Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Disputes, Clones, Audio
Needed: One referee. Quixotic1 writes "A small company I work for has discovered that a domain name has been registered with their U.S.-trademarked (since 1980) name. Requests to the owner of the site (a U.S. citizen) have gone unanswered, so we're now moving on to filing an ICANN dispute. There was a query last week about inexpensive alternatives to the $1000+ UDRP arbiters. The discussion ended up revolving around whether the author had a valid claim or not, but I'd still like to know -- are there inexpensive alternatives?"
I bet there's money to be made if someone can come up with cheaper means of settling such disputes.
Store in the ammunition box. leonbrooks writes "Recently, images from a presentation by Microsoft Belgium were published on the web. The presentation made some startling (for Microsoft) concessions to Open Source, then set about FUDding the GPL into the ground. I whacked together a point-by-point answer to the anti-GPL FUD. Happy linking ..."
Tithe 10 percent. Luke Francl writes "Inspired by Lawrence Lessig's OSCON remarks, Lessig's Challenge is a way for people concerned by the attempts by the entertainment industry to close off the net to fight back. The challenge is to spend more on those who fight for the open network than you do on its enemies. Since it appeared on Slashdot last month, 10 people have joined me and we've raised over $2300 for good causes (organizations like the EFF, the ACLU, the FSF, along with free software/open source programmers and online artists). And that's just the ones I know about! Cory Doctorow wrote to tell me that many people were inspired by the challenge to join the EFF. ... Check out the list of suggested recipients."
Like obsidian, and coal, and dirt ... salimfadhley writes "Today BBC Radio 4 began serialising Phillip Pullman's popular "Dark Materials" trilogy. The beeb will be broadcasting one episode per week, with a RA stream of the latest episode that can be found on the promotional site. You can find "The Golden Compass" (called "Northern Lights" in Europe) on the website now. This stream will be replaced with episode 2 next Saturday.
The Dark Materials series was originally intended as children's fiction, however owing to excellent storytelling and a significantly darker theme than Harry Potter, has done rather well in U.S. and UK adult market.
The central premise of the series is that God is evil, a celestial impostor who pretends to have created the universe and who so intensely hates flesh and blood that he wants people to live a repressed, joyless existence. Unsurprisingly this theme has upset fundamentalist Christians."
Unfamiliar? Read the Slashdot review of the trilogy.
The clones I meet are mostly in pairs. PizzaFace writes "The Washington Post reports that the Raelian clone claim echoes a hoax of 25 years ago. And while we have better technology now for testing the claim quickly, there is still room for deception, and some people don't trust the science (and pseudoscience) reporter the Raelians appointed to test their claim."
The premise of the Dark Materials triology sounds a LOT like the root of the Gnostic Heresey (where new age "gnosticism" comes from, actually.)
In the early days of Christianity, there were three major sects--the Christians, the Jews, and the Gnostics. The Jews were, well, jewish folk who lived as jews but thought that Jesus was the Messiah (sorta like "Jews for Jesus.") The Christians were the to-the-lions folks we all know and love, and the Gnostics--well, the gnostics are why the strong central church formed, and why the Inquisition was so harsh.
The Gnostic Heresy, as I understand it:
There was a God, and Jesus Christ was his living son--but God_the_Creator is not God-the-burning-bush-that-spoke-to-moses. Sometime after creation, a spirit called the Demiurge usurped control over creation, lied to the jews, and pretty much acted the way Christians might imagine "Satan" acting.
The Demiurge created flesh, and so flesh is flawed, and all of humanity is doomed to damnation, save for the accidental banishment from heaven of the goddess/archangel Sophia, who apparantly had no small part in Jesus Christ showing up and mascarading as a person for so many years.
The Gnosic Heresy, btw, was propagated by a series of "revelations" about the faith, sort of like the popular image of how a witch's coven is organized. It was stamped out rather freverently in the early days of Christianity, and hasn't been a going concern as a religion for a great many years.
I'm not sure what frustrates me more: the fact that the media has been hyping the Raelians' claim of a human clone without any evidence whatsoever, or the fact that the media even seems to realize that they're being silly reporting this BUT DO IT ANYHOW! If the media had any self-respect, they would have learned from the previous hoax and not be covering this new Raelian claim so much. However, they seem perfectly content to give this UFO cult a world stage to prance around on. It's almost as though the media is a semi-willing participant in this (what I assume will be a) clone fraud. Oh sure, they claim they're just reporting "important news". But let's face it: it's really just a bunch of UFO nuts who have made an incredible claim without any evidence whatsoever. This is news? I think the media is just happy to cover this because they know they can milk this for awhile regardless of whether the story is true or not. So sad that our media is willing to whore themselves like this just to entertain the masses.
GMD
watch this
I find it said that increasingly stories labelled as "news" are obviously editorialized descriptions of recent events. Take for a few quotes from the article about the Dark Materials triology:
and
How can this kind of stuff even pretend to be "news"? Is it just because the story is talking about Christians that it gets away with this kind of writing around here?
Forget the whales - save the babies.
> Neither of your suggestions work.
Sure they do.
> "Recursive" would mean that the GPL is explained in terms of the GPL.
"Recursive" has uses other than recursive definitions. In this case "recursive" describes the operation of the GPL. The base cases are software that is written from scratch but placed under the GPL anyway.
(OK, now that I think on it perhaps I should say "inductive" rather than "recursive", because the GPL, like induction, starts at some base case and goes on forever from there, whereas recursion starts at some arbitrary point and works toward a base case. nit = picked)
> Transitivity is a property of relations as in: "if a is related to b and b is related to c then a is related to c". Since the GPL is not a relation it cannot be transitive.
No, the GPL isn't a relation, but the transitive property is in fact a property of GPL'd code (barring license violations). Substitute "derived from" for your "related to" in your example, and you'll see why. (Notice that "derived from" is a relation.)
More to the point, "viral" is not a property of GPL'd code -- at least not by virtue of being GPL'd.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
A small company I work for has discovered that a domain name has been registered with their U.S.-trademarked (since 1980) name. Requests to the owner of the site (a U.S. citizen) have gone unanswered, so we're now moving on to filing an ICANN dispute.
People like you worry me. You didn't say they had any kind of a web site, only that they registered the domain.
I hope you meant that "they had a web site up that might confuse our customers" or "we have a famous mark and they are diluting it" or something like that. Not just that your trademark is stored on some hard drive at the domain registrar database and you really would like it for yourself.
I have a couple domains with short non-word names that I registered many years ago. For a while I had a stupid "hello, here are links to my friends' home page" kind of thing, but decided I would just use them for email, which I do.
And I occasionally wonder if some low-life that wants the name is going sue me (or even worst, arbitrate me) just because he wants the domain, and not because I'm actually affecting his business. In court that would be easy to win, but in arbitration I would probably lose.
Heck, that low-life might be YOU (though I doubt it since my contact info is up-to-date and I haven't seen any messages about them).
Please, register your domain in .biz or something for now and don't sue this guy unless he is actually *infringing on your trademark* or he bought the domain *in bad faith*. I don't know how generic the term in question is, but if it's something generic like "ProComputers.com", I doubt it's bad faith.