I'm curious about where people would draw the line. If it were legal to create computer animated characters that were having sex, would it be legal to film a child and map their features on, so it becomes a sort of "skin" like in Quake?
I don't think the ACLU should be getting involved. I puked just as much as everyone else did when I saw the new TLD's, and hope very much that there will be some way to ammend their choices, but I don't think that the ACLU that should be getting involved in anyway whatsoever. These TLD's, although stupid, do not encroach on our rights in any way, and the ACLU is makign a fool of itself to go hunt it down. What next.... IP addresses are infringing on the God-given rights not have to use Arabic Numberals?
What the ACLU really should be doing is investigating the problems of domain name arbitration, and looking at the rights of those people who are brought to the WPO, like the owner of Madonna.com. Now there is a relavent and important issue to investigate, not stupid choices by ICANN.
I'm betting that it'll turn out fine; Lucas has great instincts.
No need to worry, George's instincts are in full blast again -- just look at his last brilliant move: Jar Jar Binks. His instincts could not be more right on target! We are definately in safe hands.
I've used the toolbar for about two days now and really really like it. Like other people said, you can customize it so it doesn't take up much space and I removed the page rank option simply because it wasn't extremely useful.
I guess what I like the most about the toolbar is that not only is it extremely convenient (search from anywhere), customizable (you can have searches appear in a new window if you like) and easy to use, it has options that apply to any web page you might be looking at, not just the one you are searching for. You can use the backward linking and related pages tools on any page, as well as the highlighting utility which will highlight on the current webpage the terms you enter in the textbox. I find this much more useful than straight search because I can use it for many distinct words.
So all in all, I'm very pleased with it. Google has once again proven that they are at the cutting edge of providing exactly the services people want without anything more.
And can you imagine what will happen when in a few years' time, productivity across Virginia Beach will come to a complete halt when their Office 2000 subscription runs out? If they can't keep track of regular licenses, how in the world are they going to handle maintaining a subscription-based office suite? And I can guarantee you that the technology situtation in virginia beach is not that far off from that of many, if not most other state agencies across the nation.
a) not every university uses PCs (several small liberal arts colleges are practically only mac based)
b) installs are not as simple as pushing the upgrade everbody button and having everybody change overnight. Most places are not running win2k and besides that, at any one time at least one to two people from each department are away from the university each semester. Take a university with 10,000 undergraduates, 10,000 graduates, 3 schools (business, engineering, arts and sciences), 1500 faculty (with computers at home and in offices) plus numerous associated organizations such as 3 hospitals, various research centers and the regular computer labs, and you have a huge logistic problem if people's office 2k starts randomly shutting down at various times across the university. Whoops... gotta upgrade hospital 1. Gotta get department x all set. Get the library computer labs all together. Dept y. Hostpital 2. Etc. Etc. Etc. and that is also including a good portion of them Macs as well. I'm not denying that it will be difficult for businesses, but at universities there are a lot more variables that have to be managed.
Universities are going to be hit the hardest with this kind of change. Not only do they have to constantly keep track of what licenses expire when for hundreds of computers, both PC and Mac (yeah KeyServers!), they have to support and maintain software on student, lab, and faculty computers. OK. Renewing MS Word on all the lab computers is a time consuming process but relatively straight forward. But renewing MS Word on several hundred faculty computers that are have been taken home, away at sabbatical, or are tucked away in individual offices all over campus is going to be HELL! And you just know that none of the faculty are going to understand why a support personel has to come in every now and then and renew software on THEIR machine that they thought was permanent, just like software has been for the past 20 years! And not only this, but all the ITS people will have to explain the subscription service to their students which means documentation, support, etc.
Whatever happened to our good old democratic Requests For Comments? It would seem to me that if an organization was going to make a decision that would affect oh, I don't know, hundreds of millions of people, that could either foster or wither certain amounts of intellectual and commercial growth, and that WILL NOT BE REVERSABLE (you can't go back after 5 millions.biz and.pro domains have been registered), that they would perhaps ask people for their opinion? In the past, when the Internet wasn't run by corporations, there was a public discussion when anything new was to be added. Email protocols, html tags, TCP/IP specifications were all publicly discussed, so that everybody could point out the bad points and good points of what was going on. These tlds were developed in a vacuum, and because of that they are going to be terrible and underused.
...is that it makes it legal to reverse engineer the encryption on censorship packages in order to determine which sites are being blocked. Hmm.... wonder if all the links to the DMCA will suddenly be mysteriously blocked..... =D
ICANN never fails to amaze me. What have they approved?.coop,.museum, and.aero? First of all,.aero? What will this be used for? united.aero? boeing.aero? nasa.aero? Come on. This will have at most 5,000 names. Even if it has 10,000 names, it's not worth it. And there won't be growth in this area either.
.coop is for banks and such? Alright, that's not that bad of a domain.. at least those uses number in the millions, if not close to it. But here's my question: where does it stop? Do we get.farmers?.pharmaceuticals?.bakers?
.info? What in the world will this be used for? microsoft.info? help.info? lost.info? What kind of sites could this possibly be for? christian.info? election.info?
It seems to me like they are overspecifying the use of some domains and underspecifying the use of others..kids is a broad domain that allows many uses, but has a contraint on it..biz doesn't..biz will become a cleaner.com, but so what? All it would do is prevent trademark disputes. Secondly, what will happen to sites like buy.com? If they have a trademark on buy.com, then I can register buy.biz no problem, and that will be very confusing. On the other hand, they can't have a trademark on buy, so we end up with confusion. We will get an exact copy of.com, except without personal websites. But what's to say I'm not a buisness? I've done website design for people.
.name is just plain stupid. Too bad for anybody who has the same name. Can madonna get madonna.name? Are they going to verify my name? What about for international people? This will be TERRIBLE! Also, nobody with a long last name will register it. Anybody see office space? "ninnine-"? Who was the director of the Sixth Sense? Shyamalan?
The only ones I can see working are.coop and.museum. All the rest are very shortsighted and simply not thought-out. Woe for the smart and useful domains like.kids.
...That whatever they choose needs to be on a *very* solid basis. Whatever they decide here will be how the internet is run for years into the future. I think that the majority of organizations on the web and those that are constructing the Internet don't realize that what they are implementing now is how the internet will be. There's no going back after 2 million people have registered.whatever and then they realize that it was a bad idea. There is no "oops", that wasn't smart, let's try to fix it now. At the same time, ICANN needs to take a serious look at their values and what they are emphasizing, because that will shape the direction of the internet. What gets stifled and gets promoted is directly in their hands.
I'm dissapointed that.kids wasn't allowed while things like.biz are. The Internet is becoming more and more solely a place for businesses to do business with each other, to the exclusion of all else on the web. It is okay when it is happening from the bottom up (web sites on their own are more and more business oriented) but when a mandate like this comes down from heaven, it is very hard to encourage growth in other sectors. ICANN needs to realize that there is more to the web than business, that other things should be allowed to flourish. And I don't buy the claim that they couldn't patrol the.kids domain well enough.... put in guidelines for them if you need to, but don't shut it down.
On another note, this is complete BS:
According to a letter posted on ICANN's Web site, Economic Solutions is seeking a restraining order from a Missouri federal court prohibiting ICANN from establishing a ".biz" or ".ebiz" domain address or any other combination that is similar to the country code of Belize, ".bz."
Lawyers for Economic Solutions say the company entered into a marketing agreement with Belize to use the Internet address and therefore owns the intellectual property rights to the name.
.
It's not as simple as merely taking on Green issues. Many people are voting for Nader not necessarily because they want him, but because they want a third party. Now the question that leaves us with is whether or not trying to get the 5% (because that's what everybody was voting for.. nobody was voting green because they actually thought nader was going to win) was worth possibly causing Gore to lose the election.
That his action was only significant because the administration suspended him.. How different would it have been had when he stepped down the school officials merely smiled, thanked him for running and for making his decision, and had passed the crown on to the runner up?
Funny, this also just in about the movie Mission to Mars.
"Millions of disgusted viewers report that all the narrative features which looked like talent or good plot just under the surface might merely be the crap left behind when hollywood writing talent retreated thousands or millions of years ago."
and so on. I definately think this guy should have had his domain taken away (using it for ads, didn't represent himself, etc etc) but this needs to be decided once and for all. These domains would be registered and web pages would be put up decrying wipo's unfair "arbitration" processes.
even if you make 200 thousand a year hacking away in redmond, it's nothing compared to the money MS makes off your labor. imagine if all applications development were shareware based
Without responding to the rest of the post, you have to realize that this part here is complete BS. First of all, except for CEOs, workers are never paid in accordance to what their work does for the company. There would be no profits for any company if they were to pay in relation to the profit they made off of the product. Sure the battery can't be made if the factory worker isn't there, but it doesn't mean that he deserves a $2 million salary because Duracell makes $5 million in sales this year. Economics just doesn't work that way.
Secondly, do you think that a programmer would make anywhere near $200,000 a year based on shareware? This post talks big, and it's romantic to think about what would happen should our current economic system be turned on its head and completely decentralized, but I hear no concrete plans for what would happen then. Sounds like a big rationalization for plain old piracy to me.
I think Amazon is to be commended for their efforts here. The reasons for all this checking is *not* to make it difficult for you to get your password back or to remove yourself from their mailing list. As one of the world's biggest e-tailers, they are just fulfilling their duty to protecting your account from unauthorized use. And part of that is making sure that it is you who is trying to get the password back.
I'm sorry, but I don't see what you guys are all angry about here. Maybe I'm missing something, but for once isn't a corporation trying to *protect* your privacy?
I'd like to submit my patent on screwing customers over with stupid ideas. I hereby patent any any idiotic method that will either alienate, isolate, or generally piss off loyal customers and fans.
I have a current list of offenders who I will shortly be taking to court. The list consists of the following:
Amazon: Charging different customers different prices for the same DVD as part of a "test" program.
RealPlayer: For secretly tracking the usage of their products, invading their customers' privacy
Microsoft: For Win3.1, Win95, Win98, WinME...... the list is actually too long, but most significantly for removing OEM cd's from computers, replacing them with recovery cds
LinkExchange: For trying to discover absolutely everything about everybody, whether they like it or not.
AT&T: For trying to charge businesses for using their backbones for commerce.
Metallica: Alienating their number one fans
Various Movie/TV Companies: For shutting down fan sites and alienating their biggest fans. Sure, smack down the people who love you the most.
George Lucas: For Episode I. 'Nuff Sed.
As you can see, this has thousands of uses and the list grows everyday. Muhahahah! This patent also includes stupid patents, such as one-click and patenting the hyperlink. You're aaaalllllll mine!
I think the most important thing about this article is not the actual charging and whether or not they can do it. They can probably find a way to do it, blah blah blah.
The most significant part of the article was this:
The fees, however, may alienate some Web merchants who already struggle to break a profit on their online sales, analysts said.
Given the expense of attracting customers, many major Web retailers lose money every time they sell anything, a study by consultant McKinsey & Co. and brokerage Salomon Smith Barney said.
This will be the real kicker to the deal. 99% of internet-based companies do NOT make a profit. Amazon, probably the foremost of all e-tailers is constantly in the red. You cannot charge these companies because they do not have enough capital on their own. And this will have a very simple solution. When Amazon who is not making a profit gets the letter from AT&T saying that they need to pay on every transaction, they will move to UUNet because they simply will not be able to afford to stay with AT&T. This plan is doomed for that reason.
...shouldn't the section for this article be music, not movies? Hillary Rosen works for the RIAA and not the MPAA, and is talking about people stealing music, not movies.
I've been reading the posts about moderation and karma and the like on Slashdot and agree with a good number of the comments, but I feel that probably what is most needed here on slashdot is a forum for how to improve slashdot.
I realize that CmdrTaco, Hemos, and co. cannot spend a whole lot of time working on making minute or major changes to slashdot, but there needs to be a way for us to discuss changes. At the current moment, there are only two methods of discussing this: emailing the admins, and posting to other stories. Neither one is desirable. The first method probably doesn't work because of the aforementioned time issue, and isn't great because people cannot discuss the issue. It's merely a one-sided point of view. The second method (posting to stories) is undesirable because technically it is offtopic and posts should focus on the stories.
So I guess what I'm saying is that Slashdot needs an ongoing system of discussing changes. I envision it as almost being a mirror of the front page, where "stories" or topics of discussion are posted and people can discuss. Also, people submit things that they think need to be changed, and they might be accepted for discussion. I guess these stories might be actually permanent rather than temporary, but new things can be added as we go along, just to keep things fresh. Moderation could happen as normal, and I think this would help CmdrTaco filter out what it is that really needs to happen to slashdot. Essentailly it would be a larger scale of this IRC post: a means with which we can discuss the workings of slashdot. Moderation, Karma, Repeated Articles, Article Selection, Spam, anything.
Other than that, I think that a fully updated FAQ needs to be created and maintained. Changes need to be out in the open and accessible to everybody. Also, maybe a newbie faq would be helpful. This could be written by users and would discuss the actual goings on (like the whole thing with Signal 11. I don't understand that at all, and I'm not a newbie.)
I'm sorry, but this is the kind of romantic BS that seems to cloud the open-source community. According to you, these guys are cool because they're so friendly and helpful. Yeaaaaa! Let's live in a world where everybody looks out for his neighbor, people leaving cute little notes on each other's web sites: "Excuse me, I noticed a little hole in your site, so I decided to come on over and board it up... for free! Have a nice day!"
Yes, this is most likely the best way to find and fix security problems, but we have to be *very* careful about attitudes such as the one you're proposing. What would have happened had Slashdot carried our credit card numbers as well? Would we be as happy that some people were poking around the website? According to the attitude you're suggesting, the answer would be a resounding YES! YES, because there could be other people out there who are malicious and if the hole didn't get fixed this way it could have turned out to be much worse if other people had found it. But the fact of the matter is that unauthorized hacking is wrong whenever it is committed. A blind faith in white hat hackers is very dangerous because there is no telling what their motivations are, no matter what they say. How in the world do you know that they didn't take CmdrTaco's passwords? If/. had credit cards, how do you know none had been taken? Because they told us about the security hole? That is not enough proof. Hell, the best way to commit a crime would be to hack in, steal a few things, and then report the problem. And they would be held up as heros, not hackers because "luckily, the boys at slashdot "get it""
Property is property, period. Just because this is IP, and just because it is on the Internet does *not* make it any different.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm curious about where people would draw the line. If it were legal to create computer animated characters that were having sex, would it be legal to film a child and map their features on, so it becomes a sort of "skin" like in Quake?
What the ACLU really should be doing is investigating the problems of domain name arbitration, and looking at the rights of those people who are brought to the WPO, like the owner of Madonna.com. Now there is a relavent and important issue to investigate, not stupid choices by ICANN.
No need to worry, George's instincts are in full blast again -- just look at his last brilliant move: Jar Jar Binks. His instincts could not be more right on target! We are definately in safe hands.
I guess what I like the most about the toolbar is that not only is it extremely convenient (search from anywhere), customizable (you can have searches appear in a new window if you like) and easy to use, it has options that apply to any web page you might be looking at, not just the one you are searching for. You can use the backward linking and related pages tools on any page, as well as the highlighting utility which will highlight on the current webpage the terms you enter in the textbox. I find this much more useful than straight search because I can use it for many distinct words.
So all in all, I'm very pleased with it. Google has once again proven that they are at the cutting edge of providing exactly the services people want without anything more.
And can you imagine what will happen when in a few years' time, productivity across Virginia Beach will come to a complete halt when their Office 2000 subscription runs out? If they can't keep track of regular licenses, how in the world are they going to handle maintaining a subscription-based office suite? And I can guarantee you that the technology situtation in virginia beach is not that far off from that of many, if not most other state agencies across the nation.
b) installs are not as simple as pushing the upgrade everbody button and having everybody change overnight. Most places are not running win2k and besides that, at any one time at least one to two people from each department are away from the university each semester. Take a university with 10,000 undergraduates, 10,000 graduates, 3 schools (business, engineering, arts and sciences), 1500 faculty (with computers at home and in offices) plus numerous associated organizations such as 3 hospitals, various research centers and the regular computer labs, and you have a huge logistic problem if people's office 2k starts randomly shutting down at various times across the university. Whoops... gotta upgrade hospital 1. Gotta get department x all set. Get the library computer labs all together. Dept y. Hostpital 2. Etc. Etc. Etc. and that is also including a good portion of them Macs as well. I'm not denying that it will be difficult for businesses, but at universities there are a lot more variables that have to be managed.
ARGH!
Whatever happened to our good old democratic Requests For Comments? It would seem to me that if an organization was going to make a decision that would affect oh, I don't know, hundreds of millions of people, that could either foster or wither certain amounts of intellectual and commercial growth, and that WILL NOT BE REVERSABLE (you can't go back after 5 millions .biz and .pro domains have been registered), that they would perhaps ask people for their opinion? In the past, when the Internet wasn't run by corporations, there was a public discussion when anything new was to be added. Email protocols, html tags, TCP/IP specifications were all publicly discussed, so that everybody could point out the bad points and good points of what was going on. These tlds were developed in a vacuum, and because of that they are going to be terrible and underused.
...is that it makes it legal to reverse engineer the encryption on censorship packages in order to determine which sites are being blocked. Hmm.... wonder if all the links to the DMCA will suddenly be mysteriously blocked..... =D
C.Everett.coop?
It seems to me like they are overspecifying the use of some domains and underspecifying the use of others. .kids is a broad domain that allows many uses, but has a contraint on it. .biz doesn't. .biz will become a cleaner .com, but so what? All it would do is prevent trademark disputes. Secondly, what will happen to sites like buy.com? If they have a trademark on buy.com, then I can register buy.biz no problem, and that will be very confusing. On the other hand, they can't have a trademark on buy, so we end up with confusion. We will get an exact copy of .com, except without personal websites. But what's to say I'm not a buisness? I've done website design for people.
The only ones I can see working are .coop and .museum. All the rest are very shortsighted and simply not thought-out. Woe for the smart and useful domains like .kids.
I'm dissapointed that .kids wasn't allowed while things like .biz are. The Internet is becoming more and more solely a place for businesses to do business with each other, to the exclusion of all else on the web. It is okay when it is happening from the bottom up (web sites on their own are more and more business oriented) but when a mandate like this comes down from heaven, it is very hard to encourage growth in other sectors. ICANN needs to realize that there is more to the web than business, that other things should be allowed to flourish. And I don't buy the claim that they couldn't patrol the .kids domain well enough.... put in guidelines for them if you need to, but don't shut it down.
On another note, this is complete BS:
According to a letter posted on ICANN's Web site, Economic Solutions is seeking a restraining order from a Missouri federal court prohibiting ICANN from establishing a ".biz" or ".ebiz" domain address or any other combination that is similar to the country code of Belize, ".bz."
Lawyers for Economic Solutions say the company entered into a marketing agreement with Belize to use the Internet address and therefore owns the intellectual property rights to the name. .
I'd love to see them even try to win this case.
Of course then you'd have to deal with spoofing...
It's not as simple as merely taking on Green issues. Many people are voting for Nader not necessarily because they want him, but because they want a third party. Now the question that leaves us with is whether or not trying to get the 5% (because that's what everybody was voting for.. nobody was voting green because they actually thought nader was going to win) was worth possibly causing Gore to lose the election.
That his action was only significant because the administration suspended him.. How different would it have been had when he stepped down the school officials merely smiled, thanked him for running and for making his decision, and had passed the crown on to the runner up?
"Millions of disgusted viewers report that all the narrative features which looked like talent or good plot just under the surface might merely be the crap left behind when hollywood writing talent retreated thousands or millions of years ago."
wipo-really-sucks.com
wipo-really-really-sucks.com
wipo-can-wipe-my-.com
and so on. I definately think this guy should have had his domain taken away (using it for ads, didn't represent himself, etc etc) but this needs to be decided once and for all. These domains would be registered and web pages would be put up decrying wipo's unfair "arbitration" processes.
I find it interesting that http://wipo-sucks.com hasn't been disputed.
Without responding to the rest of the post, you have to realize that this part here is complete BS. First of all, except for CEOs, workers are never paid in accordance to what their work does for the company. There would be no profits for any company if they were to pay in relation to the profit they made off of the product. Sure the battery can't be made if the factory worker isn't there, but it doesn't mean that he deserves a $2 million salary because Duracell makes $5 million in sales this year. Economics just doesn't work that way.
Secondly, do you think that a programmer would make anywhere near $200,000 a year based on shareware? This post talks big, and it's romantic to think about what would happen should our current economic system be turned on its head and completely decentralized, but I hear no concrete plans for what would happen then. Sounds like a big rationalization for plain old piracy to me.
I'm sorry, but I don't see what you guys are all angry about here. Maybe I'm missing something, but for once isn't a corporation trying to *protect* your privacy?
I have a current list of offenders who I will shortly be taking to court. The list consists of the following:
Amazon: Charging different customers different prices for the same DVD as part of a "test" program.
RealPlayer: For secretly tracking the usage of their products, invading their customers' privacy
Microsoft: For Win3.1, Win95, Win98, WinME...... the list is actually too long, but most significantly for removing OEM cd's from computers, replacing them with recovery cds
LinkExchange: For trying to discover absolutely everything about everybody, whether they like it or not.
AT&T: For trying to charge businesses for using their backbones for commerce.
Metallica: Alienating their number one fans
Various Movie/TV Companies: For shutting down fan sites and alienating their biggest fans. Sure, smack down the people who love you the most.
George Lucas: For Episode I. 'Nuff Sed.
As you can see, this has thousands of uses and the list grows everyday. Muhahahah! This patent also includes stupid patents, such as one-click and patenting the hyperlink. You're aaaalllllll mine!
The most significant part of the article was this:
The fees, however, may alienate some Web merchants who already struggle to break a profit on their online sales, analysts said.
Given the expense of attracting customers, many major Web retailers lose money every time they sell anything, a study by consultant McKinsey & Co. and brokerage Salomon Smith Barney said.
This will be the real kicker to the deal. 99% of internet-based companies do NOT make a profit. Amazon, probably the foremost of all e-tailers is constantly in the red. You cannot charge these companies because they do not have enough capital on their own. And this will have a very simple solution. When Amazon who is not making a profit gets the letter from AT&T saying that they need to pay on every transaction, they will move to UUNet because they simply will not be able to afford to stay with AT&T. This plan is doomed for that reason.
But anyway. =)
I realize that CmdrTaco, Hemos, and co. cannot spend a whole lot of time working on making minute or major changes to slashdot, but there needs to be a way for us to discuss changes. At the current moment, there are only two methods of discussing this: emailing the admins, and posting to other stories. Neither one is desirable. The first method probably doesn't work because of the aforementioned time issue, and isn't great because people cannot discuss the issue. It's merely a one-sided point of view. The second method (posting to stories) is undesirable because technically it is offtopic and posts should focus on the stories.
So I guess what I'm saying is that Slashdot needs an ongoing system of discussing changes. I envision it as almost being a mirror of the front page, where "stories" or topics of discussion are posted and people can discuss. Also, people submit things that they think need to be changed, and they might be accepted for discussion. I guess these stories might be actually permanent rather than temporary, but new things can be added as we go along, just to keep things fresh. Moderation could happen as normal, and I think this would help CmdrTaco filter out what it is that really needs to happen to slashdot. Essentailly it would be a larger scale of this IRC post: a means with which we can discuss the workings of slashdot. Moderation, Karma, Repeated Articles, Article Selection, Spam, anything.
Other than that, I think that a fully updated FAQ needs to be created and maintained. Changes need to be out in the open and accessible to everybody. Also, maybe a newbie faq would be helpful. This could be written by users and would discuss the actual goings on (like the whole thing with Signal 11. I don't understand that at all, and I'm not a newbie.)
Anyway, just my $0.02. =)
Yes, this is most likely the best way to find and fix security problems, but we have to be *very* careful about attitudes such as the one you're proposing. What would have happened had Slashdot carried our credit card numbers as well? Would we be as happy that some people were poking around the website? According to the attitude you're suggesting, the answer would be a resounding YES! YES, because there could be other people out there who are malicious and if the hole didn't get fixed this way it could have turned out to be much worse if other people had found it. But the fact of the matter is that unauthorized hacking is wrong whenever it is committed. A blind faith in white hat hackers is very dangerous because there is no telling what their motivations are, no matter what they say. How in the world do you know that they didn't take CmdrTaco's passwords? If /. had credit cards, how do you know none had been taken? Because they told us about the security hole? That is not enough proof. Hell, the best way to commit a crime would be to hack in, steal a few things, and then report the problem. And they would be held up as heros, not hackers because "luckily, the boys at slashdot "get it""
Property is property, period. Just because this is IP, and just because it is on the Internet does *not* make it any different.
And why has this taken so many years to happen?