Reality-check-trivia time: who holds the trademark for "Ron Paul" in the United States?
Answer: nobody right now, let alone the politician Ron Paul (source: US Patent & Trademark Office online trademark search system). The trademark argument doesn't apply here; and remember, Ron Paul has already tried and failed to make bogus "common-law" trademark claims against YouTube and Twitter users who were critical of him and had all, part, or some variation of "Ron Paul" in their usernames.
Ron Paul wanted to get rid of the Department of Education, Department of Energy, Environmental Protection Agency, and the US Federal Reserve—to scratch the surface. If he had his way, the UN and by extension the WIPO wouldn't exist either, and he would have to play by the rules being set down by the current (and legitimate) owners of the domain name. He's using an arm of an organization he hates to circumvent the very system he wanted to force on everyone. I have zero sympathy for him, and hope whoever at the WIPO records his complaint puts it at the bottom of a very tall stack of incoming work and takes a comfortable vacation with his or her family, before telling Mr. Paul that his claims are—once again—bogus.
Exactly. There's "benchmark fast", and then there's actual usability fast. If you do a pure by-the-numbers benchmark of Vista and 7 on the same system you'll get almost identical numbers, and they probably won't be much different from XP's numbers on that machine--because it's all the same hardware, and most benchmark suites won't register much of a difference between different operating systems on the same hardware.
The difference in performance is in usability. XP is generally snappy all-around; Vista is generally ass-slow. From my experience, 7 is much more responsive in everyday use than Vista ever was, and is much closer to XP's user interface performance and stability. I've said since the 7 beta came out that the beta was better than Vista SP1; 7 RC is another several steps forward, and the fact that it's essentially a free copy of 7 until the middle of next year is a big PR plus for Microsoft.
It's because most people who bring those things up at first breath of any vaguely related article end up doing one of three things:
1. Ranting for half a screen fanboyishly with an uninformed opinion about why the other side sucks. 2. Ranting for half a screen about how everyone else is a faggot and needs to STFU and GTFO his pr0nz and/. 3. Ranting for half a screen about some half baked conspiracy theory about why every post about it that does nothing but #1 against one particular side gets modded down. *Ahem.*
The whole Novell-Microsoft thing is old news, as is the OOXML fiasco, as is the Vista...situation. There's no point in bringing them up anymore. Besides, if you forget about the opinion or "side" of the author and actually read the comments that are modded down and the ones that are modded up, there's a considerable difference in tone and apparent sanity of the writers of each.
"Except where otherwise noted, content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Content includes all materials posted by the Obama-Biden Transition project."
"there are links to high-resolution QuickTime video files beneath embedded videos (these are also available via the Transition's podcast), so that the video can be saved to a computer and edited at will."
The only direct shortcoming is the MPEG4 licensing issuesâ"but nobody except RMS can't play MPEG4 files. The Creative Commons license that these (hi-def, by the way; 1280x720 resolution) video files are under places no objections to transcoding and redistributing them in a truly free format, as long as you give proper attribution.
Simply the fact that the Obama camp is releasing everything on their site (including all speeches and agendas) under an open license is a massive step forward. Nitpick about format licensing and patent openness once as many or more computers can play Theora or Matroska videos as MPEG4.
You're not the only one. I feel damn proud to be a completely M$-defiant user of Gentoo Linux. Now we have a much higher-profile target to bring to tears and force out of society from humiliation.
SuSE was one of the best Linux distributions available. I do keep a spare hard drive with Windows on it for gaming and a few other minor-use purposes, but my main OS has long become and probably always will be Linux (Gentoo or Kubuntu, depending on the amount of effort I want to put in).
He took down the website when asked (maybe even prior to that) and nothing bad resulted from his actions.
About the website itself:
The FBI visited.
They handed me with a written order to remove the boarding pass generator. By the time we were somewhere with internet access, the website had already been taken down.
That brings up the question of whether it was even Christopher himself that took the site down. Or did the FBI feel that they also needed to do him the convenience of taking it down themselves, in addition to ransacking his apartment? I mean, they could have at least "asked" politely for him to hand over his communication records and computer equipment himself. They could have just gotten his server logs, too, while they were in his server removing the offending page.
I definitely recommend, just for interest, reading through his past several blog entries, including back to the ones where he complains about the TSA (back to last Wednesday). Also, take a look at his scans of the search warrant--scary how detailed the text on it is--at least, before the (resisting the urge to use a derogatory interpretation of the acronym) FBI "asks" him to take those down, too.
Slashdot Mirror
Reality-check-trivia time: who holds the trademark for "Ron Paul" in the United States?
Answer: nobody right now, let alone the politician Ron Paul (source: US Patent & Trademark Office online trademark search system). The trademark argument doesn't apply here; and remember, Ron Paul has already tried and failed to make bogus "common-law" trademark claims against YouTube and Twitter users who were critical of him and had all, part, or some variation of "Ron Paul" in their usernames.
Ron Paul wanted to get rid of the Department of Education, Department of Energy, Environmental Protection Agency, and the US Federal Reserve—to scratch the surface. If he had his way, the UN and by extension the WIPO wouldn't exist either, and he would have to play by the rules being set down by the current (and legitimate) owners of the domain name. He's using an arm of an organization he hates to circumvent the very system he wanted to force on everyone. I have zero sympathy for him, and hope whoever at the WIPO records his complaint puts it at the bottom of a very tall stack of incoming work and takes a comfortable vacation with his or her family, before telling Mr. Paul that his claims are—once again—bogus.
Exactly. There's "benchmark fast", and then there's actual usability fast. If you do a pure by-the-numbers benchmark of Vista and 7 on the same system you'll get almost identical numbers, and they probably won't be much different from XP's numbers on that machine--because it's all the same hardware, and most benchmark suites won't register much of a difference between different operating systems on the same hardware.
The difference in performance is in usability. XP is generally snappy all-around; Vista is generally ass-slow. From my experience, 7 is much more responsive in everyday use than Vista ever was, and is much closer to XP's user interface performance and stability. I've said since the 7 beta came out that the beta was better than Vista SP1; 7 RC is another several steps forward, and the fact that it's essentially a free copy of 7 until the middle of next year is a big PR plus for Microsoft.
It's because most people who bring those things up at first breath of any vaguely related article end up doing one of three things:
1. Ranting for half a screen fanboyishly with an uninformed opinion about why the other side sucks. /.
2. Ranting for half a screen about how everyone else is a faggot and needs to STFU and GTFO his pr0nz and
3. Ranting for half a screen about some half baked conspiracy theory about why every post about it that does nothing but #1 against one particular side gets modded down. *Ahem.*
The whole Novell-Microsoft thing is old news, as is the OOXML fiasco, as is the Vista...situation. There's no point in bringing them up anymore. Besides, if you forget about the opinion or "side" of the author and actually read the comments that are modded down and the ones that are modded up, there's a considerable difference in tone and apparent sanity of the writers of each.
Slashdot seems to have missed this entirely:
http://change.gov/about/copyright_policy
"Except where otherwise noted, content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Content includes all materials posted by the Obama-Biden Transition project."
And from http://change.gov/newsroom/entry/towards_a_21st_century_government/
"there are links to high-resolution QuickTime video files beneath embedded videos (these are also available via the Transition's podcast), so that the video can be saved to a computer and edited at will."
The only direct shortcoming is the MPEG4 licensing issuesâ"but nobody except RMS can't play MPEG4 files. The Creative Commons license that these (hi-def, by the way; 1280x720 resolution) video files are under places no objections to transcoding and redistributing them in a truly free format, as long as you give proper attribution.
Simply the fact that the Obama camp is releasing everything on their site (including all speeches and agendas) under an open license is a massive step forward. Nitpick about format licensing and patent openness once as many or more computers can play Theora or Matroska videos as MPEG4.
You're not the only one. I feel damn proud to be a completely M$-defiant user of Gentoo Linux. Now we have a much higher-profile target to bring to tears and force out of society from humiliation. SuSE was one of the best Linux distributions available. I do keep a spare hard drive with Windows on it for gaming and a few other minor-use purposes, but my main OS has long become and probably always will be Linux (Gentoo or Kubuntu, depending on the amount of effort I want to put in).
About the website itself: [http://slightparanoia.blogspot.com/2006/10/post-
That brings up the question of whether it was even Christopher himself that took the site down. Or did the FBI feel that they also needed to do him the convenience of taking it down themselves, in addition to ransacking his apartment? I mean, they could have at least "asked" politely for him to hand over his communication records and computer equipment himself. They could have just gotten his server logs, too, while they were in his server removing the offending page.
I definitely recommend, just for interest, reading through his past several blog entries, including back to the ones where he complains about the TSA (back to last Wednesday). Also, take a look at his scans of the search warrant--scary how detailed the text on it is--at least, before the (resisting the urge to use a derogatory interpretation of the acronym) FBI "asks" him to take those down, too.