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Except for pseudo-political-correct pathetic people who can't look beyond it.

If I make a game in some post-apocalyptic Texas-like desert, of course you will see massively more Rob Zombies than Mahatma Gandhis. And actually intelligent people know that this has nothing to to with genders or ethnics.

The best zombie movie of all time, George Romero's Night of the Living Dead, features a black male lead that at no point ever acts "gangsta." You'd be hard pressed to find that today. With the notable exception of the ever bankable Will Smith, black actors are either a variation of ghetto-thugs/angry-black-men, or magical-negros. (Morgan Freeman being the most prominent example.)

When I hire the best 20 people I can get for the job, I do not care if all 20 of them are white conservative males in their mid-50s, or half-Bantu half-grizzly half-swine-flu-victim-zombie girlie midgets in pink snake skin dresses. That's what it being irrelevant means. :)

Race or gender quotas are really disguised racism. It's just the "other extreme" of the full circle. ;) (Yeah, that really describes it very well.)

This isn't a fair comparison. You're not placing an ad and then filling a position from some semi-random sample. You're inventing the position, the employee, and the sample of potential employees. Unless you have a random character generator, there's no way to do this without letting your own experiences and biases shape your decision. That is, there is no objective standard for you use/hide-behind when creating fiction.

It's easy to say, "[just] look beyond it" when it's your ethnicity that's over represented. No one is arguing for quotas, but there is a desire to see people that look like yourself being portrayed heroically.

Gears of War surprised me when it actually had an Asian male as the squad leader, right up until he gets killed, and then the white guy takes the lead, and his black sidekick explains the ways of the space ghetto to him. Remember Daikatana, and how all the non-whites were stereotypes? The stupid fake accents. The stupid models. The whole thing was like a damn Charlie Chan movie. (Search Youtube if you don't believe me.) Look at the games made today. The black character is some super athletic jive talking "gangsta nigga". The Asian is inevitably the erotic assassin love interest of the white male lead.

Is this the game studios' fault? Well, they're the one making the games with their own free will. Honestly, I think it's unintentional. The game designers are white, and so are the execs. They unconsciously make the games look like themselves, and consciously make the games look like television and movies, which has a long history of institutional racism. While story goes that Jews run Hollywood, the fact is that many actors and execs changed their names to pass for white anglo-saxon protestants. (Kirk Douglas's name is really Issur Danielovitch Demsky. The Sheens are really the Estevezes. Even Jon Stewart was Jonathan Stuart Leibowitz. Just to name a few.) Why is everyone on television and movies white? There's the idea that audiences won't go for non-white characters, and so by and far whites get leads, non-whites get supporting roles. Then paradoxically those with minority leads, are either not promoted heavily (because of the belief that the work is already doomed to failure), or they're little more than minstrel shows. ("We're going for the 'urban' audience!") Even when stories do have nonwhite leads, they're frequently "white washed." SciFi's production of Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea changed the ethnicities of all the characters. The new book Liar, about a black girl, has white girl on the cover. Should this matter? In a perfect post-racial worl

I've noticed boing boing has had increasingly bad and misleading posts/articles lately, down to "what caused these waves in the snow" and other random BS. Whatever draws an audience, and the clicking of advertising links, I suppose. You don't see crappy articles like these in the NYT.

I know there are lots of ways for the Dutch to circumvent this (if it actually happens), but does anyone here remember Distributed BoingBoing? Seemed to me to be a really rather cool way of doing this kind of thing. Of course, it would need to be modified to handle connections to the tracker, so maybe it wouldn't be so easy compared to a straight http site.

I rather like this alternate interpretation of the infographic the AP used to explain their new scheme. Found via BoingBoing.

I, for one, welcome our new Robotic Firefighting Overlords...

You had better believe it.

The only thing I can think that you mean by the logically (and legally) absurd statement that "[copyright] shouldn't be abolished, but fair use should no longer be restricted" is that you're confusing copyright infringement with plagiarism. While similar, and often co-occur, plagiarism is not a legal concept.

For a timely example of the difference between copyright infringement and plagiarism, may I suggest the Jamba Juice / Get Your War On flap.

they did already

http://boingboing.net/2009/07/20/amazons-orwellian-de.html

it was the works of orwell that were removed.
not just one book

They could go a step further, using the strategy used to crack captchas, putting humans to "solve" the problem of telling what is being said in a sound file to be able to access the next part of a porn image or another kind of non economical incentive. Don't have to be the full message, just parts between pauses or things like that

"Darknet" is the term for a general concept, coined by Microsoft researchers in 2002.

Steroids can be pretty up fucking.

http://www.boingboing.net/2008/08/27/steroid-abusers-horr.html

I think this belongs on boingboing

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/07/16/mystery-blob-devouri.html

Not sure why your post would be marked insightful since it is pure speculation.

No, it's happened. Not sure why your post would be marked insightful since it is wrong...

There are plenty of known cases of police harassing photographers in public in the UK. A quick Google finds:

http://www.boingboing.net/2008/06/27/pretend-cops-bully-v.html
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/12/18/uk-police-seize-amat.html
http://www.boingboing.net/2008/07/22/police-warn-uk-man-t.html
http://www.boingboing.net/2009/06/17/uk-cop-war-on-terror.html
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/photographers-criminalised-as-police-abuse-antiterror-laws-1228149.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7888301.stm
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/feb/12/photographers-anti-terror-laws

I've also experienced this first hand - I was taking a photograph, when suddenly an undercover policeman revealed himself to me, telling me I wasn't allowed to take photos without someone's permission, and demanding I delete the photo.

The London police have always been running a scaremongering advertising campaign against photographers:

http://www.boingboing.net/2008/03/04/london-cops-declare.html

There are valid concerns with top secret items and the gov't not wanting you to take pictures of them.

Ir's not top secret if it's in public, and you're only taking a photo of what people can see in public with their own eyes! According to your original post, even material that can only be visible from the air is fair game.

Moreover, even if your argument is true, then you've still lost, as it means that your original assertion of "There is no expectation of privacy when you leave the protection of a building" isn't true in the first place. So which is it? Or are you conceding my point that buildings have more rights to privacy in public than people do? (Although note, my links do not just refer to buildings - people have been hassled for taking photos of police officers.)

For example if the gov't came out with a new plane that had some new, awesome and secret technology it makes sense they don't want you taking a picture of it.

Who cares what they want? I don't want to have a plane or CCTV taking photos of me all the time. But according to you, there's no expectation of privacy in a public place, when I want it or not. So if the Government wheels its so-called "secret" plane into public, then what it wants is irrelevant.

Not sure why your post would be marked insightful since it is pure speculation.

No, it's happened. Not sure why your post would be marked insightful since it is wrong...

There are plenty of known cases of police harassing photographers in public in the UK. A quick Google finds:

http://www.boingboing.net/2008/06/27/pretend-cops-bully-v.html
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/12/18/uk-police-seize-amat.html
http://www.boingboing.net/2008/07/22/police-warn-uk-man-t.html
http://www.boingboing.net/2009/06/17/uk-cop-war-on-terror.html
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/photographers-criminalised-as-police-abuse-antiterror-laws-1228149.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7888301.stm
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/feb/12/photographers-anti-terror-laws

I've also experienced this first hand - I was taking a photograph, when suddenly an undercover policeman revealed himself to me, telling me I wasn't allowed to take photos without someone's permission, and demanding I delete the photo.

The London police have always been running a scaremongering advertising campaign against photographers:

http://www.boingboing.net/2008/03/04/london-cops-declare.html

There are valid concerns with top secret items and the gov't not wanting you to take pictures of them.

Ir's not top secret if it's in public, and you're only taking a photo of what people can see in public with their own eyes! According to your original post, even material that can only be visible from the air is fair game.

Moreover, even if your argument is true, then you've still lost, as it means that your original assertion of "There is no expectation of privacy when you leave the protection of a building" isn't true in the first place. So which is it? Or are you conceding my point that buildings have more rights to privacy in public than people do? (Although note, my links do not just refer to buildings - people have been hassled for taking photos of police officers.)

For example if the gov't came out with a new plane that had some new, awesome and secret technology it makes sense they don't want you taking a picture of it.

Who cares what they want? I don't want to have a plane or CCTV taking photos of me all the time. But according to you, there's no expectation of privacy in a public place, when I want it or not. So if the Government wheels its so-called "secret" plane into public, then what it wants is irrelevant.

Not sure why your post would be marked insightful since it is pure speculation.

No, it's happened. Not sure why your post would be marked insightful since it is wrong...

There are plenty of known cases of police harassing photographers in public in the UK. A quick Google finds:

http://www.boingboing.net/2008/06/27/pretend-cops-bully-v.html
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/12/18/uk-police-seize-amat.html
http://www.boingboing.net/2008/07/22/police-warn-uk-man-t.html
http://www.boingboing.net/2009/06/17/uk-cop-war-on-terror.html
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/photographers-criminalised-as-police-abuse-antiterror-laws-1228149.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7888301.stm
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/feb/12/photographers-anti-terror-laws

I've also experienced this first hand - I was taking a photograph, when suddenly an undercover policeman revealed himself to me, telling me I wasn't allowed to take photos without someone's permission, and demanding I delete the photo.

The London police have always been running a scaremongering advertising campaign against photographers:

http://www.boingboing.net/2008/03/04/london-cops-declare.html

There are valid concerns with top secret items and the gov't not wanting you to take pictures of them.

Ir's not top secret if it's in public, and you're only taking a photo of what people can see in public with their own eyes! According to your original post, even material that can only be visible from the air is fair game.

Moreover, even if your argument is true, then you've still lost, as it means that your original assertion of "There is no expectation of privacy when you leave the protection of a building" isn't true in the first place. So which is it? Or are you conceding my point that buildings have more rights to privacy in public than people do? (Although note, my links do not just refer to buildings - people have been hassled for taking photos of police officers.)

For example if the gov't came out with a new plane that had some new, awesome and secret technology it makes sense they don't want you taking a picture of it.

Who cares what they want? I don't want to have a plane or CCTV taking photos of me all the time. But according to you, there's no expectation of privacy in a public place, when I want it or not. So if the Government wheels its so-called "secret" plane into public, then what it wants is irrelevant.

Not sure why your post would be marked insightful since it is pure speculation.

No, it's happened. Not sure why your post would be marked insightful since it is wrong...

There are plenty of known cases of police harassing photographers in public in the UK. A quick Google finds:

http://www.boingboing.net/2008/06/27/pretend-cops-bully-v.html
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/12/18/uk-police-seize-amat.html
http://www.boingboing.net/2008/07/22/police-warn-uk-man-t.html
http://www.boingboing.net/2009/06/17/uk-cop-war-on-terror.html
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/photographers-criminalised-as-police-abuse-antiterror-laws-1228149.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7888301.stm
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/feb/12/photographers-anti-terror-laws

I've also experienced this first hand - I was taking a photograph, when suddenly an undercover policeman revealed himself to me, telling me I wasn't allowed to take photos without someone's permission, and demanding I delete the photo.

The London police have always been running a scaremongering advertising campaign against photographers:

http://www.boingboing.net/2008/03/04/london-cops-declare.html

There are valid concerns with top secret items and the gov't not wanting you to take pictures of them.

Ir's not top secret if it's in public, and you're only taking a photo of what people can see in public with their own eyes! According to your original post, even material that can only be visible from the air is fair game.

Moreover, even if your argument is true, then you've still lost, as it means that your original assertion of "There is no expectation of privacy when you leave the protection of a building" isn't true in the first place. So which is it? Or are you conceding my point that buildings have more rights to privacy in public than people do? (Although note, my links do not just refer to buildings - people have been hassled for taking photos of police officers.)

For example if the gov't came out with a new plane that had some new, awesome and secret technology it makes sense they don't want you taking a picture of it.

Who cares what they want? I don't want to have a plane or CCTV taking photos of me all the time. But according to you, there's no expectation of privacy in a public place, when I want it or not. So if the Government wheels its so-called "secret" plane into public, then what it wants is irrelevant.

Not sure why your post would be marked insightful since it is pure speculation.

No, it's happened. Not sure why your post would be marked insightful since it is wrong...

There are plenty of known cases of police harassing photographers in public in the UK. A quick Google finds:

http://www.boingboing.net/2008/06/27/pretend-cops-bully-v.html
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/12/18/uk-police-seize-amat.html
http://www.boingboing.net/2008/07/22/police-warn-uk-man-t.html
http://www.boingboing.net/2009/06/17/uk-cop-war-on-terror.html
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/photographers-criminalised-as-police-abuse-antiterror-laws-1228149.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7888301.stm
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/feb/12/photographers-anti-terror-laws

I've also experienced this first hand - I was taking a photograph, when suddenly an undercover policeman revealed himself to me, telling me I wasn't allowed to take photos without someone's permission, and demanding I delete the photo.

The London police have always been running a scaremongering advertising campaign against photographers:

http://www.boingboing.net/2008/03/04/london-cops-declare.html

There are valid concerns with top secret items and the gov't not wanting you to take pictures of them.

Ir's not top secret if it's in public, and you're only taking a photo of what people can see in public with their own eyes! According to your original post, even material that can only be visible from the air is fair game.

Moreover, even if your argument is true, then you've still lost, as it means that your original assertion of "There is no expectation of privacy when you leave the protection of a building" isn't true in the first place. So which is it? Or are you conceding my point that buildings have more rights to privacy in public than people do? (Although note, my links do not just refer to buildings - people have been hassled for taking photos of police officers.)

For example if the gov't came out with a new plane that had some new, awesome and secret technology it makes sense they don't want you taking a picture of it.

Who cares what they want? I don't want to have a plane or CCTV taking photos of me all the time. But according to you, there's no expectation of privacy in a public place, when I want it or not. So if the Government wheels its so-called "secret" plane into public, then what it wants is irrelevant.

I would like to point out that the BBC, Boingboing, South Africa's Mail & Guardian, the UK's Daily Mirror, the bloody Katmandu, Nepal based Republica, and 632 news sources managed to report the announcement of Google Chrome OS before it was a glimmer in Slashdot's eye.

A very poor show for Slashdot, which is supposed to be news for nerds, stuff that matters.

http://www.geocities.jp/takascience/lego/fabs_en.html
http://www.boingboing.net/2009/04/20/howo-make-a-300-high.html

You will have to be good enough that fans will send you money or buy something physical such as a book from you.

I've had no problems getting older iPods to work with gtkpod, but 6G and have cryptographic hashes that still haven't been reverse-engineered yet.

This is the same Cory Doctorow that was never willing to respect the Amazon boycott, right? As I remember it he was sticking Amazon affiliate links all over his site, long after slashdot had switched to bn.com.

And he's still doing it, isn't he?

Funny, he sounds like someone with a clue:

That danger is that a couple of corporate giants will end up with a buyer's market for creative works, control over the dominant distribution channel, and the ability to dictate the terms on which creative works are made, distributed, appreciated, bought, and sold.

Would mod you insightful if I had points. Instead I provide the link to the article you quote
FTA:

I'm sending [Google Book Search] my fruit-basket today. How about you?

I think you're full of shit.

They did not provide a reference to this "component of the city's background check policy" anywhere. There's nothing here to say a password is required.

Also, for future reference:

Comment 99 from http://www.boingboing.net/2009/06/17/city-in-montana-requ.html#comments

Actual Waiver form including the request for username and passwords:
http://www.bozeman.net/bozeman/humanResource/forms/Background_Check_Form_Interview_MASTER.pdf

other (funnier) examples of global clashing with local:

http://boingboing.net/2008/07/15/chinese-restaurant-c.html

http://www.snopes.com/rumors/bert.asp

Sadly, education has yet to follow this trend. Computer Science and Computer Engineering classes have yet to implement significant group collaboration. And while the hack tenet of "something that has been done once shouldn't be done again" was a conceived by some bright students, educators still give identical tedious projects that have the students complete in isolated groups, many times of consisting by just. There has even been an instance of a student being threatened to fail a class because he posted the source code of his project. How can we expect future developers to collaborate when their education forces a way to work that is very alien to the open culture and resembles that of a proprietary company
Why hasn't the scientific community produced open textbooks, free to re-print, photocopy and distribute (a la Creative Commons license)
Why is it hard for pioneering ideas like that of the state of California trying to open their school textbooks to be implemented?

Why would Apple sue over this? On what grounds? There's no copy protection being circumvented, no cryptography being broken, it's a plaintext response. Also remember when that when Apple suggested legal trouble for Palm, Palm suggested that they wouldn't hesitate to strike back with their own patent portfolio. I can't see either party taking anything to court.

Why would Apple sue over this? On what grounds? There's no copy protection being circumvented, no cryptography being broken, it's a plaintext response. Also remember when that when Apple suggested legal trouble for Palm, Palm suggested that they wouldn't hesitate to strike back with their own patent portfolio. I can't see either party taking anything to court.

flamebait? That was the first thing I thought of when I read the headline.

http://www.boingboing.net/2005/09/14/gillettes-5blade-raz.html

The first core calculates close, the second even closer, ...

Clearly you don't know about this: http://boingboing.net/images/12cheney4xx.jpg

You can read wsj.com without a subscription. Instructions at boing.

"Are they in cahoots with the MPAA?"

Belmolis, there is at LEAST one blonde in your immediate family? And, you are having a blonde moment, right?

That top-secret ACTA treaty that Obama refuses to allow the public to see? Guess who DOES get to see it? http://www.boingboing.net/2009/03/14/partial-list-of-corp.html#previouspost

Basically, every inbred fool with a few million dollars worth of "Intellectual Property" is allowed input in this treaty, but the common man, and human rights activists seeing the same treaty would be bad for national security. Yes, all the inbreds are sleeping with each other.

Cory Doctorow is working his ass off to come out of obscurity.
http://www.boingboing.net/2006/02/14/why-publishing-shoul.html

It's a shame that he's turning into a loudmouthed pundit rather than an author I'd care to read.

I drove down the highway today and was stuck in traffic for a long while. There were lots of cars zipping in and out, but the main problem was a group of long-haul trucks taking up a mile of roadway. The amount of road we have is finite, so the addition of these large trucks is fine for a few, but once you start getting more than a handful of trucks on the road, all traffic is affect.

But Net Neutrality is a tough issue. Yes, clearly, as users we want as unfettered a line as possible. However, the ISP also needs to balance the needs of all the users against the needs of certain special users.

If it weren't for some users flooding the network with massive filesharing packets, this would all be a non-issue. Actually, for most users it still is since most users are not affected at all by bandwidth strangling.

http://www.boingboing.net/2008/06/05/entertainment-indust-1.html

Agreed, in the UK where photography in public is usually legal a man who did nothing more than take a photo was arrested under anti-terrorism laws. Even though they found nothing on his phone they held him for two days and seized his computer.

Congratulations, you just invented Facebook messages.

No. I am proposing basically the same system we already have, not a walled garden controlled by a single company who can unilaterally decide to censor your email traffic.

I cannot see it being feasible for the common user. And anyway, why would they bother?

I see it being totally feasible for everyone. The email client should have certain features, such as auto-adding people to your whitelist when you email them; that way, if two people send each other an email, they have already done all the work needed to make sure they can send each other email anytime. It would even be possible to put whitelist controls in an HTML "wrapper" around the actual email, and thus older email clients (such as Microsoft Outlook) that don't have the new whitelist features would still be usable with this, as long as the email server had the features.

As for why would they bother -- getting all their email, without any spam. I guess that is a benefit of Facebook messages as well, but this solution scales to the entire Internet. I could see the US military rolling out signed email and whitelists, and I can't see them switching to Facebook messages. (The US military has a great setup for whitelists; any email not sent from a US military server is probably not critical for most of their users. Private Jones in the Army motor pool isn't fixing cars for anyone outside the Army.)

there are significant social and technical barriers to what you are suggesting.

I think the technical problems are pretty easily solved. The social ones, we'll see. If we could get the vast majority of users on a system like this, where they never even see any spam, I dare to dream that spam may become unprofitable and the amount of spam in the Internet will drop below 95% of all email.

I am not sure how much signing e-mails would actually help if spam is already sent by botnets via random people's computers

Few of my friends are clueless enough to let their computers get 0wned without their knowledge. If one runs afoul of a worm and doesn't realize it right away, our clue will be when I start getting spam with my friend's identity on it; we will instantly know that his computer is 0wned, and if my friend doesn't instantly fix the problem, I can immediately block his email address from my whitelist (say, for 15 days, so I don't have to remember to turn it back on).

the botnet could easily just collect a bunch of keys and contact lists (so it would know who would accept e-mails signed with that key).

This level of effort is unlikely for the spammers. The reason spam works is economy of scale; they need to send out hundreds of thousands of emails at a time in order to find a few people gullible enough to believe that a product sold by spam might be worth buying.

Even if the spammers write really clever worms that work as you describe, this is still not as good for them as the current situation, where an 0wned computer can spray spam to any address on the Internet, tens of thousands of messages at a time.

steveha

Two things to think about:

1) Do you have evidence that the pirate copies make you/any other author lose money? People looking for free books might not be willing to pay even one dollar for a legitimate copy so they won't be your customers in any case. But if you can really prove that you are losing money, go ahead and try your best to take down all those pirate sites.

2) Do you have evidence that the pirate copies are not actually boosting your/any other author sales? Cory Doctorow wrote "my biggest threat as an author isn't piracy, it's obscurity" in Why Publishing Should Send Fruit-Baskets to Google, Feb 14, 2006. If you eventually end up thinking like him, start distributing your book for free and encourage everybody to copy and copy it. He does so.

If you don't have evidence of either losing or gaining money thanks to piracy, well... what's the rationale behind your reaction?

More likely, that was just the closest thing to a plausible charge that they had laying around to hit the guy with.

By all accounts, this bank, along with the president and some of his buddies, is Very Bad News. Corruption, money laundering, assasination, real banana republic and/or major western democracy stuff. A noted lawyer was assasinated a couple of days ago and left a youtube message just before that happened(in link) discussing the matter.

This isn't because some dumb jobsworth actually thinks that the guy is inciting panic.

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/05/04/art-student-creates.html

Because using the cloud has never screwed anyone

First off, the events they're talking about in the NY Times article actually came to a head in September 2007. It looks like a reporter dusted off some old notes simply because the Kindle is starting to get a lot of press, so it seems relevant now. The article doesn't really depict clearly what the controversy was about.

There's a guy named Andrew Burt, who has published a little science fiction, and had gotten elected to a middle-level position in the Science Fiction Writers of America. He noticed that scribd.com had a whole bunch of copyright-violating scans of books. He did an automated search of scribd's catalog, and based on that search, and without much consultation with anyone, he sent scribd a slew of what appeared to be DMCA takedown notices. The trouble was that he wasn't very careful, and, e.g., he got them to delete some fiction by Cory Doctorow, who actually wanted it on scribd as a form of publicity. IIRC, DMCA takedown notices are also supposed to be sent by copyright owners, and signed under penalty of perjury, but Burt's notices were sent without consulting the copyright holders, and were factually inaccurate in many cases; I think he ended up claiming that they weren't DMCA notices, but scribd apparently thought they were. Doctorow got very angry, and publicized his anger on his web site boingboing. Doctorow also published a very short piece by Ursula LeGuin on boingboing, without her permission, which made her furious. Burt ran for president of SFWA after this, and lost. The whole thing exposed a generational divide between older and younger SF authors. The older ones typically were suspicious of the internet, and saw it as a threat. The younger ones typically saw it as a way to publicize themselves. An old-timer named Howard Hendrix compared authors who gave their work away online for free to scabs, resulting in an ironic response called International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day. Here are some representative opinions on the whole thing:

1. http://www.aburt.com/sfwa-cc.ht
2. http://www.boingboing.net/2007/08/30/science-fiction-writ-1.html
3. http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/11/sfwa_attempts_to_commit_public.html

So first off, this isn't really a controversy about whether copyright should exist. The positions of all the different parties are quite similar on that issue. Scribd, Burt, Doctorow, LeGuin, and Hendrix are all pretty much in agreement that it's a bad thing to violate authors' copyrights. What they disagree on is mainly whether the internet presents more of a threat, or more of an opportunity.

Another thing to understand about this is that scribd is just a tool, in the same way that bittorrent is just a tool. I've posted some of my own nonfiction on scribd, simply on the theory that publicizing my work is always a good thing. However, just as The Pirate Bay has an extremely heavy presence of pointers to copyright-violating torrents, scribd also has a huge amount of copyright-violating stuff. Maybe the percentage is lower, but it's still a huge presence there. It's the classic situation where the web site is willing to devote x amount of effort to policing itself, but various people would like them to devote 10x (similar to Craigslist and prostitution).

He has a point. You're guilty of using your assumptions to "prove" the validity of your assumptions.

You cannot use the bible's claim that it is true as proof that the bible is true. Prove that I am not God. I hereby claim to be. Prove I'm not. Unlike YOUR god, I exist. You have proof of it in this thread. You have my claim that I am. That's as good (or as flawed) as the bible's claim that it speaks for God. Or apply Pascals' Wager ... if I'm not God, and you believe I am, you haven't lost anything ... but if I AM God, and you're wrong ... eternal damnation!

And finally... is the statement "a man may not sleep with another man" hating gays? How about "a man who sleeps with another man commits a sin"? How about "a man who sleeps with a women outside of marriage commits a sin?" Do Christians now hate both gays and straights? Calling a sin a sin is not hatred, regardless of what you want to think.

Labeling someone a sinner is inflammatory. Using the bible to justify it is just stupid, unless you have SOME proof that the bible is authoritative. What are the "wages of sin?" Come on, you know the answer - "The wages of sin is death." So, by calling gays sinners, you're saying that what they are doing is worthy of death. The bible even says that they should be stoned to death. Well, maybe I should write my own bible that says christians should be stoned to death for being nosy busybodies and gossips, pandering to ignorance, and failing to prove any of their assertions. After all, who's to say that MY version is any less authoritative than yours? After all, I'm God (prove otherwise).

I don't buy your gay-bashing. They are not "sinning" when they get it on with each other, despite what you choose to believe. It's entirely natural for them, same as other mammals. Or have you never had a dog hump your leg? Like I said, show some OBJECTIVE proof that god exists, some OBJECTIVE proof that what they do is "sinning", or admit that it's just your opinion based on a book you have chosen to believe without any proof. The problem is in your eye. Your perception. Feel free to contradict me by proving I'm not God, and proving that YOUR god exists.

Also:

How about "a man who sleeps with a women outside of marriage commits a sin?"

There's nothing wrong with two people deciding to set up house without going through a marriage ceremony. If it offends your sensitivities, that's your problem - you have no right to tell others who they should and should not have sex with, and no right to say one form is right but another form is a sin. Gays and lesbians don't pass judgment on what christians do with each other in the privacy of their bedrooms - christians should learn the same respect. God hates 2 weights, 2 measures - one for straight people, and one for the GLBTs. I declare that it's okay - prove that I am wrong by either proving that I am not God, or that your god exists. While you're at it, prove that Jesus is not the son of the Flying Spaghetti Monster - there's some serious coin - a million bucks - to be had if you do. Come on, think of all the good things you could do in Jesus' name with a million bucks.

Here's another one for you - since Eve was supposedly created from Adam's rib, wasn't she a clone? And if she was a clone, wasn't she really a guy? Or, if "god" tweaked that y chromosome into an x, wasn't that his genetic sister? So, Adam and Eve were in an incestuous relationship, as were their children (after all, there was nobody else around to "marry"). Sounds like a bunch of inbred hillbillies to me (cue "Dueling Banjos" and "Squeal like a Pig" from "Deliverance"). Would explain a few things ...

And what's up with all the polygamy?

iTunes has some songs tagged as adult content; I'm sure Spiral qualifies. On the other hand, the app store doesn't which explains this "paradox" up to first-order.

The obvious question is why the app store doesn't have an adult content section. The answer is pure politics; just calling something "adult software" (or even admitting you stock such things) has a stink of "low-art" about it: crude S&M games or masturbatory aids. On the other hand, "adult content" in music typically just means that you maybe don't want a 12 year old listening to it. Your adult friends typically wouldn't hide their NIN, but they'd hide their copy of rapelay.

And, an accurate label like "non-adult software containing/accessing music which would be labeled `adult content'" is too risky for Apple to feed its users, who might well just read it as "adult software". Sad but true: 90% would, left alone, ignore it; 5% would be in the niche; and (of course) 5% would raise holy hell about how Apple is going to start selling porn-games and rile up the 90%. It's more un-Apple than putting EQ levers or a microphone on an iPod; just icky and won't happen.

Good thing. Zack may already be on its way...

http://boingboing.net/2009/04/08/gentleman-in-new-orl.html

Some doc posted some information on Boing Boing, they don't believe that swine flu is causing Cytokine Storms.

Info here

I think we'll be safe from an Aporkalypse.

Everybody knows that democracy is 3 wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner, but I'm surprised at how inept the discussion has been so far. Here's a good example at how a democratic system can be subverted, and there's not much you can do about dedicated opponents in similar cases. But it has little to do with the internet.

Verizon's switching to GSM and CDMA is dying, so I kinda doubt Apple would waste any time on a CDMA iPhone at this point.

In addition, virtually everyone who wants a computer has one already--meaning that each additional computer bought for a random person has diminishing marginal utility. Take a look at this post regarding computers per capita, and you'll notice that the U.S. is approaching 1:1. And if you don't have a computer by now, you probably won't make much use of one.

Apple does NOT use "proprietary formats" for its iPod, that's just FUD spread around by people who never even tried one.

New iPods reengineered to block synching with Linux (2007), although I think this has been mostly (ipod touch / iphone require jailbreaking?) fixed.

Good luck with that, with today's portable media players being 1~160GB+ capacity it would be practically insane to manage files by hand. Let go of this useless obsession and learn to use metadata on your files. You'll probably even like smart playlists once you start using them.

What about how itunes won't run on linux?

My bank has a record of every purchase I make, my doctor has my medical history, and my ISP knows what web sites I visit, but I'm not worried. So why do I care if the federal government has that information? Because I don't trust them, and for good reason. The Patriot Act was supposed to protect us from terrorists, but as soon as it was enacted the government used it to enforce copyright violations, kick homeless people out of a train station, and investigate drug dealers. Demonstrate some integrity and you'll earn people's trust.

To be more specific, this Shinkansen.

Lawyers are not required by law to take cases except possibly as public defenders. You're right that we shouldn't paint lawyers who defend people with the same brush as their clients. However, when the client in question is filing the charges, when their lawyers are knowingly (or unknowingly and completely incompetently) introducing illegally-obtained evidence, etc., then yes, we should paint the lawyers with the same brush.

There's no grey area here. You either have a sense of morality or you don't. If you choose to represent somebody in suing a 66-year-old grandmother, an 83-year-old dead person, and a 12-year-old girl for tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, then you have the morals of a jellyfish.

We're not talking about going after commercial music piracy---one corporation suing another corporation (or nearly so). We're talking about companies that maliciously use laws intended to prosecute commercial piracy against ordinary people, that frequently sue completely uninvolved people, that have gross disregard for the legal process, etc. The lawyers themselves either hired unlicensed investigators (in which case the lawyers behaved illegally) or accepted evidence from them without looking into the background of the investigators (in which case the lawyers are completely inept). Either way, introducing such evidence should be grounds for disbarment in and of itself, but instead of throwing these dirtbags out on the streets where they belong, Obama is hiring these leaches on society as the highest lawyers in our land....

There's a point at which someone shows such reckless disregard for the law, for right and wrong, and for humanity in general that we can no longer give them the benefit of the doubt. RIAA lawyers crossed that line many, many years ago and have been sinking progressively farther below that line with every passing day.... I'm appalled that Obama would choose people like this to head the DOJ. You cannot hire people who knowingly violate the law to win cases as our nation's highest lawyers. That's like hiring Hitler to head up the anti-defamation league. It just doesn't make sense, and it is this very sort of practice that causes sleazebags like Ted Stevens to be let off the hook due to prosecutorial misconduct. Unless Obama wants the same crap as the last administration, he needs to seriously rethink his hiring strategy.