Wow, I guess "Internet time" has gotten so fast that now we bash companies for purchases that some analyst thinks they might make at some future time, and for imagined policies related to said hypothetical purchases. What crazy times we live in!
Yahoo! already claims unlimited non-exclusive use on messages posted to what was formerly known as eGroups. (Plus they add spam ads at the end of every message.) As more and more ISPs drop NNTP explicitly and implicity (through bad service), more and more people have been relying on Deja (now Google "Groups"). So in effect, if Yahoo! purchases Goodle, Yahoo! will be able to claim unlimited non-exclusive use for a growing percentage of UseNet traffic. Plus Yahoo! may start automatically adding spam at the end of every message (i.e. more than "Sent by Deja.com" that Deja did).
"'I wouldn't be surprised if Yahoo bought Google,' says Tomas Isakowitz, an analyst with Janney Montgomery Scott in Philadelphia" in this Red Herring article. Can you see a merging of Yahoo! Groups (aka eGroups aka One List) and UseNet?/. needs to strap a borg headset onto a Yahoo! logo.
This is another example of globalization, which is vaguely recognized as "evil" here at Slashdot. There are a couple of ways to prevent globalization: by mandate, and by taxation. Historically, the U.S. has relied on the former (e.g. anti-trust laws, the Microsoft case, etc.), but I advocate the latter. Specifically, I advocate taxes based on distance. Doing business across state lines would be taxed at a higher rate than doing business across county lines.
Instead what we have are laws that go against this philosophy:
No Internet taxes. This might have been a good idea in 1996, but it's time to seriously consider changing this philosophy, especially when there are atoms invovled, such as ISP hookups and mail-order products. I agree that taxes on intellectual property micropayments still don't make sense.
No bartering. If your spouse sets up an ISP, you can sign up tax-free, but if your neighbor does, there are taxes. That's a steep taxation curve when looked at from the perspective of taxes based on distance! This is one of many barriers to formation of small businesses that serve local communities (the other main one being the sheer amount of paperwork).
Choose your poison: AOL or Internet taxes. Or are we just going to hope for Judge Jackson in shining armor?
If some of the current plans go through, there will be a huge divide between schools as well as a class divide and it will result in a massive increase in stupid people roaming the streets.
There already is a huge class divide. It was caused by racism, facilitated by the automobile, and fertilized by negative images of cities bombed out during WWII.
Those public schools that you laud -- they undoubtedly are in the suburbs. The ones in the inner city are failing. What is your plan to help those schools?
School choice would most help inner city schools. But even that is not enough. Inner city children need role models. They need to be around successful kids (I think you said something similar, but I think you were talking only about mixing dumb suburban kids with smart suburban kids). Affordable, attractive housing needs to be built in the suburbs -- and new developments need to be walkable to make it even more affordable to lower income families.
School choice would help solve the current vast class divide. Your fears are unfounded and misplaced.
thogard continues:
You want to send your kid to a private school, fine but keep me and my money out of it.
And I ask you to keep my $112/month out of it (the portion of my local taxes that go toward Fairfax County public schools, not counting the portion from state and federal taxes).
Lurking behind the obvious "these rules are stupid" issue are a couple of important issues:
School choice. The public school and taxation system financially constrains parents to send their children to these schools. Private schools could choose to have less insane policies regarding informants, non-prescription medications, and good samaritans.
Tort reform. The real solution here is to make the boy's parents pay for the lawsuit directed against the girl's parents -- automatically -- to discourage frivolous lawsuits. Note: the lawsuit against the school was not frivolous, but the lawsuit against the girl's parents was.
So really, there are at least three ways this incident was atrocious: the school's informant rules, the lack of school choice, and the lack of tort reform. Try not to confuse them.
These companies think applying for a patent is like registering a domain name -- if it's not registered yet, it's fair game!
Re:OSX on X86.. It was called NeXTSTEP/OpenStep
on
OS X on x86?
·
· Score: 1
And let's not forget the price of NeXTSTEP. First it was $1995. Then it was $199 for a "limited time only." Then it was free. And still nobody wanted it. What's changed since 1994?
If Pillsbury does not protect "bake-off" from entering into general English usage like "xerox", "escalator", "popscicle", and "kleenex", then Pillsbury loses some ability to enforce their trademark against a direct competitor. I'm mostly on Pillsbury's side on this one. I suppose if Pillsbury wanted to be really nice, they could license the term to one or two specific organizations for $1, but even that's risky for them, and they are probably not afraid of a boycott from Slashdot readers.
What you're looking for is long-term disability insurance. But buying disability insurance is very complicated; it's not simple like life insurance (you're either dead or you're not), and it's not down-to-earth like health insurance (everyone has been to a doctor; most people haven't been disabled or even know someone who has been disabled).
Here are some things to look out for:
Long-term disability won't pay for the first 30 days or 60 days or whatever is specified in the contract. To cover the first 30 or 60 days you would need either accured vacation/sick leave, savings, short-term disability insurance, or some combination thereof.
If you pay for disability insurance with pre-tax dollars and you become disabled, you have to pay income tax on your disability check. If you pay for disability insurance with after-tax dollars, your disability check is tax-free.
The maximum benefit for disability is usually 60% of your pay (for the past year) per year, to provide a disincentive to claiming disability to induced chronic fatigue or something. Thus, if possible, you want to pay for disability insurance with after-tax dollars so that the benefit will be about the same as your current take-home pay.
If your employer offers disability insurance, I believe there is something that prevents you from buying disability insurance on your own, but I don't know what it is, whether it is a law, a tax disincentive, or an underwriter policy.
Disability insurance doesn't pay past age 65, so make sure you get enough coverage so that you can still contribute to your IRA with your disability benefit check.
Policies vary widely in what consider a disability and what benefits they will pay out and whether you're allowed to make some money on your hobby when you're disabled. Some policies (like those $10/month policies offered by most employers) will try to make you flip burgers if you at all can, and then say you're not disabled and not pay anything. That's why if you're serious about disability insurance you have to go to a Cadillac $100/month policy -- not many insurance companies offer good policies anymore, but Minnesota Life still does. Also, if you've been a member of IEEE for a while, you're eligible for their Financial Advantage Program group policies. Their disability insurance is almost as good as Minnesota Life's.
Look for automatic inflation adjustment of benefits.
You will have a choice between "level payments" and payments that increase as you get older. Since most of us aspire to early retirement and financial independence, get the latter of course, so you can simply cancel when you reach that point and not have wasted any money.
Disability insurance is cheaper if you can get two or three buddies to do it with you. You can save 10-20% this way.
The amount you pay depends on your profession. Some dangerous or high-risk professions don't qualify at all. So for a programmer, not only has the insurance company taken into account the possibility of carpal tunnel, but also brain damage, automobile accidents, etc. In other words, you're not a special case -- they've done this before. A supermodel insuring her legs is a unique case. A programmer insuring his hands is not -- it's simply disability insurance.
The short of it is that it is very expensive to not be financially independent. I think the goal of all Slashdot readers is to get to that point as soon as possible. In the meantime, disability insurance will ensure that in case of major accident or illness you can maintain your current standard of living.
About halfway into the letter, the ACLU discusses some generalities and then provides some specific examples. Unfortunately, the examples are not compelling and do not address the most onerous of possible outcomes that the generalities imply. Here is their generalities paragraph:
We believe that there are several major issues at stake in addition to which gTLDs are selected and who gets to run them. Many will emerge from the fine print of contracts currently being negotiated between ICANN and the prospective registry operators. These contracts may impact free speech rights and property rights by either extending ICANN's Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) and/or providing additional pre-emptive rights to trademark holders or holders of existing domain names at the expense of the public at large. We believe that it would be a violation of federal law, and of due process, for NTIA to consent to any plan that required individuals to consent to the UDRP as a condition of enjoying a government benefit such as registration in a new gTLD. Each of these issues will require careful consideration in a public process before any decision is made.
The subjection to UDRP means that a popular web site that espouses non-mainstream views could be taken down by simply finding a close name that happens to be trademarked and pressing the case pro bono on behalf of the company or organization with the trademark. I am thinking specifically, of course, of the Corinthians case, but more nefarious than the facts in that case. In that case, there was no legitimate web site at corinthians.com, and there was no intent to specifically squash free speech.
The ACLU should have provided a fictional example along those lines to illustrate the Sword of Damocles the UDRP is.
I can't go to Toys R Us and buy a copy of Debbie Does Dallas.
Wrong analogy. This is the Yahoo! auction site, not a store. A better analogy is the newspaper classifieds. Should the newspaper refuse to carry ads for Nazi artifacts?
And here we come to the crux of the matter. The answer to the question is "it depends on whether Yahoo! is subject to U.S. laws or 'international' laws." And so we see how the Internet is furthering globalization and loss of U.S. sovereignty.
The article touched on the e-commerce aspect of the Internet, but ignored the most profound impacts: political, and also social.
Seattle, the entire anti-globalization movement, and possibly even Nader (and by unintended consequence Bush) would not have happened without the Internet. The Internet is bringing globalization to the minds of the populace the way television brought real war to the 1960's populace. The movement is just beginning, so perhaps that is why the author overlooked it or does not see it snowballing. But the fax machine played an important role in Tiennamen Square, one of the important events of the past couple of decades and a foreshadow of the power of the Internet. The Internet is Gutenburg squared, not just an improvement in efficiency, but as Douglas Englebart says an improvement in efficiency of such magnitude that it is a completely new thing.
Also, the article completely blew past the negatives of technology -- the unintended consequences, e.g. greenhouse effect, sprawl, obesity, etc. And how this is going to get worse in the future (as in Bill Joy's predictions). Perhaps Twilight Zone had it right all along -- the best time to live is latter 20th century.
Well, perhaps while we're waiting for AI and nanotechnology to destroy the world (2020?), the Internet will foster real political change and real democracy for the first time in history. So perhaps 2010 will be the best year, not 1960.
Communicators, personal lasers (OK, stun-only, and only if aimed directly at the enemy's eye), 3.5" floppy disks. This stuff was sci-fi in the 1960's (after Ozzie and Harriet), and it's reality today.
(Just kidding. Please see my "Seattle" post for my real opinion.)
I try to limit as much as possible how much porn is presented to me while I surf the net. I do this mostly by, of course, choosing which web sites to search for and visit. But I have found some software necessary. And that is ad-blocking software. Mainstream sites like Yahoo! and Deja.com have a penchant for banner ads featuring scantily clad women. If there's any software that should be installed, it's ad-blocking software. Otherwise, if censorware must be installed, it should be left up to the user.
How much porn is viewed is 99% up to the user. Not much slips in to those who don't want it, and not much stops those who do.
Can't they tell just from the position? That is, top = stop, bottom = go?
Not at night from a distance. In fact, yellow and red traffic signals cannot be distinguished at night from a distance by some red/green colorblind people, but this is not as big an issue as distinguishing green from red traffic signals.
Just a nit: the "green" light in a traffic signal would actually need white (or possibly green LEDs plus blue LEDs), not green LEDs alone, since green and red LEDs are indistinguishable to many color-blind people. In standard traffic signals, the green light has a lot of blue in it, so that it appears white or whitish to red/green color-blind people.
Gaming crashed in 1984 not because of an oversupply, but because of an undersupply of quality games. Atari dominated the early 80's (coin-op, console, home computer hardware, AND gaming software), and when they died due to poor management, there was no one to pick up the slack until Nintendo came along a few years later.
Looks like it requires a modem for a special dial-up connection. Who owns modems anymore?
With the typical computer lifespan being three years, and everyone getting broadband connections, in three years dial-up modems will be as common in the general populace as I imagine they are for Slashdot readers now.
How about charging for subscriptions? The old deja.com was worth about up to about $10,000 per year to me. I would easily pay $2,000 per year, which is how much I pay for MSDN Universal. If we go with the $2,000 figure, I would say $1500 is for the past year and $500 for the older archives. Perhaps not coincidentally, $2000 is also about my yearly book budget. So perhaps to find the potential market size for a deja.com replacment, find the number of people who last year both bought an O'Reilly book and spent at least $400 in books, journals, and memberships; then take 25% of the combined dollars spent on books, journals, and memberships.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, I guess "Internet time" has gotten so fast that now we bash companies for purchases that some analyst thinks they might make at some future time, and for imagined policies related to said hypothetical purchases. What crazy times we live in!
Yahoo! already claims unlimited non-exclusive use on messages posted to what was formerly known as eGroups. (Plus they add spam ads at the end of every message.) As more and more ISPs drop NNTP explicitly and implicity (through bad service), more and more people have been relying on Deja (now Google "Groups"). So in effect, if Yahoo! purchases Goodle, Yahoo! will be able to claim unlimited non-exclusive use for a growing percentage of UseNet traffic. Plus Yahoo! may start automatically adding spam at the end of every message (i.e. more than "Sent by Deja.com" that Deja did).
"'I wouldn't be surprised if Yahoo bought Google,' says Tomas Isakowitz, an analyst with Janney Montgomery Scott in Philadelphia" in this Red Herring article. Can you see a merging of Yahoo! Groups (aka eGroups aka One List) and UseNet? /. needs to strap a borg headset onto a Yahoo! logo.
Instead what we have are laws that go against this philosophy:
- No Internet taxes. This might have been a good idea in 1996, but it's time to seriously consider changing this philosophy, especially when there are atoms invovled, such as ISP hookups and mail-order products. I agree that taxes on intellectual property micropayments still don't make sense.
- No bartering. If your spouse sets up an ISP, you can sign up tax-free, but if your neighbor does, there are taxes. That's a steep taxation curve when looked at from the perspective of taxes based on distance! This is one of many barriers to formation of small businesses that serve local communities (the other main one being the sheer amount of paperwork).
Choose your poison: AOL or Internet taxes. Or are we just going to hope for Judge Jackson in shining armor?There's not much philosophical difference between Eidola and the Action Semantics addition to UML due to be finalized next month.
If some of the current plans go through, there will be a huge divide between schools as well as a class divide and it will result in a massive increase in stupid people roaming the streets.
There already is a huge class divide. It was caused by racism, facilitated by the automobile, and fertilized by negative images of cities bombed out during WWII.
Those public schools that you laud -- they undoubtedly are in the suburbs. The ones in the inner city are failing. What is your plan to help those schools?
School choice would most help inner city schools. But even that is not enough. Inner city children need role models. They need to be around successful kids (I think you said something similar, but I think you were talking only about mixing dumb suburban kids with smart suburban kids). Affordable, attractive housing needs to be built in the suburbs -- and new developments need to be walkable to make it even more affordable to lower income families.
School choice would help solve the current vast class divide. Your fears are unfounded and misplaced.
thogard continues:
You want to send your kid to a private school, fine but keep me and my money out of it.
And I ask you to keep my $112/month out of it (the portion of my local taxes that go toward Fairfax County public schools, not counting the portion from state and federal taxes).
- School choice. The public school and taxation system financially constrains parents to send their children to these schools. Private schools could choose to have less insane policies regarding informants, non-prescription medications, and good samaritans.
- Tort reform. The real solution here is to make the boy's parents pay for the lawsuit directed against the girl's parents -- automatically -- to discourage frivolous lawsuits. Note: the lawsuit against the school was not frivolous, but the lawsuit against the girl's parents was.
So really, there are at least three ways this incident was atrocious: the school's informant rules, the lack of school choice, and the lack of tort reform. Try not to confuse them.Should we be surprised after the massive transfer of military knowledge to China?
These companies think applying for a patent is like registering a domain name -- if it's not registered yet, it's fair game!
And let's not forget the price of NeXTSTEP. First it was $1995. Then it was $199 for a "limited time only." Then it was free. And still nobody wanted it. What's changed since 1994?
Don't talk to management, ever, for any reason, until you read some Steve McConnell, such as Rapid Application Development: Taming Wild Software Schedules. Also, check out some of the stuff from SEI, such as Investment Analysis of Software Assets for Product Lines. If you're going to commit millions of dollars of your employer's money, you'd better have some research and data to back it up.
If Pillsbury does not protect "bake-off" from entering into general English usage like "xerox", "escalator", "popscicle", and "kleenex", then Pillsbury loses some ability to enforce their trademark against a direct competitor. I'm mostly on Pillsbury's side on this one. I suppose if Pillsbury wanted to be really nice, they could license the term to one or two specific organizations for $1, but even that's risky for them, and they are probably not afraid of a boycott from Slashdot readers.
Here are some things to look out for:
- Long-term disability won't pay for the first 30 days or 60 days or whatever is specified in the contract. To cover the first 30 or 60 days you would need either accured vacation/sick leave, savings, short-term disability insurance, or some combination thereof.
- If you pay for disability insurance with pre-tax dollars and you become disabled, you have to pay income tax on your disability check. If you pay for disability insurance with after-tax dollars, your disability check is tax-free.
- The maximum benefit for disability is usually 60% of your pay (for the past year) per year, to provide a disincentive to claiming disability to induced chronic fatigue or something. Thus, if possible, you want to pay for disability insurance with after-tax dollars so that the benefit will be about the same as your current take-home pay.
- If your employer offers disability insurance, I believe there is something that prevents you from buying disability insurance on your own, but I don't know what it is, whether it is a law, a tax disincentive, or an underwriter policy.
- Disability insurance doesn't pay past age 65, so make sure you get enough coverage so that you can still contribute to your IRA with your disability benefit check.
- Policies vary widely in what consider a disability and what benefits they will pay out and whether you're allowed to make some money on your hobby when you're disabled. Some policies (like those $10/month policies offered by most employers) will try to make you flip burgers if you at all can, and then say you're not disabled and not pay anything. That's why if you're serious about disability insurance you have to go to a Cadillac $100/month policy -- not many insurance companies offer good policies anymore, but Minnesota Life still does. Also, if you've been a member of IEEE for a while, you're eligible for their Financial Advantage Program group policies. Their disability insurance is almost as good as Minnesota Life's.
- Look for automatic inflation adjustment of benefits.
- You will have a choice between "level payments" and payments that increase as you get older. Since most of us aspire to early retirement and financial independence, get the latter of course, so you can simply cancel when you reach that point and not have wasted any money.
- Disability insurance is cheaper if you can get two or three buddies to do it with you. You can save 10-20% this way.
- The amount you pay depends on your profession. Some dangerous or high-risk professions don't qualify at all. So for a programmer, not only has the insurance company taken into account the possibility of carpal tunnel, but also brain damage, automobile accidents, etc. In other words, you're not a special case -- they've done this before. A supermodel insuring her legs is a unique case. A programmer insuring his hands is not -- it's simply disability insurance.
The short of it is that it is very expensive to not be financially independent. I think the goal of all Slashdot readers is to get to that point as soon as possible. In the meantime, disability insurance will ensure that in case of major accident or illness you can maintain your current standard of living.The ACLU should have provided a fictional example along those lines to illustrate the Sword of Damocles the UDRP is.
Wrong analogy. This is the Yahoo! auction site, not a store. A better analogy is the newspaper classifieds. Should the newspaper refuse to carry ads for Nazi artifacts?
And here we come to the crux of the matter. The answer to the question is "it depends on whether Yahoo! is subject to U.S. laws or 'international' laws." And so we see how the Internet is furthering globalization and loss of U.S. sovereignty.
Seattle, the entire anti-globalization movement, and possibly even Nader (and by unintended consequence Bush) would not have happened without the Internet. The Internet is bringing globalization to the minds of the populace the way television brought real war to the 1960's populace. The movement is just beginning, so perhaps that is why the author overlooked it or does not see it snowballing. But the fax machine played an important role in Tiennamen Square, one of the important events of the past couple of decades and a foreshadow of the power of the Internet. The Internet is Gutenburg squared, not just an improvement in efficiency, but as Douglas Englebart says an improvement in efficiency of such magnitude that it is a completely new thing.
Also, the article completely blew past the negatives of technology -- the unintended consequences, e.g. greenhouse effect, sprawl, obesity, etc. And how this is going to get worse in the future (as in Bill Joy's predictions). Perhaps Twilight Zone had it right all along -- the best time to live is latter 20th century.
Well, perhaps while we're waiting for AI and nanotechnology to destroy the world (2020?), the Internet will foster real political change and real democracy for the first time in history. So perhaps 2010 will be the best year, not 1960.
(Just kidding. Please see my "Seattle" post for my real opinion.)
I try to limit as much as possible how much porn is presented to me while I surf the net. I do this mostly by, of course, choosing which web sites to search for and visit. But I have found some software necessary. And that is ad-blocking software. Mainstream sites like Yahoo! and Deja.com have a penchant for banner ads featuring scantily clad women. If there's any software that should be installed, it's ad-blocking software. Otherwise, if censorware must be installed, it should be left up to the user.
How much porn is viewed is 99% up to the user. Not much slips in to those who don't want it, and not much stops those who do.
Can't they tell just from the position? That is, top = stop, bottom = go? Not at night from a distance. In fact, yellow and red traffic signals cannot be distinguished at night from a distance by some red/green colorblind people, but this is not as big an issue as distinguishing green from red traffic signals.
Just a nit: the "green" light in a traffic signal would actually need white (or possibly green LEDs plus blue LEDs), not green LEDs alone, since green and red LEDs are indistinguishable to many color-blind people. In standard traffic signals, the green light has a lot of blue in it, so that it appears white or whitish to red/green color-blind people.
Gaming crashed in 1984 not because of an oversupply, but because of an undersupply of quality games. Atari dominated the early 80's (coin-op, console, home computer hardware, AND gaming software), and when they died due to poor management, there was no one to pick up the slack until Nintendo came along a few years later.
Looks like it requires a modem for a special dial-up connection. Who owns modems anymore? With the typical computer lifespan being three years, and everyone getting broadband connections, in three years dial-up modems will be as common in the general populace as I imagine they are for Slashdot readers now.
How about charging for subscriptions? The old deja.com was worth about up to about $10,000 per year to me. I would easily pay $2,000 per year, which is how much I pay for MSDN Universal. If we go with the $2,000 figure, I would say $1500 is for the past year and $500 for the older archives. Perhaps not coincidentally, $2000 is also about my yearly book budget. So perhaps to find the potential market size for a deja.com replacment, find the number of people who last year both bought an O'Reilly book and spent at least $400 in books, journals, and memberships; then take 25% of the combined dollars spent on books, journals, and memberships.