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Thank PETA. If you've ever been stupid enough to support PETA you need to understand they want to ban pet ownership. Yes Ban it. It's one of their top priorities.

PETA collects unwanted pets from owners and immediately kills them in the van they drove up in. This first came to light when someone found PETA illegally dumping lots of dead animals in someone's dumpster.

The Truth about PETA
PETA Trial Day 5: Deception and Tears
Shocking New Crime-Scene Photos
PETA's Shame
PETA Kills Pets | Seattle Dogspot

"This telecast is copyrighted by the NFL for the private use of our audience. Any other use of this telecast or of any pictures, descriptions, or accounts of the game without the NFL's consent, is prohibited."

"Any rebroadcast, retransmission, or account of this game, without the express written consent of Major League Baseball, is prohibited,"

See also

http://techdirt.com/articles/20090904/0304256103.shtml

http://www.thisistrue.com/blog-the_nfls_copyright_round_two.html

"I remember that story a few weeks ago... Someone found a shotgun in their back garden (this is the UK) and called the local police station to tell them he is bringing it in. Well anyway long story short because it was loaded and the box also had ammo he ended up getting a minimum of I believe three years."

You should read: http://www.thisistrue.com/blog-paul_clarke_and_british_zero_tolerance.html

As Randy says, that "Someone" was an idiot.

Huh? The Yahoo yahoo submitted his address requesting the newsletter, replied to a confirmation email with "Yes, I want your newsletter", then complained about the newsletter he twice requested. Yet you think it's spam because he carries advertising?

Well, you are certainly overdue to enroll in Spam 101. Don't wait. Trust me, ignorance is never bliss.

A friend of mine (Randy Cassingham of This Is True ) is a HAM radio operator and he's helped provide communications for emergency responders during disasters near where he lives in Colorado. When the chips are down, it seems that radio hobbyists are ready, willing, and able to help out. It's nice to see that they're getting some positive press.

Hopefully much of this thread will be kudos for Ham radio operators around the world. A lot of them use their powers for good more often than you might think.

- Greg

A friend of mine (Randy Cassingham of This Is True ) is a HAM radio operator and he's helped provide communications for emergency responders during disasters near where he lives in Colorado. When the chips are down, it seems that radio hobbyists are ready, willing, and able to help out. It's nice to see that they're getting some positive press.

Hopefully much of this thread will be kudos for Ham radio operators around the world. A lot of them use their powers for good more often than you might think.

- Greg

What gives them the legal right to control access to live or recorded broadcasts of text accounts of games?

The fact that they are running the games. Do you think that everyone should have the right to go to a play and set up a camera with a live feed out to the world?

Re-read what I wrote: "text accounts". That's not analogous to everyone having the right to go to a play and set up a camera with a live feed because it doesn't require being present and it's not an exact representation of what's happening, it's a translation through the filter of the writer. That being said, I think it would be great if anybody could go to a play and set up a camera with a live feed out to the world.

The courts have already ruled otherwise. It's contract law.

When I watch a game on TV, or from my apartment next to the playing field, I haven't signed any contracts with the NCAA. Their contract with their TV provider or their official paid blogger doesn't bind me.

or on your blog.

That's called "public dissemination", and the copyright statement prohibits it.

The copyright statement claims to prohibit it, but it does not have the legal power to do so. Facts can be extracted from a copyrighted work and rephrased to form a new copyrighted work that is not a derivative of the first, at least according to this guy, who makes a convincing argument (scroll down to "Another Example").

Furthermore, the TV broadcast is a copyrighted work, but a live event is not a copyrighted work. As I mentioned in another post, the NCAA and other sporting organizations have leveraged their right to kick people out of their live events to gain copyrights to various copyrightable accounts of the game, but that doesn't prohibit anybody else from creating new copyrightable accounts of the game (such as a blog post, a newspaper article or a book). If the NFL didn't contractually require the copyright to TV coverage of a game, that TV coverage would be copyrighted by whatever TV network produced it.

Actually, it was Woz who called the Pope. (Full story in his book, iWoz, but cited in many online articles as well, http://www.thisistrue.com/woz.html)

The True Stella Awards (the site you linked to) is an e-mail newsletter run by one person, the same guy who does This is True. It isn't the originator of the term, and the site has always had that page up since launch. I'm not exactly sure what backpedalling has supposed to have taken place here. If you wish to criticise the True Stella Awards, why not discuss one of the cases featured in the newsletter itself?

It has been renamed "This is True" and can be found at http://www.thisistrue.com/

I like how the only thing that's even remotely relevant today is that Nethack is still around and still entertaining.

• This Just In. Every week, Randy Cassingham rounds up the strangest news events he can find...

• alt.fan.cecil-adams. Cecil Adams is an acerbic and funny know-it-all, and author of The Straight Dope....

Of course, I also still use pine (listed somewhere under Best workarounds for non-SLIP users) so what do I know?

Right. Because there are no small ISPs, no mailing list owners, nobody else that could have a small number of employees, but a large number of email recipients.

Apparently you seem to think that you need an employee for every 10 emails that pass through your system on a regular basis. Perhaps you should go and tell Randy Cassingham that he needs to hire another 12,000 employees to help send to the subscribers on his mailing lists.

slightly offtopic...

What does work is allowing conceiled carry of firearms; you get people who are sane enough to know they're going to die right there, people who are insane but really REALLY want to actually kill you and not die right there, and people who just don't care and usually (but unfortunately not always) get themselves killed trying. A couple years ago when a few communities in the US relaxed CC laws they had rapes and assults go down by 5-10%, and accidental shootings go up by ~1 per year; but most significantly, public shootings (school shootings fall into this category--I hate school shootings, teachers should all be armed so somebody can shoot these assholes back before the death toll gets too high) went up by 68%. It's true.

There's all sorts of factors about shooting someone in an armed society. If you're in public, you're going to have a large number of guns trained on you really fast. If you're in your house in the middle of the night, any neighbors waking up will be to some degree likely to get their guns and come over to see what's up -- either someone just walked into your house and shot you, or you shot someone, and I want to make sure the situation is stable so I don't have some nut running around killing people (me next?) in my neighborhood.

Perhaps the nicest thing about increased CC is that the death sentence becomes much more effective. For any given murder you have an improved chance that the person committing the crime is already dead; you don't have to investigate, you don't have to try to find a faceless jackass, and--most importantly of all--you don't have to risk executing an innocent person. You also don't have to risk NOT finding them and having a dangerous criminal on the loose.

The other side of this is that people carrying guns are people carrying guns. They're quite useless; you can point and shoot easy enough but you have to be properly conditioned to function under stress at the very least. Being trained to aim the gun and use it effectively is also helpful. Most people will duck and hide when threatened; they need to be taught to be alert and to have the balls to actually defend themselves. Having it does not imply knowing how to use it.

Does that really makes a difference? Is dell support for windows so great to start with? (you cannot get support from ms, you got to get it from dell!)

As for the money: paying MS or not paying MS(licnesefree os). What would be more profit?

Dell has become a poster child for crappy customer service. Do AMD fans want Dell dragging AMD's good name down with them? I'd prefer that Dell self-destruct on their own without pulling AMD into their vortex of suckage.

- Greg

This was the Bonzer Website from TRUE on October 30. Good to see /. keeping up with the Jonses (or Cassinghams, as the case would be).

Despite Saaya Rie?! Oh man ...

In some places it may a matter of democracy, but in all the bad stories I've read there appears to be no democracy to the organizations. Somehow, someway, they ended up becoming little fiefdoms for those in charge.

The author of the THIS IS TRUE ( http://www.thisistrue.com/ ) newsletter made these great takeoff of the Monopoly Get Out of Jail cards, called GET OUT OF HELL FREE cards. You can see them here: http://www.goohf.com/

I do hope that less than 1/3 of the population uses marijuana, as it's illegal.

Yes, because everyone who has half a brain and can think critically knows how dangerous marijuana can be, and that the government would never make illegal something that wasn't dangerous. They're fully acquainted with what should be illegal and what shouldn't.

Is it me, or is HTML like the PERFECT language of sarcasm?? :)

A friend passed along a url to me the other day about the ACLU. I strongly suggest people read it, not only to perhaps dispel a few preconceived notions, but to read the replies the author got and reflect.

There seems to be a portion of the citizenry that cannot seem to abstract their own beliefs (and belief systems) from reality. There also appears to be a distinct willful decision not comprehend separation of church and state. Individuals have the choice to restrict (or not) themselves, government does not have the choice to restrict or advocate. Why do I bring this point up? many of the "please think of the children" are running on their own religious views about sex, and sexual content, and are pushing their agenda unto to the government, pushing the govt into a role is it not only ill suited for, but has no place in. Let us examine a hypothetical, if used in a similar manner, laws could be passed to shut down any non-kosher restaurants and stores. Clearly no one pushes this because the govt has no role enforcing a set of religious beliefs or edicts, regardless the rhetoric they are couched in.

This of course puts the onus on the parents to handle the situation, and that is where the responsibility lies.

The proper thing to do is to send these emails to 419.fcd@usss.treas.gov if you're in the United States. This is my source, courtesy of Randy Cassingham, author of This Is True".

... who buys one of these getting in an accident, bending a door slightly. Ten minutes later they drive into the river without thinking and sink their car. Then if it's in the US, they sue the manufacturer for not telling them they couldn't do it. The company, of course, never thought someone would be that stupid so they are forced to notify everyone in the future.

Then the whole story gets on This is True and I get to laugh at them.

...The police are definitely not there to serve the people.

True. In fact, it might surprise some people, but there have been actual court cases where the courts said police have absolutely no legal obligaiton to respond to calls for help. The following is taken from http://www.thisistrue.com/guns.html

...Warren v. District of Columbia is one of the leading cases of this type. Two women were upstairs in a townhouse when they heard their roommate, a third woman, being attacked downstairs by intruders. They phoned the police several times and were assured that officers were on the way. After about 30 minutes, when their roommate's screams had stopped, they assumed the police had finally arrived. When the two women went downstairs they saw that in fact the police never came, but the intruders were still there. As the Warren court graphically states in the opinion: "For the next fourteen hours the women were held captive, raped, robbed, beaten, forced to commit sexual acts upon each other, and made to submit to the sexual demands of their attackers." The three women sued the District of Columbia for failing to protect them, but D.C.'s highest court exonerated the District and its police, saying that it is a "fundamental principle of American law that a government and its agents are under no general duty to provide public services, such as police protection, to any individual citizen..."

Face facts, you're on your own.

Yup, but also keep in mind that The Fable of the Keys is not without its own problems.

Link 1 Link 2

Please keep in mind I'm being blatantly lazy; those were just a couple of the links that popped up on Google, not necessarily the best ones. This debate just goes on and on and I don't care to get involved again. I just wanted to point out that that article isn't the last word on the subject.

The bottom line is that there's no reliable studies for or against Dvorak. It would be good if someone did one to help put the debate to rest, but no one has as of yet. I use it, I like it, but that's just my personal opinion.

Uhh, I did more than google it. I tried it for myself. And I can definately say that I never knew how much qwerty sucked until I got proficient at Dvorak (it took a weekend to get by and a couple of weeks to get good). As for the googling, I assume that you are referring to the study by Stan Liebowitz and Stephen Margolis. If you google enough you'll find this rebuttal

Actually, the idea that the idea that qwerty is slower then dovrak is a myth is a myth.

It was written by a bunch of free-market zealot economists who refused to believe the market could make 'mistakes'. Their only evidence was that the original study wasn't adequate. They certainly didn't disprove the advantage.

When I first heard, they were well above 10000, but at the rate things are going it could take a few years - and with the trouble that America Online is reportedly in, they regretfully may not get the opportunity to bring in the sheaves, as it were.

It's funny you mention The Lord's Prayer, because someone has actually created a shorter-than-160 chars SMS version, here it is:

dad@hvn, urspshl. we want wot u want &urth2b like hvn. giv us food &4giv r sins lyk we 4giv uvaz. don't test us! save us! bcos we kno ur boss ur tuf &ur cool 4 eva! ok?

Add that to your list and imagine the future scholars who will read it and study it. It does capture the essence of the Lord's Prayer, the same as the others.

I read about this in a newsletter I get, here's a page about it. He also makes a good point about how we shouldn't have to change our behavior for machines, it should be the other way around.

JetScootr, if you're going to post here, you should have at least a tiny clue of what you're talking about.

1) "This is True"'s distribution list has NEVER been hosted at Yahoo/YahooGroups.

2) Yahoo/YahooGroups has NEVER spammed TRUE's distribution list.

3) TRUE has been hosted at Lyris.net for quite a few years now; there has NEVER been spam sent through the list via that service, nor has there EVER been a virus that has gone to the distribution. I take list security VERY seriously, and am fairly outraged that you would post here implications that it is not.

I did, in TRUE, discuss Yahoo's privacy policy. Here it is for you verbatim:

I'VE HAD A BIG SURGE OF "warnings" from readers centering around Yahoo,
who changed all their registered customers preferences to say "Yes",
that they WANTED all sorts of marketing mail, e-mail, and phone calls!
If you have a Yahoo mail account, or anything similar, you probably
should log in and change things to "no" unless you want such mail. If
you use a Yahoo "wallet" for online purchases, they may have associated
your information into these preferences, so you really CAN get more
paper junk mail! My address was indeed shown on MY "preferences", so I
changed it all to the way *I* wanted it. An article with more details:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/24683.html
. . .
THIS MIGHT MAKE YOU WONDER about TRUE's privacy policy. I've had one for
years, long before they got "trendy". The nutshell version is: we hate
spam and carefully protect your e-mail address from others. When you
order stuff from us and we get your snailmail address, we protect THAT,
too, even though we could make good money by selling it -- and that
policy has been in place since 1983. Why? It's quite simply the way *I*
want to be treated by the companies I do business with. The details are
at http://www.thisistrue.com/privacy.html

Next time you want to discuss my business practices, I'd appreciate your doing so accurately.

Randy Cassingham
Author and Publisher
This is True

Schools are not laws.

I'm not quite sure what you mean here. Parents are required by law to send their children to school. (Home-schooling is the exception, and the National Educators' Association is trying to get it outlawed.) School boards pass "regulations" under which teachers are required to report certain offenses to the police. The police are required by law to investigate the complaints. Seems like "law" to me.

But in any case, here's your non-school example:

Detrick Washington, 25, was at his business partner's San Francisco, Calif., home office when two men forced their way in ... "I'll go and kill the kids and that girl if you don't give me the rest of the money," one of the robbers said. While they ransacked the home, Washington saw his chance: one robber put his gun down, and Washington grabbed it ... "He took a chance. I believe we could call him a hero," police Inspector Armand Gordon said. Washington "basically saved five people's lives, including his own" by grabbing the gun. Police ruled the shooting justified, yet Washington is in jail: he is on parole from a previous drug conviction, and parole rules say parolees cannot "possess" a firearm. Because Washington grabbed the robber's gun, he was in "possession" of the weapon and violated his parole.

Laws are supposed to be specific in order to restrict police activity, not to require it.

There will always be the few extrordinary circumstances <snip inflammatory example> which is why the judicial system exists. Not to interpret.

What do you think "judge" means? It is to exercise judgement. Opinions like yours are why:

• 14-year-olds are suspended from school for taking a knife away from a suicidal classmate -- "He was in posession of it."
• 10-year-old girls are suspended for sexual harassment for asking boys on the playground, "Do you like me?"
• 6-year-olds are suspended from school for giving a friend a lemon drop -- "It looked like a drug!"

The courts are the last check against the enforcement of bad laws. (This should be the place of a jury, but appeals courts have taken the activity on for themselves.)

There will always be the few extrordinary circumstances <snip inflammatory example> which is why the judicial system exists. Not to interpret.

What do you think "judge" means? It is to exercise judgement. Opinions like yours are why:

• 14-year-olds are suspended from school for taking a knife away from a suicidal classmate -- "He was in posession of it."
• 10-year-old girls are suspended for sexual harassment for asking boys on the playground, "Do you like me?"
• 6-year-olds are suspended from school for giving a friend a lemon drop -- "It looked like a drug!"

The courts are the last check against the enforcement of bad laws. (This should be the place of a jury, but appeals courts have taken the activity on for themselves.)

Or an in-browser app that automatically Google-linked everything in a page? Like M$'s proposed auto-linking, but populist. True hypertext.

Good luck! Don't count on feeling lucky d;-)

A bunch of religious- and political- minded terrorists, suddenly getting the idea to terrorize Comdex?? What the hell. Reminds me of a tag line from a recent This is True story:

The 21st Century Egotist: someone who thinks they're important enough to be a target.

Anyway, if they ban bags, does that mean I have to carry my anthrax spores, 7-inch locking blade knives, and explosives in a box? How inconvenient!

Speaking purely from the perspective of one who has had to deal with locked-down computers, I can say it is fairly obnoxious if one's work habits happen to differ from the One True Approved Way(tm) handed down from Those who Know Everything. Maybe I want to change my screen resolution (because my 17" really needs to be at least 1280x960, or maybe 1600x1200 is entirely too small on my 15", or whatever), maybe I want to change my keyboard layout (there are those who use other layouts), or maybe I want to install vim (which claims to work nicely with Visual Studio, although I haven't tried it), or maybe I think that a bunch of ringwraiths on my desktop would be better than Approved Microsoft Blue. Maybe I want to install another browser instaed of the Officially Approved Browser. I don't want to have to run crying to the Approved Policy Makers every time I want to change something, and I can imagine that the Approved Policy Makers don't want me to, either. Restrictive policies may make it harder to install unlicenced or illegal software (and I can't imagine that exchanging instant messages for eight hours constitutes useful work, although occassional use should be ok -- business phones get used for personal communication as well, but everyone has one on his or her desk anyway), but they will likely cause a larger support headache, as well as making it harder for your employees to work effectivally because they can't customize their work enviornment.

Here is a great page of zero-tolerance horror stories, courtesy of Randy Cassingham, editor of the This Is True email newsletter. Randy doesn't like Zero Tolerance much, either. (I passed on the links to the stories about the Canadian boy to him.)
--

My full rant on this ever-growing trend is available at http://www.thisistrue.com/zt.html -- It's must reading if you have school-aged kids, but don't read it if you're easily depressed....

But I quickly ran into a problem. The problem was keyboard shortcuts.

If you look at them they are chosen for the QWERTY keyboard.

This is for the mac but most of these are similar on windows.

Of course on DVORAK these keys are all over the place.

So if you wanted to make a "better" keyboard layout you would have to take this into account.

I thought I might make a custom keyboard taking this into account. Of course this would take a lot of effort. And I am not a programmer and that does not help

I'd be interested in hearing comments and personal experience stories about these three different input devices/methods:

1. Kinesis contoured keyboard ( www.kinesis-ergo.com)
2. BAT keyboard ( www.infogrip.com)
3. The DVORAK layout (info at www.thisistrue.com/dvorak.html)

I'm also doubtful of how tasteful it is to bring the book out on the anniversary...but on the other hand, if the book could do some good in getting the nonsensical "Zero Tolerance" policies of the world lifted, then perhaps it's a good thing that it gets wider publicity. Here's a good page discussing the problem.

A while ago, I had a sudden urge to change something hardware on my comp, and, since I didn't exactly have to money to buy a new K7, I decided to try a dvorak keyboard. After a half-hearted attempt to find one in local stores, I found out I could remove the keys on my keyboard. So, as a weekend-adventure, I laboriously plucked each key from my keyboard (with the help of a screw-driver), and put them back in according to a picture of a dvorak keyboard I had found. I then did a "loadkeys dvorak.kmap" and started out a tutorial I found on freshmeat. It works great. The only real side-effect: a somewhat "hilly" keyboard. At least on my (cheap) keyboard, the keys in each successive row are tilted a little bit more. It looks a tad odd when rearranged, though I, truthfully, can't tell the difference while typing. Also, the transition isn't all that hard if you can touch-type, as long as you never have to look at your keys. I can't really comment on increased speed, as I have not even finished the tutorial yet. Still, it's quite fun to see the expression on your friends' faces when they try to use your comp. ;)

Auknight Colather
-----------------
"Go placidly amid the noise and haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. As far as possible without surrender be on good terms with all persons. Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even the dull and ignorant; they too have their story." --quote from Desiderata

There's another rebuttal of this article here

As an Australian, I'm going to do with this bill what the Europeans do with stupid EU legislation. I'm going to ignore it.

After a few test cases it will be thrown out, it's completely unworkable.

There was a wonderful story in this week's " This is True" about New Zealand censors being required to view all the scenes in computer games to rate them, but simply not having enough time (12 hours of video, 100 hours gameplay - it's not like watching a 90 minute movie).

Kris.

Win a Rio (or join the SETI Club via same link)