Heh. Back in my wild youth (read: "last year"), I worked at a company that had blocking software. The way I'd customarily get around it (out of boredom! really!) would be to have AltaVista's BabelFish translate the site for me--i.e., translate an English site from Spanish to English or some such. I'd get the most bizarre text, but after all, it's about the images neh?
The funny thing is, ever since grade school I've been hearing this "Tesla-is-a-genius-and-there's-some-big-spooky-con spiracy-to-silence-the-truth-about-him" story. There seems to be a lot of factual support for the claims about his discoveries, and I'm inclined to believe this evidence. But beyond that, who really cares?
No, really. The man gave us A/C power, or something. If this is supposed to be some canonical example of how the NWO rewrites history, it's pretty lame. Everybody knows Tesla isn't getting the credit he deserves, and it doesn't seem to have much impact on the textbooks, and beyond that it really doesn't matter that much--especially not compared to the multitude of other historical inaccuracies that have been, are being, and undoubtedly will in the future be perpetrated on us all (and by some of us, too, most likely).
It's pretty far off what I'd want my kids' 3rd-grade teacher to do with his time and my tax dollars.
Urgh. Go ahead, flame me. It's just more fuel for a fire that doesn't really light my way, these days.
Yes, but... isn't the decision to trademark something a strategic business decision?
I really don't know, which is why I'm asking. I mean, I can't see a company keeping a bunch of lawyers on retainer, just to trademark whatever verbage the company has cranked out that week.
I'd expect that a responsibly-managed company would have a meeting involving top execs, marketing execs, and the company legal department. They'd have a list of prospective trademarks, and the decision to apply for exclusive rights to each one would be an executive management decision, not strictly a legal dept. decision.
Or am I totally wrong about how responsible companies are managed?
The point is, the lawyers surely didn't know about the history of whois, and could reasonably be expected to apply for whatever trademark Verio paid them to, but the instructions to apply for whois should not have originated in the legal department.
Yes, lawyers are not tech-aware. But that shouldn't be an excuse.
In his latest book, All Tomorrow's Parties, Gibson gives us a world where you can walk into a 24-hour convenience store and buy a cheap pair of sunglasses with built-in radio, phone, and gps.
I think Gibson's strength is his ability to portray the interactions between society and technology--both on the macro level and also on the individual level.
His stories aren't about tech so much as they are about people interacting with, and reacting to, tech. This is something that's easy for techs to overlook--this fact that the end-user experience is so much different from the specialist's or the designer's experience. Not to mention the experience of the culture as a whole--an experience that occurs simultaneously with the tech's changing of that culture, and the culture's changing of the tech.
Gibson comes closer to telling us what tech means, really, to all of us as a group and to each of us as individuals. He sees a world we all live in but can't really visualise.
Just because bias is unavoidable, it doesn't follow that it's acceptable.
If a reporter strives for objectivity, strives to report facts, strives to maintain a strict legal and (more importantly) a strict ethical standard; if a reporter does all these things, then the news you end up with is much more like unbiased factual reporting that the new you would get if the reporter says "well, objectivity is impossible, so I won't bother with anything but telling people whatever I want."
Objectivity (in reporting) is a noble goal, and one that every self-styled ``news service'' should aim at; that's the simple ethical question.
Some people seem to think that since the major media has proven time and again that they have only the most threadbare ties to the truth, that it's okay for this state affairs to continue--after all, if everybody knows about it, it's not really a problem, right?
Wrong. The real tragedy here is that we all know about this, and we continue to accept it. We continue to pretend that NBC is different from the tabloids, we continue to let all the major media pretend that they're objective--and then we argue the truth of this story and other news on forums like/.
Here, if someone mis-spells ``milennium'', they get flames uncountable. If someone misrepresents the deadline of a UDP against @home, the readers are quick to set the record straight--and when @home responds to the UDP proposal, people discuss the underlying facts and falshoods of that response in a public forum.
The major news networks seem to think that because their news is not open to broad debate, they are free to be as biased as they want--and they're right. What's even worse is that so many people are willing to accept this state of affairs.
Er. . . well, anyway [rant mode off]. . . I just wanted to say I think the ethics of NBC's behavior are pretty questionable. Thank you and good night.
[flamebait] I'm under the impression that there's quite a few cogent arguments to the effect that it's the wars that make the economy so strong.
One could go on to conjecture that since it takes a strong economy to produce ``frivolous'' endeavors like space exploration (and note that a lot of the same technology has both military and space exploration applications, and note that a lot of early space exploration technology in this century was actually adapted from military technology), then the only reason we've gotten as far out of our atmosphere as we have is because of a strong military-industrial complex and a few profitable wars.
Meanwhile, the company I work for is hosting an Apple website on a bunch of NT boxen, and I'm going to ponder this bit of irony instead of looking up any facts to support the above statements:) [noflamebait]
Bwah. Let's not confuse the "y2k thing" with the "new millenium" discussion.
"y2k" is happening this year. Duh.
The "new millenium" is technically not starting until 2001, and then only for people using the Gregorian calendar--though it's prolly worth noting that most of the world does submit themselves to Gregorian dates at least part of the time.
In so far as perception is reality, though, 2000 is the benchmark year for the western world. Like it or not, it's what almost everybody is identifying as the Fresh Start point, the year when we enter a new age of. . . well, whatever
Culturally, the "new millenium" starts in just over a day, and the calendar nazis be damned.
I've been having the same problem. . . My solution is still just a pipe dream, but for what it's worth:
I'd like to see somebody hack together a utility that does "Dynamic Hotkey Allocation"; thatmakes note of all the active controls in a window or page and assigns keystroke combinations to them--according to configurable prefs, of course!
As long as there was one meta-key that could be stroked to show little pop-up flags next to each control, labeled with the "hotkey" allocated to that control, your hands would never have to leave the keyboard again!
Hrm. I can't help thinking of the so-called "stealth fighter", which was apparently fully operational in the late 70s/early 80s (erm, I haven't checked the exact dates on that).
Anyway, certain gov't TLAs always seem to be about 10 years ahead of what they're telling the rest of us. I wouldn't be surprised if the NSA has had open source drew barrymore since the E.T. days.
Slashdot Mirror
Hrm--"secrecy [security] through obfuscation"?
Heh. Back in my wild youth (read: "last year"), I worked at a company that had blocking software. The way I'd customarily get around it (out of boredom! really!) would be to have AltaVista's BabelFish translate the site for me--i.e., translate an English site from Spanish to English or some such. I'd get the most bizarre text, but after all, it's about the images neh?
Yeah, this does seem pretty vehement...
The funny thing is, ever since grade school I've been hearing this "Tesla-is-a-genius-and-there's-some-big-spooky-co
No, really. The man gave us A/C power, or something. If this is supposed to be some canonical example of how the NWO rewrites history, it's pretty lame. Everybody knows Tesla isn't getting the credit he deserves, and it doesn't seem to have much impact on the textbooks, and beyond that it really doesn't matter that much--especially not compared to the multitude of other historical inaccuracies that have been, are being, and undoubtedly will in the future be perpetrated on us all (and by some of us, too, most likely).
It's pretty far off what I'd want my kids' 3rd-grade teacher to do with his time and my tax dollars.
Urgh. Go ahead, flame me. It's just more fuel for a fire that doesn't really light my way, these days.
Yes, but... isn't the decision to trademark something a strategic business decision?
I really don't know, which is why I'm asking. I mean, I can't see a company keeping a bunch of lawyers on retainer, just to trademark whatever verbage the company has cranked out that week.
I'd expect that a responsibly-managed company would have a meeting involving top execs, marketing execs, and the company legal department. They'd have a list of prospective trademarks, and the decision to apply for exclusive rights to each one would be an executive management decision, not strictly a legal dept. decision.
Or am I totally wrong about how responsible companies are managed?
The point is, the lawyers surely didn't know about the history of whois, and could reasonably be expected to apply for whatever trademark Verio paid them to, but the instructions to apply for whois should not have originated in the legal department.
Yes, lawyers are not tech-aware. But that shouldn't be an excuse.
In his latest book, All Tomorrow's Parties, Gibson gives us a world where you can walk into a 24-hour convenience store and buy a cheap pair of sunglasses with built-in radio, phone, and gps.
That is where computers are going.
I think Gibson's strength is his ability to portray the interactions between society and technology--both on the macro level and also on the individual level.
His stories aren't about tech so much as they are about people interacting with, and reacting to, tech. This is something that's easy for techs to overlook--this fact that the end-user experience is so much different from the specialist's or the designer's experience. Not to mention the experience of the culture as a whole--an experience that occurs simultaneously with the tech's changing of that culture, and the culture's changing of the tech.
Gibson comes closer to telling us what tech means, really, to all of us as a group and to each of us as individuals. He sees a world we all live in but can't really visualise.
Yeah, I thought the sandbenders were a bitchin' idea--heavier, but oh so real.
None of this plastic fantastic crap for me, thankyouverymuch. I'll pay the weight penalty any day.
What?
Just because bias is unavoidable, it doesn't follow that it's acceptable.
If a reporter strives for objectivity, strives to report facts, strives to maintain a strict legal and (more importantly) a strict ethical standard; if a reporter does all these things, then the news you end up with is much more like unbiased factual reporting that the new you would get if the reporter says "well, objectivity is impossible, so I won't bother with anything but telling people whatever I want."
Objectivity (in reporting) is a noble goal, and one that every self-styled ``news service'' should aim at; that's the simple ethical question.
Some people seem to think that since the major media has proven time and again that they have only the most threadbare ties to the truth, that it's okay for this state affairs to continue--after all, if everybody knows about it, it's not really a problem, right?
Wrong. The real tragedy here is that we all know about this, and we continue to accept it. We continue to pretend that NBC is different from the tabloids, we continue to let all the major media pretend that they're objective--and then we argue the truth of this story and other news on forums like /.
Here, if someone mis-spells ``milennium'', they get flames uncountable. If someone misrepresents the deadline of a UDP against @home, the readers are quick to set the record straight--and when @home responds to the UDP proposal, people discuss the underlying facts and falshoods of that response in a public forum.
The major news networks seem to think that because their news is not open to broad debate, they are free to be as biased as they want--and they're right. What's even worse is that so many people are willing to accept this state of affairs.
Er. . . well, anyway [rant mode off]. . . I just wanted to say I think the ethics of NBC's behavior are pretty questionable. Thank you and good night.
[flamebait]
I'm under the impression that there's quite a few cogent arguments to the effect that it's the wars that make the economy so strong.
One could go on to conjecture that since it takes a strong economy to produce ``frivolous'' endeavors like space exploration (and note that a lot of the same technology has both military and space exploration applications, and note that a lot of early space exploration technology in this century was actually adapted from military technology), then the only reason we've gotten as far out of our atmosphere as we have is because of a strong military-industrial complex and a few profitable wars.
Meanwhile, the company I work for is hosting an Apple website on a bunch of NT boxen, and I'm going to ponder this bit of irony instead of looking up any facts to support the above statements :)
[noflamebait]
Bwah. Let's not confuse the "y2k thing" with the "new millenium" discussion.
"y2k" is happening this year. Duh.
The "new millenium" is technically not starting until 2001, and then only for people using the Gregorian calendar--though it's prolly worth noting that most of the world does submit themselves to Gregorian dates at least part of the time.
In so far as perception is reality, though, 2000 is the benchmark year for the western world. Like it or not, it's what almost everybody is identifying as the Fresh Start point, the year when we enter a new age of. . . well, whatever
Culturally, the "new millenium" starts in just over a day, and the calendar nazis be damned.
I've been having the same problem. . . My solution is still just a pipe dream, but for what it's worth:
I'd like to see somebody hack together a utility that does "Dynamic Hotkey Allocation"; thatmakes note of all the active controls in a window or page and assigns keystroke combinations to them--according to configurable prefs, of course!
As long as there was one meta-key that could be stroked to show little pop-up flags next to each control, labeled with the "hotkey" allocated to that control, your hands would never have to leave the keyboard again!
Hrm. I can't help thinking of the so-called "stealth fighter", which was apparently fully operational in the late 70s/early 80s (erm, I haven't checked the exact dates on that).
Anyway, certain gov't TLAs always seem to be about 10 years ahead of what they're telling the rest of us. I wouldn't be surprised if the NSA has had open source drew barrymore since the E.T. days.
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