Amazon Bookstore Cooperative eventually agreed to settle out of court. The agreement allowed Amazon.com to continue doing business under that name - ABC's primary demand was that they be required to change their name.
(They, by the way, are the ones who sued Amazon.com - not vice versa.)
Doesn't this sort of thing (inter-species breeding, that is) happen all the time in suburban neighborhoods? I mean, dogs.........most species of dogs are "mixes" of other species.
Sorry, not so. The various dog breeds are all members of canis familiarus - all the same species. There's a lot of variation within the species due to dogs being specially bred for one and another purpose, but they are technically a single species. So no, this isn't just like dogs mating.
Although it *is* kind of similar to what happens when e.,g. a horse mates with a donkey to produce a mule. The mule foal isn't the same species as the dam.
"Diagnosable mental disorder" doesn't equate to "nuts". People who are tense in social situations might be "diagnosable" as having some sort of anxiety disorder if it's severe enough or interferes with their activities - but that doesn't make them crazy by decree, much less raise the specter of universal surveillance.
(Which is not to say that the way the law abrogates the rights of people with serious mental illness isn't a disgrace. But those laws don't cover everyone with any condition listed in the DSM.)
I immediately started buying any books from places like Barnes & Noble
Erm. So let me get this straight: because you object to Amazon obtaining an admittedly completely bogus patent, you instead go over to a company that's if anything worse? (At least Amazon isn't making a habit of suing anyone who doesn't richly deserve it.)
Or have we all forgotten so soon how Barnes & Noble attempted to torpedo Amazon's IPO by suing them over their *slogan*, for Gopod's sake, the week they went public?
If you want to support good people and unsupport bad ones, all very well, but it seems to me you're out of the frying pan and into the fire here.
When Amazon does something truly evil it will be time enough to boycott them. Slapping a bully around doesn't exactly qualify, for me. Now if, for example, the genuinely evil doings of etoys.com were getting half as much attention here as Amazon's....
It seems to me in any case that the PTO policy (apparent) of ignoring prior art and obviousness on any patent related somehow to computers is a much worse problem deserving of more attention than any single patent, regardless how odious. This isn't going to change until the PTO gets its shit together. How about spending some energy on that?
Open Source developers use Open Source code. They give back to the community by writing more code - often to solve problems they need solved.
Non-programmers also use Open Source code. CoSource potentially offers a way for non-programmers to give back to the community by sponsoring development of more code - generally to solve problems they need solved.
It fixes an asymmetry in the Open Source model, one that (I speculate here) could potentially do a lot to expand Open Source's appeal as a general model beyond the programmer community.
The police can probably already match paper and ink, and minute impressions in the paper from handling to identify a specific printer. All this would do is make the job slightly easier.
The allegation is that Xerox can identify the machine that created any copy, given the copy. If true, that's quite a bit scarier than police doing detective work on paper and ink samples. For one thing, it implies that Xerox (and anyone with this supersekrit alleged algorithm) can find out who made a given copy, without having to do any investigative work. It also enables police or other agencies to track copies as a matter of routine. Investigations and lab time normally require some justification in the form of suspicion of an actual crime; an infrastructure for tracking copies has a much lower threshold and is much likelier to be broadly used. (I'll leave it to your imagination what it could be used for.)
An analogy: the various proposed and real ID number schemes for tracing an Internet protocol transaction. You could say that the police could easily investigate and obtain the cooperation of the ISP to identify the originator of any transaction, so why should we worry about such IDs? And you'd be missing the point of the dangers in a universal, always-available ID system. Same principle here.
More than you wanted to know about charsets
on
WTO + SDMI = NWO
·
· Score: 1
HTML 4.0 and later uses Unicode as its character set, Unicode being an 16-bit character set in which you can write most human languages. Unicode is a superset of the 8-bit ISO-Latin (which in turn is a superset of 7-bit ASCII), the character set of HTML 3.2 and previous versions. It also has some nice things like typographic characters that aren't in ISO-Latin (m-dashes, curved quotes, and so forth) and some math characters.
The upshot of all this is that if a browser doesn't support Unicode, it'll still work with documents that use it...as long as those documents don't stray outside the first 8 bits. If they do, the resulting character will show up as however the browser handles indeterminate characters. Your browser gets the credit and/or blame for this.
This anti-domestic violence page repeats the legend uncritically and gives a date (1767) for this supposed law, but provides no further cite. This might be a reference to Blackstone's famous legal commentaries, which were published around that time; he does talk about the history of common-law rights for a husband to "correct" a wife, but he doesn't seem to mention thumbs.
Let me take this opportunity (for those of you who use Macs) to plug iCab. Its cookie handling is close to perfect. You can set a preference to accept, reject, ask, or accept but expire all cookies at the end of the session. The cookie-query dialog displays the cookie name, data, expiration date, and server, and has options to accept or reject, to auto-expire at the end of the session, and to add this server to the always-accept or always-reject list.
It's also in a user interface that makes all this a lot simpler than my explanation.;-) Has selective blocking of images (by server or by dimensions) and applets, too, and a built-in list of common banner sizes.
Can someone please explain to me what you gain out of changing this information?
A few years back, there was a fashion among pointy-haired web designers to use something like
if browser is Netscape
display site else display message "Netscape NOW!!!!, loser!"
(Later the if statement changed to "if browser is Netscape or MSIE", not what I'd call an improvement.) Changing your ID string to Netscape's ID let you access such sites. It's why most browsers' ID strings have "Mozilla (compatible)" in them somewhere, because of this history of testing for capabilities by checking for browser brand. Doing so also helps you get around the occasional site blockage (e.g. there's a cartoon site that blocks UNIX browsers, for no apparent good reason; MS has been known to block browsers identifying themselves as Netscape).
That said, I find Katz' immediate implication of 'educators' as proponents of the Mosaic 2000 program offensive. I can't think of many teachers who would support such an idiotic proposal
I don't think Katz is identifying "educators" with "classroom teachers". Teachers are generally low person on the educational totem pole, with little influence on policy. Most criticism I've ever read of "educators" - including this article - is referring to principals, counselors, curriculum facilitators, district officials, state administrators, federal commissioners... the whole 9/10ths of the iceberg of "education" that takes place in offices rather than classrooms.
There are some things very wrong with the way teachers are taught, hired, and retained in the US public schools, but teachers generally have more sense than to promulgate "profiles" that tell them victims of bullies are just as dangerous as the bullies. But they're not the group with the political power in schools.
Slashdot Mirror
Amazon Bookstore Cooperative eventually agreed to settle out of court. The agreement allowed Amazon.com to continue doing business under that name - ABC's primary demand was that they be required to change their name.
(They, by the way, are the ones who sued Amazon.com - not vice versa.)
Doesn't this sort of thing (inter-species breeding, that is) happen all the time in suburban neighborhoods? I mean, dogs..... ....most species of dogs are "mixes" of other species.
Sorry, not so. The various dog breeds are all members of canis familiarus - all the same species. There's a lot of variation within the species due to dogs being specially bred for one and another purpose, but they are technically a single species. So no, this isn't just like dogs mating.
Although it *is* kind of similar to what happens when e.,g. a horse mates with a donkey to produce a mule. The mule foal isn't the same species as the dam.
"Diagnosable mental disorder" doesn't equate to "nuts". People who are tense in social situations might be "diagnosable" as having some sort of anxiety disorder if it's severe enough or interferes with their activities - but that doesn't make them crazy by decree, much less raise the specter of universal surveillance.
(Which is not to say that the way the law abrogates the rights of people with serious mental illness isn't a disgrace. But those laws don't cover everyone with any condition listed in the DSM.)
I immediately started buying any books from places like Barnes & Noble
Erm. So let me get this straight: because you object to Amazon obtaining an admittedly completely bogus patent, you instead go over to a company that's if anything worse? (At least Amazon isn't making a habit of suing anyone who doesn't richly deserve it.)
Or have we all forgotten so soon how Barnes & Noble attempted to torpedo Amazon's IPO by suing them over their *slogan*, for Gopod's sake, the week they went public?
If you want to support good people and unsupport bad ones, all very well, but it seems to me you're out of the frying pan and into the fire here.
When Amazon does something truly evil it will be time enough to boycott them. Slapping a bully around doesn't exactly qualify, for me. Now if, for example, the genuinely evil doings of etoys.com were getting half as much attention here as Amazon's....
It seems to me in any case that the PTO policy (apparent) of ignoring prior art and obviousness on any patent related somehow to computers is a much worse problem deserving of more attention than any single patent, regardless how odious. This isn't going to change until the PTO gets its shit together. How about spending some energy on that?
Look at it this way:
Open Source developers use Open Source code. They give back to the community by writing more code - often to solve problems they need solved.
Non-programmers also use Open Source code. CoSource potentially offers a way for non-programmers to give back to the community by sponsoring development of more code - generally to solve problems they need solved.
It fixes an asymmetry in the Open Source model, one that (I speculate here) could potentially do a lot to expand Open Source's appeal as a general model beyond the programmer community.
The allegation is that Xerox can identify the machine that created any copy, given the copy. If true, that's quite a bit scarier than police doing detective work on paper and ink samples. For one thing, it implies that Xerox (and anyone with this supersekrit alleged algorithm) can find out who made a given copy, without having to do any investigative work. It also enables police or other agencies to track copies as a matter of routine. Investigations and lab time normally require some justification in the form of suspicion of an actual crime; an infrastructure for tracking copies has a much lower threshold and is much likelier to be broadly used. (I'll leave it to your imagination what it could be used for.)
An analogy: the various proposed and real ID number schemes for tracing an Internet protocol transaction. You could say that the police could easily investigate and obtain the cooperation of the ISP to identify the originator of any transaction, so why should we worry about such IDs? And you'd be missing the point of the dangers in a universal, always-available ID system. Same principle here.
They're legal Unicode.
HTML 4.0 and later uses Unicode as its character set, Unicode being an 16-bit character set in which you can write most human languages. Unicode is a superset of the 8-bit ISO-Latin (which in turn is a superset of 7-bit ASCII), the character set of HTML 3.2 and previous versions. It also has some nice things like typographic characters that aren't in ISO-Latin (m-dashes, curved quotes, and so forth) and some math characters.
The upshot of all this is that if a browser doesn't support Unicode, it'll still work with documents that use it...as long as those documents don't stray outside the first 8 bits. If they do, the resulting character will show up as however the browser handles indeterminate characters. Your browser gets the credit and/or blame for this.
It seems that's an urban legend. See the article on the Urban Legends site for an extended history of this idea, and an essay speculating on how this idea came to be "common knowledge". There's also an excerpt from Who Stole Feminism analyzing the political uses of this legend in activism against domestic violence.
This anti-domestic violence page repeats the legend uncritically and gives a date (1767) for this supposed law, but provides no further cite. This might be a reference to Blackstone's famous legal commentaries, which were published around that time; he does talk about the history of common-law rights for a husband to "correct" a wife, but he doesn't seem to mention thumbs.
Let me take this opportunity (for those of you who use Macs) to plug iCab. Its cookie handling is close to perfect. You can set a preference to accept, reject, ask, or accept but expire all cookies at the end of the session. The cookie-query dialog displays the cookie name, data, expiration date, and server, and has options to accept or reject, to auto-expire at the end of the session, and to add this server to the always-accept or always-reject list.
It's also in a user interface that makes all this a lot simpler than my explanation. ;-) Has selective blocking of images (by server or by dimensions) and applets, too, and a built-in list of common banner sizes.
Can someone please explain to me what you gain out of changing this information?
A few years back, there was a fashion among pointy-haired web designers to use something like
(Later the if statement changed to "if browser is Netscape or MSIE", not what I'd call an improvement.) Changing your ID string to Netscape's ID let you access such sites. It's why most browsers' ID strings have "Mozilla (compatible)" in them somewhere, because of this history of testing for capabilities by checking for browser brand. Doing so also helps you get around the occasional site blockage (e.g. there's a cartoon site that blocks UNIX browsers, for no apparent good reason; MS has been known to block browsers identifying themselves as Netscape).
I don't think Katz is identifying "educators" with "classroom teachers". Teachers are generally low person on the educational totem pole, with little influence on policy. Most criticism I've ever read of "educators" - including this article - is referring to principals, counselors, curriculum facilitators, district officials, state administrators, federal commissioners... the whole 9/10ths of the iceberg of "education" that takes place in offices rather than classrooms.
There are some things very wrong with the way teachers are taught, hired, and retained in the US public schools, but teachers generally have more sense than to promulgate "profiles" that tell them victims of bullies are just as dangerous as the bullies. But they're not the group with the political power in schools.