Mission Creek

Now I dont mean to be mean. But I think that this short excerpt is a good example of someone who doesn’t understand technology, attempting to write legislation where they don’t have a clue:

Here are Senator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) comments regarding the internet:

There’s one company now you can sign up and you can get a movie delivered to your house daily by delivery service. Okay. And currently it comes to your house, it gets put in the mail box when you get home and you change your order but you pay for that, right.

But this service is now going to go through the internet* and what you do is you just go to a place on the internet and you order your movie and guess what you can order ten of them delivered to you and the delivery charge is free.

Ten of them streaming across that internet and what happens to your own personal internet?

I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why?

Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially.

So you want to talk about the consumer? Let’s talk about you and me. We use this internet to communicate and we aren’t using it for commercial purposes.

We aren’t earning anything by going on that internet. Now I’m not saying you have to or you want to discrimnate against those people [¿]

The regulatory approach is wrong. Your approach is regulatory in the sense that it says “No one can charge anyone for massively invading this world of the internet”. No, I’m not finished. I want people to understand my position, I’m not going to take a lot of time. [¿]

They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It’s not a truck.

It’s a series of tubes.

And if you don’t understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.

Now we have a separate Department of Defense internet now, did you know that?

Do you know why?

Because they have to have theirs delivered immediately. They can’t afford getting delayed by other people.

[¿]

Now I think these people are arguing whether they should be able to dump all that stuff on the internet ought to consider if they should develop a system themselves.

Maybe there is a place for a commercial net but it’s not using what consumers use every day.

It’s not using the messaging service that is essential to small businesses, to our operation of families.

The whole concept is that we should not go into this until someone shows that there is something that has been done that really is a viloation of net neutraility that hits you and me.

Here is a story on these comments

from DenverPost.com

It was bound to happen sonner or later.  Anyone want to lay bets on the litigation to follow?

Castle Rock - Jason Bunch was listening to Metallica on his iPod while mowing the lawn outside his Castle Rock home Sunday afternoon when lightning hit him.

The last thing the 17-year-old remembers was that a storm was coming from the north and he had only about 15 minutes before he should go inside.

Next thing he knew, he was in his bed, bleeding from his ears and vomiting. He was barefoot and had taken off his burned T-shirt and gym shorts. He doesn’t know how he got back in the house.

Bunch immediately called his mother, who was in Illinois visiting family…

Bunch and his mother believe the iPod acted as an antenna, drawing the lightning to him. There were tall pine trees nearby that didn’t get hit.

But lightning and weather experts say that’s probably not the case.

full story here

I’m not sure of the functionality overall, but conceptually it works.  Problem is a mouse is not a good pen substitute.  See the White Board Here.

Apparently I am not the only one who things Microsoft may miss the mark. Here is what Dvorak said:

“We saw this coming a mile away. Better than iPOD? That ’s not the key. The key is to be “hotter” and “cooler” than iPOD. No easy chore. Microsoft is not up to this challenge. Go for the portable gaming device, not this!”

And here is a comment I posted on Digg.com about this:

I agree with a great deal of what has been written. I think the truth of the matter is any challenger needs to have a blend of function, style, and ease of operation. But don’t overlook the importance of Itunes. That is a key distinction here. If MS can emulate all of those factors, including Itunes, and improve on any of them, it has a chance. But with MS wins with the Xbox notwithstanding, experience with Windows Mobile platforms indicates that they may be a tall hill to crest for MS.

Link to Digg.com story

from the BBC

I think this is a good example of how far the US will go to pursue Hackers that attack them directly:

A US request to extradite a British computer hacker accused of the “biggest military hack of all time” has been granted by Home Secretary John Reid.

Gary McKinnon, who is accused of breaking into US government computer networks, has been fighting extradition since his arrest in November 2002.

full story here

from New York Law Journal
I think this is a correct rulling by the court which shows a modern and viable interpretation of the law.

The posting of a comment on a subscription-based Web site constitutes a single publication under New York state defamation law, a Manhattan judge has ruled.

The decision takes an expansive reading of the seminal 2002 Court of Appeals case Firth v. State of New York, 98 NY2d 365, which held that postings on publicly available Internet sites constitute single publications

 full story here

from cnet.com 

This problem has been around for years, so I am not sure these reports truly bring to light new information.

Online advertisers estimate that about 14.6 percent of the clicks on ads for which they’re billed are fraudulent, costing them about $800 million last year, according to a study released Wednesday.

The study, called “Click Fraud Reaches $1.3 billion, Dictates End of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ Era” and released by research and advisory firm Outsell, claims that “Google, Yahoo and MSN…are stonewalling on click fraud, to their own and others’ detriment.”

Search engines have refused to release figures on the amount of fraud in search advertising, most of which comes from Web sites boosting their revenue by clicking on ads on their own sites.

full Story Here

I think this is well written article that summaries the legal issues surrounding opensource:

Karen Copenhaver, a partner at law firm Choate, Hall & Stewart, tells a story about running a seminar for a large company. The goal of the seminar was to make it clear that software developers had a responsibility to abide by their company’s guidelines surrounding the use of open-source, free and other third-party code.

Copenhaver thought it went well. Then the development group’s manager came up to her and said, “You know, these fellows can’t get everything they need to get done every day and worry about all of this stuff.”

The manager’s words lie at the core of an issue that affects countless development departments around the globe today. Faced with shrunken budgets, tight deadlines, the fear of jobs being shipped off to the lowest bidder and expanding demands for ever-more-complicated software, programmers are tempted to grab bits, pieces and even large bites of code from various third-party sources in order to get things done more quickly.

The consequences of this (to be kind) borrowing can be anodyne; that is, no one ever notices the code, the product ships (either externally or internally), and life goes on. Or the consequences can be catastrophic. Dirty code, according to intellectual property lawyers, has led to expensive delays during many mergers and acquisitions. And thanks to the efforts of a single programmer–Linux kernel contributor Harald Welte–at least 100 companies have been forced either to remove or release as open-source various pieces of GPL code that they borrowed without properly complying with the license.

full story here