Comment Re: Not an IETF Draft (Score 1) 75
What I mean is that "floating by the IETF..." is misleading. Anybody can submit an I-D for standard track. Few are adopted by the IETF.
Comment Not an IETF Draft (Score 5, Informative) 75
An IETF draft starts with "draft-ietf-". This is merely a proposal by a member of the IETF to discuss this subject.
Comment Moral rights (Score 2) 480
The Berne convention (which the USA is a signatory) explicit states the existence of moral rights:
"Independent of the author's economic rights, and even after the transfer of the said rights, the author shall have the right to claim authorship of the work and to object to any distortion, modification of, or other derogatory action in relation to the said work, which would be prejudicial to the author's honor or reputation"
This is not well known, because these rights cannot be licensed or sold in exchange of money, but that does not mean they do not exist.
In short, a programmer is, in an inalienable manner, the author of all the programs s/he wrote, whatever the contract or terms used to write them. Modifying the author name is a violation of these rights. Also, IANAL.
Comment all proposals must have working prototypes before? (Score 1) 27
This sentence in the article is no longer true. There was a time when people coded stuff, then wrote an I-D to document it. The problem is that the burden of having at least 2 implementations is only to promote an RFC to the Draft Standard level, which is less and less frequent.
This is a real problem, because some of the bugs in an RFC can only be found by testing two implementations against each other. Unfortunately my last tentative to improve this was rejected:
http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf/current/msg55964.html
Submission + - Zero day exploit found in Windows Media Player
filenavigator writes: Another zero day flaw has been reported in Windows Media player. It comes only one day after a serious zero day flaw was found in word. The flaw is dangerous because it involves IE and Outlook's ability to automatically launch .asx files. No fix from Microsoft has been announced yet.
Feed No More Loan Solicitations in Free Tax-Filing Program (nytimes.com)
The I.R.S. and private tax preparers have agreed that the free tax-filing program will be offered for 2006 tax returns without solicitations for refund loans.
The DOJ's New Spin on Blocking Software 150
Bennett Haselton has writes
"In recent
arguments over the constitutionality of the Child Online Protection
Act, both sides have argued over the efficiency of Internet blocking
software. While COPA would prohibit
commercial U.S. websites from publishing freely
available material that is "harmful to minors", the ACLU has argued that
blocking software is a far more effective alternative, since among other
things it can block porn sites located overseas, non-commercial websites,
and p2p programs, all of which are beyond the reach of COPA. On the other
hand, we had the surreal experience of watching the Department of Justice
lawyer arguing in favor of a censorship law by saying that the blocking
software alternative was unfair to children -- because it blocked too much
legitimate material." The rest of Bennett's essay follows.
Journal Journal: New Evidence of Water on Mars
An article in the Daily Mail (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=420833&in_page_id=1770) is reporting newly found evidence of water on the surface of Mars. Pictures taken by the Mars Global Surveyor show new light colored deposits in gullies. Another photo shows gullies in craters that scientists believe were caused by recent flows of w
Journal SPAM: Tail-Gater Detection with Lasers 1136
Police in Arizona are using laser range finders to detect and ticket tailgaters. An officer can now not only measure the speed of passing vehicles but also how close they are to one another. The units described in this article are built by Laser Technology Inc., a company that provides lasers for traffic control, engineering purposes and even tactical/military solutions.
Submission + - Verisgn Given Control of .com Domain Until 2012
eldavojohn writes: "A controversial deal has given Verisign control from the US Department of Commerce on the .com domain. From the article, "The .com domain is by far the most popular of the net's addresses and currently there are 59 million domains registered which use the suffix. Verisign maintains the address books of who owns which .com domain and runs the computers that direct web users' computers to the right place. The deal also signals the end of legal action taken by Verisign against ICANN and the dropping of a retaliatory suit by the net overseer." Sounds like a lucrative contract to win. I wonder how this is considered a free market with one company maintaining the commerce domain of the entire internet."
Submission + - Organic Matter Found on Meteorites in Canada
eldavojohn writes: "From what sounds like the opening of an X-Files episode, Canadian scientists have reportedly found organic matter on a meteorite older than the sun. In Tagish Lake in Canada, scientists believe that organic globules found inside a meteorite are organic material older than the sun. From the article,
The article seems to imply that life could potentially survive in these meteorites and maybe even travel through space — supporting the theory that life arrived on earth and evolved from that point on.""We mean that the material in the meteorite has been processed the least since it was formed. The material we see today is arguably the most representative of the material that first went into making up the solar system." The meteorite likely formed in the outer reaches of the asteroid belt, but the organic material it contains probably had a far more distant origin. The globules could have originated in the Kuiper Belt group of icy planetary remnants orbiting beyond Neptune. Or they could have been created even farther afield. The globules appear to be similar to the kinds of icy grains found in molecular clouds — the vast, low-density regions where stars collapse and form and new solar systems are born.
Submission + - Corporate America is not ready for Windows Vista
thefickler writes: Corporate America is not ready for Microsoft's new Windows Vista, according to a new study by Softchoice. The study found that 50% of the PCs inventoried are below Windows Vista's basic system requirements and roughly half of these PCs will need to be replaced outright to run Vista. 94% are not ready for Vista Premium edition.
Journal Journal: Ellison faulted for wanting to use Quran instead of Bible 4
I kept having to look up at the URL to verify it, but this article does not come from the Onion. Evidently, the conservative Dennis Prager (from Townhall.com) finds it offensive that the newly elected Muslim congressman Keith Ellison has chosen to be sworn in using the Quran instead of the Bible.
Submission + - Researchers find clue for SIDS
SpaceAdmiral writes: "Scientists have found that babies who die from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) tend to have an abnormality in their brain stem. By linking SIDS to a biological cause, it may now be possible to test for the abnormality and treat babies at risk of SIDS."
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