This all may be true, but I signed up for service on Friday, and they sent out my Cisco ATA-186 box and start up kit the same day, I had my UPS tracking number by Friday night, and it was in New York City by Saturday morning (and will be at my apartment Monday morning, presumably). If that's not fast service, I don't know what is.
Granted, I've heard at least one tale of modest set up woes (a broken proxy server on their end made the call forwarding very unreliable until my friend finally got somebody at Vonage to track the problem down). Once they located the problem though, they did get it fixed right away.
So the moral is their service is generally good, they are customer focused, but probably just understaffed because the demand has outpaced their ability to meet it. Though they seem to have had enough money to market the hell out of it, so I don't know how they couldn't afford to staff up accordingly.
Unless Google starts pursuing OEM bundling deals for their Toolbar with PC manufacturers. The trust issue, as others have pointed out, is key to the search engine business and explains why people go to www.google.com and use their search engine instead of the default MSN search page. People trust Google, people don't trust Microsoft.
I don't think this battle has even started yet. We can't assume that Google will bend over and die like Netscape did in the face of even modest competition. Sure, MS can bundle apps with their OS, and build in search capabilities, but I don't think we're going to see the death of the browser anytime soon, or the need for web-based search, where Google is clearly dominant over MS.
And we won't even discuss the generally shitty search capabilities MS provides for its own sites and content. Ugh. It's better to Google for MSDN information than to use MSDN search.
Okay, I take your point, but your argument is just the classic slippery slope. I never suggested that. I fail to see why it's okay for me to get flagged as a suspected terrorist based on my travelling preferences but not okay for them to get flagged based on their religious practices, when one of them is a much more useful statistical predictor of terrorist inclinations than the other.
Sure, there are more violent acts by American militias and other nuts, but they are distinctly less effective than those by organized Middle-Eastern terrorists. Frankly, there are more people killed by gang members in drive by shootings. Such acts of random violence are terrible, but they kill one, two, maybe ten people. Likewise with disgruntled postal and office workers. But the potential for a devastating act of terrorism like the September 11th attacks seems much more likely to originate outside this country, and to be directed, broadly, at our country and our national infrastructure, rather than at a former employer, rival street gang etc.
The Michigan Militia types may want to direct attacks on the federal government, but even they don't, for the most part, see innocent bystanders as evil Americans worthy of death.
The point of my post wasn't about overall odds of dying via various types of violent criminals, it was about screening practices in airports, which I think is a far different, and more specific thing.
Okay, I don't believe I am a "racist" in the sense of the word that most people would agree with. But let's suppose for a second that I were. How on earth do you thereby thing you have "won every single argument" that you ever had against a conservative in your life? Claiming by assertion is not a rational means of argumentation. You, sir, have just discredit every other claim in your post.
So how can we suppose that you are right about anything else?
Your supposition, that my stated preference for the use of racial profiling implies that I am a "racist" (in the pejorative sense, i.e. The belief that race accounts for differences in human character or ability and that a particular race is superior to others. - American Heritage Dictionary) is irrational.
I don't have to believe that Arabs are inferior to make the rational, positive (non-normative) observation that the people blowing up planes and buildings are far more likely to be Arabs and/or Muslims (the union of these two sets), and it is far more likely, given an Arab or Muslim individual, that they would be inclined to perform such an act of terrorism in the United States than would others. Your assertion that I must be a racist to recognize positive facts thoroughly discredits your own intellect, and I suggest you rethink your approach to such discussions in the future if you want to be taken seriously.
Well, if we are going to live in happy-fairy-liberal redefine the words as you please land, then I define ignorant, self-hating liberal as you. A bigoted attitude, because I realistically admit that racial profiling is a necessary evil in this world?
As far as I can tell, every statement you have made is a classic example of a straw man argument.
Al Qaeda has millions of dollars to make perfect fake US passports. Okay, maybe they can do that, and maybe they can't. It certainly puts a big hurdle up, if nothing else. As far as I can tell, it's much harder than you think to acquire technologically advanced projects in places where Al Qaeda can openly operate, and harder to move money into more advanced nations than you seem to think, or at least there is no evidence of their ability to do that at this point.
Sure, ten thousand bucks here and ten thousand bucks there is easy. But even that can't buy you the quality level of fake US passports you refer to (i.e. good enough to fool US Customs Agents, Police, or even airport TSA employees). Fooling the HR person at a small company with a fake green card you bought in LA for 200 bucks is a totally different matter.
As for identifying an Arab, obviously you can't identify somebody's ethnic group on a foolproof basis, and I don't think I ever suggested that. All I said was, when you identify people with fake US passports, and they turn out to be Arab in origin after you've detained them for a while, they will likely get locked up, and have the key thrown away.
Oh yes, all those high quality fake US passports out there. The fact is that most terrorists aren't going to be travelling around with fake passports in the US. It's hard to get good ones. Sure, nobody really cares if a Mexican uses a fake green card to get a job, but somebody sees an Arab with a fake passport, they are going to rot in jail for a very, very long time.
Also, I don't think I've ever been called a redneck by somebody posting from the state of Georgia. Come live in NYC a while, then let's talk about racial realities. Forget the "redneck" tripe, I'm a yuppie city boy, shithead.
"Flagged as a terrorist"? Please, they SSSS everybody who flies one way. I (and thousands upon thousands of business travelers) end up having to fly one way, three legged trips all the fucking time, and we all become "terrorists". Also, if you flying somewhere for an extended trip (like a hospital stay) and haven't booked a return trip yet, you are also a "terrorist". Most of the airport security TSA idiots even stopped taking the whole system too seriously after a while.
As any good terrorist knows, you never book a one way trip in the US. Duh. Now the rest of us poor schmoes just need to accept that we should pay twice as much every time we travel to avoid getting a fucking anal probe in line at the airport.
The government needs to flag people whose name is Mohammad bin Mohammad, people who have spent modest to extended amounts of time in the Middle East, people who act suspiciously and so on. And all the Slashdot liberals can take your liberal bullshit and shove it, I fucking *WANT* some racial profiling.
Your point 2 simply makes no sense, and runs contrary to what several Harvard Law students and graduates have told me. A click-through license is a non-negotiated form contract, period. In any case, the relevant part of the page was explaining what the term means and how it applies here, not what the entire body of case law is.
I'm aware, for example, of the ProCD case, Compuserve v. Patterson, and the Hotmail case. These are all relevant to click-through licenses in general. These cases all established the existance and legitimacy of the concept of a contract made by online or software-based user action. But none of them touch on onerous or unexpected vendor terms, to the best of my knowledge. They all basically establish that a contract made online is like any other contract (for example, the contract you would sign when you rent a car). Again, the rental car contract can't contain terms that sign away your first born baby, they would be thrown away by a judge, because a reasonable person would not expect to find them there.
If you go through the entirety of a top tier law school (not one of those places where you memorize the civil procedure code and that's it), I think you'll find the law is never, ever so absolute as you seem to claim here. We all know that the recent case law on click-throughs sucks. But as you freely pointed out in point 1, it just doesn't apply in the same way in this case. And luckily, I wasn't arguing a case to a judge, I was just pointing out how much this sucks, and how those contracts shouldn't be enforced _on the user_. You're correct though - the content provider isn't even a party to those contracts. Nonetheless, I desperately want to see somebody who got fucked over start a major class action suit against some deceptive spyware maker.
Sorry, yes I did mean adhesion. As with many things in the law, there are no terms in such contracts that are banned or may not be used, however, as I stated, terms that are considered outrageous, unexpected, or unusual _in contracts of the relevant type_ are generally unenforceable in contracts of adhesion - one of those many places in the law where the answer is "what would a reasonable person expect such a contract to contain", and "would a reasonable person expect that such a contract would contain a term allowing the counterparty to do X". So the standard for software licenses would be different than the standard for rental car contracts.
I don't think a reasonable person would expect that installing a P2P filesharing would allow the company/software to interfere with their ability to access certain webpages or other 3rd party copyrighted material. You wouldn't even expect to look for such a term in a software license (well, at least, not until now), simply because it would be crazy to have to look for such things.
There is precedent on EULAs and click-through as contracts of adhesion. Read this summary, which I find particularly useful. A good quote (relevant to California law, yes, but I think the same basic concepts hold almost everywhere by precedent if nothing else): Restatement (Second) of Contracts 211(3) provides that where a drafting party has reason to believe that the consenting party to a contract would not consent if he knew that the writing contained a particular term, the term is not part of the agreement.
Really, and does the EULA tell you that you will not be able to uninstall the program? And are you aware that a contract of adherence can't make unreasonable claims in it, as the contract is not subject to negotiation?
I think terms that allow the spyware program to do things that somebody doesn't expect the program to do (i.e. spyware that fails to advertise itself as such) should be unenforceable via a contract of adherence such as an EULA. You can't put anything you want in the fine print of anything that's "sort of" a contract and expect it to be valid. An EULA, as somebody else pointed out, is closer to a handshake contract than to a written contract. But this means that expectations on the parts of the two parties to the contract are _critical_ in how the document should be interpreted. If the party expected they were downloading and installing a P2P filesharing program (for example), but the program modified their web pages and happened to mention that fact in bullet point 16 of the EULA, it is not and should not be a valid contract, and the spyware company should not have that right.
If the company represents that they sell uninstallable software that monitors a users actions and modifies 3rd party web pages without notifying a user, and somebody installs it and clicks on the EULA, then I think they have a case. Otherwise, it's bullshit.
Sorry, that's just not right. Go read up on contracts of adherence and what can legally appear in a non-negotiable contract. I'll give you a big fucking hint: an EULA can NOT contain anything you want it to, because it's not a negotiated contract, period.
Sorry, this ruling is bullshit. My mother didn't "consent" to shit when she installed Bonzi Buddy. She had never heard of the term "spy ware". The fact is most computer users DON'T know that a lot of the crap they download from the internet is ill-intentioned. Even well known, commonly talked about and used software like Kazaa is riddled with spyware. Sure, you and I know how to clean that gunk off (of course, even then sometimes these nasty things take tons of time and effort to remove).
Maybe this epidemic will help convince people to read those software licenses more carefully, but I am doubtful. Though after I explained to my mother what spyware was and she read the article the other day in the New York Times, she has told me she's going to be much more careful about what she downloads and runs, even if a friend recommends it.
Is there any centralized archive of malicious and/or spyware programs that surreptitiously modify users' computers or cause other undesired side effects and resist uninstallation? You know, something I could tell people like my mother to use to check out a piece of software to see if it's legitimate before they install it and cause a mess that somebody else has to fix? If not, there should be.
If everybody used VoIP, our phone service would generally be as reliable as our internet service. If you think this is a good thing, raise your hand... Anyway, I'm all for VoIP, but right now, consumer/home grade VoIP just ain't comparable to POTS service for plain old fashioned reliability. I also don't think it should be taxed, for a variety of reasons, but let's be real folks - the broadband ISPs aren't going to sit on their thumbs and let people soak up bandwidth with VoIP devices and not get their cut of it.
For a small business, or as a second line, something like Vonage is great. This needs to be fostered, not taxed, for the time being. Right now, I wouldn't be willing to pay a tax on Vonage because I don't get plain old telephone-style reliability guarantees - that's what you trade off for the bargain. Of course, the real problem is the reliability of the internet infrastructure and last mile broadband connections, which generally are just terrible (especially with DSL, which I finally just dumped in favor of cable). You just can't get reliable service over an unreliable medium.
I'm willing to pay all these taxes, if and only if I get real reliability and uptime guarantees (for less than 200 dollars a month, which is what these fucking thieves want to charge you for business DSL service).
Like any process administered and regulated by humans, it is flawed, open to manipulation by the many parties with interests at stake, and imperfect in that it will not always catch the bad guys, and sometimes will inconvenience the good guys.
But we're still better off talking and thinking about it, and consciously making those tradeoffs than just sticking our heads in the sand. These domestic security issues are also so fundamentally visible that they _are_ subject to feedback and criticism by the public - unlike obtuse IRS regulations, the absurdity of, for example, flagging every flyer with a one-way ticket for special security treatment, is eminently visible to every frequent business traveler. And thus there are a lot of us to whine, bitch and complain until something gets done about it.
I'm much more worried about the invisible stuff than the visible stuff (like nail clippers being banned from planes). The invisible stuff is the pressure exerted on ISPs, credit card companies, technology organizations, encryption researchers, etc. to "help combat terrorism" by reducing security, or opening and releasing personal information to the government. Because, doncha know, "hackers" are terrorists. What's a hacker? Well, you know, those "cybercriminals". And "identity thieves". And you never know who might be doing those things. And maybe tax evaders are also helping the terrorists - aren't they avoiding funding our fabulous military? And what about drug users - well, clearly, they are supporting terrorists, I mean, we saw the government make those claims in ads on TV.
That "with us or against us" attitude combined with the power of overreaching legislation like the Patriot Act makes me queasy about who or what comes next behind the scenes - the security we don't see at the airport, or in city hall, or on the streets during a festival or parade, and that does give me cause to worry. I don't have a perfect solution, other than that we, the technologically aware and literate, need to push our causes more, be more politically organized, and make sure that some portion of the citizenry is watching what the government is doing, and that we do a better job of getting that word out to the mass media, and to politicians.
I feel bad for the entrepreneur who got screwed in Cringely's story, but you have to always doubt and distrust ANYBODY that is sent your way by your investors. They will almost surely have a conflict of interest. The trick described (emptying a board seat and keeping it empty to enable the lead investor(s) to rule the board without challenge), or just structuring the board so that common-shareholders-be-damned aren't uncommon techniques that venture capitalists use. And all those "outside" managers they want to bring in - here's a hint, these people are often people they go to church with, or whose kids go to daycamp with their kids, or who are on the town council with them.... in short, they are going to scratch each other's backs whenever possible.
My recommendation is to raise money from people who already know or trust to some degree whenever possible, and ALWAYS, I repeat, ALWAYS, worry about control. Control is often times far more important than who has how many shares. Shares can very often end up worthless at the end of life of a business venture, if it is liquidated, or M&Aed away, or basically has any end-game other than an IPO, unless your shares are all on a level basis (this is a nice thing about flat LLC memberships and S Corporations as business entities, though that's certainly not necessary).
Just remember that you have to make sure that all your contracts and legal structure reinforce your power and control, and it's often better to give up some extra equity in exchange for this. Be careful who you trust. And never make yourself unnecessary before you have your exit strategy well on its way to execution.
Re:We didn't know we were doing anything special..
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Code Generation in Action
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Well, we used XDoclet as well. Actually, it was EJBDoclet originally, back when we started using it - this was several years back, mind you. EJBDoclet became a subset of our build system. But our custom JavaDoc modules wouldn't really have benefitted much from anybody's framework, honestly, and we had by then 90% decoupled our system from the EJB way of doing things. For example, we auto-generated EJB session beans that used direct DB access for bulk updates and retrieval, because entity beans were insanely slow. In fact, we were also autogenerating the input files for EJBDoclet at the time, since they were sort of EJB "shell classes", and EJBDoclet generated the rest of the annoying EJB stuff.
Like I said, I have no idea what people are doing these days, this was back during EJB 1.1 days, pre-2.0, and we had a primarily message-based system that used JMS or other non-JMS compliant messaging systems like TIB. Thank god I don't have to touch EJB/Enterprise Java with a 10 foot pole anymore, since it's one of the most poorly designed systems imagineable - I love a lot about the Java language, but Enterprise Java needs to die a slow death.
We didn't know we were doing anything special...
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Code Generation in Action
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· Score: 4, Insightful
But we built a very large code generation system as part of my old company's electronic trading system. It used the JavaDoc system and a custom JavaDoc parser we built to generate oodles and oodles of very repetitive code from the base business objects, such as XML parsers and translaters and the like. It was a big time saver, undoubtedly. The big problems we had were versioning and its interaction with our build system, and more importantly, the fact that the code generator itself becomes very complex to read, such that only one or two developers are capable of making changes to it.
My rule of thumb is if I find myself writing code that bores me silly and thinking "a frigging monkey could be taught to code this piece", I will strongly consider writing a program to write the program for me. Be warned about the maintenance and readability issues though in larger development projects where there are a lot of mediocre programmers around. You can always assign those mediocre programmers to hack on monkey-easy code, but you can't get them to hack on a code generator, so carefully consider the nature of the development organization you are dealing with, and the tradeoff between available "high-value" time and resources vs. "low-value" (i.e. monkey coder) time and resources. This perspective has been brought to you by my pointy-haired side.
The confused one's reply is useful. I think it should be added that the Big Bang was a true singularity (or something roughly equivalent thereto) - and most physicists agree that the laws of nature DO break down at a singularity (luckily, there aren't any naked singularities out there in the universe - they are all modestly cloaked in event horizons). Sure, energy was either created at that instant, when t=0, or otherwise got there when it wasn't there before (what does before mean again? hmm), but that's a singularity for you. This doesn't mean that physics is bollocks, just that physics, and the rest of science, can only describe the universe starting at, or withing moments (femtoseconds) after the Big Bang.
"Before" the Big Bang, we don't know. In fact, the phrase "before" the Big Bang isn't really well defined, since as best we understand the working of things right now, there is no "time" at all prior to the Big Bang, since time is a property of (and temporal dimension of) our Universe. So in what stuff, place or location did the Big Bang occur? Why was all that matter compressed into one point? Was it caused by some irregularity in some higher order somethingness? Did the Universe have to come into existence, or not? Did it have to take a certain form or not? Some of these questions are properly the domain of philosophy at this point, but all of them are questions that physicists would love to be able to analyze, if there were any data available. Unfortunately, barring radical new discoveries, we're just not likely to answer most of those questions anytime soon. But that certainly doesn't mean that physics is bollocks - you just have to understand that most of modern physics seeks to describe and model predictable behaviors of the universe, rather than to explain them. If you want answers to "how", physics is pretty good at giving them. If you want answers to "why", physics sucks - every "why" just produces another question that you need to ask "why to.
For example, I can say an electric generator works because of the electromagnetic force, and that the electromagnetic force produces an r^2 force between particles with a property we call charge. Why? Well, particles with charge exchange virtual photons which results in this force. Why? Err... well... because QED says so? It all breaks down after a while. Four years as a physics major led me to a deep, deep depression when I realized physics just couldn't provide the kind of Einsteinian "why" answers I was looking for. The great physicists of the first half of this century came into a rapidly growing field where it was reasonable to think we'd have it all solved soon. I came into a sluggish, sick field filled with unsatisfied, unhappy scientists. Ugh. Glad I got myself out of there. Rant off.
Well, some of us are experimenting with the concept of games as art/entertainment and looking at ways to extend the appeal of 3D graphical entertainment apps outside of the classic "gamer market" (my company is one of those). There are opportunities for computer entertainment that doesn't involve semi-clad women writhing around or spewing blood and guts, though you wouldn't know it from going to SIGGRAPH, E3 or other such industry conferences.
I don't quite know if video-game-as-3D-avatar-chat is _the_ killer app to bring 3D to the masses, but I think one of the keys is simpler modes of interactivity. The controls and interactions of many games, as you rightly point out, are just too complex for Joe Average. A combination of new control mechanisms with a shift in thinking about games and use of realtime 3D graphics will certainly be required to make the real crossover to mainstream.
Right, the problem is that source code in and of itself would seem to be a circumvention device, since a simple changing of a #define ENABLED_DRM followed by a recompile would remove all that spiffy DRM stuff. The question is really would Microsoft push the issue through the legal system if OpenOffice or others try to emulate DRM features for compatibility, or just let a quiet threat hang over everybody's head?
It shows up as nearly 10% of hits on my site, if you include Netscape 6/7, Phoenix, and the various species of Netscape and Gecko based browsers. My mother uses it (or rather she used Navigator 7, a Mozilla based browser, until I showed her that Mozilla is the same thing with more features). To me that's not microscopic. Obviously, the average Joe or Jane still uses IE, but there are a lot of average Joes and Janes that have moved away from IE because of its lack of popup blocking. The not-showing-up-on-stats thing sounds very suspicious to me - I agree that a consumer goods site would probably have a rather lower Mozilla hit rate than my site, but that sounds too low to be accurate to me.
I would say that $10,800 seems low for willfully failing to comply with a preliminary injunction, which is what this fine is for. The fine for ignoring court orders should be a heck of a lot higher than that for a decent sized company. Of course, there's still presumably the potential for much larger damages later if they were found to commit whatever the German equivalent of slander is, thereby damaging many people's businesses (are civil and criminal proceedings combined in Germany as in many other European jurisdictions?).
I know a lot of Slashbots seem to think that all geekdom is required to mindlessly support Mozilla, and that it has always been that way. But I remember a time in days of yore when Mozilla was the project everybody loved to hate. It was _the_ example of Open Source gone awry - here's how not to open up your product, here's how not to manage an open source project, etc. And back then Mozillazine was a quiet place - but Chris kept it running, and a small gang of the faithful hung out, waiting with baited breath for the next Milestone, hoping against hope that it would be faster, better and... oh, never mind, it couldn't get cheaper.
Anyway, the point is, these days the majority of us - geekdom, that is - use Mozilla or a Mozilla-derived browser (Galeon and Phoenix/Firebird). Mozillazine deserves a lot of credit for keeping the fan base alive during the long, dark period of time when it wasn't really clear that Mozilla was ever going to succeed. Thanks, Mozillazine, for giving me hope and keeping me and a lot of other hopeful users fed with info and inspired to stay involved and keep the project going.
Slashdot Mirror
Granted, I've heard at least one tale of modest set up woes (a broken proxy server on their end made the call forwarding very unreliable until my friend finally got somebody at Vonage to track the problem down). Once they located the problem though, they did get it fixed right away.
So the moral is their service is generally good, they are customer focused, but probably just understaffed because the demand has outpaced their ability to meet it. Though they seem to have had enough money to market the hell out of it, so I don't know how they couldn't afford to staff up accordingly.
I don't think this battle has even started yet. We can't assume that Google will bend over and die like Netscape did in the face of even modest competition. Sure, MS can bundle apps with their OS, and build in search capabilities, but I don't think we're going to see the death of the browser anytime soon, or the need for web-based search, where Google is clearly dominant over MS.
And we won't even discuss the generally shitty search capabilities MS provides for its own sites and content. Ugh. It's better to Google for MSDN information than to use MSDN search.
Okay, I take your point, but your argument is just the classic slippery slope. I never suggested that. I fail to see why it's okay for me to get flagged as a suspected terrorist based on my travelling preferences but not okay for them to get flagged based on their religious practices, when one of them is a much more useful statistical predictor of terrorist inclinations than the other.
Sure, there are more violent acts by American militias and other nuts, but they are distinctly less effective than those by organized Middle-Eastern terrorists. Frankly, there are more people killed by gang members in drive by shootings. Such acts of random violence are terrible, but they kill one, two, maybe ten people. Likewise with disgruntled postal and office workers. But the potential for a devastating act of terrorism like the September 11th attacks seems much more likely to originate outside this country, and to be directed, broadly, at our country and our national infrastructure, rather than at a former employer, rival street gang etc.
The Michigan Militia types may want to direct attacks on the federal government, but even they don't, for the most part, see innocent bystanders as evil Americans worthy of death.
The point of my post wasn't about overall odds of dying via various types of violent criminals, it was about screening practices in airports, which I think is a far different, and more specific thing.
Okay, I don't believe I am a "racist" in the sense of the word that most people would agree with. But let's suppose for a second that I were. How on earth do you thereby thing you have "won every single argument" that you ever had against a conservative in your life? Claiming by assertion is not a rational means of argumentation. You, sir, have just discredit every other claim in your post.
So how can we suppose that you are right about anything else?
Your supposition, that my stated preference for the use of racial profiling implies that I am a "racist" (in the pejorative sense, i.e. The belief that race accounts for differences in human character or ability and that a particular race is superior to others. - American Heritage Dictionary) is irrational.
I don't have to believe that Arabs are inferior to make the rational, positive (non-normative) observation that the people blowing up planes and buildings are far more likely to be Arabs and/or Muslims (the union of these two sets), and it is far more likely, given an Arab or Muslim individual, that they would be inclined to perform such an act of terrorism in the United States than would others. Your assertion that I must be a racist to recognize positive facts thoroughly discredits your own intellect, and I suggest you rethink your approach to such discussions in the future if you want to be taken seriously.
Well, if we are going to live in happy-fairy-liberal redefine the words as you please land, then I define ignorant, self-hating liberal as you. A bigoted attitude, because I realistically admit that racial profiling is a necessary evil in this world?
As far as I can tell, every statement you have made is a classic example of a straw man argument.
Al Qaeda has millions of dollars to make perfect fake US passports. Okay, maybe they can do that, and maybe they can't. It certainly puts a big hurdle up, if nothing else. As far as I can tell, it's much harder than you think to acquire technologically advanced projects in places where Al Qaeda can openly operate, and harder to move money into more advanced nations than you seem to think, or at least there is no evidence of their ability to do that at this point.
Sure, ten thousand bucks here and ten thousand bucks there is easy. But even that can't buy you the quality level of fake US passports you refer to (i.e. good enough to fool US Customs Agents, Police, or even airport TSA employees). Fooling the HR person at a small company with a fake green card you bought in LA for 200 bucks is a totally different matter.
As for identifying an Arab, obviously you can't identify somebody's ethnic group on a foolproof basis, and I don't think I ever suggested that. All I said was, when you identify people with fake US passports, and they turn out to be Arab in origin after you've detained them for a while, they will likely get locked up, and have the key thrown away.
Oh yes, all those high quality fake US passports out there. The fact is that most terrorists aren't going to be travelling around with fake passports in the US. It's hard to get good ones. Sure, nobody really cares if a Mexican uses a fake green card to get a job, but somebody sees an Arab with a fake passport, they are going to rot in jail for a very, very long time.
Also, I don't think I've ever been called a redneck by somebody posting from the state of Georgia. Come live in NYC a while, then let's talk about racial realities. Forget the "redneck" tripe, I'm a yuppie city boy, shithead.
"Flagged as a terrorist"? Please, they SSSS everybody who flies one way. I (and thousands upon thousands of business travelers) end up having to fly one way, three legged trips all the fucking time, and we all become "terrorists". Also, if you flying somewhere for an extended trip (like a hospital stay) and haven't booked a return trip yet, you are also a "terrorist". Most of the airport security TSA idiots even stopped taking the whole system too seriously after a while.
As any good terrorist knows, you never book a one way trip in the US. Duh. Now the rest of us poor schmoes just need to accept that we should pay twice as much every time we travel to avoid getting a fucking anal probe in line at the airport.
The government needs to flag people whose name is Mohammad bin Mohammad, people who have spent modest to extended amounts of time in the Middle East, people who act suspiciously and so on. And all the Slashdot liberals can take your liberal bullshit and shove it, I fucking *WANT* some racial profiling.
I'm aware, for example, of the ProCD case, Compuserve v. Patterson, and the Hotmail case. These are all relevant to click-through licenses in general. These cases all established the existance and legitimacy of the concept of a contract made by online or software-based user action. But none of them touch on onerous or unexpected vendor terms, to the best of my knowledge. They all basically establish that a contract made online is like any other contract (for example, the contract you would sign when you rent a car). Again, the rental car contract can't contain terms that sign away your first born baby, they would be thrown away by a judge, because a reasonable person would not expect to find them there.
If you go through the entirety of a top tier law school (not one of those places where you memorize the civil procedure code and that's it), I think you'll find the law is never, ever so absolute as you seem to claim here. We all know that the recent case law on click-throughs sucks. But as you freely pointed out in point 1, it just doesn't apply in the same way in this case. And luckily, I wasn't arguing a case to a judge, I was just pointing out how much this sucks, and how those contracts shouldn't be enforced _on the user_. You're correct though - the content provider isn't even a party to those contracts. Nonetheless, I desperately want to see somebody who got fucked over start a major class action suit against some deceptive spyware maker.
I don't think a reasonable person would expect that installing a P2P filesharing would allow the company/software to interfere with their ability to access certain webpages or other 3rd party copyrighted material. You wouldn't even expect to look for such a term in a software license (well, at least, not until now), simply because it would be crazy to have to look for such things.
There is precedent on EULAs and click-through as contracts of adhesion. Read this summary, which I find particularly useful. A good quote (relevant to California law, yes, but I think the same basic concepts hold almost everywhere by precedent if nothing else): Restatement (Second) of Contracts 211(3) provides that where a drafting party has reason to believe that the consenting party to a contract would not consent if he knew that the writing contained a particular term, the term is not part of the agreement.
I think terms that allow the spyware program to do things that somebody doesn't expect the program to do (i.e. spyware that fails to advertise itself as such) should be unenforceable via a contract of adherence such as an EULA. You can't put anything you want in the fine print of anything that's "sort of" a contract and expect it to be valid. An EULA, as somebody else pointed out, is closer to a handshake contract than to a written contract. But this means that expectations on the parts of the two parties to the contract are _critical_ in how the document should be interpreted. If the party expected they were downloading and installing a P2P filesharing program (for example), but the program modified their web pages and happened to mention that fact in bullet point 16 of the EULA, it is not and should not be a valid contract, and the spyware company should not have that right.
If the company represents that they sell uninstallable software that monitors a users actions and modifies 3rd party web pages without notifying a user, and somebody installs it and clicks on the EULA, then I think they have a case. Otherwise, it's bullshit.
Sorry, that's just not right. Go read up on contracts of adherence and what can legally appear in a non-negotiable contract. I'll give you a big fucking hint: an EULA can NOT contain anything you want it to, because it's not a negotiated contract, period.
Maybe this epidemic will help convince people to read those software licenses more carefully, but I am doubtful. Though after I explained to my mother what spyware was and she read the article the other day in the New York Times, she has told me she's going to be much more careful about what she downloads and runs, even if a friend recommends it.
Is there any centralized archive of malicious and/or spyware programs that surreptitiously modify users' computers or cause other undesired side effects and resist uninstallation? You know, something I could tell people like my mother to use to check out a piece of software to see if it's legitimate before they install it and cause a mess that somebody else has to fix? If not, there should be.
For a small business, or as a second line, something like Vonage is great. This needs to be fostered, not taxed, for the time being. Right now, I wouldn't be willing to pay a tax on Vonage because I don't get plain old telephone-style reliability guarantees - that's what you trade off for the bargain. Of course, the real problem is the reliability of the internet infrastructure and last mile broadband connections, which generally are just terrible (especially with DSL, which I finally just dumped in favor of cable). You just can't get reliable service over an unreliable medium.
I'm willing to pay all these taxes, if and only if I get real reliability and uptime guarantees (for less than 200 dollars a month, which is what these fucking thieves want to charge you for business DSL service).
But we're still better off talking and thinking about it, and consciously making those tradeoffs than just sticking our heads in the sand. These domestic security issues are also so fundamentally visible that they _are_ subject to feedback and criticism by the public - unlike obtuse IRS regulations, the absurdity of, for example, flagging every flyer with a one-way ticket for special security treatment, is eminently visible to every frequent business traveler. And thus there are a lot of us to whine, bitch and complain until something gets done about it.
I'm much more worried about the invisible stuff than the visible stuff (like nail clippers being banned from planes). The invisible stuff is the pressure exerted on ISPs, credit card companies, technology organizations, encryption researchers, etc. to "help combat terrorism" by reducing security, or opening and releasing personal information to the government. Because, doncha know, "hackers" are terrorists. What's a hacker? Well, you know, those "cybercriminals". And "identity thieves". And you never know who might be doing those things. And maybe tax evaders are also helping the terrorists - aren't they avoiding funding our fabulous military? And what about drug users - well, clearly, they are supporting terrorists, I mean, we saw the government make those claims in ads on TV.
That "with us or against us" attitude combined with the power of overreaching legislation like the Patriot Act makes me queasy about who or what comes next behind the scenes - the security we don't see at the airport, or in city hall, or on the streets during a festival or parade, and that does give me cause to worry. I don't have a perfect solution, other than that we, the technologically aware and literate, need to push our causes more, be more politically organized, and make sure that some portion of the citizenry is watching what the government is doing, and that we do a better job of getting that word out to the mass media, and to politicians.
You know, like the guy who gets lots of people to publish his stuff because his name sounds suspiciously similar to a certain famous duo.
My recommendation is to raise money from people who already know or trust to some degree whenever possible, and ALWAYS, I repeat, ALWAYS, worry about control. Control is often times far more important than who has how many shares. Shares can very often end up worthless at the end of life of a business venture, if it is liquidated, or M&Aed away, or basically has any end-game other than an IPO, unless your shares are all on a level basis (this is a nice thing about flat LLC memberships and S Corporations as business entities, though that's certainly not necessary).
Just remember that you have to make sure that all your contracts and legal structure reinforce your power and control, and it's often better to give up some extra equity in exchange for this. Be careful who you trust. And never make yourself unnecessary before you have your exit strategy well on its way to execution.
Like I said, I have no idea what people are doing these days, this was back during EJB 1.1 days, pre-2.0, and we had a primarily message-based system that used JMS or other non-JMS compliant messaging systems like TIB. Thank god I don't have to touch EJB/Enterprise Java with a 10 foot pole anymore, since it's one of the most poorly designed systems imagineable - I love a lot about the Java language, but Enterprise Java needs to die a slow death.
My rule of thumb is if I find myself writing code that bores me silly and thinking "a frigging monkey could be taught to code this piece", I will strongly consider writing a program to write the program for me. Be warned about the maintenance and readability issues though in larger development projects where there are a lot of mediocre programmers around. You can always assign those mediocre programmers to hack on monkey-easy code, but you can't get them to hack on a code generator, so carefully consider the nature of the development organization you are dealing with, and the tradeoff between available "high-value" time and resources vs. "low-value" (i.e. monkey coder) time and resources. This perspective has been brought to you by my pointy-haired side.
"Before" the Big Bang, we don't know. In fact, the phrase "before" the Big Bang isn't really well defined, since as best we understand the working of things right now, there is no "time" at all prior to the Big Bang, since time is a property of (and temporal dimension of) our Universe. So in what stuff, place or location did the Big Bang occur? Why was all that matter compressed into one point? Was it caused by some irregularity in some higher order somethingness? Did the Universe have to come into existence, or not? Did it have to take a certain form or not? Some of these questions are properly the domain of philosophy at this point, but all of them are questions that physicists would love to be able to analyze, if there were any data available. Unfortunately, barring radical new discoveries, we're just not likely to answer most of those questions anytime soon. But that certainly doesn't mean that physics is bollocks - you just have to understand that most of modern physics seeks to describe and model predictable behaviors of the universe, rather than to explain them. If you want answers to "how", physics is pretty good at giving them. If you want answers to "why", physics sucks - every "why" just produces another question that you need to ask "why to.
For example, I can say an electric generator works because of the electromagnetic force, and that the electromagnetic force produces an r^2 force between particles with a property we call charge. Why? Well, particles with charge exchange virtual photons which results in this force. Why? Err... well... because QED says so? It all breaks down after a while. Four years as a physics major led me to a deep, deep depression when I realized physics just couldn't provide the kind of Einsteinian "why" answers I was looking for. The great physicists of the first half of this century came into a rapidly growing field where it was reasonable to think we'd have it all solved soon. I came into a sluggish, sick field filled with unsatisfied, unhappy scientists. Ugh. Glad I got myself out of there. Rant off.
I don't quite know if video-game-as-3D-avatar-chat is _the_ killer app to bring 3D to the masses, but I think one of the keys is simpler modes of interactivity. The controls and interactions of many games, as you rightly point out, are just too complex for Joe Average. A combination of new control mechanisms with a shift in thinking about games and use of realtime 3D graphics will certainly be required to make the real crossover to mainstream.
Right, the problem is that source code in and of itself would seem to be a circumvention device, since a simple changing of a #define ENABLED_DRM followed by a recompile would remove all that spiffy DRM stuff. The question is really would Microsoft push the issue through the legal system if OpenOffice or others try to emulate DRM features for compatibility, or just let a quiet threat hang over everybody's head?
It shows up as nearly 10% of hits on my site, if you include Netscape 6/7, Phoenix, and the various species of Netscape and Gecko based browsers. My mother uses it (or rather she used Navigator 7, a Mozilla based browser, until I showed her that Mozilla is the same thing with more features). To me that's not microscopic. Obviously, the average Joe or Jane still uses IE, but there are a lot of average Joes and Janes that have moved away from IE because of its lack of popup blocking. The not-showing-up-on-stats thing sounds very suspicious to me - I agree that a consumer goods site would probably have a rather lower Mozilla hit rate than my site, but that sounds too low to be accurate to me.
I would say that $10,800 seems low for willfully failing to comply with a preliminary injunction, which is what this fine is for. The fine for ignoring court orders should be a heck of a lot higher than that for a decent sized company. Of course, there's still presumably the potential for much larger damages later if they were found to commit whatever the German equivalent of slander is, thereby damaging many people's businesses (are civil and criminal proceedings combined in Germany as in many other European jurisdictions?).
Anyway, the point is, these days the majority of us - geekdom, that is - use Mozilla or a Mozilla-derived browser (Galeon and Phoenix/Firebird). Mozillazine deserves a lot of credit for keeping the fan base alive during the long, dark period of time when it wasn't really clear that Mozilla was ever going to succeed. Thanks, Mozillazine, for giving me hope and keeping me and a lot of other hopeful users fed with info and inspired to stay involved and keep the project going.