I wasn't saying that bloggers aren't objective. Many are. I am saying that objectivity should be kept as an ideal - which is something many people want to throw out, saying that you need to be subjective and speak truth to power and tell people your opinions. That's fine for opinion writing, but it's not journalism. That's all I'm saying about objectivity. That it's good and that we need it. From your comment, you seem to agree. I also think that journalism has done a terrible job at it, recently.
The only reason I brought up business blogging and objectivity is that many people explicitly say that the fact that things can be written by insiders is a big plus for blogging, and argue that the whole idea of a third-party journalist is obsolete. I think that's a lot of bunk.
Oh, and another thing... most of the misdeeds people in this comment thread are attributing to journalists are really the work of columnists. A columnist can write about whatever he wants and is probably the closest thing to the stereotypical blogger in traditional journalism. Columnists aren't journalists (although many of them used to be) because they're writing opinion pieces, mostly, instead of proper journalism. Michael Gerson is a columnist. Glenn Beck and Keith Olbermann are the cable equivalent of the columnist. Edward R. Murrow was also a columnist, at least in terms of the work people most remember him for. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who broke Watergate, those guys are journalists.
I think it says a lot about the state of media in this company that many people can no longer tell the difference.
Let me begin by saying that most comments on/. dealing with traditional journalism quickly turn into a bonfire, cheering the death of traditional journalism and heralding blogs as a bright new dawn with untold promises. I think this is wrongheaded, for reasons I'll get to quickly.
I work for a pretty niche tech magazine as a writer and editor. Much of what I cover is business tech., a lot of venture news and business tech products. It might amuse people how traditionally we do things from a journalistic point of view, since we're frequently writing about the technologies and sites that are changing journalism - editors comb leads and find stories, hand them off to writers who do interviews and then pass the copy back to the editors, who fact-check and rewrite. etc. We have an online component, but we're still very definitely a print publication first.
I think blogging and new journalism has a lot to offer. The distribution method and quick turnaround is great. They can get and exchange news much quicker than I can, although in my particular niche there's not much urgent news, so being a monthly pub. isn't really a problem. But I also think new journalism has a downside, and I think Gerson is right about many of the things he says (never thought I'd say that).
First off, objectivity is not dead. No, you can never be perfectly objective. And objectivity doesn't necessarily mean never expressing an opinion. But it does mean disclosing conflicts of interests (not that traditional journalism has always done a good job of this - it hasn't) and trying to be as honest as possible with your readers. My biggest problem with blogging in general, at least as far as replacing traditional journalism, is that so much of it is done by interested parties. Sure, you can get great info about goings on directly from CEOs and the people involved, but oftentimes it's like hearing about a break-up from only one half of the couple. Business being the way it is, once you're working in an industry, you've got some kind of relationship - however tenuous - with everyone else in it.
I'm not going to name names, but especially in venture and business journalism, many apparently disinterested blogging parties have a history in business themselves, and many are currently engaged in business ventures of their own. There's plenty of people who aren't going to let this cloud their judgment or color their writing, but how can you tell? People talk about new journalism like there's no gatekeepers, but companies and organizations and PR agencies are always going to have gatekeepers. And if it's someone in an industry writing about goings-on in that same industry (which many people see as a big plus for blogging - since, they say, a participant knows more about the situation than an uninvolved third-party journalist), they're going to have a vested interest in not causing too many waves. Sure, some people get big enough or well-read enough that it doesn't matter, and admittedly plenty of lowly traditional journalists have been forbidden from doing a hit piece because they don't have the clout (or their pub. doesn't), but that added conflict of interest certainly can't help matters.
People like to heap scorn on traditional journalism, but there's a very good reason for fact-checking, and there's a very good reason for objectivity. I'm all for new journalism and I read plenty of blogs. I do think that form of journalism is, more or less, the future. But let's not be quite so hasty to discard everything that made traditional journalism what it was (even if it's tarnished, in this day and age), and let's not be quite so quick to put all our faith in blogging. I'm confident that a more concrete code of ethics will develop in blogging, and bloggers who lie and distort will get weeded out just like traditional journalists who've committed the same transgressions tend to be (eventually), but I'm not quite ready to hang up my sad little hat with the press pass or my dreaded red editor's pen just yet.
AGW isn't science, but neither is the competing movement of skeptics. This is all just politics, and the whole thing is awful, and everyone parading around with glee over this controversy is just as guilty of politicizing matters as the people they're lambasting. It's impossible to do proper science when both sides of the argument have become moralistic crusades, and the tainting influence of politics has basically made the entire subject a mish-mash of lies and nonsense on both sides of the equation.
Neither pride nor gloating have any place in science. Global warming needs to be evaluated solely on the evidence. Skepticism should be applauded wherever it's found, but the entire global warming debate has devolved into nothing but gross factionalism.
Put a small light near the bottom of the windshield directly in front of the driver and have it blink at random intervals. After it blinks, you have three seconds to push a corresponding steering wheel button or you get hit in the back by a piston inside the driver's seat. Pushing the button when the light hasn't blinked will also result in getting hit in the back. Alternately, you could deliver a small electrical shock or maybe the steering wheel just comes off and the car explodes.
How is an emergency shut-off button that's easier to use than it is to start the car safe? Given that shutting off the power deactivates the power steering and makes the car harder to control, it could lead to an accident if someone hit it accidentally while (for instance) coming up to a turn and didn't compensate for the harder-to-control unpowered steering, causing them to veer into oncoming traffic or a barrier.
Also, it seems much more likely that someone would accidentally turn their car off than it is they would need to instantly turn it off with the tertiary failsafe.
There are at least three other methods of stopping the car in the case of uncontrollable acceleration. And the other emergency actions ARE all instant.
1. Brakes work as normal. (instant) 2. Brakes fail, shift into neutral. (instant) 3. Parking brake (foot pedal on the Prius [at least the old ones, don't know about the new ones], doesn't even require moving your hands). (Slow, since parking brakes really aren't meant to stop a car these days, but instant in activation) 4. Turn car off with emergency button. (Takes a couple seconds, then you still have to coast assuming your brakes have failed)
I see where you're coming from, but I think an instant-turn-off safety feature is going to be more prone to causing accidents than it is to avoiding them.
It'd be a huge stretch to declare video games and home entertainment systems to be under the umbrella of the FCC, and any kind of censorship or regulation on their part would be a massive expansion of their purpose and powers. I just don't see this happening.
The FCC is one of the most important governmental agencies with regards to technology and culture, yet the FCC doesn't seem to have any clue what it's supposed to be doing. They consistently eliminate or nullify their most valuable powers (ensuring fair and beneficial use of the public airwaves), while trying to grab ridiculous and useless ones to replace them (censorship, this nonsense).
You're right that most companies are using it to monitor customer satisfaction and do market research, not in any negative sense but to see how people honestly feel. However, the issue is one of bad apples - in the classical, correct sense of one bad apple spoiling the barrel, I should specify, not the dismissive "just a few bad apples."
Every time a company gets spotted promulgating fake reviews or comments, they're essentially poisoning the well. As clever as we are (or as clever as we think we are), there's really no way to ascertain whether a comment or review is an honest response or well-written PR flak. And exactly because of such backlash, the market selectively ensures that marketers get better at it - it's the companies that pull it off successfully and without ever getting noticed that are going to stay in business, because if people catch on then the gig is up and the promotion probably failed from a ROI point of view.
I'm not saying we should be in an uproar that people are data-mining social media or that we should be suspicious of any and all positive comments, but it's certainly a reason to be skeptical and keep an eye on developments like this.
I've spent the past several years designing and prototyping a new type of eco-friendly air conditioning for automobiles that solves both these problems. By using the intrinsic velocity of an automobile and cutting-edge gas dynamics, I've discovered that the inside of a car can be cooled merely by adding an additional aperture to the side of the vehicle. This aperture can even be temporary, thanks to an innovative sliding glass mechanism that preserves visibility and allows a variety of different settings to suit the user's preference. A slight decrease in aerodynamics and therefore fuel efficiency, as well as a tendency for papers to blow around in the back seat, is the only downside.
I believe the only unavoidable cost of getting a patent is the filing fee (and the issuing fee, if it's accepted), but that only amounts to a few hundred dollars. There are maintenance fees every few years, and while these are a bit more expensive, it's not an insurmountable expense. All the prior work research and everything can be done by an individual, assuming they're determined and resourceful, although depending on the nature of the patent that could get real tricky.
What you should really ask is, "What's the purpose of getting this patent?" Having a patent doesn't automatically protect you from people stealing the idea, or ensure that you'll be duly compensated if someone decides to use it. The most onerous part of the patenting and licensing process comes after you get the patent - patent battles can go on for years or decades, and there's no guarantee that you'll win any compensation after almost unavoidably spending a ton of money to fight the good fight, often against people with far more resources than yourself.
If you think you can really do something with your invention and are willing to take on the entirely separate and probably even more difficult task of marketing the invention to a company and getting them to distribute it or license it, then a patent is probably something to seriously consider. If you want to patent it because it's your idea and you're proud of it, but you don't necessarily see yourself pursuing it in a commercial sense, then in my opinion you're probably better off just publishing it and taking satisfaction in the fact that you're contributing to the knowledge base.
I actually don't think it is! You can (and almost certainly do) use more than one finger to type web, so the speed with which it can be typed isn't related at all to how quickly you can move your fingers. By the time the W is pressed, you should've already been moving to the E in anticipation of having to type it, etc.
WWW on the other hand is limited by how quickly (and accurately) you can move one finger up and down.
Here's another demonstration: see how quickly you can tap out a repetitive rhythm with just one finger. Now try it alternating between two fingers. See?
I should probably clarify my complaint about Fringe. I'm not saying it's not realistic, because, well, it's a scifi show. I don't expect it to be. I'm saying I don't think you should reference a specific, basic, real-world scientific or technological principal and say it's something other than it is.
I think that the fact that the science is not the focus of the plot excuses treknobabble, to a degree. It never really bothers me, because it's generally pretty self-aware that it's just making stuff up.
On the other hand, to use a current example, a show like Fringe distorts or flat-out makes up stuff about real world, modern-day science so often that I actually find it distracting, and I don't even have a particularly strong science background. Star Trek is at least in the far future - I can't call them out on making stuff up about dilithium crystals and transwarp mogons or what-have-you.
But if you're going to talk about things that aren't much more advanced than a high school science class, you should at least try not to just make stuff up because you're too lazy to look it up. Not only does it take people out of it who know that it's wrong, it misleads people and perpetuates a poor understanding of science in the general population. I'm not saying fictional programming should be educational, but it should at least make a modicum of effort to not be absurd.
This is an opt-in service where specific people can pay a fee to have their cameras monitored by the game's players. It has no connection with the CCTV network already installed by British officials. It's basically just a very stupid and sensational business venture that will probably fail, because who's going to be willing to pay 20 quid a week for random internet people to watch their CCTV?
I meant no disrespect to the designers and researchers working on the LHC, merely noting that at this point saying something could be tested with it is a little pie in the sky. You're right that it's much more complex than a Toyoto Pickup at the garage, but neither are going to take you anywhere if they're not working.
It varies at different levels of government, but public officers are generally under various restrictions for receiving gifts, most of which are much stricter than simply being required to disclose them. That said, I can't imagine this isn't constantly circumvented. Illegal gift giving to legislators was a big part of the Jack Abramoff scandal, however.
Most of the news on a 24 hour news cycle is old, too. The same stories get endlessly rehashed. Despite the fact that there's more frequent updates and coverage, there's usually not even enough NEWS to fill a 24 hour news cycle. Watch any cable news network for more than an hour and you're liable to hear the same stuff over and over again.
The point about liberal slants may be true for the editorial sections of a few specific, national newspapers, but most small-town newspapers - the ones that are really suffering - are and have always been fairly conservative, particularly in more rural and conservative areas. Admittedly, this may not be the case with the Rocky Mountain News (I'm not familiar enough with it specifically to comment). But for most local newspapers, the people doing the reporting are just that: local, not so-called "mainstream media elite" from the big city, or what-have-you.
The reason newspapers are failing is because advertising revenue has fallen in print media, while the price of advertising online is simply too low to sustain the sort of large organizations traditional newspapers have required. That's it. It's not people defecting from dying traditional media to seek the new golden horizon of genius online reporting or sad dinosaurs who can't keep up with the new times, it is a business issue and little else. It's also the fact that the internet is inherently an international medium, and people want national and international news online. And there's simply no way the Bupkisville Free Chronicler can compete with the NY Times, WaPo, and The Times of London on that front.
As is so often the case, the headline is misleading. This is not an issue with the rights and legal definitions of a corporation, but the specific structure and definitions of the Freedom of Information Act. I don't see how it could impact the general issue of the rights of a corporation, because the FOIA has nothing to do with creating or altering those rights; it merely happened to define the exemption in such a way that a corporation qualified. This is an FOIA issue, not a broader corporate law issue.
And I strongly suspect any attempt to use this as a precedent for unrelated 'rights of corporations' issues would get shot down; it's a very specific case dealing with a specific provision of a specific law.
The problem here is not with the technology, but with the business ethics of the company involved. It's not like discovering the phone numbers of consumers has been outright impossible before, it's merely become simple enough in this particular instance that an unscrupulous company thought it was worth the effort.
Sure, right and wrong may be a matter of opinion, but 'legal and illegal', in this case, isn't. What Napster was facilitating was illegal. Not even many die-hard Napster fans will dispute that fact, nor has Napster. The case is about if Napster is legally responsible for how it's used, not if whether or not people trading these mp3s is legal. It's not legal, bottom line. Whether or not it's 'right,' the band (and the recording industry, technically) are legally entitled to the profits of, and sole ability to, distribute the music. Being rich has nothing to do with your right to make money. It all boils down to the fact that we don't live in a world ruled by morals: we live in one ruled by laws.
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I wasn't saying that bloggers aren't objective. Many are. I am saying that objectivity should be kept as an ideal - which is something many people want to throw out, saying that you need to be subjective and speak truth to power and tell people your opinions. That's fine for opinion writing, but it's not journalism. That's all I'm saying about objectivity. That it's good and that we need it. From your comment, you seem to agree. I also think that journalism has done a terrible job at it, recently.
The only reason I brought up business blogging and objectivity is that many people explicitly say that the fact that things can be written by insiders is a big plus for blogging, and argue that the whole idea of a third-party journalist is obsolete. I think that's a lot of bunk.
Country, not company. That was a little freudian, there.
Oh, and another thing... most of the misdeeds people in this comment thread are attributing to journalists are really the work of columnists. A columnist can write about whatever he wants and is probably the closest thing to the stereotypical blogger in traditional journalism. Columnists aren't journalists (although many of them used to be) because they're writing opinion pieces, mostly, instead of proper journalism. Michael Gerson is a columnist. Glenn Beck and Keith Olbermann are the cable equivalent of the columnist. Edward R. Murrow was also a columnist, at least in terms of the work people most remember him for. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who broke Watergate, those guys are journalists.
I think it says a lot about the state of media in this company that many people can no longer tell the difference.
Let me begin by saying that most comments on /. dealing with traditional journalism quickly turn into a bonfire, cheering the death of traditional journalism and heralding blogs as a bright new dawn with untold promises. I think this is wrongheaded, for reasons I'll get to quickly.
I work for a pretty niche tech magazine as a writer and editor. Much of what I cover is business tech., a lot of venture news and business tech products. It might amuse people how traditionally we do things from a journalistic point of view, since we're frequently writing about the technologies and sites that are changing journalism - editors comb leads and find stories, hand them off to writers who do interviews and then pass the copy back to the editors, who fact-check and rewrite. etc. We have an online component, but we're still very definitely a print publication first.
I think blogging and new journalism has a lot to offer. The distribution method and quick turnaround is great. They can get and exchange news much quicker than I can, although in my particular niche there's not much urgent news, so being a monthly pub. isn't really a problem. But I also think new journalism has a downside, and I think Gerson is right about many of the things he says (never thought I'd say that).
First off, objectivity is not dead. No, you can never be perfectly objective. And objectivity doesn't necessarily mean never expressing an opinion. But it does mean disclosing conflicts of interests (not that traditional journalism has always done a good job of this - it hasn't) and trying to be as honest as possible with your readers. My biggest problem with blogging in general, at least as far as replacing traditional journalism, is that so much of it is done by interested parties. Sure, you can get great info about goings on directly from CEOs and the people involved, but oftentimes it's like hearing about a break-up from only one half of the couple. Business being the way it is, once you're working in an industry, you've got some kind of relationship - however tenuous - with everyone else in it.
I'm not going to name names, but especially in venture and business journalism, many apparently disinterested blogging parties have a history in business themselves, and many are currently engaged in business ventures of their own. There's plenty of people who aren't going to let this cloud their judgment or color their writing, but how can you tell? People talk about new journalism like there's no gatekeepers, but companies and organizations and PR agencies are always going to have gatekeepers. And if it's someone in an industry writing about goings-on in that same industry (which many people see as a big plus for blogging - since, they say, a participant knows more about the situation than an uninvolved third-party journalist), they're going to have a vested interest in not causing too many waves. Sure, some people get big enough or well-read enough that it doesn't matter, and admittedly plenty of lowly traditional journalists have been forbidden from doing a hit piece because they don't have the clout (or their pub. doesn't), but that added conflict of interest certainly can't help matters.
People like to heap scorn on traditional journalism, but there's a very good reason for fact-checking, and there's a very good reason for objectivity. I'm all for new journalism and I read plenty of blogs. I do think that form of journalism is, more or less, the future. But let's not be quite so hasty to discard everything that made traditional journalism what it was (even if it's tarnished, in this day and age), and let's not be quite so quick to put all our faith in blogging. I'm confident that a more concrete code of ethics will develop in blogging, and bloggers who lie and distort will get weeded out just like traditional journalists who've committed the same transgressions tend to be (eventually), but I'm not quite ready to hang up my sad little hat with the press pass or my dreaded red editor's pen just yet.
AGW isn't science, but neither is the competing movement of skeptics. This is all just politics, and the whole thing is awful, and everyone parading around with glee over this controversy is just as guilty of politicizing matters as the people they're lambasting. It's impossible to do proper science when both sides of the argument have become moralistic crusades, and the tainting influence of politics has basically made the entire subject a mish-mash of lies and nonsense on both sides of the equation.
Neither pride nor gloating have any place in science. Global warming needs to be evaluated solely on the evidence. Skepticism should be applauded wherever it's found, but the entire global warming debate has devolved into nothing but gross factionalism.
Put a small light near the bottom of the windshield directly in front of the driver and have it blink at random intervals. After it blinks, you have three seconds to push a corresponding steering wheel button or you get hit in the back by a piston inside the driver's seat. Pushing the button when the light hasn't blinked will also result in getting hit in the back. Alternately, you could deliver a small electrical shock or maybe the steering wheel just comes off and the car explodes.
That will teach them.
On second thought ... if hitting the power button shifted the car into neutral, that would be an ideal situation.
So I guess I agree. It should immediately do SOMETHING if you press it.
How is an emergency shut-off button that's easier to use than it is to start the car safe? Given that shutting off the power deactivates the power steering and makes the car harder to control, it could lead to an accident if someone hit it accidentally while (for instance) coming up to a turn and didn't compensate for the harder-to-control unpowered steering, causing them to veer into oncoming traffic or a barrier.
Also, it seems much more likely that someone would accidentally turn their car off than it is they would need to instantly turn it off with the tertiary failsafe.
There are at least three other methods of stopping the car in the case of uncontrollable acceleration. And the other emergency actions ARE all instant.
1. Brakes work as normal. (instant)
2. Brakes fail, shift into neutral. (instant)
3. Parking brake (foot pedal on the Prius [at least the old ones, don't know about the new ones], doesn't even require moving your hands). (Slow, since parking brakes really aren't meant to stop a car these days, but instant in activation)
4. Turn car off with emergency button. (Takes a couple seconds, then you still have to coast assuming your brakes have failed)
I see where you're coming from, but I think an instant-turn-off safety feature is going to be more prone to causing accidents than it is to avoiding them.
I am sure you can't turn the car off with the keyless power button, the only option on this model.
You can force a Prius to turn off in an emergency by holding down the power button for several seconds.
It'd be a huge stretch to declare video games and home entertainment systems to be under the umbrella of the FCC, and any kind of censorship or regulation on their part would be a massive expansion of their purpose and powers. I just don't see this happening.
The FCC is one of the most important governmental agencies with regards to technology and culture, yet the FCC doesn't seem to have any clue what it's supposed to be doing. They consistently eliminate or nullify their most valuable powers (ensuring fair and beneficial use of the public airwaves), while trying to grab ridiculous and useless ones to replace them (censorship, this nonsense).
You're right that most companies are using it to monitor customer satisfaction and do market research, not in any negative sense but to see how people honestly feel. However, the issue is one of bad apples - in the classical, correct sense of one bad apple spoiling the barrel, I should specify, not the dismissive "just a few bad apples."
Every time a company gets spotted promulgating fake reviews or comments, they're essentially poisoning the well. As clever as we are (or as clever as we think we are), there's really no way to ascertain whether a comment or review is an honest response or well-written PR flak. And exactly because of such backlash, the market selectively ensures that marketers get better at it - it's the companies that pull it off successfully and without ever getting noticed that are going to stay in business, because if people catch on then the gig is up and the promotion probably failed from a ROI point of view.
I'm not saying we should be in an uproar that people are data-mining social media or that we should be suspicious of any and all positive comments, but it's certainly a reason to be skeptical and keep an eye on developments like this.
I've spent the past several years designing and prototyping a new type of eco-friendly air conditioning for automobiles that solves both these problems. By using the intrinsic velocity of an automobile and cutting-edge gas dynamics, I've discovered that the inside of a car can be cooled merely by adding an additional aperture to the side of the vehicle. This aperture can even be temporary, thanks to an innovative sliding glass mechanism that preserves visibility and allows a variety of different settings to suit the user's preference. A slight decrease in aerodynamics and therefore fuel efficiency, as well as a tendency for papers to blow around in the back seat, is the only downside.
I believe the only unavoidable cost of getting a patent is the filing fee (and the issuing fee, if it's accepted), but that only amounts to a few hundred dollars. There are maintenance fees every few years, and while these are a bit more expensive, it's not an insurmountable expense. All the prior work research and everything can be done by an individual, assuming they're determined and resourceful, although depending on the nature of the patent that could get real tricky.
What you should really ask is, "What's the purpose of getting this patent?" Having a patent doesn't automatically protect you from people stealing the idea, or ensure that you'll be duly compensated if someone decides to use it. The most onerous part of the patenting and licensing process comes after you get the patent - patent battles can go on for years or decades, and there's no guarantee that you'll win any compensation after almost unavoidably spending a ton of money to fight the good fight, often against people with far more resources than yourself.
If you think you can really do something with your invention and are willing to take on the entirely separate and probably even more difficult task of marketing the invention to a company and getting them to distribute it or license it, then a patent is probably something to seriously consider. If you want to patent it because it's your idea and you're proud of it, but you don't necessarily see yourself pursuing it in a commercial sense, then in my opinion you're probably better off just publishing it and taking satisfaction in the fact that you're contributing to the knowledge base.
I actually don't think it is! You can (and almost certainly do) use more than one finger to type web, so the speed with which it can be typed isn't related at all to how quickly you can move your fingers. By the time the W is pressed, you should've already been moving to the E in anticipation of having to type it, etc.
WWW on the other hand is limited by how quickly (and accurately) you can move one finger up and down.
Here's another demonstration: see how quickly you can tap out a repetitive rhythm with just one finger. Now try it alternating between two fingers. See?
I should probably clarify my complaint about Fringe. I'm not saying it's not realistic, because, well, it's a scifi show. I don't expect it to be. I'm saying I don't think you should reference a specific, basic, real-world scientific or technological principal and say it's something other than it is.
I think that the fact that the science is not the focus of the plot excuses treknobabble, to a degree. It never really bothers me, because it's generally pretty self-aware that it's just making stuff up.
On the other hand, to use a current example, a show like Fringe distorts or flat-out makes up stuff about real world, modern-day science so often that I actually find it distracting, and I don't even have a particularly strong science background. Star Trek is at least in the far future - I can't call them out on making stuff up about dilithium crystals and transwarp mogons or what-have-you.
But if you're going to talk about things that aren't much more advanced than a high school science class, you should at least try not to just make stuff up because you're too lazy to look it up. Not only does it take people out of it who know that it's wrong, it misleads people and perpetuates a poor understanding of science in the general population. I'm not saying fictional programming should be educational, but it should at least make a modicum of effort to not be absurd.
This is an opt-in service where specific people can pay a fee to have their cameras monitored by the game's players. It has no connection with the CCTV network already installed by British officials. It's basically just a very stupid and sensational business venture that will probably fail, because who's going to be willing to pay 20 quid a week for random internet people to watch their CCTV?
I meant no disrespect to the designers and researchers working on the LHC, merely noting that at this point saying something could be tested with it is a little pie in the sky. You're right that it's much more complex than a Toyoto Pickup at the garage, but neither are going to take you anywhere if they're not working.
I agree, it should be downgraded to the less impressive and more hierarchically correct megadrive or perhaps superdrive.
It could be tested at the LHC if it ever manages to stay working for more than a month at a time, that is. :(
It varies at different levels of government, but public officers are generally under various restrictions for receiving gifts, most of which are much stricter than simply being required to disclose them. That said, I can't imagine this isn't constantly circumvented. Illegal gift giving to legislators was a big part of the Jack Abramoff scandal, however.
Honestly, I disagree with most of these reasons.
Most of the news on a 24 hour news cycle is old, too. The same stories get endlessly rehashed. Despite the fact that there's more frequent updates and coverage, there's usually not even enough NEWS to fill a 24 hour news cycle. Watch any cable news network for more than an hour and you're liable to hear the same stuff over and over again.
The point about liberal slants may be true for the editorial sections of a few specific, national newspapers, but most small-town newspapers - the ones that are really suffering - are and have always been fairly conservative, particularly in more rural and conservative areas. Admittedly, this may not be the case with the Rocky Mountain News (I'm not familiar enough with it specifically to comment). But for most local newspapers, the people doing the reporting are just that: local, not so-called "mainstream media elite" from the big city, or what-have-you.
The reason newspapers are failing is because advertising revenue has fallen in print media, while the price of advertising online is simply too low to sustain the sort of large organizations traditional newspapers have required. That's it. It's not people defecting from dying traditional media to seek the new golden horizon of genius online reporting or sad dinosaurs who can't keep up with the new times, it is a business issue and little else. It's also the fact that the internet is inherently an international medium, and people want national and international news online. And there's simply no way the Bupkisville Free Chronicler can compete with the NY Times, WaPo, and The Times of London on that front.
As is so often the case, the headline is misleading. This is not an issue with the rights and legal definitions of a corporation, but the specific structure and definitions of the Freedom of Information Act. I don't see how it could impact the general issue of the rights of a corporation, because the FOIA has nothing to do with creating or altering those rights; it merely happened to define the exemption in such a way that a corporation qualified. This is an FOIA issue, not a broader corporate law issue.
And I strongly suspect any attempt to use this as a precedent for unrelated 'rights of corporations' issues would get shot down; it's a very specific case dealing with a specific provision of a specific law.
The problem here is not with the technology, but with the business ethics of the company involved. It's not like discovering the phone numbers of consumers has been outright impossible before, it's merely become simple enough in this particular instance that an unscrupulous company thought it was worth the effort.
Sure, right and wrong may be a matter of opinion, but 'legal and illegal', in this case, isn't. What Napster was facilitating was illegal. Not even many die-hard Napster fans will dispute that fact, nor has Napster. The case is about if Napster is legally responsible for how it's used, not if whether or not people trading these mp3s is legal. It's not legal, bottom line. Whether or not it's 'right,' the band (and the recording industry, technically) are legally entitled to the profits of, and sole ability to, distribute the music. Being rich has nothing to do with your right to make money. It all boils down to the fact that we don't live in a world ruled by morals: we live in one ruled by laws.