> Of course, you can always request and then sue them for not allow it... better use an european court, because > in the states you won't have a chance...
Actually, I think a civil suit in the US might work better than in an European court for one strong reason -- due process.
As I understand it, for better or worse ICANN is acting as an agent for the US government. US Constitutional law has been very explicit about the importance of due process, & federal courts will force US agencies to restart the process when they are convinced this principal has not been followed. (Even though the current administration has been trying to make an end run around it ``for security reasons".)
What this means is that for the.org TLD to be managed by the non-profits, they may have to go to court & trudge thru litigation for years over this issue. Distasteful as it is, since ICANN refuses to be open or law-abiding maybe the best solution is to let loose the landsharks of war upon this cabal.
I'm responding because outside the US, this isn't seen as a joke, but as a believeable possibility.
I seriously doubt this, in part because MS no record or rumor of using violence to achieve their goals. No strike-breaking, no midnight threats in response to employee whistle-blowers, none of that. Just selectively offering cash incentives, and heavy-handed PR tactics. And I also doubt it because many of the long-term employees in MS are the kind of guys who never won a fight -- I doubt Bill Gates ever did -- & just don't think of resolving conflicts with violence.
So it's more likely that Bill & Steve will be visiting Venezuela in the coming days with briefcases full of cash. Now if the PTB in Venezuela *still* advocate GPL'd software after that, *maybe* MS will venture into a new market strategy. (I'd be surprised if there aren't a lot of military veterans working in Redmond, so maybe my thoughts about the successful use of violence being foreign to MS employees is wrong.)
> Secondly, the degree of this "saturation" you speak of is much easier > to attain in a relatively small country such as Japan or South Korea, south Korea being about the same size as Indiana > and the total sum of Japanese islands being comperable in area to California. Got the smaller land mass?
Then what are the figures for parts of the US that are densely populated, relatively affluent, & under the same local government? If this lack of density were the sole cause, I'd expect the states of Rhode Island, Connecticut, & Delaware all to be either at the top or near the top in terms of saturation.
(I'll concede that there are probably enough low-income folks in Delaware & Rhode Island to make keep them from the ideal of a broadband line for every household, but last I checked Connecticut had one of the highest average incomes in the US. Anyone who wants a high-speed internet connection in that state should have one, unless the market wass hamstrung by hide-bound ILECs.)
Although I'm puzzled that I can't find any of it here on/. (All the vitriolic RH-bashing posts must have been given misleading subject lines & modded down to -1.)
As an example, you can take a look at the following email in a flamewar I have gotten myself into:
(Sorry for the space in the URL -- it's an artifact due to/.'s interface.) And feel free to take a look at the other emails in this thread.
Quite frankly, I'm dealing with a mindset that I am having trouble communicating with. This mindset believes that all corporations are evil, & since RH is a corporation, ipso facto RH is evil. And twice as evil since RH is ``corrupting" Linux. In other words, for some people, equating RedHat with Microsoft is a religious issue. They don't want to persuade you that it is, they want to convert you.
Another source was an ex-acquaintence who claimed that RedHat was just another example of ``glitter Linux". He claimed that RH was one of the most insecure distributions in existence, & that the only true Linux distribution was . . . Slackware.
Shortly after this proclamation, he also claimed that Windows NT was superior to Linux, a claim that I felt proved that either he was seriously burnt out as a computer tech or had sold his soul to Microsoft. (There were other signs that he had been wooed by people at Redmond & was drinking their kool-aid.) So I wasn't too surprised when he declared his intent to sell everything, buy a farm in Northern California & leave the industry.
None of these viewpoints reflect my opinions. Just trying to document the phenomena.
I wish this review has discussed how this book compares to other books written on this topic, say A.S. Romer's _The Vertebrate Story_ (4th. ed., Chicago, 1959) or the well-known works of Stephen S. Gould.
> 1. Floppies. Asking our users to mount and unmount a floppy disk was gonna be a chore. Floppies are used a lot. > That was actually gonna be a headache. Windows with its waiting for the green light to go out and then pop it out is > (in theory) a better solution from a user point. > I've heard this same problem mentioned a few days ago in a volunteer organization I'm helping with. Said organization went with an automounter, which prompted an argument that bordered on the religious. Sigh. Whatever happened to the pragmatic approach if it just works, use it?
> 2. Palm support. This was a difficult thing to get all kludged together and still didn't feel right. Had to stop on > it eventually.
Odd. Both Pilot-link [http://www.pilot-link.org/] & J-pilot [http://www.jpilot.org/] work quite nicely at enabling a Palm OS device to talk to a UNIX workstation. I've heard J-Pilot praised as the single best Linux desktop utility in existence.
Did you get to look at these two tools before the PHBs interfered & made the wrong decision?
> This works around the apartment or on a friend's PC. But, for a second do you actually think that someone in charge of > a network infrastructure is going to gamble his reputation on a consultant with a few burned CDs and no support? > > What if the pilot was a disaster and he had nobody to call? The client would have been back to the "Windows 2000 > Migration Plan" quicker than it would have taken you to feel the foot across your ass as you hit the street.
Following this entire thread, richj's comments describe a situation where he walked up to some salesdroids, handed them a hot lead that would make the day ofany salesdroid from MS or Oracle, & they told him to FOAD.
Granted, I don't know if richj was dressed in a suit & tie, or forgot to bathe that week & wore tattered jeans & a ``Fuck Gates" t-shirt. But I doubt it was the latter.
If a company can't go thru the trouble of putting on a dog-&-pony show for a client, tell them the usual stories about how their product is a dessert topping & a floor wax, will eat their dog if they want it eaten, they deserve to go out of business.
> I'm wondering how Personal Telco can afford to provide access to two T1's for free.
It's donated by local ISPs. This is how all of the PersonalTelco sites in Portland are set up. The only exceptions are folks who set up a wireless node to share the bandwidth they pay for. And according to Adam Shand, one of the founders of PersonalTelco, the extra traffic acquired by doing this is negligible to the sharer.
However, PersonalTelco has taken the position that if your provider forbids sharing your connection, you shouldn't either. In other words, if you get your internet conenction from someone like AT&T Cable, you shouldn't set up a wireless node.
Everything PersonalTelco has been doing so far is on the up-&-up.
> Today, landlords may forceably evict tenants because of and within the limits of the legal (contractual) agreement known > as a lease that DEFINES the tenant/landlord relationship. Nowadays, eviction has next to nothing to do with the fact > that landlords own the land and/or property the tenant rents. In fact, who is the lessor and lessee is defined in the lease, > not who holds the deed to the land (except to laws that define who may rent, etc., where the deed comes into play as > to who legally owns the propety to be rented).
When I rented an apartment in the 1980s, I didn't sign a lease. I rented unit a the 30-day notice basis, which is defined by common usage & state law. Also, when I worked as an apartment manager, the setup was the same way. The situation may be different now & in your state.
Granted, there have been abuses by landlords in the past; this is reflected in current laws. What this does is force the landlord to spend a lot of money to effect the eviction, while the tenant need only dig in her/his heels & say no to fight it. All the tenant has to lose is her/his debt rating -- & I'm constantly amazed at how many people consider this a trivial cost of doing business.
(Not to say that the landlords will always screw the tenant. But in a disagreement, they have the deeper pockets to cope with a loss -- & other customers to pass it on to.)
[snip]
> As you can see, my ranty explanation fully fits the trend you and the other poster sees regarding the media industry's > power grab as it pertains to rental/lease real estate. However, it does NOT fit the explanation you gave that possession is > 9/10s of the law; rather the opposite is true. Please, don't step into other arenas you know little about in an attempt to try > and make an otherwise valid point.
You've never had to deal with evicting anyone, have you? I have, as far as going & changing the locks on the SOB who refused to move out. It didn't matter a whole lot whose name was on the property deed to get that deadbeat out.
The whole point about the saying ``possession is 9/10s of the law" is that once someone gets her/his fingers around something, it takes a lot more effort to get the object freed than it takes forsaid person to hold onto it.
It works the same way whether you're a deadbeat in a rental property -- something many of us have witnessed first hand, which is why I picked that example -- the owner of a patent, a party in a debt repossession, or a dishonest party in a contractual agreement. And I picked up that phrase from a lawyer.
> Your newsfeed is almost definitely pre-filtered, probably by your ISP
True. The only groups I would bet that *aren't* targetted by spammers would be some of the comp.* groups, as well as the Monastery & it's little brother.
After all, only a newbie or an auto-Darwinating spammer would annoy someone who could gleefully drop an obsfucated patch into BIND, sendmail, Postfix -- or even gcc -- that effectively blackholes the spammer for eternity.
Hmm. I shuld take a look at the source code for one of these applications & see if it has been done.
> Rosen, Valenti et al are students of history. They know that the door swings both ways.
True. A little bit of reading in legal history will uncover many examples where a law passed to change the existing legal opinion was limited by the existence of a body of precedent. (The examples I can think of off the top of my head are the law of privacy -- which has been incorporated into common law in every US state except for New York, where even the passage of a law defining a right to privacy has been limited by their court system; the other example is Canada's Bill of Rights, which their Supreme Court has held is limited by pre-existing common law.)
Unfortunately, there is little legal precedent to extend or limit DMCA. Neither the US Supreme Court nor any of the State courts have shown whether they embrace the corporist ideas of ``intellectual property" or Lessig's ideas of public domain.
> I believe their thinking is that they > should grab as much land as they are allowed to grab, so that when the door swings back, maybe it will be left leaning > a bit to their side.
As the saying goes, possession is nine-tenths of the law. Ask any landlord who forceably evicts a tenant 6 months behind in the rent.
> You sez: > > "P.S. -- I don't know if this argument is convincing in a court of law, so it is probably worthless. And if you try this at > home, you implicitly hold me blameless for trying it. > > While I agree with the rest of your comment wholeheartedly, I do find this bit amusing.
Take it to its logical conclusion: since I implicily declare this idea to be worthless, then I can't assert ownership of this idea. And if you take it, & use it to break the current mismanagement of intellectual property laws for fun & profit, then you don't owe me a dime. Nor aven an email to let me know that you've done it. (Although if you did, an email reporting your success would probably make my day.)
And yes, sometimes my sense of humor is takes a coffee break.
A spark went across my neurons as I read this post, & I had an idea.
All software vendors zealously guard their ``intellectual property", looking for ways to not only protect their investment, but get the maximum return on it. At the same time, their lawyesrs are working overtime to avoid any responsibility for the effects of this software: if the results aren't correct, & a company loses money for buying & using the software, too bad so sad.
Now what makes me wonder is if the algorhythms & coding in the software is held on one hand to be of value -- e.g., ``pay us money to use this application" -- but on the other hand the creator of this software wants to be held blameless & without guarrantee, doesn't that suggest that there is *NO* value in this software? That the creator is trying to sell to people something that she/he simultaneously avows is of no useful value?
If there is no useful value to a given piece of software, then why should the creator be given any rights of ownership to something that is worthless?
It would be worth the price of admision to see the corporate lawyers for MS, Oracle, Network Associates, et alia, argue that down.
Geoff
P.S. -- I don't know if this argument is convincing in a court of law, so it is probably worthless. And if you try this at home, you implicitly hold me blameless for trying it.
> Bollier apparently wishes to join the likes of Stalin, Lenin, and Pol Pot who feel they must "liberate" > private property from the capitalist pigs.
I read the article; you are putting words in his mouth.
Making property or land publicly owned is an old, well-documented legal idea. The Roman jurist Gaius describes it in his _Institutes_: ``Public things are regard as belonging to no individual, but as being the property of the whole world [ipsius enim universitatis esse creduntur]." As a result, Gaius argued that these public properties were not subject to the law of nations, but of an older, natural or common law -- ``communis onmium hominum jus" -- that is derived from custom, & not from legislation.
Last I checked, neither Gaius nor the hundreds of Civil Law jurists whose work derives from him were communists. Which is not surprising in that he lived some 1500 years before Karl Marx was born. And if he were, that would mean that the law of much of Europe & the rest of the world -- which is derived from Civil Law, as distinguished from Canon or Church, & from Common or Anglo-American -- follows Communist law.
Only a parochial US citizen would argue that much of the world follows a ``Communist" law. The same kind of person who instinctively equates communist with mass murderer, although there have been far more mass murderers who did not profess communism than did so.
In short, one can easily argue for the existence of a commons if the existence of intellectual property is assumed. And the concept of intellectual property is something that was invented only in the last few decades.
> Oh, boy, VeriSign wants ICANN to give up some of its regulatory power. Out of the frying pan, into the fire. > > Maybe the Swiss could do it; they seem like nice folks.
Heh. That's the rub.
We're all agreed that ICANN is doing a bad job of things. But who shall we replace them with?
Some department or body of the US government? I can't believe that the rest of the world would go for that very well. Same argument if we grant oversight powers to any national government -- be they the British, the Russians, Japanese or teh Swiss.
Set up a part of the UN to oversee this? At best you would have a crippled organization because some major country (e.g. the US, China, Japan, one or more European nation) decided NOT to ratify the treaty that enables this organization to work. At worst, you'd end up with something worse than ICANN: not only corrupt & self-serving, but without a clue of how the Internet actually works.
The best solution would be a group like ICANN only with more transparentness & accountability -- as well as a majority of outside directors elected in a representative fashion. The same fixes that Karl Auerbach has been fighting for. The same fixes I'd wager all of us would back. Once done, this body could eventually free itself from a close association with one nation, & become a truly global entity.
This dispute doesn't address that. It's an attempt by various regional registries to sieze power from ICANN, to increase their own little empires. If this action is successful, instead of one crew of thieves, we're going to have several crews. Not an improvement.
> The majority of the 50 states do not have significant technology industries and so might be willing to overturn UCITA which > would benefit computer users.
One item that opened my eyes when I testified against this legislation in 2001 before a committe of the Oregon Legislature, was that the insurance industry was set against it, as well as a number of industries who buy software. And the insurance industry has members in each of the 50 states.
Think of it as big corporation vs. big corporations over profits.
> Unfortunately it is Congress which passed UCITA in the first place.
Err, no: this model legislation, written by a group of lawyers. It is then submitted to each of the 50 states to adopt, modify, or ignore as they see fit. Because it is a ``model", drafted by legal ``experts", most state legislatures are inclined to adopt it unless the local users (both individual & business) raise a stink about it.
I have a first edition copy of the book, D. Brent Chapman & Elizabeth D. Zwicky, _Building Internet Firewalls_ (Sevastopol, California: O'Reilly and Associates), dated September 1995. Thumbing thru it, I find chapter 6, which is titled ``Packet Filtering". ISTR that September is the month that preceeds October.
Since it takes about a year for a book to go from start of writing, thru production & at last release, I'd say Packet Filtering was a technology very familiar if not much used in late 1994.
Is that satisfactory evidence of prior art?
Geoff
A Suggested Title for this Project
on
Free as in Books?
·
· Score: 2
Abby Hoffman's _Steal This Book_.
Heck, can you find a copy of this book _anywhrere_?
> There's an old > saying, a class A person will do better with a class B plan than a class B person will do with a class A plan.
Heh. Reminds me of my last fulltime job (which ended just over a year ago). I worked for a company that, in a word, sold consulting services to dot-coms. One of these companies we sold services to actually had a pretty good business plan that passed my sniff test . . . unfortunately the company collapsed by the end of 2000. Talking to the lead engineer who handled this account, the problem wasn't the technology or the business plan -- it was bickering amongst management.
As for my last employer, I joined them after the alternative telcom services provider I was working for declared bankrupcy, looking for some long-term job security. This employer ran out of work when the number of dot-coms thinned out too much & the survivors cut their operating budgets to the bone, & laid me off in May of last year. As for the telco, my ex-coworkers had a job until that September.
What else can you say about a UNIX flavor developed by Microsoft? It takes all of the user unfriendliness of UNIX & combines it with the bad programming habits of MS. And SCO (before they were bought out by Caldera) failed horribly at maintaining the resulting code.
At least Caldera did the sensible thing: let SCO die, & offered all of the customers still using it a way to migrate to a better OS.
You learn one flavor of UNIX, get to know it inside & out. And because of the shop, the job market, whatever, you start working with another flavor. And it will look weird because it's different.
Sometimes the differences are due to developers' choices, sometimes they fix problems existent in the first flavor you've encountered, sometimes they cause problems you didn't have in the first flavor. And sometimes what's weird about this new flavor is because the guy who set the computer up botched things.
Also, the longer you know one flavor of UNIX, the more likely you are to call any new flavor you encounter ``braindead".
Except when it comes to SCO. Trust me on that one.
> well, my perspective is that hp has built a lot of crap recently, but they seem to be doing it because people want *cheap*!
We all have heard the saying about being penny wise & pound foolish.
In late 1992 I bought an HP LaserJet IIP+ for about $900.--. It has proven to be almost unstoppable: after I had it for 2 years or so, it developed a constant squeak, but never gave it much attention, until it broke in 1998. The repair shop reported that the squeak was due to a broken part which had been broken for 4 years! At this rate, I expect it to easily outlast my current computer.
I always wondered about the people who settled with buying the $100 to $150 printers: perhaps they did expect to buy a new printer with each new computer.
> In essence it really isn't the bad or buggy OS you run or how good your damn anti-virus software is. It all comes down to > the end-user: if someone is stupid enough to open "myNakedWife.bmp.exe" they kinda deserve being bitraped by a damn > virus or a worm.
And will you still think this if it happens to you or someone you care about?
Something like this happened to my wife: she received an email with an image attatchment with a return address from someone she knew. She tried to open the attachment, found nothing there, thought it was odd.
Her acquaintence was online later, & several people asked her about this email. ``What email?" At that point my wife called on me.
(Note: yes my wife runs Win98. That's because she's an accountant & uses a lot of software that runs on Windows.)
We downloaded a virus checker, & I sweated while I waited for it to do it's thing: I knew just how easily her system could get corrupted by a virus, & that we'd have to wipe & reinstall her system -- & spend hours reconfiguring it. Fortunately I insisted on her using Eudora as her mail client for this very reason, & the virus she had recieved was inert.
In short, the viruses are getting ever craftier, & even knowledgeable Windows users are getting bit. Unless you're willing to argue that anyone using Microsoft software deserves this result for selecting inferior software, you can't dump the entire responsibility onto the end users.
> Ha ha! Is this the same schoolteacher that can't figure out how to add an attachment to her Outlook/GroupWise/Lotus > Notes e-mail?
Nope, just a woman who demonstrated that she understood computers, and had a clue or two. Part of the work she undertakes for her school district is teaching her students how to build computers thru the STRUT program (see http://www.strut.org). And she has been lobbying her bosses for a couple of years to replace Windows with Linux because of cost and reliability issues. She understands the issues, and admitted that adopting Linux with or without Apple would not be feasible -- there's still too much important software that's been written only for MS Windows. (There appear to be a number of people on the grass root level who not only understand computers, but advocate Linux; so far they are working in ignorance of each other.)
What I find offensive is that you imagine the worst kind of end user you had to deal with in your previous job, and immediately assume all end users are as equally incompetant. This is a logical fallacy. Arguing that all members of a class always have the same characteristics can be decisively refuted by producing only one counterexample; this woman clearly is that counterexample.
Slashdot Mirror
> Of course, you can always request and then sue them for not allow it... better use an european court, because
.org TLD to be managed by the non-profits, they may have to go to court & trudge thru litigation for years over this issue. Distasteful as it is, since ICANN refuses to be open or law-abiding maybe the best solution is to let loose the landsharks of war upon this cabal.
> in the states you won't have a chance...
Actually, I think a civil suit in the US might work better than in an European court for one strong reason -- due process.
As I understand it, for better or worse ICANN is acting as an agent for the US government. US Constitutional law has been very explicit about the importance of due process, & federal courts will force US agencies to restart the process when they are convinced this principal has not been followed. (Even though the current administration has been trying to make an end run around it ``for security reasons".)
What this means is that for the
Geoff
I'm responding because outside the US, this isn't seen as a joke, but as a believeable possibility.
I seriously doubt this, in part because MS no record or rumor of using violence to achieve their goals. No strike-breaking, no midnight threats in response to employee whistle-blowers, none of that. Just selectively offering cash incentives, and heavy-handed PR tactics. And I also doubt it because many of the long-term employees in MS are the kind of guys who never won a fight -- I doubt Bill Gates ever did -- & just don't think of resolving conflicts with violence.
So it's more likely that Bill & Steve will be visiting Venezuela in the coming days with briefcases full of cash. Now if the PTB in Venezuela *still* advocate GPL'd software after that, *maybe* MS will venture into a new market strategy. (I'd be surprised if there aren't a lot of military veterans working in Redmond, so maybe my thoughts about the successful use of violence being foreign to MS employees is wrong.)
Any 2 centavos worth.
Geoff
> Secondly, the degree of this "saturation" you speak of is much easier
> to attain in a relatively small country such as Japan or South Korea, south Korea being about the same size as Indiana
> and the total sum of Japanese islands being comperable in area to California. Got the smaller land mass?
Then what are the figures for parts of the US that are densely populated, relatively affluent, & under the same local government? If this lack of density were the sole cause, I'd expect the states of Rhode Island, Connecticut, & Delaware all to be either at the top or near the top in terms of saturation.
(I'll concede that there are probably enough low-income folks in Delaware & Rhode Island to make keep them from the ideal of a broadband line for every household, but last I checked Connecticut had one of the highest average incomes in the US. Anyone who wants a high-speed internet connection in that state should have one, unless the market wass hamstrung by hide-bound ILECs.)
Geoff
Although I'm puzzled that I can't find any of it here on /. (All the vitriolic RH-bashing posts must have been given misleading subject lines & modded down to -1.)
u gu st/008350.html
/.'s interface.)
As an example, you can take a look at the following email in a flamewar I have gotten myself into:
http://lists.pdxlinux.org/pipermail/plug/2002-A
(Sorry for the space in the URL -- it's an artifact due to
And feel free to take a look at the other emails in this thread.
Quite frankly, I'm dealing with a mindset that I am having trouble communicating with. This mindset believes that all corporations are evil, & since RH is a corporation, ipso facto RH is evil. And twice as evil since RH is ``corrupting" Linux. In other words, for some people, equating RedHat with Microsoft is a religious issue. They don't want to persuade you that it is, they want to convert you.
Another source was an ex-acquaintence who claimed that RedHat was just another example of ``glitter Linux". He claimed that RH was one of the most insecure distributions in existence, & that the only true Linux distribution was . . . Slackware.
Shortly after this proclamation, he also claimed that Windows NT was superior to Linux, a claim that I felt proved that either he was seriously burnt out as a computer tech or had sold his soul to Microsoft. (There were other signs that he had been wooed by people at Redmond & was drinking their kool-aid.) So I wasn't too surprised when he declared his intent to sell everything, buy a farm in Northern California & leave the industry.
None of these viewpoints reflect my opinions. Just trying to document the phenomena.
Geoff
I wish this review has discussed how this book compares to other books written on this topic, say A.S. Romer's _The Vertebrate Story_ (4th. ed., Chicago, 1959) or the well-known works of Stephen S. Gould.
If nothing else, a suggestion for future reviews.
Geoff
> 1. Floppies. Asking our users to mount and unmount a floppy disk was gonna be a chore. Floppies are used a lot.
> That was actually gonna be a headache. Windows with its waiting for the green light to go out and then pop it out is
> (in theory) a better solution from a user point.
>
I've heard this same problem mentioned a few days ago in a volunteer organization I'm helping with. Said organization went with an automounter, which prompted an argument that bordered on the religious. Sigh. Whatever happened to the pragmatic approach if it just works, use it?
> 2. Palm support. This was a difficult thing to get all kludged together and still didn't feel right. Had to stop on
> it eventually.
Odd. Both Pilot-link [http://www.pilot-link.org/] & J-pilot [http://www.jpilot.org/] work quite nicely at enabling a Palm OS device to talk to a UNIX workstation. I've heard J-Pilot praised as the single best Linux desktop utility in existence.
Did you get to look at these two tools before the PHBs interfered & made the wrong decision?
Geoff
> This works around the apartment or on a friend's PC. But, for a second do you actually think that someone in charge of
> a network infrastructure is going to gamble his reputation on a consultant with a few burned CDs and no support?
>
> What if the pilot was a disaster and he had nobody to call? The client would have been back to the "Windows 2000
> Migration Plan" quicker than it would have taken you to feel the foot across your ass as you hit the street.
Following this entire thread, richj's comments describe a situation where he walked up to some salesdroids, handed them a hot lead that would make the day ofany salesdroid from MS or Oracle, & they told him to FOAD.
Granted, I don't know if richj was dressed in a suit & tie, or forgot to bathe that week & wore tattered jeans & a ``Fuck Gates" t-shirt. But I doubt it was the latter.
If a company can't go thru the trouble of putting on a dog-&-pony show for a client, tell them the usual stories about how their product is a dessert topping & a floor wax, will eat their dog if they want it eaten, they deserve to go out of business.
Geoff
> I'm wondering how Personal Telco can afford to provide access to two T1's for free.
It's donated by local ISPs. This is how all of the PersonalTelco sites in Portland are set up. The only exceptions are folks who set up a wireless node to share the bandwidth they pay for. And according to Adam Shand, one of the founders of PersonalTelco, the extra traffic acquired by doing this is negligible to the sharer.
However, PersonalTelco has taken the position that if your provider forbids sharing your connection, you shouldn't either. In other words, if you get your internet conenction from someone like AT&T Cable, you shouldn't set up a wireless node.
Everything PersonalTelco has been doing so far is on the up-&-up.
Geoff
> Today, landlords may forceably evict tenants because of and within the limits of the legal (contractual) agreement known
> as a lease that DEFINES the tenant/landlord relationship. Nowadays, eviction has next to nothing to do with the fact
> that landlords own the land and/or property the tenant rents. In fact, who is the lessor and lessee is defined in the lease,
> not who holds the deed to the land (except to laws that define who may rent, etc., where the deed comes into play as
> to who legally owns the propety to be rented).
When I rented an apartment in the 1980s, I didn't sign a lease. I rented unit a the 30-day notice basis, which is defined by common usage & state law. Also, when I worked as an apartment manager, the setup was the same way. The situation may be different now & in your state.
Granted, there have been abuses by landlords in the past; this is reflected in current laws. What this does is force the landlord to spend a lot of money to effect the eviction, while the tenant need only dig in her/his heels & say no to fight it. All the tenant has to lose is her/his debt rating -- & I'm constantly amazed at how many people consider this a trivial cost of doing business.
(Not to say that the landlords will always screw the tenant. But in a disagreement, they have the deeper pockets to cope with a loss -- & other customers to pass it on to.)
[snip]
> As you can see, my ranty explanation fully fits the trend you and the other poster sees regarding the media industry's
> power grab as it pertains to rental/lease real estate. However, it does NOT fit the explanation you gave that possession is
> 9/10s of the law; rather the opposite is true. Please, don't step into other arenas you know little about in an attempt to try
> and make an otherwise valid point.
You've never had to deal with evicting anyone, have you? I have, as far as going & changing the locks on the SOB who refused to move out. It didn't matter a whole lot whose name was on the property deed to get that deadbeat out.
The whole point about the saying ``possession is 9/10s of the law" is that once someone gets her/his fingers around something, it takes a lot more effort to get the object freed than it takes forsaid person to hold onto it.
It works the same way whether you're a deadbeat in a rental property -- something many of us have witnessed first hand, which is why I picked that example -- the owner of a patent, a party in a debt repossession, or a dishonest party in a contractual agreement. And I picked up that phrase from a lawyer.
Geoff
> Your newsfeed is almost definitely pre-filtered, probably by your ISP
True. The only groups I would bet that *aren't* targetted by spammers would be some of the comp.* groups, as well as the Monastery & it's little brother.
After all, only a newbie or an auto-Darwinating spammer would annoy someone who could gleefully drop an obsfucated patch into BIND, sendmail, Postfix -- or even gcc -- that effectively blackholes the spammer for eternity.
Hmm. I shuld take a look at the source code for one of these applications & see if it has been done.
Geoff
> Rosen, Valenti et al are students of history. They know that the door swings both ways.
True. A little bit of reading in legal history will uncover many examples where a law passed to change the existing legal opinion was limited by the existence of a body of precedent. (The examples I can think of off the top of my head are the law of privacy -- which has been incorporated into common law in every US state except for New York, where even the passage of a law defining a right to privacy has been limited by their court system; the other example is Canada's Bill of Rights, which their Supreme Court has held is limited by pre-existing common law.)
Unfortunately, there is little legal precedent to extend or limit DMCA. Neither the US Supreme Court nor any of the State courts have shown whether they embrace the corporist ideas of ``intellectual property" or Lessig's ideas of public domain.
> I believe their thinking is that they
> should grab as much land as they are allowed to grab, so that when the door swings back, maybe it will be left leaning
> a bit to their side.
As the saying goes, possession is nine-tenths of the law. Ask any landlord who forceably evicts a tenant 6 months behind in the rent.
Geoff
> You sez:
>
> "P.S. -- I don't know if this argument is convincing in a court of law, so it is probably worthless. And if you try this at
> home, you implicitly hold me blameless for trying it.
>
> While I agree with the rest of your comment wholeheartedly, I do find this bit amusing.
Take it to its logical conclusion: since I implicily declare this idea to be worthless, then I can't assert ownership of this idea. And if you take it, & use it to break the current mismanagement of intellectual property laws for fun & profit, then you don't owe me a dime. Nor aven an email to let me know that you've done it. (Although if you did, an email reporting your success would probably make my day.)
And yes, sometimes my sense of humor is takes a coffee break.
Geoff
A spark went across my neurons as I read this post, & I had an idea.
All software vendors zealously guard their ``intellectual property", looking for ways to not only protect their investment, but get the maximum return on it. At the same time, their lawyesrs are working overtime to avoid any responsibility for the effects of this software: if the results aren't correct, & a company loses money for buying & using the software, too bad so sad.
Now what makes me wonder is if the algorhythms & coding in the software is held on one hand to be of value -- e.g., ``pay us money to use this application" -- but on the other hand the creator of this software wants to be held blameless & without guarrantee, doesn't that suggest that there is *NO* value in this software? That the creator is trying to sell to people something that she/he simultaneously avows is of no useful value?
If there is no useful value to a given piece of software, then why should the creator be given any rights of ownership to something that is worthless?
It would be worth the price of admision to see the corporate lawyers for MS, Oracle, Network Associates, et alia, argue that down.
Geoff
P.S. -- I don't know if this argument is convincing in a court of law, so it is probably worthless. And if you try this at home, you implicitly hold me blameless for trying it.
> if you all had a clue youd realize this is a web3d.org inititaive
Aha, so that's their game: take an idea that's had its 15 minutes of fame & now is a forgotten fad, give it a new name & throw some hype behind it.
[I take a quick look at the members list.]
Nope. Surprise: Microsoft's not a member.
Geoff
> Bollier apparently wishes to join the likes of Stalin, Lenin, and Pol Pot who feel they must "liberate"
> private property from the capitalist pigs.
I read the article; you are putting words in his mouth.
Making property or land publicly owned is an old, well-documented legal idea. The Roman jurist Gaius describes it in his _Institutes_: ``Public things are regard as belonging to no individual, but as being the property of the whole world [ipsius enim universitatis esse creduntur]." As a result, Gaius argued that these public properties were not subject to the law of nations, but of an older, natural or common law -- ``communis onmium hominum jus" -- that is derived from custom, & not from legislation.
Last I checked, neither Gaius nor the hundreds of Civil Law jurists whose work derives from him were communists. Which is not surprising in that he lived some 1500 years before Karl Marx was born. And if he were, that would mean that the law of much of Europe & the rest of the world -- which is derived from Civil Law, as distinguished from Canon or Church, & from Common or Anglo-American -- follows Communist law.
Only a parochial US citizen would argue that much of the world follows a ``Communist" law. The same kind of person who instinctively equates communist with mass murderer, although there have been far more mass murderers who did not profess communism than did so.
In short, one can easily argue for the existence of a commons if the existence of intellectual property is assumed. And the concept of intellectual property is something that was invented only in the last few decades.
Geoff
> Oh, boy, VeriSign wants ICANN to give up some of its regulatory power. Out of the frying pan, into the fire.
>
> Maybe the Swiss could do it; they seem like nice folks.
Heh. That's the rub.
We're all agreed that ICANN is doing a bad job of things. But who shall we replace them with?
Some department or body of the US government? I can't believe that the rest of the world would go for that very well. Same argument if we grant oversight powers to any national government -- be they the British, the Russians, Japanese or teh Swiss.
Set up a part of the UN to oversee this? At best you would have a crippled organization because some major country (e.g. the US, China, Japan, one or more European nation) decided NOT to ratify the treaty that enables this organization to work. At worst, you'd end up with something worse than ICANN: not only corrupt & self-serving, but without a clue of how the Internet actually works.
The best solution would be a group like ICANN only with more transparentness & accountability -- as well as a majority of outside directors elected in a representative fashion. The same fixes that Karl Auerbach has been fighting for. The same fixes I'd wager all of us would back. Once done, this body could eventually free itself from a close association with one nation, & become a truly global entity.
This dispute doesn't address that. It's an attempt by various regional registries to sieze power from ICANN, to increase their own little empires. If this action is successful, instead of one crew of thieves, we're going to have several crews. Not an improvement.
Geoff
> The majority of the 50 states do not have significant technology industries and so might be willing to overturn UCITA which
> would benefit computer users.
One item that opened my eyes when I testified against this legislation in 2001 before a committe of the Oregon Legislature, was that the insurance industry was set against it, as well as a number of industries who buy software. And the insurance industry has members in each of the 50 states.
Think of it as big corporation vs. big corporations over profits.
> Unfortunately it is Congress which passed UCITA in the first place.
Err, no: this model legislation, written by a group of lawyers. It is then submitted to each of the 50 states to adopt, modify, or ignore as they see fit. Because it is a ``model", drafted by legal ``experts", most state legislatures are inclined to adopt it unless the local users (both individual & business) raise a stink about it.
Geoff
This patent claim was filed 4 October 1995.
I have a first edition copy of the book, D. Brent Chapman & Elizabeth D. Zwicky, _Building Internet Firewalls_ (Sevastopol, California: O'Reilly and Associates), dated September 1995. Thumbing thru it, I find chapter 6, which is titled ``Packet Filtering". ISTR that September is the month that preceeds October.
Since it takes about a year for a book to go from start of writing, thru production & at last release, I'd say Packet Filtering was a technology very familiar if not much used in late 1994.
Is that satisfactory evidence of prior art?
Geoff
Abby Hoffman's _Steal This Book_.
Heck, can you find a copy of this book _anywhrere_?
Geoff
> There's an old
> saying, a class A person will do better with a class B plan than a class B person will do with a class A plan.
Heh. Reminds me of my last fulltime job (which ended just over a year ago). I worked for a company that, in a word, sold consulting services to dot-coms. One of these companies we sold services to actually had a pretty good business plan that passed my sniff test . . . unfortunately the company collapsed by the end of 2000. Talking to the lead engineer who handled this account, the problem wasn't the technology or the business plan -- it was bickering amongst management.
As for my last employer, I joined them after the alternative telcom services provider I was working for declared bankrupcy, looking for some long-term job security. This employer ran out of work when the number of dot-coms thinned out too much & the survivors cut their operating budgets to the bone, & laid me off in May of last year. As for the telco, my ex-coworkers had a job until that September.
Geoff
> You'll call SCO 'braindead' no matter what.
Exactly my point.
What else can you say about a UNIX flavor developed by Microsoft? It takes all of the user unfriendliness of UNIX & combines it with the bad programming habits of MS. And SCO (before they were bought out by Caldera) failed horribly at maintaining the resulting code.
At least Caldera did the sensible thing: let SCO die, & offered all of the customers still using it a way to migrate to a better OS.
Geoff
It works like this . . .
You learn one flavor of UNIX, get to know it inside & out. And because of the shop, the job market, whatever, you start working with another flavor. And it will look weird because it's different.
Sometimes the differences are due to developers' choices, sometimes they fix problems existent in the first flavor you've encountered, sometimes they cause problems you didn't have in the first flavor. And sometimes what's weird about this new flavor is because the guy who set the computer up botched things.
Also, the longer you know one flavor of UNIX, the more likely you are to call any new flavor you encounter ``braindead".
Except when it comes to SCO. Trust me on that one.
Geoff
> well, my perspective is that hp has built a lot of crap recently, but they seem to be doing it because people want *cheap*!
We all have heard the saying about being penny wise & pound foolish.
In late 1992 I bought an HP LaserJet IIP+ for about $900.--. It has proven to be almost unstoppable: after I had it for 2 years or so, it developed a constant squeak, but never gave it much attention, until it broke in 1998. The repair shop reported that the squeak was due to a broken part which had been broken for 4 years! At this rate, I expect it to easily outlast my current computer.
I always wondered about the people who settled with buying the $100 to $150 printers: perhaps they did expect to buy a new printer with each new computer.
Geoff
> In essence it really isn't the bad or buggy OS you run or how good your damn anti-virus software is. It all comes down to
> the end-user: if someone is stupid enough to open "myNakedWife.bmp.exe" they kinda deserve being bitraped by a damn
> virus or a worm.
And will you still think this if it happens to you or someone you care about?
Something like this happened to my wife: she received an email with an image attatchment with a return address from someone she knew. She tried to open the attachment, found nothing there, thought it was odd.
Her acquaintence was online later, & several people asked her about this email. ``What email?" At that point my wife called on me.
(Note: yes my wife runs Win98. That's because she's an accountant & uses a lot of software that runs on Windows.)
We downloaded a virus checker, & I sweated while I waited for it to do it's thing: I knew just how easily her system could get corrupted by a virus, & that we'd have to wipe & reinstall her system -- & spend hours reconfiguring it. Fortunately I insisted on her using Eudora as her mail client for this very reason, & the virus she had recieved was inert.
In short, the viruses are getting ever craftier, & even knowledgeable Windows users are getting bit. Unless you're willing to argue that anyone using Microsoft software deserves this result for selecting inferior software, you can't dump the entire responsibility onto the end users.
Geoff
> Ha ha! Is this the same schoolteacher that can't figure out how to add an attachment to her Outlook/GroupWise/Lotus
> Notes e-mail?
Nope, just a woman who demonstrated that she understood computers, and had a clue or two. Part of the work she undertakes for her school district is teaching her students how to build computers thru the STRUT program (see http://www.strut.org). And she has been lobbying her bosses for a couple of years to replace Windows with Linux because of cost and reliability issues. She understands the issues, and admitted that adopting Linux with or without Apple would not be feasible -- there's still too much important software that's been written only for MS Windows. (There appear to be a number of people on the grass root level who not only understand computers, but advocate Linux; so far they are working in ignorance of each other.)
What I find offensive is that you imagine the worst kind of end user you had to deal with in your previous job, and immediately assume all end users are as equally incompetant. This is a logical fallacy. Arguing that all members of a class always have the same characteristics can be decisively refuted by producing only one counterexample; this woman clearly is that counterexample.
Geoff