I keep hearing this, and I have no idea what people are talking about. The font on my terminal is as beautiful as it has always been. Are all of you using those outdated green-on-black monochrome terminals instead of these slick new 256-color white-on-black ones? I can even change it to amber-on-black, which is a little easier on the eyes, in my opinion, and reminds me of that awesome Hurcules graphics card I used to run!
that doesn't mean that you have to use wildly inaccurate numbers to justify your claims.
If you want to be taken seriously, you should remember that trying to disprove what you consider an exaggeration with an truly gross exaggeration simply makes you look uneducated, illogical and narrow-minded. First, your observation that "half the CDs people own are illegally burned," even if true, is most likely limited to peers you interact with regularly. Since you are a Slashdot reader, we shall presume for the moment that you consider yourself technically adept, which implies that your friends are most likely of a similar demographic. This is a self-selecting poll, because those you are polling (your friends), are the group most likely to pirate music. Second, even if 100% of high shool students pirate music (they don't -- I have younger siblings in high school, and they do not pirate music), your assertion that high school students alone "push that figure to 25-30%" of the general population relies upon the ludicrous assumption that high school students, between the ages of 14 and 18, comprise between one in every three and one in every four members of the general population.
The parent poster does not use any hard evidence to support his assertion, but in terms of probability, his "wildly inaccurate" assertion of 1% is much more tenable than your much-inflated assertion of 25-30%. Next time, take a few moments to think before posting.
Not really, because now you're talking more about operations per second (i.e., "flops") or possibly instructions per second (i.e. "mips"). The "GHz" measurement refers strictly to the frequency of the oscillator that is providing the clock signal to the logic gates. Incindentally, this is why GHz (or MHz in the old days; or KHz in the really old days) is a fairly useless performance metric -- it doesn't really tell you much. On the other hand, it's great for marketing because you know it's going to keep increasing incrementally, so you can keep telling people that their computers are out of date. If you're going to lust after this chip, lust after the HT stuff you were referring to. That really might make a difference. The 3GHz hype is just the latest "Ho-hum" increase in clock speed.
On the other hand, if you are a journalist who uses your name in your by-line (how dare he?), and some washed-out bassist from a not-that-great band happened to change his name to your name 3 years after you were born, you probably have the right to scorn and mock when his lawyer starts sending you Cease and Desist orders. Now what did this article have to do with domain names?
Crap, my name's not even common, and I found a VP for some ISP (who works with an outfit called "Stalker Software," which makes me sound creepy), a Star Wars fan who is not me, and some Enron marketeer (among others). Maybe I should sue the Enron guy for dilluting my name.
Before you click on this, look at the full hypertext. It's a goatse link. If you do not know what I am talking about, count yourself lucky and please believe me when I tell you that you do not want to know, and you will be happier person for never having followed a goatse link.
Okay, now that you have hit the "Back" button as fast as you could and your eyes are wide with horror and disgust, I would just like to say, "I told you so."
This kind of precedent could make for some ugly disclaimers. Wouldn't it be fun if everybody with the same name had to qualify who they are and are not? I live in San Antonio, and I'd bet there are probably at least 100 Jose Garcia's in this city alone.
I would guess that if you are using nissan.com as the homepage for Nissan Computers, a small business run by Uzi Nissan, you have every right to use nissan.com. You did read the article, didn't you?
I'm usually all for personal rights over corporate rights, but the course you suggest here pretty well cripples Trademark law to the point that it is meaningless. If your last name is Disney, you have every right to go into the film business, or any other business you feel inclined to, but if you choose film, you do not have a right to call yourself "Disney Films." That has already been trademarked by The Great Satan. If trademark holders do not even have the right to protect trademarks in their own namespace, a trademark really is meaningless. Now, that's not to say that I think Mr. Bob Disney, the hypothetical independent film maker should be absolutely prohibited from using his last name, but he needs to make it reasonably difficult to confuse with Disney, Inc. (for example, if his company were "Bob Disney Independent Films, LLC," and his logo looked nothing like that the famous "Disney" logo, I think he would be on firm legal ground).
The Nissan case is over a domain name. And I don't think that it matters a bit who had the name first. If they are both commercial entites and they both are named Nissan, then whoever registered the domain name first gets it.
My favorite comment from the Nissan lawyer was that he said something like, "We would have no problem with it if he had used nissancomputer.com." As if they have some kind of unique privilege to the name Nissan, despite the fact that they are "Nissan Motor Company". Under their logic, nobody should get the name nissan.com. He should have to use "nissancomputer.com" and they should have to use "nissanmotorcompany.com."
Right or not, that's pretty much the way it works (very simplified, of course). Your unstated implication is that the less than 50% who hold the opposite opinion (in this case, that parents should be allowed to name their children 'Hitler') and think they are right should be able to make the laws, which makes even less sense. Unless you can win a major victory by proving to a court that a particular law is in some way fundamentally flawed (in the U.S., that generally means Unconstitutional), you're stuck with the majority's opinion until you can persuade enough of them to change their minds.
Re:Pravda apparently no longer means truth
on
We Are Not Related
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"Fire ants, Solenopsis Invicta (invincible), are ready to destroy any and all enemies, regardless of size[...] At first, it seems that they just idle around their ant hill. However, this idling time might be used to plan well-coordinated attacks."
These guys have obviously never been to S. Texas, where the well-coordinated attacks have already begun, and humans counter-attack with everything from lawnmowers to diazinon to gasoline. It's a civil war, and the prize is the finest piece of Real Estate in the world. DEATH TO THE FIRE ANTS!!! MAY THEY ALL ROT IN HELL WITH THE COCKROACHES!!!
It's more like an NSA secure Linux kernel hack that adds some kernel level authentication layers. Also, their diclaimer states that it's more of a conceptual thing they were doing to prove out the concept, and that they don't guarantee it will actually work or anything.
Only 40% of people wash their hands exiting public restrooms, one study showed (imagine being the data-taker); the problem there being the encouragement of the fecal-oral route of disease transmission from the non-handwasher to others. I'll let you visualize what fecal-oral involves.
You do realize that your just ruined my lunch for a week, don't you? And for the record, I always wash my hands thoroughly after using the bathroom, but I wonder if it has really helped as soon as I have to touch the handle to open the door.
First of all, let me thank you for the most intelligent discussion I've had on Slashdot (that may be a small compliment, considering the forum, but it's sincere). You have very reasonable arguments, and I consider myself more informed for having heard them.
I promise to think about your position if you'll do the reverse, how's that?
Entirely fair.
An ICBM -- engineer?
An almost electrical engineer (I graduate this summer) who finally decided a whole week ago to go to law school (I had been thinking about it for a while). I had though I maybe might apply for the fall 2004 semester, but a complicated turn of events pushed me into high gear, and I decided to take the 7 Dec. LSAT and apply for this fall, so I'm cramming for that on top of projects and finals. In the meantime, I've got 5 years with TRW (the Air Force's prime contractor for ICBMs and a major player in missile defense, among other things).
I later learned from Doonesbury about the GPS telemetry broadcast by the projectile and was a lot less impressed
Actually, my criticism of missile defense is not the technology. You may want to take a second look and consider being impressed again. I'm not involved with this specific project, but I do not believe that the interceptor had access to the telemetry data. Also, I know a little something about re-entry dynamics, and even if you have a GPS telling you where the thing is, a positive kill is still very impressive, particularly given the accuracy that GPS would need (and doesn't have) to make a real difference. A re-entry vehicle is traveling mighty fast (it does not have time to decelerate to its terminal velocity, in fact), and trying to side-swipe the thing is no small task. You also might be surprised to learn that some re-entry vehicles actually have telemetry packages (to be fair, I do not know if these would be transmitting in a war scenario) -- again, they won't help an interceptor much. Our best hope previous to this was to toss a small nuke up into the upper atmosphere and try to blast the hostile warheads to death before they get too terribly close (of course, we still have the damage done by our "deterrent," but it's smaller and the effects of upper-atmosphere detonations are a little more palatable than low-altitude airbursts). So, the technology itself is very real, and beyond cool. The real problem I have with a ballistic missile defense system is the same one you have. The first hostile nuclear weapon to target America will probably be in somebody's suitcase, and our fancy lasers and interceptors will do exactly Jack Squat against that. ICBMs controlled by Super Powers have been self-deterrent for the last 50 years, and will probably stay that way in the near term, so the only immediate threat there is a rogue launch, which is (again, in my opinion) much less likely than the suitcase bomber scenario. Once Osama Bin Laden or Saddam Hussein is able to make a good "physics package", he is not going to sit on it for decades longer while he tries to learn the secrets of Circular Error Probabilities and heat shielding needed to build a good delivery vehicle. He's going to concentrate on how to get the thing across the border and into an area of high population density, which means that we should be working on a web of sensors that will keep the thing out of the country to begin with, or, failing that, at least keep it outside of the Beltway. Unless they are able to get a 15-20 Megaton "city buster" (which they aren't), just keeping it outside of urban areas makes a big difference. The best weapon they would have would probably be about 10-15kT, which is approximately what was used in Japan. We inflicted considerable damage because they were used inside dense cities, but if we had dropped it on a farming community, the results would have been much less destructive, both in terms of human life and structural damage (and may still have made our point -- it's an interesting point to consider). Also, a suitcase bomb would be detonated on the ground (most weapons, including the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, are designed for air burst), which means you actually get a lot of attenuation of the blast wave, so your radius for near complete destruction is really quite small (possibly as small as a few hundred meters). Hence, the importance to the terrorist of getting his suitcase into an area of high popluation density that is preferrably flat, and possibly to the top of a tall building so you get more of an airburst affect. A detonation atop the Empire State Building would be orders of magnitude more catastrophic than a detonation a mile outside of the New York City metro area. That's what I think we should be concentrating on.
This reminds me of when we go to church with my wife's parents. There's this old guy there who is basically deaf and likes to make snide comments "under his breath" (meaning, of course, that the comments are quite loud and are caught by the whole congregation). I think it's the coolest thing I've ever seen, and I swear he does it on purpose. More than once, he's managed to shut up a long-winded speaker. I now look forward to being a cranky old goat so that I too can get away with making loud, rude comments in church.
The Supreme Court can't be wrong because they're the court of last resort.
Still, your example of the National Guard was more analogous to the Supreme Court pre-emptively declaring Bush the winner before anybody brought the suit -- which would have been outside of their authority. When Gore started litigation, he knew it would probably go to the Supreme Court, and he knew he was taking a chance in doing it. If you're going to appeal, be prepared to live with the decision.
As for time pressure, well the Court both created it (by staying the recounts pending its decision) and invented it. There was no deadline looming.
What about the electoral vote? That was looming mighty close, and the recounts would not have been finished before 20 January. With the decision reversed, we create a precedent whereby a single candidate can hold the entire electorate hostage indefinitely because he doesn't like the outcome of a vote, besides the problem of having a president who by default would unconstitutionally continue to hold office without accountability to the voters. I still maintain that the Court did exactly what it was intended to do: it made a final decision so that the country could continue to function normally. As for the recount being delayed by the Court, I don't think the time difference in the Court's stay would have made a practical difference in the process of recounting, and I believe that they acted appropriately in staying a count that was being conducted with standards they felt were inequitable. As for Bush's political manuevering, I still believe that he was justified in defending his victory when Gore started bringing suits. Wouldn't you? In any case, I think we will have to agree to disagree on the propriety of the Court's actions, since we obviously are not going to convince each other.
I'm not, as I stressed at the outset, and again, and again, obsessed with Gore not winning
I believe you. I really think that you are concerned about the electoral process, and I commend you for that, even in the presence of some differences of opinion.
There were numerous significant problems with the election, and I'm frankly astonished that anyone would claim otherwise.
I'm certainly not. If nothing else, I hope that I have made that point.
The Nixon supporters "whined" for years about the 1960 election
As you implied earlier, two wrongs do not make a right. I'm an equal opportunity mocker. I freely mock whiners of all political, social, religious and cultural persuasions, including those who could not get over the 1960 election.
Instead, he had political operatives make the charges, such that if he did not prevail he looked noble (despite the "suspicious" election) for a later attempt.
At least he tried. I was not alive at the time, so I don't remember specifically, but my understanding is that these "political operatives," as you fashion them, did not bring the matter to court. The strategy obviously worked. I think that Gore has seriously compromised his viability as a 2004 candidate. Frankly, I will be surprised if he even gets the nomination.
It would be nice to believe that one could just look at ballots to determine voter intent. If there were any lessons of Florida, it was that it ain't true. If the sudden surge in Buchanan support in a Jewish community were not enough, the whole mess of hanging/pregnant whatever chads proves the point
I'm not entirely sure I understand what you're implying here. If you're implying that demographics should be used as a factor in counting disputed votes, I will have to disagree with you most fervently. If we are to adopt this course, why pretend to hold elections at all? Using external factors and statistics to evaluate ballots would be tantamount to fascism. This would be a much, much greater travesty than what happened in 2000. If, as I hope, you are saying that these apparent anomalies should be an impetus for change, I agree whole heartedly. It appears quite possible that a number of people who intended to vote for Gore may have inadvertantly voted for Buchanan. However, what number may have done so is a matter of pure speculation, and I will never advocate using speculation to count votes or determine elections. Furthermore, I believe that the voter himself ultimately should bear at least a tiny bit of responsibility for casting a clear vote -- especially if he is really concerned about his voice being heard. We can and should work to make the ballots more clear and easier to use, but if voters cannot even be bothered to read the instructions and look before randomly poking holes in a card, then I do not believe we have either the right or responsibility to try to use some kind of statistical or psychological magic to attempt to read his mind. Once the vote has been cast, the ballot itself should be the only factor in determining the voter's intent. If a machine cannot tell, let a human examine it, but if the voter has not marked the ballot clearly enough for a person to decipher it, he is the one who has disenfranchised himself. Adopting any other standard would be a direct attack on popular voting. I, for one, read my ballot carefully and double-checked to make sure I had marked it correctly and completely before turning it in (this was before the 2000 mess). If a secondary result of this mess is that more people are careful when casting votes, something good really will have come of this.
and even those happy with the result should sharply criticize it
Again, I agree with you. There was a definite problem in 2000, and it needs fixing.
President Bush did not, incidentally, push for the bill financing updating voting equipment and that like &c.
No, it was not among his pet projects, and Bush seems to be very focused on his pet projects. Even I do not agree with all of these (a missile defense system, for example -- and I work with the ICBM program). However, it did pass a Republican controlled House, a very nearly split Senate (both overwhelmingly, if I recall), and Pres. Bush signed it. I think that sends a clear message that everybody thought this was needed.
The financing bill won't do the trick, anyway
Perhaps not completely, but I think it is the best we can do in the short term. A complete overhaul of the process will require more time and money than we have available before the next election. In the meantime, throw a high-tech band-aid at it and hopefully that buys us enough time to really fix things.
If the National Guard had taken over Florida and declared Bush the winner, that wouldn't be irrelevant even though the outcome was the same.
This analogy is flawed. Had the National Guard taken over Florida and imposed martial law to declare Bush the winner, it would have been acting well outside of its authority. The Supreme Court, on the other hand, did exactly what it is meant to do -- it made a final, decisive decision so that the country could move forward from a dispute. You may disagree with the decision, but are you really arguing that they had no authority to make this decision? Furthermore, the independent recounts took months. Would you leave the issue of the presidency undecided for so long (really, I'd like to know)? Finally, as I recall, the Supreme Court voted 7-2 to vacate the ruling of the Florida Supreme Court in favor of Gore, and then voted 5-4 that, although it was true, in principle, that it was desirable to use the intent of the voter to determine the voter's ballot, in the absence of a uniform, objective method for determining intent, a recount was not practical given the time constraints. To construe this as "agreeing with Gore in principle," is, in my opinion, a stretch, particularly in light of the fact that Gore wanted recounts only in 3 select counties where he (wrongly) expected a net increase, which the court specifically ruled "inequitable." I do not believe the court acted any more "improperly" than Bush did in defending his position when Gore started litigating.
what happened procedurally was a travesty and can not recur
I can't disagree with you on this. Highlighting the need for election reform was one of the important results of the 2000 election mess. As you pointed out, Pres. Bush himself signed off on funding to aid in this reform ("quietly"? I heard about it without specifically looking for it). However, there is a difference between still whining about an election that your favorite candidate lost two years ago and advocating positive reform that will avoid such a mess again.
I reject any method that not place the intent of the voter as paramount
How do we determine the intent of the voter except by looking at the ballot itself? Granted, the article you linked to cited exactly one example of a type of overvote ballot that would make the intent of the voter clear, but it does not assert that this type of ballot constituted the majority of overvotes, nor does it tell how the other overvotes were counted. Yes, the one example cited indicates clearly the voter's intent, but that is not compelling evidence without either evidence that those types of votes alone would account for the difference or a reliable standard by which other types of overvotes can be accurately counted, which I did not see. Also, the article makes the vague assertion "it almost doesn't matter what standard you used when looking at undervotes," which really doesn't mean anything without specifying which standards do and don't make a difference. All I see from that article is evidence that the author's opinion is that Gore should have won.
I'm surprised you would imply a "tiny, tiny" victory is somehow not a victory
Remember the LSAT?
Based on his post, Zordak would most likely consider a Gore victory illegitimate because
(A) The margin of victory would have been only three votes.
(B) The three vote margine of victory could only be obtained by tossing out thousands of legitimate votes.
(C) Al Gore is a spineless crybaby.
(D) Chelsea Clinton is uglier than his dog.
(E) He thinks Charlton Heston is his president.
The irregularities in the Florida election were objectively concrete
And did not necessarily favor the Democrats.
It will probably never be possible to determine the question of Nixon vs. Kennedy, but after the 2000 election mess, my respect for Nixon increased greatly because he chose not to manufacture the kind of crisis Gore did. If Gore had raised a cry for election reform after the election without trying to litigate himself into office, I would have been able to respect him as a person, despite the fact that I disagree with him politically (it really can happen -- Jimmy Carter is a really nice guy). I want to say that I agree with you completely that election reform needs to be a high priority for us in the short term. The system is broken in many ways and needs to be fixed. However, the specific issue of Bush vs. Gore was put to rest two years ago by all of the players involved, and I don't think it will hurt the push for election reform for the rest of us to do the same. You may disagree with that conclusion, and you certainly are entitled to, but I think that we are already seeing, and will continue to see, evidence of positive reform despite the fact that almost everybody else has gotten over it.
You didn't read my post very carefully. I was simply mocking the Democrats, who were screaming "Election Fraud!" two years ago, pretending to be so concerned about the sacred election process, yet illegally substituted a candidate this year. Simultaneously, I was mocking Slashdot readers who seem to be the only ones in the world who cannot get over the no-longer-disputed election results in 2000. I conceded nothing about the 2000 Presidential election being fraudulent (it wasn't). The "ambiguous" results you are referring to were not as ambiguous as you make out:
Ironically, a tougher standard of counting only cleanly punched ballots advocated by many Republicans would have resulted in a Gore lead of just three votes, the newspaper reported.
This is the only possible scenario where Gore gets a tiny, tiny victory. Gore would have gotten a 3 vote edge only if, by the Democrats' own standard, voters had been "disenfranchised" by their non-machine-readable votes (hanging chads and whatnot) being left uncounted. Every other recount, by every other standard, showed that Bush had more votes. In fact, when the newspapers counted the votes in the manner that they would have been re-counted had Gore's demands for a re-count been successful, Bush's margin of victory tripled. So, the only logical conclusion is that if Bush had not won in the Supreme Court, he would have won in the recount, and Gore would have been embarassed to make so much noise only to see his opponents lead triple. This makes the question of whether the Supreme Court should have allowed the re-count to continue an entirely moot point, since the result would have been exactly the same (including the moaning about the results). To make this remotely on topic, the people still moaning about it are, in my opinion, similar to the conspiracy theorists in that no amount of evidence that they are wrong will convince them to stop. If you don't like Bush, then don't like Bush. You have that right as much as I have the right to want to puke every time I see Dick Gephardt's face. But, for crying out loud, dislike him for a reason. Dislike him because you disagree with him on some point or even because you don't like his clothes. Just quit harping on a tightly contested election that was ultimately determined to be in favor of the person awarded the office. I am begging all of you to find a new horse to beat.
As for your difficulty with the word "inasmuch," try Merriam-Webster's sometime. Dictionaries can be very enlightening tools. It doesn't make a person sound more intelligent; it makes him sound more convoluted, which is exactly the point in a mock decree such as mine.
Why stop at the IPBM (Inter-Planetary Ballistic Missile) base? Heck, we have an entire regiment of higly-trained super-secret military personnel living up there right now with all of that Ballistic Missile power at their fingertips. They've been up there since 1969 in a self-sustaining moon base, and have even had children who have grown up there. Problem is, they've been showing signs of lunacy (I couldn't resist), and just recently they severed all contact with the Mega-Top-Secret Super Communications Base (MTSSCB) in area 51 (you knew there was a reason your tin foil hat seemed to be getting fewer brain control signals lately), shortly after NASA caught some garbled arguments about "maybe we should just wipe the stupid 'Terrans' off of their pretty blue planet." Nobody's sure how stable these folks are, so we've got to get back up there RIGHT NOW and take care of the situation. The aliens say they will be able to help us with the expedited launch schedule, but they will need a lot more money than is currently available to them to make it work.
Inasmuch as the New Jersey Democratic party illegally changed the ballot after the deadline in order to remove a losing candidate from the ballot, and inasmuch as the New Jersey Supreme Court for some reason upheld this crass disregard for the law (could it be that they are a liberal-leaning court, just as some accuse the Supreme Court of leaning to the right?), and inasmuch as the United States Supreme Court (also, apparently, known as the John Birch Society) refused to interfere in the matter, and inasmuch as the illegally substituted candidate won the Senatorial seat, without the losing (legitimate) candidate so much as asking for a recount, and inasmuch as this constitutes material evidence that the Great Holy Liberals do not, in fact, care about the purity of the election process as much as they pretended to TWO YEARS AGO, I hereby declare a moratorium on anti-Bush Slashdotters with no grasp of the fact that everybody else has gotten over it (just like they get over every election they lose) continuing to post FUD about Bush "stealing" the election or making cutesy comments like "in the end, only 9 votes counted," particularly in light of the fact that independent recounts of the ballots again affirmed that more votes were, in fact, cast for Bush than for Gore in Florida in the 2000 General Election. You may now resume your traditional Microsoft Bashing and Linux Cheerleading.
Slashdot Mirror
(Yes, I know. It's in homage to an old college roommate who could deliver the line with such a straight face, it was absolutley hillarious).
I keep hearing this, and I have no idea what people are talking about. The font on my terminal is as beautiful as it has always been. Are all of you using those outdated green-on-black monochrome terminals instead of these slick new 256-color white-on-black ones? I can even change it to amber-on-black, which is a little easier on the eyes, in my opinion, and reminds me of that awesome Hurcules graphics card I used to run!
The parent poster does not use any hard evidence to support his assertion, but in terms of probability, his "wildly inaccurate" assertion of 1% is much more tenable than your much-inflated assertion of 25-30%. Next time, take a few moments to think before posting.
Not really, because now you're talking more about operations per second (i.e., "flops") or possibly instructions per second (i.e. "mips"). The "GHz" measurement refers strictly to the frequency of the oscillator that is providing the clock signal to the logic gates. Incindentally, this is why GHz (or MHz in the old days; or KHz in the really old days) is a fairly useless performance metric -- it doesn't really tell you much. On the other hand, it's great for marketing because you know it's going to keep increasing incrementally, so you can keep telling people that their computers are out of date. If you're going to lust after this chip, lust after the HT stuff you were referring to. That really might make a difference. The 3GHz hype is just the latest "Ho-hum" increase in clock speed.
On the other hand, if you are a journalist who uses your name in your by-line (how dare he?), and some washed-out bassist from a not-that-great band happened to change his name to your name 3 years after you were born, you probably have the right to scorn and mock when his lawyer starts sending you Cease and Desist orders. Now what did this article have to do with domain names?
Crap, my name's not even common, and I found a VP for some ISP (who works with an outfit called "Stalker Software," which makes me sound creepy), a Star Wars fan who is not me, and some Enron marketeer (among others). Maybe I should sue the Enron guy for dilluting my name.
Plus, I'm betting Uzi Nissan is an Arabic name, and we all know how well Arabs and Jews get along.
Okay, now that you have hit the "Back" button as fast as you could and your eyes are wide with horror and disgust, I would just like to say, "I told you so."
This kind of precedent could make for some ugly disclaimers. Wouldn't it be fun if everybody with the same name had to qualify who they are and are not? I live in San Antonio, and I'd bet there are probably at least 100 Jose Garcia's in this city alone.
I would guess that if you are using nissan.com as the homepage for Nissan Computers, a small business run by Uzi Nissan, you have every right to use nissan.com. You did read the article, didn't you?
I'm usually all for personal rights over corporate rights, but the course you suggest here pretty well cripples Trademark law to the point that it is meaningless. If your last name is Disney, you have every right to go into the film business, or any other business you feel inclined to, but if you choose film, you do not have a right to call yourself "Disney Films." That has already been trademarked by The Great Satan. If trademark holders do not even have the right to protect trademarks in their own namespace, a trademark really is meaningless. Now, that's not to say that I think Mr. Bob Disney, the hypothetical independent film maker should be absolutely prohibited from using his last name, but he needs to make it reasonably difficult to confuse with Disney, Inc. (for example, if his company were "Bob Disney Independent Films, LLC," and his logo looked nothing like that the famous "Disney" logo, I think he would be on firm legal ground).
Right or not, that's pretty much the way it works (very simplified, of course). Your unstated implication is that the less than 50% who hold the opposite opinion (in this case, that parents should be allowed to name their children 'Hitler') and think they are right should be able to make the laws, which makes even less sense. Unless you can win a major victory by proving to a court that a particular law is in some way fundamentally flawed (in the U.S., that generally means Unconstitutional), you're stuck with the majority's opinion until you can persuade enough of them to change their minds.
It's more like an NSA secure Linux kernel hack that adds some kernel level authentication layers. Also, their diclaimer states that it's more of a conceptual thing they were doing to prove out the concept, and that they don't guarantee it will actually work or anything.
But isn't drug use a "victimless crime"?
This reminds me of when we go to church with my wife's parents. There's this old guy there who is basically deaf and likes to make snide comments "under his breath" (meaning, of course, that the comments are quite loud and are caught by the whole congregation). I think it's the coolest thing I've ever seen, and I swear he does it on purpose. More than once, he's managed to shut up a long-winded speaker. I now look forward to being a cranky old goat so that I too can get away with making loud, rude comments in church.
Based on his post, Zordak would most likely consider a Gore victory illegitimate because
(A) The margin of victory would have been only three votes.
And did not necessarily favor the Democrats.(B) The three vote margine of victory could only be obtained by tossing out thousands of legitimate votes.
(C) Al Gore is a spineless crybaby.
(D) Chelsea Clinton is uglier than his dog.
(E) He thinks Charlton Heston is his president.
It will probably never be possible to determine the question of Nixon vs. Kennedy, but after the 2000 election mess, my respect for Nixon increased greatly because he chose not to manufacture the kind of crisis Gore did. If Gore had raised a cry for election reform after the election without trying to litigate himself into office, I would have been able to respect him as a person, despite the fact that I disagree with him politically (it really can happen -- Jimmy Carter is a really nice guy). I want to say that I agree with you completely that election reform needs to be a high priority for us in the short term. The system is broken in many ways and needs to be fixed. However, the specific issue of Bush vs. Gore was put to rest two years ago by all of the players involved, and I don't think it will hurt the push for election reform for the rest of us to do the same. You may disagree with that conclusion, and you certainly are entitled to, but I think that we are already seeing, and will continue to see, evidence of positive reform despite the fact that almost everybody else has gotten over it.
As for your difficulty with the word "inasmuch," try Merriam-Webster's sometime. Dictionaries can be very enlightening tools. It doesn't make a person sound more intelligent; it makes him sound more convoluted, which is exactly the point in a mock decree such as mine.
Why stop at the IPBM (Inter-Planetary Ballistic Missile) base? Heck, we have an entire regiment of higly-trained super-secret military personnel living up there right now with all of that Ballistic Missile power at their fingertips. They've been up there since 1969 in a self-sustaining moon base, and have even had children who have grown up there. Problem is, they've been showing signs of lunacy (I couldn't resist), and just recently they severed all contact with the Mega-Top-Secret Super Communications Base (MTSSCB) in area 51 (you knew there was a reason your tin foil hat seemed to be getting fewer brain control signals lately), shortly after NASA caught some garbled arguments about "maybe we should just wipe the stupid 'Terrans' off of their pretty blue planet." Nobody's sure how stable these folks are, so we've got to get back up there RIGHT NOW and take care of the situation. The aliens say they will be able to help us with the expedited launch schedule, but they will need a lot more money than is currently available to them to make it work.
Inasmuch as the New Jersey Democratic party illegally changed the ballot after the deadline in order to remove a losing candidate from the ballot, and inasmuch as the New Jersey Supreme Court for some reason upheld this crass disregard for the law (could it be that they are a liberal-leaning court, just as some accuse the Supreme Court of leaning to the right?), and inasmuch as the United States Supreme Court (also, apparently, known as the John Birch Society) refused to interfere in the matter, and inasmuch as the illegally substituted candidate won the Senatorial seat, without the losing (legitimate) candidate so much as asking for a recount, and inasmuch as this constitutes material evidence that the Great Holy Liberals do not, in fact, care about the purity of the election process as much as they pretended to TWO YEARS AGO, I hereby declare a moratorium on anti-Bush Slashdotters with no grasp of the fact that everybody else has gotten over it (just like they get over every election they lose) continuing to post FUD about Bush "stealing" the election or making cutesy comments like "in the end, only 9 votes counted," particularly in light of the fact that independent recounts of the ballots again affirmed that more votes were, in fact, cast for Bush than for Gore in Florida in the 2000 General Election. You may now resume your traditional Microsoft Bashing and Linux Cheerleading.