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Re:Lifetime: months? by RobertB-DC · 2004-01-27 03:44 · Score: 2, Interesting · on Polymer Vision Produces 5" Rollable Displays

More's the pity. I suppose Joe and Jenny Idiot have to have their gadgets, but such horrendously disposable items will lead to a lot of unpleasant waste.

I agree with you. I'm sure when they talk about "organics-based displays", they're not talking about the good kind of "organic". The term "organic chemistry" simply means that it's based on carbon instead of silicon. Unfortunately, the carbon compounds will be heavily doped with the same sort of toxic metals and other compounds that cause problems when disposing of traditional electronics.

But I do think the market will take off, given the right price point, for the same reason people talk on their disposable cell phones while driving their modified military vehicles. (And as soon as you can figure out what that reason is, please let me know!)

OT: Cars.... by richieb · 2003-12-19 00:20 · Score: 1 · on Wal-Mart Music Download Service Launches

2)I don't have a car. But that's beside the point, since most people have no (realistic) choice but to buy from these "evil oil companies". Hell, even public transportation is encouraging them!

Actually you can do a lot by encouraging car companies to make fuel efficient cars. See Detroit Project

Re:Librarians - keepers of the faith by sg3000 · 2003-04-08 05:26 · Score: 3, Interesting · on Librarians Join the Fight Against The Patriot Act

> As anyone who studies political science will tell
> you, a democracy only works well when you have an
> educated public.

That explains what Karl Rove (you know, Bush's brain) was thinking when he said, "As people do better, they start voting like Republicans--unless they have too much education and vote Democratic."

You can easily steer the country on the road to fascism all the while calling it "democracy," if your citizens don't know any better. Republicans have made no secret of their anti-academic views (e.g. they want to teach Biblical Creation in science class, and the current president probably hasn't even read a book since The The Very Hungry Caterpillar). Utimately, they want to replace our democracy with a plutocratic theocracy under their brand of Christianity. Sounds a little extreme, right? Well, Bush already believes that he was elected by God to lead this country.

Wow, this post is probably one sentence away from violating Godwin's law. I should have read my sig before posting.

Re:supporting terrorism by lactose_incarnate · 2003-03-14 10:17 · Score: 1 · on MPAA, Microsoft Testify Piracy Funds Terrorism

Regarding the SUV commercials: See the about page. The group does want to raise awareness about the reliance on foreign oil, but the commercials were parodies.
And dammit, they're hilarious.

So do SUVs by Publicus · 2003-03-14 02:51 · Score: 1 · on MPAA, Microsoft Testify Piracy Funds Terrorism

I wonder how many were parked in the parking lot at this conference?

BTW, this is a legitmate argument, not flamebait.

Read more about it here.

supporting terrorism by MasterD · 2003-03-14 02:21 · Score: 4, Funny · on MPAA, Microsoft Testify Piracy Funds Terrorism

I like to listen to mp3's and watch SVCD's in my SUV while I am high.

Re:plural acronyms by r2ravens · 2003-01-05 06:09 · Score: 2 · on Hollywood's DRM Agenda Moving Forward

I saw an essay by Arianna Huffington on Salon regarding this very subject just a few weeks ago (December 17.)

From the essay:

"Things only got worse the next morning when, while reading the New York Times, I came across not one, but two examples of apostrophes being put in the wrong place -- including one in a column by my hero, Paul Krugman."

"Flummoxed, I got ahold of the New York Times' manual of style and, to my horror, discovered that the paper's rash of apostrophe errors had not been the result of sloppy copy-editing but a conscious executive decision to ignore the rules of proper punctuation."

So, if Ms. Huffington is correct, the NYTSG does indeed allow it's authors to debase the language. While the New York Times may be a respected publication, and might even be considered some form of authority, I'd be inclined to stay with the established rules of grammar and punctuation that have served us well for a very long time (e.g. Strunk & White.)

She also covers the pluralization of acronyms, and lays out the (proper and generally accepted) rules quite clearly. And this comes from a person for whom english is not her first language.

From her bio:

Originally from Greece, she moved to England when she was sixteen and graduated from Cambridge University with a M.A. in Economics. At twenty-one she became President of the famed debating society, the Cambridge Union.

I would say her credentials are quite respectable.

The placement of an apostrophe has been a pet peeve of mine for quite a while with the most egregious offense lately being the title of the movie "Bridget Jones's Diary". Or maybe that just the british way of doing things...

We've got to keep people on their toes, or Mr Twain's vision may indeed come to pass. Of course, it might just be easier to switch to Esperanto.

Re:Liberal as insult by MacAndrew · 2002-11-14 05:24 · Score: 2 · on HomeSec In the News

Ronald Reagan. Honed By George Bush (#41) with the "card-carrying ACLU member" crack.

I tell people I'm a free-market liberal, which perplexes them enough that they don't go into the usual rants. It's accurate, too -- I don't think regulation and gov't involvement is good for everything, but I insist on certain hard limits on individual rights, ensured by the gov't.

There's an old saw that a conservative is a liberal who got mugged the day before; well, a liberal might be a conservative whose brother was falsely accused of mugging the day before. People do convert from right to left -- Arianna Huffington is a particularly perplexing example (read her account of her "transformation").

Don't mention Canada -- you'll just get draft-dodgers jokes and the usual grunting accusations that liberals are cowards and disloyal. Quite the contrary.

( .hj by Anonymous Coward · 2002-07-31 18:56 · Score: -1, Offtopic · on Matchbox -- a Small Footprint Window Manager

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NAFTA: Sell toxic products;sue when they're banned by ToastyKen · 2002-02-08 22:15 · Score: 2 · on Vermont Goes Opt-In, Corps Unhappy

You think that's a joke? Take a look at this column. It talks about a provision in NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement, for non-North Americans) that lets companies sue other govt's if they enact laws that cause the companies to have losses.

Methanex, a Canadian company, is suing the U.S. gov't for $970 million because a California law against their carcinogenic gasoline additive is going to cost them money.

Metalclad, a U.S. company, has already won $16 million from Mexico because a community rejected their cancer-causing toxic waste dump.

These suits, being part of an international treaty, are not subject to national laws for appeal.

In other words, if your product is banned because it kills peoplesue the gov't for making your product illegal. Imagine cigarette companies being able to sue places that enact anti-smoking laws. (Hell, that just might happen, even.) Of course, we're talking actual frickin' toxic waste here, not just cigarettes. What a wonderful world we live in.

P.S.: Note that this is an article written by a prominent Republican, while I am not Republican by a long shot. I don't care, because it's a good article! :)

Not the first time by cascino · 2001-09-08 07:53 · Score: 1 · on Congress Plans DMCA Sequel: The SSSCA

It appears that our Mr. Hollings is easily swayed by corporate soft money donations:

from http://www.ariannaonline.com/columns/files/101899. html:

"Sen. ``Fritz'' Hollings (D-S.C.) received more than $250,000 from the banking, insurance and securities industries during that same period. He was -- coincidentally? -- the only Democrat to vote for a bill that would eliminate the firewall between banks, insurance and securities companies and water down laws requiring banks to serve low-income communities."

from http://www.usatoday.com/news/index/finance/ncfin31 5.htm:

"South Carolina Republican Party Chairman Henry McMaster says lack of disclosure laws there has allowed three big long-distance telephone companies to give stealth contributions of $50,000 each to the state's Democrats a few weeks ago to help the re-election campaign of Sen. Ernest ''Fritz'' Hollings, at Hollings' behest.

"Hollings is one politician the long-distance companies can't ignore. He is the top Democrat on the Commerce Committee, which controls telecommunications policy. The phone companies' money has helped Democrats flood the airwaves with ''issue ads'' supporting Hollings."

Sounds like scum to me.

Re:Suggestion by Kellindil · 2001-07-10 05:15 · Score: 1 · on Global Warming: Do You Believe?

First off, the other nations of the world with a higher standard of living than the US also resent the nation. That can hardly be attributed to envy of the US's prosperity. The rest of the world resents that the US acts as if the world revolves around it and everything else is secondary.

As for the environement. It's all just a bunch of scare tactics, right? Well, if you listen to ultra right-wing groups such as capitalismmagaize.com and aynrand.org, perhaps, since it's in their own best interest to promote their ideology which says you shouldn't inconvenience yourself for the benefit of anyone else. Similarly, a story about the severity of global warming from a group like Earth First! wouldn't carry much weight, either, even though they can quote plenty of studies themselves.

So is it just a bunch of scare tactics? We have hard data showing that people definitely have a significant impact on the local climate -- think urban heat islands. Is it possible that in doing so, the local climate can have such a huge effect without impacting the larger world? Not really. There aren't ecosystems that large that exist in complete isolation.

Many people have claimed that carbon sinks, largely in the form of forests, would be more than enough to counter the effect of increase carbon dioxide emissions. The Kyoto Protocol placed significant emphasis on forests for that purpose. Unfortunately for that view, researchers at Duke released the results of a study showing that while the growth rate of plants showed significant initial increases, it slowed dramatically within a couple years (see the last couple paragraphs). What's the implication? That we'd need to constantly be planting forests. And of course since they'd absorbed the carbon we couldn't cut them down since that'd end up releasing the carbon back to the atmosphere. Actually, it isn't known how much of the carbon the trees actuall keep as opposed to storing in short-lived organs like leaves which fall off, decay, and release the carbon back into the environment (see the infor about this ongoing Harvard study). And if you want to know more about the group that did the research for Duke and is conducting related studies, their homepage is here.

Finally, as for the idea that "our president has stood up for his belief that environmentalism, when carried to the extreme, is very unhealthy for everybody"... Well, if you cut through the political commentary in this column you find out that Bush's own ranch has gone to great lengths to be environmentally sensitive. So much for his politics reflecting his actual beliefs.

Re:Death of Sun Predicted? by scoove · 2001-06-26 21:44 · Score: 2 · on Sun Closes Solaris Source Sales June 30

Also I think the Solaris code licensing fialure is do to the fact it wasn't an open project which would have allowed a "community" to be built around improving and enhancing Solaris.

Yea, I'm waiting for the California-style blame shift. You know, the press release with McNeally saying:

"Oh yes, we tried open source. It failed miserably, because open source just doesn't work." (soundbite inserted for easy PHB digestion; open, read and repeat 500 times)

Then the UNIXland PHBs have their ammo to say no to open source in their companies. (Hopefully, this will lead to more tech PHBs living in homeless shelters, and more 1950s culture companies going over the brink.)

*scoove*

Predicted in "Free For All" by drivers · 2000-11-19 23:59 · Score: 2 · on Taxing Free Software

This weekend I just finished "Free For All" which was reviewed on /. In the last chapter, the author makes some predictions that the current "system" is going to be very threatened by software that flows freely "like dandelion seeds blowing in the wind." Lost tax revenue is going to be a large one. Governments are going to do what they can to tax free software (governments can't resist the urge to tax anything they can get away with). This is a pretty big threat to free software. You can bet the current commercial software giants are going to put pressure behind such efforts. (Which reminds me, we also need to get rid of soft money (the other book I've been reading: How to Overthrow the Government by Arianna Huffington, an advocate for campaign finance reform)).

(My quick review Free for All: If you already know the history of free software/open source, there will be little in this book to learn that is worth the $23, although I did learn some things about BSD history I didn't know. I couldn't picture the general population being interested in most of the detailed explanations. There are a few sloppy mistakes such as confusing free speech vs. free beer in some chapters while explaining it in other chapters. Only in the last chapter does the author attempt to add insights instead of going over dry facts.)

Re:No. The proper response is to IGNORE the law. by kableh · 2000-05-17 03:52 · Score: 1 · on Today's Helping Of The DMCA

http://www.ariannaonline.com /columns/files/050400.html

Along the same lines, an excellent article about how our police are becoming increasingly paramilitary. Think that we aren't already living in a police state? Guess again...

Re:This is an example of one of Jamie's points. by Jagged · 2000-02-23 03:19 · Score: 1 · on Victory in Holland

http://www.ariannaonline.com/c olumns/files/040698.html

I am currently sitting behind a proxy with SurfWatch active (for "sex" only). I had a feeling that the above domain name would be a trigger.

Well what a surprise...*BLAM!*... Blocked by SurfWatch®

I then checked out Arianna Online through my home machine and it appears that she is just a political writer. An anti-censorship one at that.

Where is the "sex" in that? Of course I had to use Lynx, so there could be pictures showing a sexy political writer.

I just can't figure these filterware companies out.

Lowering our guffaw threshold. by Apuleius · 2000-02-22 23:49 · Score: 2 · on Victory in Holland

part of the problem is that when a politician talks about "protecting the children" from the latest bugaboo (like Internet porn), too many of us, who would be laughing at his expense, restrain this natural urge to faux civility.

Take Arianna's advice:

http://www.ariannaonline.com/columns/files/04069 8.html

Lower your guffaw threshold. Better yet go to political rallies and lower your guffaw threshold.

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