If it were me, I'd contact the other defendants, and see if everyone were willing to pitch in to front one company challenging the validity of the patents. I'd look for some blatant prior art, which should be trivially easy to find. IANAL, but I'd be looking to get a summary judgement based on a mountain of prior art, and I'd want to ask a lawyer if it would be possible to countersue for malicious prosecution or fraud. You might also want to contact your senators or representatives -- you might be able to get the USPTO to "independantly" re-review their patents (and obviously, subsequently revoke them)
The real point is that the pay-by-the-Gig plans are often overpriced. For example, rackspace, that stalwart Slashdot advertiser, charges $980/mo for 400G xfer, (first 30G free with your box). That works out to be 154Kbps. Right now, I'm colocated with a larger tier-1 provider, getting a full rack and a 100Mbp/s connection for $600/mo. I can average 1Mbp/s without paying an extra dime -- so for only 2/3 of the rackspace BANDWIDTH charge, I can get almost 7x the bandwidth.
So, of course you pay for bandwidth. But the question is: will you overpay for bandwidth? On a fixed Gb xfer plan, you may well be.
That's simply not true. Many providers can provide you a fixed-rate setup, where you have a maximum transfer rate that you can sustain constantly and pay nothing more. While the "X gigs of transfer" is popular among many web hosters, most colocation providers offer based on sustained average usage. IE, there is a base price for 1 Mbps/sec, and if you only average that, you pay the base. Then there is a surcharge based on your average for the month being >1Mbps/sec.
It could also be pointed out that colo isn't for the "average joe". Not everyone wants the hassle of running their own box.
Maybe DeCSS is being used for lots of pirating -- but so are ReplayTVs, VCRs hooked up to each other, photocopy machines, etc. The fact is, you don't ban photocopiers because they can infringe on a book copyright, and you shouldn't ban DeCSS because it can infringe on a DVD copyright, because it has a legitimate use. And again, DeCSS doesn't enable any real pirating you can't do anyhow. bit-by-bit rips of DVDS, still encoded, can be transferred and burned out, and digital copies can be ripped after decoding by reading the video output.
What does the MPAA need to do? Obviously, they need to donate a lot of money to Senator Fritz Hollings, so he'll try to make american consumers pay for extra technology to police us. After all, it's worth assuming that every American is just a criminal waiting to commit so we can get more content online and encourage broadband adoption, right?
Well, I was once in support. The company I worked for (an early ISP in 95) had a fairly well known client for internet connecting - it was a visual basic piece of crap designed to get you connected and start a slip connection, along with a few trivial tools (like a very lame usenet reader, a gopher search, etc).
I could relate anecdotes all day, but here's a good one: customer calls up, and is getting the message, "Out of memory" and the app is crashing. Customer only has 4 or 8 megs of ram, a smidge low but not too low to run the app back in the world of WFG 3.11. I happened to divine this from listening to the call from the next cube over, and heard the person conclude that windows was causing the problem and recommend to the customer that they reinstall! ARGH. I practically jumped over the cube wall and got them to transfer them over to me, where I discovered that the customer had their virtual memory settings set to 0MB, manually. That and the 4/8M of physical ram did not mix.
"Reinstall Windows" and "Reinstall XXXXX" (our product) were the favorite responses, and it was a culture of lazy, voodoo support, which is why I got customers calling back for the 12th time, sometimes. Add that to a hold time of over an hour, and its no wonder that company faded into obscurity.
My experience going the other direction is even more common. I can scarcely EVER call anyone responsible for supporting an Internet service and not get either (1) a moron or (2) a lazy moron. Admittedly, I don't expect a lot -- good engineers don't like doing technical support. But when you describe routing problems to your colo provider and their support staff tries to immediately claim it is a problem with some other provider before even checking a traceroute (which, if they knew what they were doing, would let them realize what an out-and-out fabrication their claim obviously was), you get fed up.
However, all this aside, my advice to the original poster was based on this general idea: his support people will be familiar with stuff like checking DSL line-downs and scheduling truck rolls, debugging customer DNS/DHCP settings, etc. They will never have any reason to even wonder about a caching server, most likely, but because many tech support departments have poor to nonexistant escalation paths to engineering, they will attempt to shaft the customer, either knowingly or perhaps ignorantly. But one way or the other, they won't fight their way through to escalate properly. I think if your experience is different, its the exception rather than the rule. (and bravo to your TS department if you do provide competent service time and again -- I've yet to come personally in contact with anyone who could do it, including a company where reps made an average of over $55k/yr).
Possibly. There's a decent chance that the cache server is actually responsible for passing all the traffic, actually. A lot of routers can't properly route-cache if you try policy-based routing (which you must in order to route by port and not just destination IP + routing table). So ALL packets get passed through the cache server, but it just forwards non-port 80 traffic, since a mere receive/send is very quick, as its routing table will likely consist of only a dozen or so entries (the vast majority of which will be its default route out), and the cache server is likely to be sitting between their backbone routers which have to maintain BGP tables and the DSL lines/etc in question.
Be sure to try the other helpful suggestion I read of trying port 65616 (that is the right port, btw) -- if your proxy server is stupid, it might pass that on. Of course, you'd have to type it into your URLs a lot, but it is still a way to get around the cache when you need to, if it works.
First of all, the phrase "routing" is a misnomer. Web caching is something that happens on the application layer of the OSI model, layer 7, whereas "routing" refers to layer 3, which supplies IP routing for the TCP/IP protocol suite. What's broken is their caching, their cache server, or their proxying; pick a term.
Second, there's a lot of ways around it which involve tunnelling.
Tunnel to another box running a non-broken web cache. I used to tunnel my http traffic through ssh to my colocated boxes, which ran adzapper, and proxied through that.
Tunnel at the IP layer by running any IP-in-IP encapsulation. If you have some version of windows, for example, you might convince someone with a server to run a PPTP server for you somewhere and you could tunnel through that. There are even Free PPTP Servers for Linux available to help.
Find someone who runs a little proxier for their own net with socks, and bounce off their socks proxy. Someone you know no another ISP probably has Wingate or the like running, and if they allowed it (and on some older version, it will permit this by default), you could set your browsers SOCKS settings to bounce off their proxy server, and since SOCKS isn't on port 80, your ISP will probably ignore it.
There are also a number of things you might discuss with your ISP to resolve the issue.
Suggest that they switch to a less broken cache server. (Squid, anyone?)
Suggest that they exempt you specifically from the cache server by telling it to ignore your ip address.
Note that they have an obligation to make sure their caching software doesn't interfere with your browsing; so it will be necessary (and not cost-effective for them) for you to call for every problem you notice.
Obviously, you'll need to probably speak to a whole number of supervisors, and probably eventually get transferred to a "real engineer", and they will probably hack in a fix (like exempting you only) rather than truly deal with the problem.
If all else fails, then you may want to try issuing ultimatums, like, "If you can't fix this problem, then you can cancel my service." Tech support people are lazy, however, in some cases, and may just opt to cancel you. This is a harsh reality in the world of consumer bandwidth -- and it will be worse, soon, with bells closing their DSL lines to competition, meaning unless someone else builds a telephony infrastructure to you, you'll probably pick Cable vs 1 DSL provider, and if you don't like something at either of them, you're just out of luck.
Filtering of customer traffic is already widespread. It isn't called censorship because it hasn't been based on content. But filtering is done by port (to stop inbound connections to customers), by protocol and direction (egress filtering to block email to non-ISP mail servers, or to block any spoofed packets, especially outgoing broadcast requests), etc. What you should be afraid of is a world where there is only one ISP to choose, because then you'll give what they get you and like it.
Ah, I wish I could say the same. This is the most expensive stuff they offer -- the only thing you can get from swbell that's more than what I have is their leased line stuff, or very high-bandwidth SDSL (1.1 bidirectional). Mine is about 4.5x cost of entry residential DSL, and was 4x as fast, too, although my position relative to their equipment resulted in a very low decibal tolerance.
Perfectly acceptable is in the eye of the beholder. I spent 5 years working at a top NSP, and 10 minutes of unplanned downtime at 2 AM sunday morning was unacceptable to our customers. In other instances of downtime, I've waited more than 2 days in the middle of the week to get my phone AND dsl back up when they went down together. Down monday, and a person will be dispatched, "by thursday", and sure enough, not until thursday morning do I get a tech -- who discovered without even coming to my address that it was just a problematic port in a switch 400 miles away and fixes it remotely.
Anyhow, it might be your opinion that 24 business hours is 'standard' -- but it isn't for a business service provided by a real provider. If I had a T1 and it was down, an ISP would be testing the line inside of minutes, and SWBell advertises business DSL as an alternative to 'expensive leased lines'. In other words, they want to sell you a premium service (and the beefy DSL I was subscribing to was $180/mo, pretty hefty for typical broadband), but provide you entry-level service. Furthermore, they're selling this to retail business and other 7-day-a-week operations. The tech who installed mine had a retail store in a nearby shopping center as his next call -- if their DSL was down on all weekend, I wonder how it would affect them?
You've been duped into thinking that the poor service provided by a telco monopoly is normal. Just because it's typical telco crap doesn't mean it isn't crap.
I'm paying the extra for 'business' dsl, which, aside from having a static/29, is the same as residential rates -- when my DSL went down at 4:30pm on a Friday, I was told the soonest a technician could look into it was Monday. Huh? If my business depends on my connectivity, I can't wait that time. Business lines are just a way to soak the customers for extra money, they won't help your service.
It starts out as a tale of possible corporate espionage, with a top techie from AT&T moving to @Home and then back to AT&T, but the guy in question seems to have done nothing but good for @Home while he was there.
Yes, but dynamic lining does NOT produce indivisible executable object code. I understand that NuSphere was statically linking, so they're in the wrong undoubtedly. But the point I'm raising is that you can dynamically load a shared object (ie, libmysqlclient.so), from a proprietary piece of software, without running afoul of the GPL.
All your source -> your executable
All GPL source -> GPL shared library
When your executable runs, it then loads the GPL shared library in order to have access to the required object code. If it doesn't find it, it has unresolved symbols and craps out. It is, therefore, clearly dependant upon that shared library, but it is, by the same token, clearly NOT a derivative work, since 'your executable' is derived without any GPL source code.
The static executable under GPL is a clear cut violation. But that leaves static binaries under the LGPL (I'm unsure), the dynamic under the GPL (unsure, think legal), and dynamic under the LGPL (must be legal -- hell, what would the LGPL be good for if it wasn't?:))
And hey, this is exactly what we get when we buy cable tv -- especially digital cable or satellite with their umpteen billion channels. I have like 200 channels on my digital cable. It's insane. I barely watch any of them, let alone all of them -- but its easy enough to offer the whole package. Obviously, there's a slight distribution difference with cable TV vs the net, but not a big one, you're just peer to peer with their web server with IP, instead of paying a provider for a feed and being forced to watch a subset of what they choose to provide. Imagine if cable could carry 2^32 channels;)
I'm a bit vague now on GPL and LGPL for static vs dynamic linking. Let me note that NuSphere makes themselves sound crooked when they claim that a mail client connecting to a GPL'd mail server would be polluted. That's absurd.
So, I've always gathered that the LGPL exists to permit a program to link to libraries - but my impression was that the LGPL was phrased such that code could statically link to it -- such that the result would be a single executable, and that even under the GPL, it was legally permissible to write code that would rely upon a dynamically loaded library. Can someone confirm this is the case? IE, you could write a program which required that a person have libmysqlclient.so* installed for dynamic loading and that program could be closed source, but you could NOT produce an executable which statically linked that into the executable unless libmysqlclient.so was distributed under the LGPL (which, of course, it is not).
Even Salon has no business charging $6. _$6_? When someone can pay $10/month for their internet access, they're supposed to pay 60% of that to read a couple articles? And Salon doesn't even need dead trees. The problem is that they need that much from their subscribers because a lot of people won't take time to sign up for $1, maybe.
There's good news, though. Eventually, all things become more competitive. Once many sites are paid sites, you'll begin to see content aggregation solutions. You'll get Salon along with a hundred other sites for $10. You'll see a couple you love, a few you regularly pop into, and you'll then pay. The privacy concerns are going to be horrid, however. How do you centrally authenticate those page views without centrally tracking the user?
That's 2 stories in a row where you've had glaring errors in the text. Hello? You don't even have to _write_ this stuff, you just have to make sure its not mangled. Please pay a little attention, a hundred thousand people are watching.
Secretly, all wives get root passwords -- they eventually forget them, because they never wanted them in the first place, but you give them nonetheless.
I think that Peter Jackson is a shoe-in, first of all. It's been pointed out that LotR is one of the world's foremost genre-establishing tales, and its been mis adapted for screen/animation enough times that this attempt was viewed with great trepidation. Jackson is obviously the man with the vision that turned the epic into an excellent on-screen adaptation. Trying to envision ways to portray/convey all that he did is difficult.
With 13 nominations -- well, best picture is the one to bring them all, and in the Dorothy Chandler pavilion, bind them. I have to say, I'd have seen LotR regardless of what anyone said about it, but I had to go in hoping for the best but fearing the worst, because fantasy never has done well on the big screen. And of course, I was stunned by the quality. At some point, best picture might be awarded for the vision of bringing something with variety in. I'm a little concerned that with last year's gladiator win, they may want to award BP to something less 'epic' and more quirky, like 99's American Beauty. Still, popular movies clearly do better in the BP race, partially because the whole academy gets to vote on it, I'm sure, whereas only one's peers vote for related oscars (ie, directors vote for directors).
Anyhow, I think LotR may win simply because it may have the power to create an onscreen genre just as it did in print -- and what a marvelous accomplishment. But if the sequels perform as well, then they'll have essentially grossed $900M on a $300M budget -- that would basically be in line with Titanic ($600M back domestically on a >$200M movie), and hollywood loves a winner. Also, those kind of numbers are the sort that might bring other fantasy novels to the screen. That would be a paramount accomplishment.
Having been a member for some time, I remember the email they sent out, lamenting that CA (which will tax anything they can) decided that the DVDs themselves, when shipped to another state, constituted a "presence" there, by virtue of their property (the dvds) being in that state. Of course, in my mind, that would still leave Netflix paying tax to the state in question, not CA, but expect CA to make up anything they can, and expect you to settle it in court if you don't like it.
Slashdot Mirror
Personally I'm much more interested in the fact that the Star Wars Galaxy Beta that has started taking beta apps.
Taco is eagerly awaiting his chance to play his long-imagined gungan character j4r-j4r during the beta.
If it were me, I'd contact the other defendants, and see if everyone were willing to pitch in to front one company challenging the validity of the patents. I'd look for some blatant prior art, which should be trivially easy to find. IANAL, but I'd be looking to get a summary judgement based on a mountain of prior art, and I'd want to ask a lawyer if it would be possible to countersue for malicious prosecution or fraud. You might also want to contact your senators or representatives -- you might be able to get the USPTO to "independantly" re-review their patents (and obviously, subsequently revoke them)
The real point is that the pay-by-the-Gig plans are often overpriced. For example, rackspace, that stalwart Slashdot advertiser, charges $980/mo for 400G xfer, (first 30G free with your box). That works out to be 154Kbps. Right now, I'm colocated with a larger tier-1 provider, getting a full rack and a 100Mbp/s connection for $600/mo. I can average 1Mbp/s without paying an extra dime -- so for only 2/3 of the rackspace BANDWIDTH charge, I can get almost 7x the bandwidth.
So, of course you pay for bandwidth. But the question is: will you overpay for bandwidth? On a fixed Gb xfer plan, you may well be.
That's simply not true. Many providers can provide you a fixed-rate setup, where you have a maximum transfer rate that you can sustain constantly and pay nothing more. While the "X gigs of transfer" is popular among many web hosters, most colocation providers offer based on sustained average usage. IE, there is a base price for 1 Mbps/sec, and if you only average that, you pay the base. Then there is a surcharge based on your average for the month being >1Mbps/sec.
It could also be pointed out that colo isn't for the "average joe". Not everyone wants the hassle of running their own box.
This issue was already discussed on K5, a while ago, for anyone interested in seeing the discussion there.
Maybe DeCSS is being used for lots of pirating -- but so are ReplayTVs, VCRs hooked up to each other, photocopy machines, etc. The fact is, you don't ban photocopiers because they can infringe on a book copyright, and you shouldn't ban DeCSS because it can infringe on a DVD copyright, because it has a legitimate use. And again, DeCSS doesn't enable any real pirating you can't do anyhow. bit-by-bit rips of DVDS, still encoded, can be transferred and burned out, and digital copies can be ripped after decoding by reading the video output.
What does the MPAA need to do? Obviously, they need to donate a lot of money to Senator Fritz Hollings, so he'll try to make american consumers pay for extra technology to police us. After all, it's worth assuming that every American is just a criminal waiting to commit so we can get more content online and encourage broadband adoption, right?
Well, I was once in support. The company I worked for (an early ISP in 95) had a fairly well known client for internet connecting - it was a visual basic piece of crap designed to get you connected and start a slip connection, along with a few trivial tools (like a very lame usenet reader, a gopher search, etc).
I could relate anecdotes all day, but here's a good one: customer calls up, and is getting the message, "Out of memory" and the app is crashing. Customer only has 4 or 8 megs of ram, a smidge low but not too low to run the app back in the world of WFG 3.11. I happened to divine this from listening to the call from the next cube over, and heard the person conclude that windows was causing the problem and recommend to the customer that they reinstall! ARGH. I practically jumped over the cube wall and got them to transfer them over to me, where I discovered that the customer had their virtual memory settings set to 0MB, manually. That and the 4/8M of physical ram did not mix.
"Reinstall Windows" and "Reinstall XXXXX" (our product) were the favorite responses, and it was a culture of lazy, voodoo support, which is why I got customers calling back for the 12th time, sometimes. Add that to a hold time of over an hour, and its no wonder that company faded into obscurity.
My experience going the other direction is even more common. I can scarcely EVER call anyone responsible for supporting an Internet service and not get either (1) a moron or (2) a lazy moron. Admittedly, I don't expect a lot -- good engineers don't like doing technical support. But when you describe routing problems to your colo provider and their support staff tries to immediately claim it is a problem with some other provider before even checking a traceroute (which, if they knew what they were doing, would let them realize what an out-and-out fabrication their claim obviously was), you get fed up.
However, all this aside, my advice to the original poster was based on this general idea: his support people will be familiar with stuff like checking DSL line-downs and scheduling truck rolls, debugging customer DNS/DHCP settings, etc. They will never have any reason to even wonder about a caching server, most likely, but because many tech support departments have poor to nonexistant escalation paths to engineering, they will attempt to shaft the customer, either knowingly or perhaps ignorantly. But one way or the other, they won't fight their way through to escalate properly. I think if your experience is different, its the exception rather than the rule. (and bravo to your TS department if you do provide competent service time and again -- I've yet to come personally in contact with anyone who could do it, including a company where reps made an average of over $55k/yr).
Possibly. There's a decent chance that the cache server is actually responsible for passing all the traffic, actually. A lot of routers can't properly route-cache if you try policy-based routing (which you must in order to route by port and not just destination IP + routing table). So ALL packets get passed through the cache server, but it just forwards non-port 80 traffic, since a mere receive/send is very quick, as its routing table will likely consist of only a dozen or so entries (the vast majority of which will be its default route out), and the cache server is likely to be sitting between their backbone routers which have to maintain BGP tables and the DSL lines/etc in question.
Be sure to try the other helpful suggestion I read of trying port 65616 (that is the right port, btw) -- if your proxy server is stupid, it might pass that on. Of course, you'd have to type it into your URLs a lot, but it is still a way to get around the cache when you need to, if it works.
Second, there's a lot of ways around it which involve tunnelling.
Tunnel to another box running a non-broken web cache. I used to tunnel my http traffic through ssh to my colocated boxes, which ran adzapper, and proxied through that.
Tunnel at the IP layer by running any IP-in-IP encapsulation. If you have some version of windows, for example, you might convince someone with a server to run a PPTP server for you somewhere and you could tunnel through that. There are even Free PPTP Servers for Linux available to help.
Find someone who runs a little proxier for their own net with socks, and bounce off their socks proxy. Someone you know no another ISP probably has Wingate or the like running, and if they allowed it (and on some older version, it will permit this by default), you could set your browsers SOCKS settings to bounce off their proxy server, and since SOCKS isn't on port 80, your ISP will probably ignore it.
There are also a number of things you might discuss with your ISP to resolve the issue.
Suggest that they switch to a less broken cache server. (Squid, anyone?)
Suggest that they exempt you specifically from the cache server by telling it to ignore your ip address.
Note that they have an obligation to make sure their caching software doesn't interfere with your browsing; so it will be necessary (and not cost-effective for them) for you to call for every problem you notice.
Obviously, you'll need to probably speak to a whole number of supervisors, and probably eventually get transferred to a "real engineer", and they will probably hack in a fix (like exempting you only) rather than truly deal with the problem.
If all else fails, then you may want to try issuing ultimatums, like, "If you can't fix this problem, then you can cancel my service." Tech support people are lazy, however, in some cases, and may just opt to cancel you. This is a harsh reality in the world of consumer bandwidth -- and it will be worse, soon, with bells closing their DSL lines to competition, meaning unless someone else builds a telephony infrastructure to you, you'll probably pick Cable vs 1 DSL provider, and if you don't like something at either of them, you're just out of luck.
Filtering of customer traffic is already widespread. It isn't called censorship because it hasn't been based on content. But filtering is done by port (to stop inbound connections to customers), by protocol and direction (egress filtering to block email to non-ISP mail servers, or to block any spoofed packets, especially outgoing broadcast requests), etc. What you should be afraid of is a world where there is only one ISP to choose, because then you'll give what they get you and like it.
Ah, I wish I could say the same. This is the most expensive stuff they offer -- the only thing you can get from swbell that's more than what I have is their leased line stuff, or very high-bandwidth SDSL (1.1 bidirectional). Mine is about 4.5x cost of entry residential DSL, and was 4x as fast, too, although my position relative to their equipment resulted in a very low decibal tolerance.
Perfectly acceptable is in the eye of the beholder. I spent 5 years working at a top NSP, and 10 minutes of unplanned downtime at 2 AM sunday morning was unacceptable to our customers. In other instances of downtime, I've waited more than 2 days in the middle of the week to get my phone AND dsl back up when they went down together. Down monday, and a person will be dispatched, "by thursday", and sure enough, not until thursday morning do I get a tech -- who discovered without even coming to my address that it was just a problematic port in a switch 400 miles away and fixes it remotely.
Anyhow, it might be your opinion that 24 business hours is 'standard' -- but it isn't for a business service provided by a real provider. If I had a T1 and it was down, an ISP would be testing the line inside of minutes, and SWBell advertises business DSL as an alternative to 'expensive leased lines'. In other words, they want to sell you a premium service (and the beefy DSL I was subscribing to was $180/mo, pretty hefty for typical broadband), but provide you entry-level service. Furthermore, they're selling this to retail business and other 7-day-a-week operations. The tech who installed mine had a retail store in a nearby shopping center as his next call -- if their DSL was down on all weekend, I wonder how it would affect them?
You've been duped into thinking that the poor service provided by a telco monopoly is normal. Just because it's typical telco crap doesn't mean it isn't crap.
I'm paying the extra for 'business' dsl, which, aside from having a static /29, is the same as residential rates -- when my DSL went down at 4:30pm on a Friday, I was told the soonest a technician could look into it was Monday. Huh? If my business depends on my connectivity, I can't wait that time. Business lines are just a way to soak the customers for extra money, they won't help your service.
It starts out as a tale of possible corporate espionage, with a top techie from AT&T moving to @Home and then back to AT&T, but the guy in question seems to have done nothing but good for @Home while he was there.
In other words, he was actually good at it?
Yes, but dynamic lining does NOT produce indivisible executable object code. I understand that NuSphere was statically linking, so they're in the wrong undoubtedly. But the point I'm raising is that you can dynamically load a shared object (ie, libmysqlclient.so), from a proprietary piece of software, without running afoul of the GPL.
:))
All your source -> your executable
All GPL source -> GPL shared library
When your executable runs, it then loads the GPL shared library in order to have access to the required object code. If it doesn't find it, it has unresolved symbols and craps out. It is, therefore, clearly dependant upon that shared library, but it is, by the same token, clearly NOT a derivative work, since 'your executable' is derived without any GPL source code.
The static executable under GPL is a clear cut violation. But that leaves static binaries under the LGPL (I'm unsure), the dynamic under the GPL (unsure, think legal), and dynamic under the LGPL (must be legal -- hell, what would the LGPL be good for if it wasn't?
And hey, this is exactly what we get when we buy cable tv -- especially digital cable or satellite with their umpteen billion channels. I have like 200 channels on my digital cable. It's insane. I barely watch any of them, let alone all of them -- but its easy enough to offer the whole package. Obviously, there's a slight distribution difference with cable TV vs the net, but not a big one, you're just peer to peer with their web server with IP, instead of paying a provider for a feed and being forced to watch a subset of what they choose to provide. Imagine if cable could carry 2^32 channels ;)
I'm a bit vague now on GPL and LGPL for static vs dynamic linking. Let me note that NuSphere makes themselves sound crooked when they claim that a mail client connecting to a GPL'd mail server would be polluted. That's absurd.
So, I've always gathered that the LGPL exists to permit a program to link to libraries - but my impression was that the LGPL was phrased such that code could statically link to it -- such that the result would be a single executable, and that even under the GPL, it was legally permissible to write code that would rely upon a dynamically loaded library. Can someone confirm this is the case? IE, you could write a program which required that a person have libmysqlclient.so* installed for dynamic loading and that program could be closed source, but you could NOT produce an executable which statically linked that into the executable unless libmysqlclient.so was distributed under the LGPL (which, of course, it is not).
Even Salon has no business charging $6. _$6_? When someone can pay $10/month for their internet access, they're supposed to pay 60% of that to read a couple articles? And Salon doesn't even need dead trees. The problem is that they need that much from their subscribers because a lot of people won't take time to sign up for $1, maybe.
There's good news, though. Eventually, all things become more competitive. Once many sites are paid sites, you'll begin to see content aggregation solutions. You'll get Salon along with a hundred other sites for $10. You'll see a couple you love, a few you regularly pop into, and you'll then pay. The privacy concerns are going to be horrid, however. How do you centrally authenticate those page views without centrally tracking the user?
Webmaster: "What are you saying? That I can dodge a slashdotting?"
Morpheus: "No, webmaster, what I'm saying is that when you're ready...well, who are we kidding? You're doomed."
Slashdot:1, Matrix:0
That's 2 stories in a row where you've had glaring errors in the text. Hello? You don't even have to _write_ this stuff, you just have to make sure its not mangled. Please pay a little attention, a hundred thousand people are watching.
There'd better be some slashback followup where we get a date ;) [when there is one]
We need a hof measurement for "most moderator points spent on 'funny'".
Secretly, all wives get root passwords -- they eventually forget them, because they never wanted them in the first place, but you give them nonetheless.
I think that Peter Jackson is a shoe-in, first of all. It's been pointed out that LotR is one of the world's foremost genre-establishing tales, and its been mis adapted for screen/animation enough times that this attempt was viewed with great trepidation. Jackson is obviously the man with the vision that turned the epic into an excellent on-screen adaptation. Trying to envision ways to portray/convey all that he did is difficult.
With 13 nominations -- well, best picture is the one to bring them all, and in the Dorothy Chandler pavilion, bind them. I have to say, I'd have seen LotR regardless of what anyone said about it, but I had to go in hoping for the best but fearing the worst, because fantasy never has done well on the big screen. And of course, I was stunned by the quality. At some point, best picture might be awarded for the vision of bringing something with variety in. I'm a little concerned that with last year's gladiator win, they may want to award BP to something less 'epic' and more quirky, like 99's American Beauty. Still, popular movies clearly do better in the BP race, partially because the whole academy gets to vote on it, I'm sure, whereas only one's peers vote for related oscars (ie, directors vote for directors).
Anyhow, I think LotR may win simply because it may have the power to create an onscreen genre just as it did in print -- and what a marvelous accomplishment. But if the sequels perform as well, then they'll have essentially grossed $900M on a $300M budget -- that would basically be in line with Titanic ($600M back domestically on a >$200M movie), and hollywood loves a winner. Also, those kind of numbers are the sort that might bring other fantasy novels to the screen. That would be a paramount accomplishment.
Having been a member for some time, I remember the email they sent out, lamenting that CA (which will tax anything they can) decided that the DVDs themselves, when shipped to another state, constituted a "presence" there, by virtue of their property (the dvds) being in that state. Of course, in my mind, that would still leave Netflix paying tax to the state in question, not CA, but expect CA to make up anything they can, and expect you to settle it in court if you don't like it.