Yeah, once upon a time, I did something like this too (I was the one saying "yeah").

Thinking about it, while Roc Games is not online anymore, at least we had a cool website (to be fair, one of the head honchos there does have a cool site).

Just for the record, I don't think that what Angelides admitted to in his race against Schwarzenegger counts as hacking. I formed that opinion when similar cases came up before.

Generally speaking, things cannot get on the Internet accidentally. Somebody must put them there. If something is on the Internet, it's a good bet that it's supposed to be accessed unless there is some kind of password protection. In Angelides's case, Schwarzenegger's people did not protect the audio file with a password, so it's hard to say that Angelides did anything wrong.

Put another way, if I write my plans for world domination on my car bumper, it's a safe bet I want people to see them. I can't then get upset when people know what my next move is going to be. If I go through the trouble of putting the plans on my kitchen table, it's a safe bet I only want people who I permit into my kitchen to see the plans. If you enter my house (even if it's unlocked), you know or should know that you aren't supposed to be there, and you've done something wrong.

By the way, it's not that unusual for computers to ask for passwords when they don't really want them (anonymous FTP for instance expects an email address when it asks for a password). So asking for a password by itself isn't enough either.

Interesting politics in Iraq. Apparently the strongest political person in Iraq wants a moderate government.

Just when I'm tempted to believe the media.

If global warming is clearly happening, why can't the guys who want to turn it around agree on how bad it is? Is there a little more uncertainty there than they are admitting to? Are they just making things up?

This is pretty funny. You can skim through most of it, reading just the captions. It's great to know California schools are just as I remember them.

Every so often, I giggle about an old credit card story. Last week I came across the much funnier Michael Jackson prank (that also involved a credit card).

He and others have been very busy for your entertainment.

I am still not a lawyer, but an interesting lawsuit is talked about at Law.com. Unfortunately, the write-up there isn't all that interesting. Here's the gist of the case: Netflix got two "business process patents" that cover how it rents movies over the Internet. Blockbuster is now renting movies over the Internet, and Netflix is suing for patent infringement. Blockbuster is counter-suing, claiming that Netflix is trying to use its patent to illegally become a monopoly in Internet movie rentals.

They are both garbage lawsuits. It's stuff like this that makes foreigners think the US attorneys are trigger happy. I'm inclined to agree.

First, Netflix's patents aren't going to hold up in court. In order to get a patent, an idea must be novel (that is, never done before) and nonobvious (that is, not something that any schmoe could come up with). Netflix's way of doing things is novel because any difference from how things used to be done is novel, and Netflix can show something there. However, there is just too much "prior art" for it to be nonobvious. There were experiments in the late '80s and early '90s to determine if it would be profitable to sell movie downloads (like iTunes now does). Because Internet connections weren't high speed at the time, these experiments simulated the inconvenience of downloading a movie (compared to the inconvenience of going to the video store) by having the customer call the video store, which would put the movie into a VCR connected to the customer's TV with a long cable.

Anyone familiar with these experiments (or with, say, just about any early '90s "Internet company," from Amazon.com to online restaurant or grocery stores) would have been able to come up with the general "go to a website, rent a movie to be mailed to house, mail movie back after you've watched it" concept when Netflix filed the patent. And I'm familiar with these experiments because they were in a popular textbook about programming.

Blockbuster itself may be able to point to internal memos showing that it was looking at this general idea five or ten years before Netflix filed for the patent. And while the Netflix patent may stand if enough details are thrown in (no late fees, monthly subscription model, etc.), there will be enough ground carved out that Blockbuster will be able to rent movies over the Internet.

But even so, Blockbuster's counter-suit has absolutely no merit. Patents are defined as legal monopolies granted for a limited period of time. Judges eventually decided that it's wrong to use that legal monopoly as super-duper leverage in getting an illegal monopoly, so Blockbuster's attorneys are actually relying on a real legal theory. However, that legal theory is based on anti-trust law, and one of the first questions in an anti-trust case is whether there is a monopoly in a defined market. The definition of market came into play in US vs. Oracle, where the judge made a big deal about how customers viewed the markets.

Customers realize there is a car market and a school bus market, and that the two are separate. However, customers don't think of "Internet video rentals" as a different market from "traditional video rentals," so Blockbuster is going to have a hard time convincing anybody that its smaller competitor Netflix is actually a monopoly player in this "Internet video rental" market, or that Netflix can seriously raise prices without people flocking to competitors (a common rule of thumb judges use to determine if there's a monopoly; if Netflix raised prices too high, people of course would flock to Blockbuster and traditional video stores, which really hurts Blockbuster's case that the two companies are in separate markets).

Looks like some of the "competitive" House and Senate races aren't competitive. What a shock.

I've wondered about this. I'll file this away for later (which may never come, but if it does, this will be useful).