In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own.
-Thomas Jefferson in a letter to Horatio G. Spafford (March 17, 1814)
Perhaps any errors have not been fixed because they serve the will of the church better that way?
The one I went to the guy actually did know what a Molex connector was. The first place I looked was the connector draw at the back of the store (and you're right, it has shrunk considerably), but all they had there were (mostly) audio and RF connectors, no Molex or anything along those lines. I don't know, maybe I just have a bad Radio Shack in my area, but more and more the only thing they carry are cheap RC cars and random Chinese made electronic toys/accessories. More and more it's getting to be where you can't find any actual electronics components for sale in brick and morter stores. I guess maybe they can't compete with being able to order things in bulk online and have it shipped to your door, after all, who actually repairs electronics these days? For the most part if your shopping for electronics you're building something, not trying to repair it, so what difference does it make if you have to wait a few days for it to arrive?
Patent Pending ST:TNG Plot Formula:
Crew discovers anomaly.
Crew investigates.
Senior Bridge Crew deduce cause of anomaly.
Picard after listening to his crews advice manages to deal with (or delegate dealing with) anomaly and save the day.
Roll ending credits.
It also largely depends on intent. They're suing Christies for civil damages I imagine because they have no evidence of intent to defraud. They're claiming that Christies didn't do their part to ensure that what they sold was the genuine article, so they're responsible for paying. Christies in turn can perform its own investigation and may very well sue whoever told them the item was the genuine article for civil damages, while the court follows up with criminal charges. Standard IANAL disclaimer here.
Somewhat off-topic for this, but on the topic of Best Buy. I recently needed a molex y-cable on short notice, so I drove out looking for one. I looked in (based mostly on the order I passed them) Radio Shack, Office Depot, Circuit City, Staples, and finally Best Buy before I found any Molex connectors let alone a y-cable. I was somewhat surprised that only Best Buy out of all those stores carried them. If it wasn't for finding them at Best Buy, my last hope would have been Compusa (going out of business as already covered) which also happens to be a 45 minute drive I wasn't particularly looking forward to. Say what you will about Best Buy, but in some places it's just about the only place to find certain computer components without having to wait a few days for shipping.
You're missing the point entirely. The whole reason for the exercise of querying the registrar is to find out of the domain you're interested in is taken already. If there's no way using the hash to determine if the domain has been taken (because one hash can correspond to many domains) then it's effectively worthless to have performed the query in the first place because even if it comes back as existing you don't know if the domain you're looking for exists, or if another domain with the same hash does.
Sometimes a big company will try some new endeavor to much fanfare, but not bother to try very hard, assuming somehow that they will win because they are big. *cough*zune*cough*
Yeah yeah, someone is going to mod me troll or flamebait for this, but it was too perfect, I couldn't pass it up.
I think that's really the core of the Apple/PC divide. Apples systems (except for the REALLY expensive ones like the G5) are very slick but essentially designed to be black boxes. You plug them in, and they work, and if something breaks or you want something new you need to buy a new one (more or less, I know you can take them in for service, but from the customers standpoint it's a sealed box). They're targeted at the non-technical, the people that don't know a motherboard from a hard drive, but still want to be able to surf websites, install software, and maybe kill some time with solitaire or the sims or something. They strive to reach that perfect balance between being to dumb to do anything interesting, and being to complicated for the simple to figure out how to get things done. Apple for the most part has done an amazing job of walking that very fine line. Unfortunately, in order to achieve all of this they've had to sacrifice a lot of flexibility, less so now than it used to be (the new UNIX core has added a lot more depth to the software side of things) but they're still more constrained than similar PCs. By introducing OS X Apple has made it much easier to tweak and modify the OS, but the hardware still suffers from the same limited flexibility. Part of the cost of the hardware on a Apple computer is to pay for the slick integration at all levels that allows you to plug it in and start using it, and all of that would be ruined if you could put any parts you wanted into it. This is essentially why Apple is so resistant to allowing OS X to run on non-Apple hardware. To do so would tarnish their reputation because outside of their carefully picked and polished hardware selection the stability and ease of use of the OS (and hardware) could not be guaranteed.
At the other end of the spectrum we have PCs. They're mutts, of dubious parentage. They're kind of like that one pair of really comfortable paints you own that have a fews holes and are patched in a couple places (before someone asks, no I won't do a car analogy). They aren't pretty, and they sometimes have problems, and need to be replaced entirely every once in a while, but you can do just about everything in them and feel comfortable. And when the time finally comes to retire them, you can probably cut em up and use the pieces for something else. PCs are not for the technically inept, and they won't hold your hand or go out of their way to make sure that everything is dead simple. They expect you to RTFM, and to know which cables go where and what everything is called. But the reward you get for that cost is the ability to create exactly the system you want. You can replace anything at any time, and configure just about anything however you want it. There's no absolute guarantee that it will work when you're done with it, but odds are it can be made to work even if not necessarily by you. Of course, much as Apples move to OS X has made their computers easier to tweak, recent (relatively) technologies like USB have made PCs a little more idiot proof than they used to be. At some point in the future maybe we'll have the ultimate hybrid of PC and Apple, a computer that's hard to break, but easy to tweak.
My guess is he does C++ development of windows apps with Visual Studio. I can do development on just about anything because I mostly use open source development tools (or nearly open as the case with Suns JDK). I've done development on Windows XP, Linux, Solaris, an old 486DX running MSDOS, Windows 98, and yes, even OS X. The OS really doesn't matter, it's the tools, and all the good ones are cross-platform (basically everything buy Visual*).
After all, don't they actually end up having to eventually pay for all the domains they've squatted upon? In a word, no. Also, I don't think setting up a low level DDoS on the registrars is really the direction we want to move in.
As some have pointed out it costs the squatter nothing. They have a loophole because many registrars allow a 30 day trial period on a domain in which you can have it and if you decide you don't want it you can get rid of it for no cost. The squatters can then play a shell game by having a set of dummy companies swap the domain between themselves without ever passing the 30 day mark. With only 3 companies a squatter could tie a domain up for just under 3 months, and never have to pay a penny.
Uhm... except for that whole problem of hash collisions. Plus as was already pointed out it doesn't do you any good when it looks like it's the registrars themselves snooping you. Using hashes would also require the registrars to maintain a second registration DB of hashes which invariably will mean one of them will offer a hash -> domain mapping service and you're right back at square one (more or less, would have to be "hash" -> "list of possible domains" due to collisions).
It should also be noted that the SCO of today isn't the original SCO. A number of years back they changed their name from Caldera Systems to "The SCO Group" and are referred to informally as SCO. The original SCO (that is Santa Cruz Operation) sold their Unix divisions (among others) to Caldera Systems (now SCO) who at the time were primarily a distributor of a custom Linux distribution. The current SCO has never really done much innovation of any sort preferring instead to buy successful technologies and then litigate about them (as they did with DR-DOS after they purchased it from Novell).
That may be 3.1416% for Apple's share of the entire market. But the iMac has got something like 90% of the all-in-one market. Yep, nothing like lies, damn lies, and statistics to prop up arguments one way or another. Until fairly recent Apple had 100% of the all-in-one market, because they created it (the market that is, not the concept). It's only just now that some of the others (Dell, Sony, etc.) are starting to put out credible all-in-one systems to compete with the iMac.
It's funny, I find myself in the exact opposite situation. My monitors tend to last a rather long time, but I need to upgrade my PC fairly regularly. Of course I also spend a load of money to get a really nice monitor when I do replace it (usually close to or more then the cost of my current computer).
Well, even if they could relicense it they would still need to meet the requirements of copyright law, simply making a small change to something isn't enough to get it a new copyright. I would also assume that if they aren't required to honor US copyright, the US is likewise not obliged to honor their copyright. There's also the issue that the file itself would need to reside within a server in their country at least at some point, where as in bittorrent the file is hosted initially by one of the clients using the server, not the server itself.
Yeah, that's kind of a half solution though. Yes it will make the torrent server immune, so you won't see it shutting down like demonoid, but the RIAA/MPAA (more so the RIAA though) will just go after the downloaders in that case like they currently are with the RIAA lawsuits. Doesn't matter if the server is out of US jurisdiction if the MAFIAA can just connect to the server and harvest IP lists that are most definitely in US jurisdiction.
In addition to what greg1104 said it should be noted that SCO already had prior history with patent/copyright trolling. Based on their previous history it was fairly obvious that they hoped the lawsuit they brought against IBM would be settled quickly out of court rather than having to actually defend their ludicrous claims earning them a quick cash infusion for little actual work. When IBM failed to roll over and instead bit back they got caught trying to prove the un-provable, but continued to insist all along that they were right while tossing out every excuse they could come up with to buy time. They probably would have been dead in the water long ago, but it seems that Microsoft and various parties (strongly suspected to be Microsoft shills) bought ridiculous numbers of bogus "licenses" from SCO to help shore up SCOs bank account. Of course after many long years of SCO screaming their fool head off that they own Linux (among many other stupid claims) they've finally been beaten into the smear on the concrete that we all knew they were to begin with. This is merely the final act where they get the hose out and wash them into the gutter.
CUSTOMER: Here's one -- nine pence.
DEAD PERSON: I'm not dead!
MORTICIAN: What?
CUSTOMER: Nothing -- here's your nine pence.
DEAD PERSON: I'm not dead!
MORTICIAN: Here -- he says he's not dead!
CUSTOMER: Yes, he is.
DEAD PERSON: I'm not!
MORTICIAN: He isn't.
CUSTOMER: Well, he will be soon, he's very ill.
DEAD PERSON: I'm getting better!
CUSTOMER: No, you're not -- you'll be stone dead in a moment.
MORTICIAN: Oh, I can't take him like that -- it's against regulations.
DEAD PERSON: I don't want to go in the cart!
CUSTOMER: Oh, don't be such a baby.
MORTICIAN: I can't take him...
DEAD PERSON: I feel fine!
CUSTOMER: Oh, do us a favor...
MORTICIAN: I can't.
CUSTOMER: Well, can you hang around a couple of minutes? He won't be long.
MORTICIAN: Naaah, I got to go on to Robinson's -- they've lost nine today.
CUSTOMER: Well, when is your next round?
MORTICIAN: Thursday.
DEAD PERSON: I think I'll go for a walk.
CUSTOMER: You're not fooling anyone y'know. Look, isn't there something you can do?
DEAD PERSON: I feel happy... I feel happy.
[whop]
CUSTOMER: Ah, thanks very much.
MORTICIAN: Not at all. See you on Thursday.
CUSTOMER: Right.
So does that mean if we continue at the current rate in the future we'll be nostalgic for things that haven't happened yet? Also xkcd weighs in on nostalgia.
Slashdot Mirror
In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own.
-Thomas Jefferson in a letter to Horatio G. Spafford (March 17, 1814)
Perhaps any errors have not been fixed because they serve the will of the church better that way?
The one I went to the guy actually did know what a Molex connector was. The first place I looked was the connector draw at the back of the store (and you're right, it has shrunk considerably), but all they had there were (mostly) audio and RF connectors, no Molex or anything along those lines. I don't know, maybe I just have a bad Radio Shack in my area, but more and more the only thing they carry are cheap RC cars and random Chinese made electronic toys/accessories. More and more it's getting to be where you can't find any actual electronics components for sale in brick and morter stores. I guess maybe they can't compete with being able to order things in bulk online and have it shipped to your door, after all, who actually repairs electronics these days? For the most part if your shopping for electronics you're building something, not trying to repair it, so what difference does it make if you have to wait a few days for it to arrive?
That was supposed to be " anomaly" but I forgot that I was posting HTML formated so slashcode ate it as a tag.
Patent Pending ST:TNG Plot Formula:
Crew discovers anomaly.
Crew investigates.
Senior Bridge Crew deduce cause of anomaly.
Picard after listening to his crews advice manages to deal with (or delegate dealing with) anomaly and save the day.
Roll ending credits.
It also largely depends on intent. They're suing Christies for civil damages I imagine because they have no evidence of intent to defraud. They're claiming that Christies didn't do their part to ensure that what they sold was the genuine article, so they're responsible for paying. Christies in turn can perform its own investigation and may very well sue whoever told them the item was the genuine article for civil damages, while the court follows up with criminal charges. Standard IANAL disclaimer here.
Somewhat off-topic for this, but on the topic of Best Buy. I recently needed a molex y-cable on short notice, so I drove out looking for one. I looked in (based mostly on the order I passed them) Radio Shack, Office Depot, Circuit City, Staples, and finally Best Buy before I found any Molex connectors let alone a y-cable. I was somewhat surprised that only Best Buy out of all those stores carried them. If it wasn't for finding them at Best Buy, my last hope would have been Compusa (going out of business as already covered) which also happens to be a 45 minute drive I wasn't particularly looking forward to. Say what you will about Best Buy, but in some places it's just about the only place to find certain computer components without having to wait a few days for shipping.
You're missing the point entirely. The whole reason for the exercise of querying the registrar is to find out of the domain you're interested in is taken already. If there's no way using the hash to determine if the domain has been taken (because one hash can correspond to many domains) then it's effectively worthless to have performed the query in the first place because even if it comes back as existing you don't know if the domain you're looking for exists, or if another domain with the same hash does.
Yeah yeah, someone is going to mod me troll or flamebait for this, but it was too perfect, I couldn't pass it up.
I think that's really the core of the Apple/PC divide. Apples systems (except for the REALLY expensive ones like the G5) are very slick but essentially designed to be black boxes. You plug them in, and they work, and if something breaks or you want something new you need to buy a new one (more or less, I know you can take them in for service, but from the customers standpoint it's a sealed box). They're targeted at the non-technical, the people that don't know a motherboard from a hard drive, but still want to be able to surf websites, install software, and maybe kill some time with solitaire or the sims or something. They strive to reach that perfect balance between being to dumb to do anything interesting, and being to complicated for the simple to figure out how to get things done. Apple for the most part has done an amazing job of walking that very fine line. Unfortunately, in order to achieve all of this they've had to sacrifice a lot of flexibility, less so now than it used to be (the new UNIX core has added a lot more depth to the software side of things) but they're still more constrained than similar PCs. By introducing OS X Apple has made it much easier to tweak and modify the OS, but the hardware still suffers from the same limited flexibility. Part of the cost of the hardware on a Apple computer is to pay for the slick integration at all levels that allows you to plug it in and start using it, and all of that would be ruined if you could put any parts you wanted into it. This is essentially why Apple is so resistant to allowing OS X to run on non-Apple hardware. To do so would tarnish their reputation because outside of their carefully picked and polished hardware selection the stability and ease of use of the OS (and hardware) could not be guaranteed.
At the other end of the spectrum we have PCs. They're mutts, of dubious parentage. They're kind of like that one pair of really comfortable paints you own that have a fews holes and are patched in a couple places (before someone asks, no I won't do a car analogy). They aren't pretty, and they sometimes have problems, and need to be replaced entirely every once in a while, but you can do just about everything in them and feel comfortable. And when the time finally comes to retire them, you can probably cut em up and use the pieces for something else. PCs are not for the technically inept, and they won't hold your hand or go out of their way to make sure that everything is dead simple. They expect you to RTFM, and to know which cables go where and what everything is called. But the reward you get for that cost is the ability to create exactly the system you want. You can replace anything at any time, and configure just about anything however you want it. There's no absolute guarantee that it will work when you're done with it, but odds are it can be made to work even if not necessarily by you. Of course, much as Apples move to OS X has made their computers easier to tweak, recent (relatively) technologies like USB have made PCs a little more idiot proof than they used to be. At some point in the future maybe we'll have the ultimate hybrid of PC and Apple, a computer that's hard to break, but easy to tweak.
My guess is he does C++ development of windows apps with Visual Studio. I can do development on just about anything because I mostly use open source development tools (or nearly open as the case with Suns JDK). I've done development on Windows XP, Linux, Solaris, an old 486DX running MSDOS, Windows 98, and yes, even OS X. The OS really doesn't matter, it's the tools, and all the good ones are cross-platform (basically everything buy Visual*).
Cool resource. Thanks for the link, it's part of my bookmarks now.
As some have pointed out it costs the squatter nothing. They have a loophole because many registrars allow a 30 day trial period on a domain in which you can have it and if you decide you don't want it you can get rid of it for no cost. The squatters can then play a shell game by having a set of dummy companies swap the domain between themselves without ever passing the 30 day mark. With only 3 companies a squatter could tie a domain up for just under 3 months, and never have to pay a penny.
Uhm... except for that whole problem of hash collisions. Plus as was already pointed out it doesn't do you any good when it looks like it's the registrars themselves snooping you. Using hashes would also require the registrars to maintain a second registration DB of hashes which invariably will mean one of them will offer a hash -> domain mapping service and you're right back at square one (more or less, would have to be "hash" -> "list of possible domains" due to collisions).
It should also be noted that the SCO of today isn't the original SCO. A number of years back they changed their name from Caldera Systems to "The SCO Group" and are referred to informally as SCO. The original SCO (that is Santa Cruz Operation) sold their Unix divisions (among others) to Caldera Systems (now SCO) who at the time were primarily a distributor of a custom Linux distribution. The current SCO has never really done much innovation of any sort preferring instead to buy successful technologies and then litigate about them (as they did with DR-DOS after they purchased it from Novell).
It's funny, I find myself in the exact opposite situation. My monitors tend to last a rather long time, but I need to upgrade my PC fairly regularly. Of course I also spend a load of money to get a really nice monitor when I do replace it (usually close to or more then the cost of my current computer).
Well, even if they could relicense it they would still need to meet the requirements of copyright law, simply making a small change to something isn't enough to get it a new copyright. I would also assume that if they aren't required to honor US copyright, the US is likewise not obliged to honor their copyright. There's also the issue that the file itself would need to reside within a server in their country at least at some point, where as in bittorrent the file is hosted initially by one of the clients using the server, not the server itself.
Yeah, that's kind of a half solution though. Yes it will make the torrent server immune, so you won't see it shutting down like demonoid, but the RIAA/MPAA (more so the RIAA though) will just go after the downloaders in that case like they currently are with the RIAA lawsuits. Doesn't matter if the server is out of US jurisdiction if the MAFIAA can just connect to the server and harvest IP lists that are most definitely in US jurisdiction.
In addition to what greg1104 said it should be noted that SCO already had prior history with patent/copyright trolling. Based on their previous history it was fairly obvious that they hoped the lawsuit they brought against IBM would be settled quickly out of court rather than having to actually defend their ludicrous claims earning them a quick cash infusion for little actual work. When IBM failed to roll over and instead bit back they got caught trying to prove the un-provable, but continued to insist all along that they were right while tossing out every excuse they could come up with to buy time. They probably would have been dead in the water long ago, but it seems that Microsoft and various parties (strongly suspected to be Microsoft shills) bought ridiculous numbers of bogus "licenses" from SCO to help shore up SCOs bank account. Of course after many long years of SCO screaming their fool head off that they own Linux (among many other stupid claims) they've finally been beaten into the smear on the concrete that we all knew they were to begin with. This is merely the final act where they get the hose out and wash them into the gutter.
CUSTOMER: Here's one -- nine pence.
DEAD PERSON: I'm not dead!
MORTICIAN: What?
CUSTOMER: Nothing -- here's your nine pence.
DEAD PERSON: I'm not dead!
MORTICIAN: Here -- he says he's not dead!
CUSTOMER: Yes, he is.
DEAD PERSON: I'm not!
MORTICIAN: He isn't.
CUSTOMER: Well, he will be soon, he's very ill.
DEAD PERSON: I'm getting better!
CUSTOMER: No, you're not -- you'll be stone dead in a moment.
MORTICIAN: Oh, I can't take him like that -- it's against regulations.
DEAD PERSON: I don't want to go in the cart!
CUSTOMER: Oh, don't be such a baby.
MORTICIAN: I can't take him...
DEAD PERSON: I feel fine!
CUSTOMER: Oh, do us a favor...
MORTICIAN: I can't.
CUSTOMER: Well, can you hang around a couple of minutes? He won't be long.
MORTICIAN: Naaah, I got to go on to Robinson's -- they've lost nine today.
CUSTOMER: Well, when is your next round?
MORTICIAN: Thursday.
DEAD PERSON: I think I'll go for a walk.
CUSTOMER: You're not fooling anyone y'know. Look, isn't there something you can do?
DEAD PERSON: I feel happy... I feel happy.
[whop]
CUSTOMER: Ah, thanks very much.
MORTICIAN: Not at all. See you on Thursday.
CUSTOMER: Right.
Think it could better be classified as NIHS rearing its ugly head.
Looking at that I keep wanting to read it as GlaDOS. My poor weighted companion cube.
So does that mean if we continue at the current rate in the future we'll be nostalgic for things that haven't happened yet? Also xkcd weighs in on nostalgia.
Coming up next "Ow! My Balls!" on the Violence Channel.