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Microsoft definitely has something going on with .NET code though. The kind of security you can get there can't be compared with anything you can do on the software or even hardware level, with pure unmanaged code.

Of course, both of these statements are wrong. Lisp machines had finer grained authority management, as did earlier capability hardware (tagging down to the word level); we're talking technology from the 70s and 80s here which can surpass the capabilities of new millennium technology.

Typed Assembly Languages are "unmanaged code", ie. raw assembly, but are accompanied with a proof certificate proving various properties of the assembly code, including memory safety and beyond. This is more recent work under the banner of "proof carrying code". This counts as a software technique which is superior to .NET's managed code. Heck, .NET's managed code can't even express strongly typed function pointers, and must resort to ad-hoc delegate techniques in the VM (despite many researchers suggesting MS add them way back in the early design stages of .NET).

I like .NET to a certain extent, and I like Microsoft's Singularity project, but .NET is far from the true cutting edge in safety. Unfortunately, Java is no better off, and functional languages are only marginally better when it comes to security.

Here's an interesting tidbit ( from http://simplyted.blogspot.com/2005/12/how-to-visualize-data.html ) :
Our DNA sequence is 600MB ... 1/2 the size of a Vista install.
We could start rating hard disks in People, i.e. that 4 TB hard disk will hold 6.6KP (KiloPeople)

I read as much news on line as the next geek (many hours a day). However...

100% in agreement on that one. With an online resource, the old news is a link away unlike any offline reader. For example, if you are following the RIAA lawsuits, you have an instant list of the past and related documents. The Media Sentry testimony is old news, but when the points are in the current case, you can review the testimony. A prime example is the IP spoofing and such in the recent mega award. IP spoofing is possible as well as piggybacking on an unsecured access point. The jury found that is not probable because of the lack of a router or wireless access point and the user names showed the probability that this was not plausible. Old news is as important as new news. Having it readily available online is very important.

The Recording industry vs the people is much more important than the Yahoo headline news most any day.
http://recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com/
http://news.yahoo.com/

I mean, the un-important entertainment stuff is in the top stories on the entertainment media news networks. Yahoo is news that doesn't matter.
Under top stories is a story about a dancing cockatoo and some dispute over a dog. That's real news? Does it matter? It's entertainment and little else. Why is any of this in NATIONAL news?

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071018/ap_on_fe_st/odd_dancing_cockatoo;_ylt=AsqNO.bEkPvxhYtiBiy3z6.s0NUE
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071018/ap_on_en_tv/people_degeneres;_ylt=Aqhd_MV_fCo68v1cgksbX3Os0NUE
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071018/ap_on_en_tv/people_degeneres;_ylt=Aqhd_MV_fCo68v1cgksbX3Os0NUE

We see a lot of junk hitting our greylist at the gateway, but 95% just ends there.

OpenBSD's spamd is a wonderful greylister, and it offers a few other options which will
make a dent in the reminaing few if you can be bothered to set it up. See my blog at
http://bsdly.blogspot.com/ and links from there for some examples.

http://clare-panton.blogspot.com/2007/09/1969-online-shopping.html

Click twice on the video on that page. You can't click just once because that would violate another patent.

While it's true that doing 3000 miles on a motorcycle NON STOP would be next to impossible, doing it with a couple of hours of rest each night, while grueling, is certainly possible.

Witness the IronButt Association: http://www.ironbutt.com/about/about.cfm

And how about doing it on scooter: http://cannonball2006.blogspot.com/

And yes, the guy from the story is a complete ass and deserves to rot in jail.

Been playing with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud more than one year, like its simplicity and great deal of opportunities it provides for businesses and other type of clients. Forum provides good deal of advice and useful information (see http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/forum.jspa?forumID=30 ) Resource center has all kinds of tools to get you running in very short period of time, including pre-configured images of operating systems (currently only Linux), called Public AMIs. There's also some good blogs ( http://ihatecubicle.blogspot.com/ ), that provide help on advanced things like persistence to external services (S3, Nirvanix etc). SQS provides messaging facility with simple API, so it's easy to work with.

Hellooooooooo....... this is a rule from the United States Supreme Court. In case you want to read about it here's the brief.

Link to actual motion shamelessly copied from Mr. Beckerman, more background info and the 14th Amendment. Links further indicating parent is quite correct and for the curious.

I agree. Here is my post: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/10/splash-plot.html. Comments are welcome.

You get up groggy, haven't had enough sleep. The shower knobs are stiff. The sink knobs are too far from where you stand, so you bend over. Your bed isn't firm enough, so pushing off is a struggle. The doorknob on the way out is stiff and the door spring-loaded, so you stop it with your hand.

At work, your pen is the wrong size for your hand. Your water is too far and too low. The elevator buttons are stiff, and you can't tell when the ATM buttons (membrane keyboard) have triggered.

Many of our everyday objects are bad designs. We can fix them, with some patience and an insightful technical writer or user interface designer or interaction designer on the scene.

In the US acronyms tend to be spelled with all capital letters. In Europe then tend to be spelled with only the first letter capitalized, or even in all smalls in some cases. It is usually best to just pick one style and stick with it.

http://mrsquid.blogspot.com/

I clicked across some of the blogs listed on the site, and came across an interesting point. The environment isn't just the whole planet, but also your local environment. Taking action to make one's own environment a better place sounds fine to me...

I was someone who was once considered to be exceptional in math. Unfortunately, I made the mistake of stopping at calculus.

To regain my mastery of mathematics, I decided to take a single math problem very seriously. I figured that I would try to
understand the solution by grounding all ideas down to postulates.

I figured that this was a great way to learn mathematics anew and really get advanced. I soon learned that there were wonderful
math resources on the web. Wikipedia is really great. There's also MathWorld.com.,
PlanetMath, MathForum.org, and
Cut-The-Knot.org.

Being pretty ambitious, I chose Fermat's Last Theorem and Andrew Wiles's solution as my jump off point. I started this adventure
in 2004. Since then, because the problem is so tough, I started blogging through the different threads of the problem and I find
myself recreating the history of mathematics from the perspective of number theory.

I am not sure that this approach would work for everyone but if you are a solid problem solver, it can really make advanced
mathematics more fun. If you are interested to see what I came up with, you can check out my blog a My math blog.
I also started a general math blog.

Best of luck in learning mathematics.

-Larry

I was someone who was once considered to be exceptional in math. Unfortunately, I made the mistake of stopping at calculus.

To regain my mastery of mathematics, I decided to take a single math problem very seriously. I figured that I would try to
understand the solution by grounding all ideas down to postulates.

I figured that this was a great way to learn mathematics anew and really get advanced. I soon learned that there were wonderful
math resources on the web. Wikipedia is really great. There's also MathWorld.com.,
PlanetMath, MathForum.org, and
Cut-The-Knot.org.

Being pretty ambitious, I chose Fermat's Last Theorem and Andrew Wiles's solution as my jump off point. I started this adventure
in 2004. Since then, because the problem is so tough, I started blogging through the different threads of the problem and I find
myself recreating the history of mathematics from the perspective of number theory.

I am not sure that this approach would work for everyone but if you are a solid problem solver, it can really make advanced
mathematics more fun. If you are interested to see what I came up with, you can check out my blog a My math blog.
I also started a general math blog.

Best of luck in learning mathematics.

-Larry

The essence of understanding math is being able to use it to solve problems. Math problems are like chess problems: they both have a start state and an end state and a solution consists of a sequence of legal moves. Routine problems are easy, like mate-in-1 or a simple application of a single mathematical rule. Non-routine problems require you to think a few moves ahead, but if you can't do that, you don't really understand the moves/material.

It's important to become proficient at non-routine applications of basic material before moving on to more advanced material like calculus. As the author of The Calculus Trap writes: Rather than learning more and more tools, students are better off learning how to take tools they have and apply them to complex problems.

To this end, I recommend The Art of Problem Solving Volume 1: the basics & The Art of Problem Solving Volume 2: and beyond. They are the best math textbooks I have ever seen. The intuitive explanations really sink in, so no memorization is required. But the key is that each section is followed by a bunch of non-routine problems from middle-school and high-school math contests like MATHCOUNTS and AMC. These are a fun way to make the material second nature, and besides, it's pretty motivating to know that a bunch of middle- or high-school kids solved the problem you're struggling with. (I want a shirt that says I'm as good as a middle schooler on the front, and on the back says MATHCOUNTS.)

After studying the first few chapters of Volume 1, you will be able to solve problems such as these:

• The formula N = 8 * 10^8 * x-3/2 gives, for a certain group, the number of individuals whose income exceeds x dollars. What is the smallest possible value of the lowest income of the wealthiest 800 individuals? (AHSME 1960)
• Find Sqrt[53 - 8 Sqrt[15]]. (MATHCOUNTS 1990)
• If for three distinct positive numbers x, y, and z: y/(x-z) = (x+y)/z = x/y, then find the numerical value of x/y. (AHSME 1992)
• For each of n = 84 and n = 88, find the smallest integer multiple of n whose base 10 representation consists entirely of 6's and 7's. (USAMTS 1)

This post is based in part upon similar posts of mine at Reddit and MathNotations.

Why don't we choose the best energy system we have today. Simply modelled, it is a superconductor ring with an EM wave travelling around it. When the wave travels through an inductor connected to a secondary circuit it produces a current in that secondary circuit. I know about its existence as I was stabbed by an arseXXXX when I started talking to people about it (approx 1-2 years ago). It is free energy. It is non-polluting, probably uses very low pressure nitrogen as a refrigerant, does not explode when cracked, provides unlimited energy (you don't turn it off) etc. My blog is at http://overunityenergy.blogspot.com/ and provides other evidence of its existence.

• Fast User Switcher
• Deskbar
• Volume Control, and
• Clock

• Network Manager and
• Update Notifier

The New York Times published an article about the possibilities of Google entering the wireless phone market. The angle they chose to take was about Google's GPhone and Apple's IPhone. While there may be enough speculation to warrant several paragraphs of news, I think the NYT completely missed the target.

I believe Google has very little interest in Apple's IPhone, other than partnering with them to insure Google's applications run on the device. I think Google's eyes are on a much bigger picture, affording them another huge source for advertising revenue. My theory is based on several things Google has been taking an interest in. The first one, other than the GPhone itself, is Google's interest in the 700MHz band being auctioned off by the FCC. With this in mind, I have very little doubt the GPhone will work in this area of the spectrum.

There are some other things Google has been doing help to bring this all home. For example, have you tried Goog411? If not, visit Http://www.google.com/goog411/. Why would Google be so interested in a telephone 411 application? Well, if you have a mobile phone which can receive Google Maps, Google Information, and (of course) Google Advertisements, then you have a potentially profitable revenue stream.

Taking this to the next level, Google has always had a very strong interest in providing free WiFi to metropolitan areas. While this has proven to be less-than practical to implement, I think Google still would like to see some form of wireless communications which is free to access by the masses. Don't forget, Google is sitting on a very large network of unused fiber optics. If Google wins the 700MHz spectrum, establishes access points linked by their fiber network, and provides mobile communications with the GPhone, Google will be in a position to collect HUGE truck-loads of money from advertisers.

Scenario :
You use GPhone and Goog411 to call a hardware store. Google sends you a map (to your GPhone via Google Maps). On the map, other advertisers have their stores listed along the route AND Google is sending you additional advertisements related to hardware. Over time, the GPhone will have accumulated certain trends, based on the calls you make, and custom advertisements are sent to your phone - maybe even GPhone-Only coupons to be used at participating retailers.

http://williamfink.blogspot.com/

1. Have these guys ever heard of antitrust laws?

2. Don't they realize that their antitrust combination to try to defeat Apple would be a flagrant violation of antitrust law?

3. Why are they incapable of just trying to compete with someone in a fair and open way?

4. Who in the US would be stupid enough to patronize their new venture and thus subsidize their RIAA lawsuits against the American people.

5. SONY BMG are the guys who just testified in Capitol v. Thomas that it is illegal for people to copy their cd's onto their computers for personal use.

Anyone who would buy anything from these companies is an idiot.

Another good source of information.

There is little electricity generated from oil and silicon processing mainly uses electricity so this is not a direct concern. Some at that site suggest that the impact of oil scarcity on society could be so large that industry will be disrupted. That would be an indirect effect. However, few there seem interested in potentially large oil fields like the Bakken Formation: http://www.undeerc.org/price/ so that there may be a bias in some of the analysis.
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Rent solar power for your home: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users-selling-solar.html

The Afghanistan war was planned before 9/11.

The decision to launch the Iraq war was made before 9/11.

The decision to launch a war against Iran was made before 9/11.

The Patriot Act was written before 9/11.

The government's spying on Americans began before 9/11.

The government knew that terrorists could use planes as weapons -- and had even run its own drills of planes being used as weapons against the World Trade Center and other U.S. high-profile buildings, using REAL airplanes -- all before 9/11.

The government heard the 9/11 plans from the hijackers' own mouths before 9/11.

No steel-framed high-rise building had ever collapsed due to fire before 9/11.

The neocons who now run the U.S. government lamented, before 9/11, that they could not institute their plans for global domination without a "new Pearl Harbor".

Did 9/11 really "change everything"? Or was everything we're seeing now planned before 9/11?

well ... EVE is slightly more attractive than C3-PO, though I guess you'd have to have some some of puritanistic japanese middle class teacher kink to fully enjoy sex with her:P

• Google now sells storage to people that reached the space limit: 10GB for $20 per year, 40GB for $75, 150GB for $250, or 400GB for $500; the prices are specified in https://www.google.com/accounts/PurchaseStorage, but you need to have a gmail account to access this page.
• Google repeatedly refuses to users' requests to add to the gmail interface an option to delete attachments, which is one of the most wanted gmail features, thereby making it hard to save space.
• Likewise, google repeatedly refuses to let you sort email messages by size, making it almost impossible to locate the most space-consuming emails, a functionality one really needs when one reaches the space limit.
• Considering the above non-existent options are really trivial to add, one can only conclude that google wants you to reach the limit and pay up. And they claim they're "not evil"...

That was basically his point, that, and that when his patients were poor, he didn't charge them.

Presume I'll support a candidate who who has a plan for single payer. Doctors have many other opportunities for private charity. Hopefully we'll be out of Iraq before the election.
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Rent solar power for your home: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users-selling-solar.html

Ron Paul was interviewed on the News Hour tonight and made the same point there. He also said that passengers are indoctrinated in timidity, or something to that effect, so that they don't defend themselves. To me, in his demenor, he seemed uncomfortable about presenting his views. He critisized the democrats for wanting to stay in Iraq and proposed ending medicare and social security. Kind of gutsy, but perhaps out of his element.
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Getting free from fossil fuels: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users-selling-solar.html

Ohhh, yeah, you are right, they check that in the boarding gate, I have forgotten that, ... even though, I managed to get in the wrong plane (sorry, too lazy to type it again). They might ask for it, but not really read everything.

The "Great Firewall", authorities texting website admins, and regular meetings with a few dozen major websites aren't going to solve the PRC's information control problem. IP blocks can be circumvented. Filters can be tricked. And even if they have 10,000 'Net police texting website owners, they won't be able to remove more than a handful of messages from the millions of forums and comment threads that have been created. There's only one solution that *might* work for them if Internet discourse gets too uncomfortable, and that's pulling the plug on the Internet, just like their Burmese pals did a few weeks ago. But China has a far more developed 'net infrastructure and industry, a huge SMS network that has been used to spread news of protests, and stronger business and personal connections with the outside world. They may have to batten down the hatches for the upcoming party congress, but they also have to look open and friendly in the runup to the Beijing Olympics.

It is important to hold murders accountable for their acts, but when working for peace, it is often more important to reduce the occation for conflict. Thus, truth an reconcilliation trumps punishment in South Africa. Similarly, reducing poverty reduces the sense of injustice that inspires those middle and upper class terrorists while controlling desertification keeps refugee situations from arising. Arming the refugees is the proximate cause of the genocide, but it is not the root cause of the conflict, climate change is.

You can choose not to acknowledge your responsibility in the genocide, but that does not mean that if you (and I) had not changed the climate there, genocide would be occurring anyway. What we cause, we can also mitigate. You are incorrect to say that warming cannot be stopped: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/08/undertaking.html

To make things realy go, you need to make carbon penalties very large. New Jersey has decided to do away with its solar rebates and now plans to set penalties for utilities not having the required amount of solar power in their system at more than double the current $0.30 per kWh sold. People who buy solar power systems will be issued Solar Renewable Energy Certificates (SRECs) according to their generation which they may sell to New Jersey utlities at a market price (around $0.20/kwh presently http://markets.flettexchange.com/njsrec units are $/MWh). Utilities are planning on making loans to help people install solar power which would be repaid in these SRECs. Because the penalty is so high, and the opportunity for those with solar power capability to profit is so large, it seems likely that New Jersey's Renewable Energy Standards for solar will be met with ease. Offsets can be traded voluntarily and such, but mandated fractions of renewable energy with effective enforcement penalties will be more sucessful I think.
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Rent solar power for you home and save (unless you want NJSRECs): http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users-selling-solar.html

In fact, democrats controlled the Senate at the time and that is what counts for treaties. But, the Senate indicated that it would not ratify before the negociations were complete so that another round should have taken place. The main issue was large and growing emitter who had no obligations. A treaty that had obligations, even just symbolic ones, probably could have been ratified, but the Clinton administration believed that it could use perssuation after ignoring the Senate to get ratification. They were mistaken in this.
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Rent solar power for your home: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users-selling-solar.html

From a link provided in the Groklaw article:


What I have found, though, is astounding. Acacia has sued hundreds of defendants in 213 different patent lawsuits brought by 36 different Acacia subsidiaries. That's right - they have sued in 36 different names! By doing so, Acacia, a publicly traded company, has increased its market cap by tenfold, going from a 35M company in early 2003 to a 350M company today.


This company doesn't make anything, it is a patent troll pure and simple.

So let's sum up: a California inventor moves his California shell company to Nevada, and then joins up with another California company, using an Illinois shell, to buy patents from Xerox and then assert them against a California company, a North Carolina company and a Massachusetts company. In Marshall, Texas.

Apparently IP Innovations LLC is a subsidiary of Acacia, one of the largest patent troll groups around according to Troll Tracker. IP Innovations has only been around since 2002 with 5 employees and revenues less than $1 million, according to their listing on Fedvendor, so it's quite perverse to be trying to sue over a patent issued to somebody else in 1991...

Actually, it was a sincere expression of sentiment. All the recipients have been critisized by me in the past but I do admire their effort and the insight of the Committee that this is a pressing peace issue. It was not an attempt to have the first post since I clicked preview before submitting. I've had the first three posts on a story before because I was in a hurry to get to church and I had some information to share that did not fit well into the summary. Mods don't have a lot to choose from early on so it is best to discount mods of early posts. For that reason, I apreciate the mods who take the time to read through later and pick out nuggets in a larger field.
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Rent solar power equipment at a flat rate that'll save you money. Ask about Solar Assurance! http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users-selling-solar.html

There's no question that the earth is going through some sort of warming trend. However, it's far from conclusive that that warming is man-made. In fact, there seems to be evidence that global warming is occurring on other planets in the solar system, too, suggesting that the cause is the Sun getting warmer:

http://motls.blogspot.com/2006/05/global-warming-on-jupiter.html

So, why are they giving Gore the Nobel Prize for giving out misinformation about a natural event that we can't do anything about?

"Acacia subsidiary IP Innovation LLC and fellow patent troll Technology Licensing Corp sued Red Hat and Novell in Marshall"

In July 2007, Acacia Research Corporation announced that Jonathan Taub joined its Acacia Technologies group as Vice President. Mr. Taub joins Acacia from Microsoft

Acacia Research Corporation .. has named Brad Brunell as Senior Vice President .. Mr. Brunell joins Acacia from Microsoft

--

Is there any disinterested law official anywhere on the planet that is concerned with what is going on here. A seller of inferior software facilitates the formation of a patent troll and extortion racket. It then uses threats from said same company to intimidate people into using its own product and scare them away from using competitors product.

Acacia, a well-known patent troll, just filed suit against Novell and Red Hat claiming that Linux infringes their patents. See http://trolltracker.blogspot.com/2007/10/acacia-targets-linux-in-new-lawsuit.html.

We'll see how far Red Hat and Novell will go now that there is an actual patent suit in play, and more to come, probably.

I used to believe exactly that. I even argued that interpretation on my blog. But note that even there I found that with a little research one could crank out quite a large number of articles with a minimum of research. (That reminds me: I need to finish those 500-odd articles I started on town in Ethiopia. Boy, what a determined Perl hacker can create with access to the right set of census returns.)

However, I think Dragonflight's study shows that the cause lies in the fact that the pool of contributors has a finite size. Whether this is due to the fact that writing encyclopedia articles is an unusual hobby, or that Wikipedia's current policies are driving away would-be contributors, is another issue.

Geoff

But I've done a few Internet researches. "religion child abuse" for example, yields about 2.5 million Google hits, many on the first few pages are links to scientific papers researching the link between those two. "religion mental illness" yields about 2 mio. pages, again several from the first few pages pointing to scientific journals or papers. If the link is no obvious to you: You certainly would agree that "training" a child in, say, shizophrenia, would be abusive, wouldn't you?

Your "Google Proof" method of affirming your claims is invalid. The majority of pages on the "religion child abuse" search are quoting Dawkins and discussing his claims. Let's look at the first 10 results, shall we?

1. http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=48252 - WorldNetDaily
Discusses Dawkins' series "The Root of All Evil?". Presents comments from a Catholic Church spokesperson in responce. Takes no position on the issue, as good news journalism shold.

2. http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,100175,00.html - Time Magazine
A news article about a paricular sect who refuse medical treatment for their children in favour of prayer. This is not common religious teaching, and the article doens't present it as such, but discusses the rights of the parent and changes to the view of "freedom of religion." More about politics then religion.

3. http://www.nospank.net/bottoms.pdf - NoSpank PDF
Bias aleart. NoSpank has a pre-published agenda and have cherrypicked articles to support. That aside, the article doesn't conclude that religion is child abuse, but that when religion is used to abuse it can have worse after affects. I would dispute this article based on the fact that it is published by a non-objective source, but regardless, it doesn't support your initial idea.

4. http://richarddawkins.net/article,118,Religions-Real-Child-Abuse,Richard-Dawkins
I won't even bother. Yep - surprise. Richard Dawkins thinks religion is child abuse. But wait a second - it reveals where some of Richard's spite towards the church comes from:

Being fondled by the Latin master in the Squash Court was a disagreeable sensation for a nine-year-old, a mixture of embarrassment and skin-crawling revulsion...

This is something I've been searching to find for a while. Reading Dawkins' work, and listening to him talk, I've always thought to myself "someone in the church has hurt him, and he's blaming God for it". And I was right. He speaks like someone who is motivated by bitterness rather then a series of objective findings that lead him to atheism. So he was abused, and blames religion/church/god for it. Maybe laying blame on the abuser who was using their position of responsobility for wrongdoing would be more sensible then a crusade against religion.

5. http://powerofnarrative.blogspot.com/2006/11/religion-as-child-abuse-and-about-hell.html - Blog post
Not anything approaching authorititive, the author links his own critiques of James Dobson that take read meaning into statements where there are none, and then write a diatribe on that one point. Example? He links an article which looks at the following paragraph:

Some kids can be crushed with nothing more than a stern look; others seem to require strong and even painful disciplinary measures to make a vivid impression. This difference usually results from the degree to which a child needs adult approval and acceptance. The primary parental task is to see things as the child perceives them, thereby

Just posted this comment on Ben Witherington's blog in question, and thought I'd share. Be interesting to see how Ben replies, and others' thoughts on this:

"Interesting discussion, there is further debate at Game Politics and the venerable Slashdot.

The commentary (particularly at the sites above) is sometimes quite openly hostile toward Christianity - this is not uncommon amongst the youth community today. I wanted to write a little about why I think this is the case.

Society has become far more sceptical of "messages of goodwill" and young people - quite rightly - demand more concrete evidence and credibility before committing to a belief.

This cynicism has developed out of necessity and I believe it is "a good thing". One only has to look at the widespread "good will" messages (with hidden motives) and false promises that we are bombarded with every day from marketers, politicians, et al to see how this cynicism has been nurtured.

• "Our product/service will make you a better person!"
• "Vote for X and build a better Britain!"
• "Catch the monkey and win a FREE iPod!"
• "There's something for everyone at Mecca Bingo!"
• "If you download MP3s, you are funding terrorism!"
• "Come join our Youth Group, it's loads of fun!"

When a young person rejects Christianity, they are not saying "I do not wish to be a good person" or "I do not believe in God". They are simply applying the same level of cynicism and questioning to something often promoted in a very similar way to - frankly - a miracle cure, a politician's manifesto or a bingo club.

Personally, I attended Sunday school in the UK until my mid-teens and maintain a strong interest in religion as a humanitarian subject. When asked to Confirm, I chose not to. My reasoning was that I believed in the common-sense principles behind Christianity, but was put off by the inconsistencies and uncertain history of the Bible. Therefore, I decided to live my life by commonsense, hold respect for Christianity as a belief alongside others, but I couldn't commit to unquestioning adherence.

Were I to make my decision now, as young people today must, I would also be strongly influenced by the examples of extreme negative effects of all-consuming belief in a particular religion that we see today. If my faith in particular teachings were so strong that I was prepared to detonate myself in a public place, killing hundreds, was commonsense not a better way to live my life?

Take Scientology too as an example of a vile cult that is marketed using the similar methods to Christian preaching. How is a young person to know with conviction the difference between your typical friendly-friendly leaflet-brandishing youth group leader and a smiling face offering free "personality tests"?

Without a means to prove credibility over the sea of other "me too" ideas that young people are exposed to and must weigh up every day, Christianity will face the same scrutiny, scepticism and sometimes outright hostility as any other message.

I hope this is a useful insight into the rise of Agnosticism?"

It's gotten so bad that someone created a song about it:

Wikipirates

And while granted that was about the singer's entry in Wikipedia there are plenty of more examples on the Internet.

This sort of attitude is what keeps otherwise knowledgeable people from contributing. IIRC that's not what Wikipedia has said they've wanted in the past.

Classical Latin was (or more accurately, is) much more complex than modern Romance languages. However, vulgate Latin, which is what the vast majority of Romans used back in the days of the Empire, was significantly simpler than Classical Latin. Many of the complex grammatical structures found in Classical Latin were not used in the vulgate.

http://mrsquid.blogspot.com/

The way I see it, they faced a fork in the road when preparing their case: either agree that some infringement could have taken place with/without the defendant's knowledge but that the impact was minimal and the act was unlikely to be repeated in the future, or assert that no infringement took place and force the plaintiff to show 51%+ likelihood that it did. In the courtroom one tactic would tend to undermine the other (though as a Slashdotter on a jury I imagine one would be free to discuss both possibilities.)

The problem with the first approach, which would have probably been easier to argue, is that in the best case scenario they were looking at $750/song in damages (for 1,702 songs, $1,276,500.) Hardly a win, especially if you put plaintiff's attorney fees into the mix, and they'd still face the risk of a costlier judgement.

The second approach was essential if they were to provide the jury the additional choice of not finding infringement. It's a weaker case as you point out, especially with the tie between the KaZaA username and the internet account username, but as it kept the door open on the only desirable outcome I think it was the better choice.

Perhaps it would have been wisest to settle, but maybe not.

People are doing some interesting things this campaign. For example I created an ever expanding Ron Paul Mosaic where supporters can upload photos and message of support. Someone else took the photos and created a mosaic in the image of Ron Paul which has since been turned into newspaper ads, T-Shirts, YouTube vidoes, and even a proposed TV Ad.

Others are doing lots more. Ron Paul Portal is a good starting point. And of course, there is Liv, the ever popular Ron Paul Girl.

Now the RIAA can use this case to turn up the heat in their threat letters.


Unfortunately, the villagers recognise the angry bull elephant in town is thrashing anybody in the path and are responding. Moves are well underway to nuter the elephant http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20060503/0411203.shtml to shooting the elephant http://recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com/2005/10/oregon-riaa-victim-fights-back-sues.html to getting out of the way and getting out of sight. http://phoenixlabs.org/pg2/

People might find the views of a Canadian IP Lawyer interesting. He seems to think that the copyright claim is non-sense, and the official mark one likely won't fly based on recent Supreme court rulings.

I dunno much about either, but the copyright on an image from 1937 does seem like a stretch. Maybe someone should have some t-shirts printed and really rub it in.

Credit where credit is due: this comes via Michael Geist.