understand it (well enough to teach it to you) to teach you this concept. That time is well spent for you, but not for your employer (nor necessarily your "teacher" in this case). This assumes, of course, that you know how to recognize somebody who actually does understand the concept, which is non-trivial at best; otherwise you'll still get it all wrong.
In the real world, if I want to hire you and you have a degree, I expect you to have been through that drill already for certain complex concepts, with professors (and indeed classmates) who are nominally proficient in their respective fields. If you haven't, you'll inevitably become a burden to your team.
No, it's not really that simple. This is much like the difference between first-party cookies and third-party cookies. In fact, I'd be happy if they decided to limit them at that level of granularity. I honestly wouldn't mind first-party pings. This provides--as you correctly note--nothing more than they can already collect now. It does, however, significantly enhance the developers' ability to directly collect stateful click-through information.
On the other hand, I'd say third-party pings are no less (and no more) evil than third-party cookies in terms of privacy. It seems to be a fairly common practice to disable third-party cookies while leaving first-party cookies enabled. I would certainly like the option to specify my preferences at that level.
They've already been there and done that.
Well, on the admittedly limited chance that you're not trolling, and that instead you'll actually consider a reasoned response with an open mind, I'll try one more time. First, yes, we "idiots" do know exactly what we're talking about, so I honestly hope you'll bother to read and possibly even learn something.
The fine example you gave is a trivially simple and quite static format, similar to an image. It is far from complex and dynamic enough to describe any useful arbitrary document. If you'd actually re-read the post to which you replied, you'd find a much more relevant example, that of HTML. HTML can't be described as a basic C-style structure like your example, but a formal grammar such as BNF (or a DTD for XHTML) could be used. However, you can very easily omit many optional flags/features when describing how to write a valid document in any such format. As noted, I might only tell you only about the head, title, and body tags, and perhaps the h1-h7 tags as well.
Is it possible for me to neglect to tell you about all the other formatting tags (like b and i and friends) and even "forget" to mention the whole hyperlink concept with the "a" tag? Sure it is. Can you write a valid document? Sure you can. Now, can you really read all possible documents, including those that use the tags I so conveniently neglected to describe? No.
Let's even use your own example, with a modification:
long version 0x0100
long number of strings 0x0002
long string length
string
long string length
string
long number of options 0x0001
int option_num
int option_length
byte [] option_data
EOF
Here you see that I've told you how and where to add multiple options. However, I've not told you what options are valid. I might only tell you about some of the options and not others. You can always still write a document given that format, but you can't read all documents unless you've been told all the possible valid options.
So, really I hope this hasn't been a waste of time, and that you can see that Microsoft can choose to give out any arbitrary amount of detail for how to write a proper and valid document, without giving sufficient tools with which to parse all possible valid documents.
Right, then. Let me teach you how to write an HTML document. First, you have one "html" tag, then enclose one "title" tag first and one "body" tag second, then put some text into the title and a bunch of text into the body. There, you now know how to write a perfectly valid HTML document.
Now, let's try a quick experiment. Click the View Source on the browser for page you are reading right now. Can you make any meaningful sense of that document, given only the description above about how to write a document? I hope you can see the point. Please indeed.
This is going expose only a way to write to these formats. It says absolutely nothing about how to read documents created by their proprietary packages. It's much easier to say "here's how to create a valid document" without giving away all of the keys to the kingdom than it is to explain fully "here's how to read any document created by our suite" (and you have to presume they'll intentionally leave out the good stuff).
As far as I can tell, this is a no-op.
Sony won't need to install a rootkit, because the Microsoft DRM will be designed specifically to help enforce things like Sony's EULA. Why should Sony bother with a rootkkit when the OS itself will impose the limits by design?
If main power fails in an AC data center, the UPS systems need to take the DC from the batteries and convert to AC, then distribute, then each machine needs to convert back to DC. That's terribly wasteful, since neither of these conversions is anywhere near perfect efficiency. In a DC data center, the UPS systems are just the batteries, so they can hold much longer.
Now, of course there's a counter to this; the problem is that batteries don't handle the load very long, and you typically need to switch to a generator, and typical mechanical generators inherently provide AC rather than DC (because it is mechanically more efficient).
Of course; it's easy to recognize the future that Roddenberry (and countless others) have vividly described. As an end game, it's great! The only problem is during that pesky (and highly non-trivial) "transitional" period, when lots of stuff is free and lots of other stuff is not. We have to solve some basics first--starting at the lowest tier of the Maslow hierarchy of needs--before we can realize the potential. Some may argue that software may help satisfy some of these basic needs, but certainly software alone can't do it. And to bring this back on topic, it's debatable whether a limited monopoly would encourage or discourage the fundamental research required to satisfy these needs.
So because child porn wasn't outlawed in the US until only half a century ago or so, exploiting children was peachy keen because the photographers and participants were obeying "the laws in place"?
Just because something is legal doesn't make it right.
Well no, of course not. It seems like a non-sequitur troll, but let's examine it, just in case you're serious. The idea here is that, if you disagreed at the time, you'd have two choices. I suggest that society would be better off in the long term working to enact laws to make such exploitation illegal. The alternative is simply to point blame directly to the exploiters. Pointing blame doesn't carry much weight, and doesn't really address the fundamental problem now, does it?
So, what exactly would you propose? Take the law in your own hands and shoot all the exploiters? Well, that might work once or twice, but soon you'll find yourself on the wrong side of the law ("right" or otherwise for stopping the exploitation). Murder has been illegal for quite some time.
As a relatively civilized society, we tend to create criminal laws for just this purpose; to allow reasonable enforcement of reasonable standards. Of course it's not a perfect world where right==legal, and I still don't see how you jumped to that conclusion from my posting in the first place.
Great point; the whole software industry could feasibly collapse in this scenario. Currently our laws treat software like a recipe; nothing more than an expression of a set of instructions. But here, it's as if we'd have the ability to perfectly recreate any arbitrarily tasty dish (say, the perfect egg salad). New software would become literally worthless, because you'd have instant arbitrage down to zero cost. Oh, by the way, the same would hold for other digital content (think movies, music, etc.).
Still, I can't see such a hypothetical universe would be necessarily better in all respects. However it's highly intriguing to consider the vast ramifications.
This is absolutely true. Every time something gets posted here about patents, somebody inevitably brings up failings of the system, and blames either the lawyers or the examiners. These folks are just doing their jobs according to the laws in place. If you don't like it, talk to the legislators, not the implementors. Blame the broken system; cure the disease at its source.
(...and you're probably right about the karma thing, too!)
True enough, but that's clearly a problem with the tax law (or perhaps tax law enforcement) rather than intellectual property law. GP is correct that, in theory, the limited monopoly of a patent is intended to enhance economic growth, not hinder it.
Yes, I agree they do. However, I think your major premise goes a bit too far:
For our society to grow, we need to accept that monopolies are always bad, and only government can create them.
Consider for a moment copyright law, which you noted (negatively) "gives incredible power" to the holder. Indeed this is true, but how exactly would you propose to ever enforce any type of open source licenses (such as GPL) without copyright law granting a limited monopoly to the original author? Are you suggesting that copyrights in this context are bad? Perhaps so, but if copyrights magically never existed, the world of open source would almost immediately crumble. Your favorite software giants would totally absorb any "free" software into their own.
I think we can't just go from one extreme to the other, and expect all the earlier problems to vanish.
Why do you think organizations around the planet all take it all so seriously? I think all of you saying that "it's just a game" or "it's just virtual" have been missing the point. This is intellectual property we're talking about. As noted above, we have nothing more than our identities when online. My name is indeed my proverbial passport.
International laws allow names to be protected. If I were you, I'd seriously consider applying for trademark and/or service mark protection. The use of "CmdrTaco" can be considered a valuable commodity (more karma gone, I'm sure) which can be formalized.
Now, will this help in the game? Maybe not; in fact you'll possibly be banned from using it, unless they bother to ensure that you are the rightful owner. Their rules; their game. Can you at least prevent others from using your name? Well, it really depends how much you care. You do have an obligation to defensively protect a registered mark, but you certainly have the right to choose your fights. If somebody does use your mark in a game, you can probably stop them from doing so (assuming again that you care enough).
However, such protection is not universal; you must declare specific uses (and classes) of your mark. For example, you might choose to protect software you distribute, but not bother to protect against somebody marketing "CmdrTaco fabric softener" of other unrelated goods/services. The concept technically only covers commerce (interstate commerce, to be exact, in the US) but the concept is broadly defined. And "advertising" on the Internet counts as international commerce, which trumps any more localized commerce.
So what's the bottom line? I suggest to those of you who have a vested interest (meaning you've spent real-world time and real-world effort) in your "virtual" identity, to seriously consider protection. I'm sure my last remaining bit of karma wil go away with one last analogy: you'd not think twice about protecting your "virtual" credentials with proper encryption, so don't be so quick to allow your virtual identity to be freely used by others for any purpose.
Not quite, but there is a mandatory audit procedure enforced, if you are a large enough merchant.
Well, you're off topic, so I hope I don't get modded into oblivion for responding, but I think you should reconsider your logic. Let's reword your statement just a bit, for the sake of argument:
Given the relative populations, and uncertainty of the statistics, I'm not sure which country has a bigger homeless problem. But I sure wouldn't argue that the U.S. should adjust its priorities and send all NASA's funding to care for the homeless.
Actually that's not true in all case. If you dig through TFA it shows how the participants self-rated their experience level with computers in general on a 1-10 scale. At least a few participants in some of the grouping were at 1/10 ("no experience"). Note that this is self-reported, so I expect all the experience scores are somewhat inflated. Even a participant claiming to be at 8/10 may still not be what we consider "fluent" in this context.
The availability grid for the past 4 hours shows ~40% and the grid for the past 1 hour shows 100%. As noted by "Cally" below, I honestly have no idea how exactly this grid has been generated (hence my original disclaimer) but this certainly seems to indicate, from a practical standpoint, that the L3/Cogent issue has been very recently resolved. Indeed, from my (single-homed) L3 server I can now traceroute directly to a (single-homed) Cogent host.
http://www.internetpulse.net/
I'm not affiliated with them in any way, and I'm sure there are other similar sites, but I thought it was worth mentioning.
Apparently so. They also expect you to pay the same amount as the lowest-end Dell desktop (which, a few months ago, actually shipped with a 15-inch CRT monitor and an inkjet printer).