Your question should be, how is spam really all that different from thousands of people blocking the entrances to your store, using your bathrooms, tracking mud all over your nice clean floors, and asking each and every one of your customers, "Hey buddy, wanna buy a watch?"
Sounds like some gas stations in rural Idaho I've been to, actually *g*. Seriously, if you had that happening in a physical store, you'd put up something to keep them out, so why not do the same with spam? To keep the analogy going, just because the police can't arbitrarily arrest the street hustlers, doesn't mean you can't hire security guards, bouncers, etc.
So in this case, make your "bouncer" a set of filter rules to bounce mail. There's a pretty good set of filters for Netscape Messaging Server (much as I don't like the product, I inherited it in one project) available here that should be readily adaptible to many other servers. If you're an ISP (Doing some multiplication here...) then not only will this cut down on the amount of crap you're spooling, it also has value as a selling feature; given the tight market for ISPs nowadays, the more value you can add, the better.
I'm going to stick by my original point: inasmuch as we might not like it, people have a right to create "junk speech". The best solution is to implement ways to tune it out....
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
Really, we shouldn't allow the medium to dictate our metaphor here: how is spam really all that different from someone approaching you on the street and asking "Hey buddy, wanna buy a watch?" It's generally unwelcome, yes, is a low-percentage approach to generating sales, and oftentimes triggers anger on the part of the recipient, but (as others have already said) it's also constitutionally-protected speech. Quite frankly, I'd rather receive the junk through email (if I have to receive it at all) than have my physical mailbox jammed full of flyers and/or have to deal with street hustlers. At least with email relatively few physical resources are being used (at least compared to print) and there's little risk of physical violence (unlike an angry response to a street hustler).
So what's the best remedy to fighting spam, if legally they have a right to say it? The same answer as works best with street hustlers: pretend not to be listening! Close open relays. Run procmail and filter everything, discarding headers that appear to be forged. Refuse to work for people who generate junk mail; there's plenty of work for the technically-savvy in this country with companies that don't send it. And make sure 'net newbies that you know are well aware of the obvious choice: boycott anyone who sends you unsolicited mail, unequivically, regardless of how lucrative it is or how much it fills a need.
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
Now that "Slackware Linux Inc." is being spun off, are there any plans to honor J. Robert "Bob" Dobbs by designating him Chairman Emeritus? What kind of poison-pill-defenses are going to be included in the corporate bylaws to prevent being taken over by X-ists, or for that matter, anyone from Cupermond or Redtino?
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
As a journalist you should know that the only sources entitled to anonymity (or for that matter, for which anonymity is appropriate -- what happened to "cite everything!"?) are those for whom anonymity was a precondition to receiving the statements in the first place.
That said, "inquiring minds want to know": which Congressman did the aide you quoted work for, and (this is a matter of simple research) how much Big Vinyl is lining the pockets of his suit-coat? If you're serious about a political solution to IP reform, then it only makes sense to expose which politicians are firmly in the pocket of large corporate IP owners....
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
How about getting permission from the appropriate parties, and using the "unofficial" Slackware logo: Tux, with the head of J. Robert "Bob" Dobbs superimposed on his chest? For it is only through paying proper homage to Bob that Slashdot can truly accumulate more Slack (and less grits?).
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
That's somewhat disturbing. I immediately had visions of the Slackware core team skipping and twirling down the street, all decked out in pastel colors, taped glasses and little pointy elf shoes.
No, I'd expect that if they were on the Berzerkeley side of the tunnel, not the Walnut Creek side. Although, I have to admit the mental image of Patrick Volkerding dressed up like a harlequin, whirling like a dervish down Telegraph is VERY disturbing! Actually, with a name like "Slackware" they should probably move out into the valley (not the Valley!) somewhere, say Turlock or Modesto.... Maybe they can pioneer the concept of three-story Gelco-space?
Which brings up an interesting point about the merger: now that they are just going to be the "BSD people", are they going to move back to the Berkeley side of the tunnel and take the Walnut Creek CDROM out of Walnut Creek the same way they just took "Walnut Creek" out of Walnut Creek CDROM?
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
That's easy: there's a fairly exhaustive patent space of arithmetic encoders. A quick search of www.patents.ibm.com on "arithmetic encoder" listed seven patents, including 4488143, which featured a convenient link to how to license the patent from IBM. The other 6 were owned by Canon (2), Mitsubishi (2), Lucent, and Sharp. IIRC, there were a couple others (I used to work in compression) owned by Sony, etc., that didn't turn up in this rudimentary (30-second) snapshot.
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
I mean, it's prohibited under Japanese law. So suppose I find a way to acquire one and remove it from Japanese soil? I simply don't take any trips somewhere where the Japanese have jurisdiction.
It's not like the US is going to permit extradition of a US citizen to Japan for importing a video game in violation of Japanese export controls any more than they would allow extradition of a US citizen to Saudi Arabia for illegally importing Playboy into that country (or *gasp* simply putting nude pictures on the internet where Saudi citizens can download them).
The world is a pretty complex place. Just because you offend a particular government doesn't mean all that much if you are beyond that government's reach... consider how publications like the New American treat the governments of China, Russia, Cuba, et al.
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
Seriously though, can you imagine how much money and manhours it will cost to change the name of a college?
Not as much as you might think. Things like viewbooks get reprinted every year anyway, and letterhead, business cards, envelopes, etc. are all consumable supplies.
My alma mater (Albertson College of Idaho) changed its name from The College of Idaho my senior year there -- and expense wasn't really a consideration (given the amount Joe Albertson had donated to the institution in the sixty years since he attended, the cost of the unilateral decision to change the name to honor him was trivial). The bigger issues were tradition (a big deal at small privated colleges, it had been "The College of Idaho" since its inception, back when Caldwell was still called "Bugtown") and development (would naming the instituion after Albertson discourage other donors? It appears the answer to that has been an overwhelming "no."). If anything, it (the name change) has been a boon, since it has effectively eliminated confusion regarding whether or not it is a public institution (no) and which school it actually is (people often confused it with the University of Idaho, in Moscow, where I went to grad school).
They will have to buy and design new uniforms for all athletics and everything else that contains the Beaver logo.
Though I couldn't find it on their website, I sincerely suspect their mascot isn't the "Beaver Beavers" -- if anything, it appears from the design that they are the "Beaver Gargoyles", which is in-and-of-itself more-than-mildly suggestive! Once again, though, I'd like to point out that schools typically change athletic uniforms every couple years anyway, as a minimum.
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
Biweekly. You're paid for every ten workdays, your first check in March happens to fall a day earlier than it did in February, when in most years it falls on the same day.
Monthly/Semimonthly. You're paid on the presupposition that there are an average of 22-or-so working days in a given month. This year, February actually has 21 (including the holiday), so while you aren't seeing your average hourly rate go up as much as it does MOST Februaries, it's still slightly above average.
Since I mentioned the holiday in February, does anyone else feel kinda shortchanged by the fact that from the last week of November to the middle of February there are five legal holidays, but from the second week of July to the end of August there aren't any? (I know I'm drifting dangerously close to offtopic here...).
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
Perhaps they should get Celine Dion to sing the Sheila part... she did say she was retiring to "be a mom" right? After all, Sheila's younger son, Ike, is Canadian... so why not a Canadian Sheila singing "Blame Canada" during the Oscars? Especially since Celine Dion played such a significant role in the Terence & Philip TV-Movie "Not Without My Anus".
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
That, rather than focusing on an arbitrary distinction among sites, we should consider taking a more scientific approach to such a breakdown. For example, sixdegrees.com has a cluster of people they refer to as the "great cloud" (or something along those lines) because the people in question are all interlinked.
Since there are search mechanisms (google comes to mind) that are driven by who links to whom, it sounds as if the data exists to define 'net continents ("continets"?) based on interlinking volume. That is, sites among which the volume of hyperlinks is relatively dense would be lumped onto the same "landmass," and any comparatively sparsely linked regions on the graph (this is a !@@#!% big graph!) would be the "oceans" between them.
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
Never mind that there are also sociopolitical issues with releases that staggered release dates, DVD region coding, etc. help to alleviate as well. For example:
You can't show pubic hair at all in Japan. In the US, a brief flash of pubic hair in context may not be sufficient to push you from PG-13 to R.
Certain films are deemed too sensitive for certain countries by the local government. As I recall, A Clockwork Orange has been banned in the UK (is it still?). Can you imagine the issues associated with making The Killing Fields available in Cambodia, or The Year of Living Dangerously in Indonesia?
A lot of investment is required to do i18n on films. Foreign-language films in the US are dubbed and/or subtitled, what makes you think similar measures aren't required when releasing English-language movies in Italy, Norway, or Uzbekistan? It takes time and money to employ reasonably talented actors who speak Spanish, Farsi, and Swahili to produce dub versions of Tom Cruise's next film... and these production constraints, on top of things like local censors, all but guarantee that it really is impossible for Mission Impossible 2 to open simultaneously in Ithaca and Islamabad.
So, perhaps we are the ones who need to step back and evaluate whether we are being short-sighted WRT the realities of their business model, before we commit to stringing the MPAA up by their thumbnails for trying to control what physical jurisdictions their content is being viewed in.
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
When I installed Mandrake 6.0 I noticed the same thing, but I made a small hack to Xsession to check for the existence of a file in $HOME and invoke the appropriate desktop. It seemed neither nontrivial nor nonobvious, but I suppose I can put up the details later (when I'm at home on my Mandrake box).:)
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
I face a similar dilemma. I bought a domain a couple of years ago that I had intended to use for a personal site with a particular theme, and actually did have a partial deployment on it for a while; I've subsequently abandoned that project, and have little other use of my own for the name. The registration is up in a couple of months, and I've considered just letting it lapse, but for one thing: because of the awarding of a particular new sports franchise, the domain name has some serious potential as a fansite, etc.
My current take on it is this: it's a domain name investment, I have every right to try and sell it; like the poster said, it's real estate. I've bought domain names purely speculatively before, nothing has come of them (yet), but it seems to me that the critical distinction between legitimate domain name speculation and cybersquatting is that legitimate speculation doesn't impinge upon the rights of a current trademark holder. If someone had the foresight to buy oven.com when it was still available, who's to argue with their right to make a (potentially substantial) profit on it when they sell the name to GE?
Anyone have a good argument as to why someone should NOT profit from a legitimate domain name investment?
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
The only Republic like facility we still share is the famed electoral college which also does not operate as intended.
I disagree. Your arguments about direct election of Senators are a good indication that the United States has ceased to become as Federal as it once was, but don't bear on the fact that it's a republic and not a democracy. It doesn't matter that the extra tier was removed between the people and their elected senators (that tier being the state legislatures which used to designate senators), the senators are still delegated representatives whose responsibility is to make decisions on behalf of the public; that is, by its very nature, a republic. Nor does it matter how taxes are collected, or whether they are collected from the people are the states. You've effectively confused federalism with republicanism....
Like I said in my earlier post, the only people who are seriously discussing democracy in the US are the Perot groupies with their rhetoric about "direct electronic referenda". Just because we've effectively eliminated through constitutional amendement an extra layer between the people and some of their representatives does not mean we've fallen down the slippery slope into democracy. If you want to be particular about areas where we have, there are a number of conservatives I know who have real issues with the "Oregon System" (statewide ballot initiatives) adopted by a number of states, because it (1) does trample down that slippery slope and (2) appears to be unconstitutional under Article 4 Section 4 that I discussed previously.
Not that I disagree with you entirely in philosophy, however: the break from federalism that we have made has had fairly substantial consequences, many of which are negative. Like you said, the ability of the federal calf to wean itself off the tax teat of the states with the income tax has resulted in a far-less-restrained federal government than was originally envisioned. On the other hand, the relative drop in importance of the states has helped forge more of a national identity in the last several years, where people consider themselves "Americans" more than "Nutmeggers" or "Hoosiers," and that is in-and-of-itself arguably an improvement; I myself have lived in five different states during the last five years, migrating as my needs progressed, something I'm quite sure would have been unthinkable had I perceived myself as a fiercely committed and patriotic "Idahoan."
In fact, it is arguable that we are, by creating communities in the virtual realm that are forged out of common interest rather than common geography, effectively rendering irrelevant governments themselves which are predicated on common geography. Do I, for example, have more in common, in terms of political interests, with the people who live three miles away on the other side of my current town, or with the people three thousand miles away on the other coast who practice the same profession I do and have remarkably similar social and economic interests? In my case, it is quite clearly the latter, yet my voice is heavily diluted by having the intermediary layers of our republic divided along geographic boundaries. Will states ever be completely obsolete? No, somebody has to collect the garbage and franchise electric utilities. But in twenty-first century America, has their relative importance diminished? Certainly, and that is not altogether inappropriate, for the reason I described above.
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
Well, in a democracy, the laws should me made by the people. If the people decide that a law is wrong then it should be repealed.
Then it's a good thing we don't live in a democracy:) . Seriously, the United States is not a democracy, has never been a democracy, and was never intented to be a democracy. We are a Republic, and the people who claim otherwise have listened to too much of Ross Perot's "direct electronic referenda" rhetoric.
The founders of this country were well aware of the problems attendant with democracy as a form of government, they were classically educated and had all read their Plutarch (democracy will invariably degenerate to mob rule). Consequently, they adopted a system based on elected representation, where the people, who in the course of their daily lives as farmers or bankers or whatever could not be troubled to know enough to make intelligent decisions about every issue confronting the country, would instead elect representatives, whose jobs it would be to make the intelligent and informed decisions. We can lament about how the republic has degenerated in its own way, but the reality is that the current system, with all its faults, is still the best there is -- we can work to improve it, but the last thing we need (for example) is a system whereby people vote to prevent the government from breaking up Microsoft because they like the fact that a 4-year-old can use Excel competently. In fact, if you read the Constitution, Article 4 Section 4 states that "The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government," indicating that the founders' commitment against democracy extended beyond just the Federal government, down into the states as well.
The fact is, the public doesn't generally think things through very well, study issues, and understand the ramifications of its decisions. If you were to conduct a poll, I'm quite sure that most people would oppose milk price supports; what they don't realize is that without those supports, most dairy farmers would go out of business, the industry would be controlled by a handful of mega-producers, and they'd be paying twice as much for milk as they do otherwise. Unpopular government exercises generally do serve a purpose, and in many instances it involves getting the government we need rather than the government we say we want.
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
I live on the East Coast and just watched World News Tonight in its entirety. A whole lot of Clinton this, New Hampshire that, and Gonzalez the other thing... but no J.J. It's as if ABC News has mysteriously discovered a world outside of software development...!?
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
Keep in mind that ABC is owned by Disney and Disney has chosen to leverage it's power repeatedly (i.e. the Sitcom "Ellen" was cancelled because she is gay on the show and Disney won't stand for that).
Get the story right. Ellen wasn't cancelled because she was gay, Ellen was cancelled because she was boring. The fact that she was gay made the show potentially controversial for some advertisers, but if the ratings were there the show would have stayed.
Or have you forgotten that our Southern Baptist Convention friends launched a failed boycott of Disney a couple years ago because Disney, quite possibly the world's largest single employer of gay personnel, was one of the first major corporations to extend "domestic partner" benefits? Not to mention that the mouse apparently flexes its muscles on Sixth Avenue soooo much to protect its "family image" that the ever-controversial "NYPD Blue" returned to ABC a couple weeks ago after the show's producers insisted it would only return in its original time slot. Don't kid yourself -- the Disney people are quite skilled at making "good business decisions" -- and bullying their TV network is generally not one of them.
There is such a thing as "journalistic integrity," and ABC News often exhibits a great deal of it, and the mouse generally gives them a great deal of latitude with it. So let's give them the benefit of the doubt until after we see how the interview goes.
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
It's not the largest, most cumbersome, or most-widely-used module out there, but...
It's new. As in, actually completed in the last year.:)
It's not a programming language extension, like JServ, PHP, or mod_perl.
It's incredibly useful in the situation for which it was designed (companies with A LOT of virtual hosts).
It's innovative! "Let's write a module to cut down on the administrative overhead of running virtual hosts on Apache." Tony Finch, et al, at Demon Internet definitely had the right idea with this one:)
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
For the major players, very little. Brands such as "RedHat", "VA", and "Caldera" are indetifiable without the "Linux" appendage. In fact part of the reason these companies have been so sucessful is that they have powerful brand names backed up by good product(s). Highly evoloved tech companies should rely on more than just the latest craze to survive. In a world without the word "Linux", would we somehow not know what "RedHat" meant? Of course not. And a new term for the OS would crop up Slashdot discussions the next day anyway... PenguinOS for example.
This is nothing new... just ask the Anheuser-Busch people about trying to sell "Budweiser" in Europe. They had to rebrand it as "Bud"...
The beer isn't actually made in Budweis, so the name "Budweiser" creates confusion in a way Europeans are particularly picky about (contrast "Champagne" with "sparkling wine/methode Champagnoise").
There's already a beer brewed in Budweis that has (had? they may have settled this for $$ since then) the rights (locally) to call itself "Budweiser". Amusingly, American Budweiser calls itself the "King of Beers" while the Czech Budweiser is the "Beer of Kings".
It's not as if varying the names of things from country to country is all that unusual anyway. Do you think GM could sell the Chevy Nova as a "no va" (doesn't go) in Spanish-speaking countries? North American carmakers routinely give their products different names just between the US and Canadian markets (ever seen a Pontiac Acadian?).
So, really, what's the big deal? Linux, Unix, GNU/Linux, etc. Call it what you need to to get the job done locally. To make a really bad pun: An OS by any other name would smell as sweet.
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
Is David Bowie REALLY the person who fits that description? Yes, he has BowieNet, and now his bank, but on the other hand...
Thomas "Blinded With Science" Dolby runs a little company called Headspace. No, AFAIK they don't make Beatnik for Linux yet, but still, (minor rock star + internet software company) is arguably more wired than (major rock star + minor ISP).
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
Most interesting things in it I've found so far are: 1. Better regulation of the "invention promotion services" industry (ie. the "Do you have an idea?" TV spot guys). 2. Any 3rd party can request the reexamination of a patent based on prior art. (this IS DEFINITELY a step in the right direction...)
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
Slashdot Mirror
Your question should be, how is spam really all that different from thousands of people blocking the entrances to your store, using your bathrooms, tracking mud all over your nice clean floors, and asking each and every one of your customers, "Hey buddy, wanna buy a watch?"
Sounds like some gas stations in rural Idaho I've been to, actually *g*. Seriously, if you had that happening in a physical store, you'd put up something to keep them out, so why not do the same with spam? To keep the analogy going, just because the police can't arbitrarily arrest the street hustlers, doesn't mean you can't hire security guards, bouncers, etc.
So in this case, make your "bouncer" a set of filter rules to bounce mail. There's a pretty good set of filters for Netscape Messaging Server (much as I don't like the product, I inherited it in one project) available here that should be readily adaptible to many other servers. If you're an ISP ( Doing some multiplication here...) then not only will this cut down on the amount of crap you're spooling, it also has value as a selling feature; given the tight market for ISPs nowadays, the more value you can add, the better.
I'm going to stick by my original point: inasmuch as we might not like it, people have a right to create "junk speech". The best solution is to implement ways to tune it out....
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
Really, we shouldn't allow the medium to dictate our metaphor here: how is spam really all that different from someone approaching you on the street and asking "Hey buddy, wanna buy a watch?" It's generally unwelcome, yes, is a low-percentage approach to generating sales, and oftentimes triggers anger on the part of the recipient, but (as others have already said) it's also constitutionally-protected speech. Quite frankly, I'd rather receive the junk through email (if I have to receive it at all) than have my physical mailbox jammed full of flyers and/or have to deal with street hustlers. At least with email relatively few physical resources are being used (at least compared to print) and there's little risk of physical violence (unlike an angry response to a street hustler).
So what's the best remedy to fighting spam, if legally they have a right to say it? The same answer as works best with street hustlers: pretend not to be listening! Close open relays. Run procmail and filter everything, discarding headers that appear to be forged. Refuse to work for people who generate junk mail; there's plenty of work for the technically-savvy in this country with companies that don't send it. And make sure 'net newbies that you know are well aware of the obvious choice: boycott anyone who sends you unsolicited mail, unequivically, regardless of how lucrative it is or how much it fills a need.
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
Now that "Slackware Linux Inc." is being spun off, are there any plans to honor J. Robert "Bob" Dobbs by designating him Chairman Emeritus? What kind of poison-pill-defenses are going to be included in the corporate bylaws to prevent being taken over by X-ists, or for that matter, anyone from Cupermond or Redtino?
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
As a journalist you should know that the only sources entitled to anonymity (or for that matter, for which anonymity is appropriate -- what happened to "cite everything!"?) are those for whom anonymity was a precondition to receiving the statements in the first place.
That said, "inquiring minds want to know": which Congressman did the aide you quoted work for, and (this is a matter of simple research) how much Big Vinyl is lining the pockets of his suit-coat? If you're serious about a political solution to IP reform, then it only makes sense to expose which politicians are firmly in the pocket of large corporate IP owners....
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
How about getting permission from the appropriate parties, and using the "unofficial" Slackware logo: Tux, with the head of J. Robert "Bob" Dobbs superimposed on his chest? For it is only through paying proper homage to Bob that Slashdot can truly accumulate more Slack (and less grits?).
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
That's somewhat disturbing. I immediately had visions of the Slackware core team skipping and twirling down the street, all decked out in pastel colors, taped glasses and little pointy elf shoes.
No, I'd expect that if they were on the Berzerkeley side of the tunnel, not the Walnut Creek side. Although, I have to admit the mental image of Patrick Volkerding dressed up like a harlequin, whirling like a dervish down Telegraph is VERY disturbing! Actually, with a name like "Slackware" they should probably move out into the valley (not the Valley!) somewhere, say Turlock or Modesto.... Maybe they can pioneer the concept of three-story Gelco-space?
Which brings up an interesting point about the merger: now that they are just going to be the "BSD people", are they going to move back to the Berkeley side of the tunnel and take the Walnut Creek CDROM out of Walnut Creek the same way they just took "Walnut Creek" out of Walnut Creek CDROM?
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
That's easy: there's a fairly exhaustive patent space of arithmetic encoders. A quick search of www.patents.ibm.com on "arithmetic encoder" listed seven patents, including 4488143, which featured a convenient link to how to license the patent from IBM. The other 6 were owned by Canon (2), Mitsubishi (2), Lucent, and Sharp. IIRC, there were a couple others (I used to work in compression) owned by Sony, etc., that didn't turn up in this rudimentary (30-second) snapshot.
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
I mean, it's prohibited under Japanese law. So suppose I find a way to acquire one and remove it from Japanese soil? I simply don't take any trips somewhere where the Japanese have jurisdiction.
It's not like the US is going to permit extradition of a US citizen to Japan for importing a video game in violation of Japanese export controls any more than they would allow extradition of a US citizen to Saudi Arabia for illegally importing Playboy into that country (or *gasp* simply putting nude pictures on the internet where Saudi citizens can download them).
The world is a pretty complex place. Just because you offend a particular government doesn't mean all that much if you are beyond that government's reach... consider how publications like the New American treat the governments of China, Russia, Cuba, et al.
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
Seriously though, can you imagine how much money and manhours it will cost to change the name of a college?
Not as much as you might think. Things like viewbooks get reprinted every year anyway, and letterhead, business cards, envelopes, etc. are all consumable supplies.
My alma mater (Albertson College of Idaho) changed its name from The College of Idaho my senior year there -- and expense wasn't really a consideration (given the amount Joe Albertson had donated to the institution in the sixty years since he attended, the cost of the unilateral decision to change the name to honor him was trivial). The bigger issues were tradition (a big deal at small privated colleges, it had been "The College of Idaho" since its inception, back when Caldwell was still called "Bugtown") and development (would naming the instituion after Albertson discourage other donors? It appears the answer to that has been an overwhelming "no."). If anything, it (the name change) has been a boon, since it has effectively eliminated confusion regarding whether or not it is a public institution (no) and which school it actually is (people often confused it with the University of Idaho, in Moscow, where I went to grad school).
They will have to buy and design new uniforms for all athletics and everything else that contains the Beaver logo.
Though I couldn't find it on their website, I sincerely suspect their mascot isn't the "Beaver Beavers" -- if anything, it appears from the design that they are the "Beaver Gargoyles", which is in-and-of-itself more-than-mildly suggestive! Once again, though, I'd like to point out that schools typically change athletic uniforms every couple years anyway, as a minimum.
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
all salaried employees are working for free today
Not exactly. Consider the following two cases:
Since I mentioned the holiday in February, does anyone else feel kinda shortchanged by the fact that from the last week of November to the middle of February there are five legal holidays, but from the second week of July to the end of August there aren't any? (I know I'm drifting dangerously close to offtopic here...).
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
Perhaps they should get Celine Dion to sing the Sheila part... she did say she was retiring to "be a mom" right? After all, Sheila's younger son, Ike, is Canadian... so why not a Canadian Sheila singing "Blame Canada" during the Oscars? Especially since Celine Dion played such a significant role in the Terence & Philip TV-Movie "Not Without My Anus".
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
That, rather than focusing on an arbitrary distinction among sites, we should consider taking a more scientific approach to such a breakdown. For example, sixdegrees.com has a cluster of people they refer to as the "great cloud" (or something along those lines) because the people in question are all interlinked.
Since there are search mechanisms (google comes to mind) that are driven by who links to whom, it sounds as if the data exists to define 'net continents ("continets"?) based on interlinking volume. That is, sites among which the volume of hyperlinks is relatively dense would be lumped onto the same "landmass," and any comparatively sparsely linked regions on the graph (this is a !@@#!% big graph!) would be the "oceans" between them.
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
Never mind that there are also sociopolitical issues with releases that staggered release dates, DVD region coding, etc. help to alleviate as well. For example:
So, perhaps we are the ones who need to step back and evaluate whether we are being short-sighted WRT the realities of their business model, before we commit to stringing the MPAA up by their thumbnails for trying to control what physical jurisdictions their content is being viewed in.
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
When I installed Mandrake 6.0 I noticed the same thing, but I made a small hack to Xsession to check for the existence of a file in $HOME and invoke the appropriate desktop. It seemed neither nontrivial nor nonobvious, but I suppose I can put up the details later (when I'm at home on my Mandrake box). :)
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
I face a similar dilemma. I bought a domain a couple of years ago that I had intended to use for a personal site with a particular theme, and actually did have a partial deployment on it for a while; I've subsequently abandoned that project, and have little other use of my own for the name. The registration is up in a couple of months, and I've considered just letting it lapse, but for one thing: because of the awarding of a particular new sports franchise, the domain name has some serious potential as a fansite, etc.
My current take on it is this: it's a domain name investment, I have every right to try and sell it; like the poster said, it's real estate. I've bought domain names purely speculatively before, nothing has come of them (yet), but it seems to me that the critical distinction between legitimate domain name speculation and cybersquatting is that legitimate speculation doesn't impinge upon the rights of a current trademark holder. If someone had the foresight to buy oven.com when it was still available, who's to argue with their right to make a (potentially substantial) profit on it when they sell the name to GE?
Anyone have a good argument as to why someone should NOT profit from a legitimate domain name investment?
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
Umm, in case you missed it:
:)
Republic of China != People's Republic of China
Republic of China == Taiwan
Last time I checked, our Taiwanese friends made a point of paying more than lipservice to Intellectual Property.
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
The only Republic like facility we still share is the famed electoral college which also does not operate as intended.
I disagree. Your arguments about direct election of Senators are a good indication that the United States has ceased to become as Federal as it once was, but don't bear on the fact that it's a republic and not a democracy. It doesn't matter that the extra tier was removed between the people and their elected senators (that tier being the state legislatures which used to designate senators), the senators are still delegated representatives whose responsibility is to make decisions on behalf of the public; that is, by its very nature, a republic. Nor does it matter how taxes are collected, or whether they are collected from the people are the states. You've effectively confused federalism with republicanism....
Like I said in my earlier post, the only people who are seriously discussing democracy in the US are the Perot groupies with their rhetoric about "direct electronic referenda". Just because we've effectively eliminated through constitutional amendement an extra layer between the people and some of their representatives does not mean we've fallen down the slippery slope into democracy. If you want to be particular about areas where we have, there are a number of conservatives I know who have real issues with the "Oregon System" (statewide ballot initiatives) adopted by a number of states, because it (1) does trample down that slippery slope and (2) appears to be unconstitutional under Article 4 Section 4 that I discussed previously.
Not that I disagree with you entirely in philosophy, however: the break from federalism that we have made has had fairly substantial consequences, many of which are negative. Like you said, the ability of the federal calf to wean itself off the tax teat of the states with the income tax has resulted in a far-less-restrained federal government than was originally envisioned. On the other hand, the relative drop in importance of the states has helped forge more of a national identity in the last several years, where people consider themselves "Americans" more than "Nutmeggers" or "Hoosiers," and that is in-and-of-itself arguably an improvement; I myself have lived in five different states during the last five years, migrating as my needs progressed, something I'm quite sure would have been unthinkable had I perceived myself as a fiercely committed and patriotic "Idahoan."
In fact, it is arguable that we are, by creating communities in the virtual realm that are forged out of common interest rather than common geography, effectively rendering irrelevant governments themselves which are predicated on common geography. Do I, for example, have more in common, in terms of political interests, with the people who live three miles away on the other side of my current town, or with the people three thousand miles away on the other coast who practice the same profession I do and have remarkably similar social and economic interests? In my case, it is quite clearly the latter, yet my voice is heavily diluted by having the intermediary layers of our republic divided along geographic boundaries. Will states ever be completely obsolete? No, somebody has to collect the garbage and franchise electric utilities. But in twenty-first century America, has their relative importance diminished? Certainly, and that is not altogether inappropriate, for the reason I described above.
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
Well, in a democracy, the laws should me made by the people. If the people decide that a law is wrong then it should be repealed.
Then it's a good thing we don't live in a democracy :) . Seriously, the United States is not a democracy, has never been a democracy, and was never intented to be a democracy. We are a Republic, and the people who claim otherwise have listened to too much of Ross Perot's "direct electronic referenda" rhetoric.
The founders of this country were well aware of the problems attendant with democracy as a form of government, they were classically educated and had all read their Plutarch (democracy will invariably degenerate to mob rule). Consequently, they adopted a system based on elected representation, where the people, who in the course of their daily lives as farmers or bankers or whatever could not be troubled to know enough to make intelligent decisions about every issue confronting the country, would instead elect representatives, whose jobs it would be to make the intelligent and informed decisions. We can lament about how the republic has degenerated in its own way, but the reality is that the current system, with all its faults, is still the best there is -- we can work to improve it, but the last thing we need (for example) is a system whereby people vote to prevent the government from breaking up Microsoft because they like the fact that a 4-year-old can use Excel competently. In fact, if you read the Constitution, Article 4 Section 4 states that "The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government," indicating that the founders' commitment against democracy extended beyond just the Federal government, down into the states as well.
The fact is, the public doesn't generally think things through very well, study issues, and understand the ramifications of its decisions. If you were to conduct a poll, I'm quite sure that most people would oppose milk price supports; what they don't realize is that without those supports, most dairy farmers would go out of business, the industry would be controlled by a handful of mega-producers, and they'd be paying twice as much for milk as they do otherwise. Unpopular government exercises generally do serve a purpose, and in many instances it involves getting the government we need rather than the government we say we want.
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
I live on the East Coast and just watched World News Tonight in its entirety. A whole lot of Clinton this, New Hampshire that, and Gonzalez the other thing... but no J.J. It's as if ABC News has mysteriously discovered a world outside of software development...!?
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
Keep in mind that ABC is owned by Disney and Disney has chosen to leverage it's power repeatedly (i.e. the Sitcom "Ellen" was cancelled because she is gay on the show and Disney won't stand for that).
Get the story right. Ellen wasn't cancelled because she was gay, Ellen was cancelled because she was boring. The fact that she was gay made the show potentially controversial for some advertisers, but if the ratings were there the show would have stayed.
Or have you forgotten that our Southern Baptist Convention friends launched a failed boycott of Disney a couple years ago because Disney, quite possibly the world's largest single employer of gay personnel, was one of the first major corporations to extend "domestic partner" benefits? Not to mention that the mouse apparently flexes its muscles on Sixth Avenue soooo much to protect its "family image" that the ever-controversial "NYPD Blue" returned to ABC a couple weeks ago after the show's producers insisted it would only return in its original time slot. Don't kid yourself -- the Disney people are quite skilled at making "good business decisions" -- and bullying their TV network is generally not one of them.
There is such a thing as "journalistic integrity," and ABC News often exhibits a great deal of it, and the mouse generally gives them a great deal of latitude with it. So let's give them the benefit of the doubt until after we see how the interview goes.
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
It's not the largest, most cumbersome, or most-widely-used module out there, but...
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
Without his work on mod_perl, many of the open-source-based solutions on the web wouldn't be possible -- among them, the site you're reading now....
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
For the major players, very little. Brands such as "RedHat", "VA", and "Caldera" are indetifiable without the "Linux" appendage. In fact part of the reason these companies have been so sucessful is that they have powerful brand names backed up by good product(s). Highly evoloved tech companies should rely on more than just the latest craze to survive. In a world without the word "Linux", would we somehow not know what "RedHat" meant? Of course not. And a new term for the OS would crop up Slashdot discussions the next day anyway... PenguinOS for example.
This is nothing new... just ask the Anheuser-Busch people about trying to sell "Budweiser" in Europe. They had to rebrand it as "Bud"...
It's not as if varying the names of things from country to country is all that unusual anyway. Do you think GM could sell the Chevy Nova as a "no va" (doesn't go) in Spanish-speaking countries? North American carmakers routinely give their products different names just between the US and Canadian markets (ever seen a Pontiac Acadian?).
So, really, what's the big deal? Linux, Unix, GNU/Linux, etc. Call it what you need to to get the job done locally. To make a really bad pun: An OS by any other name would smell as sweet.
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
Is David Bowie REALLY the person who fits that description? Yes, he has BowieNet, and now his bank, but on the other hand...
Thomas "Blinded With Science" Dolby runs a little company called Headspace. No, AFAIK they don't make Beatnik for Linux yet, but still, (minor rock star + internet software company) is arguably more wired than (major rock star + minor ISP).
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
Here's the pdf of HR 1907 from the GPO.
Most interesting things in it I've found so far are:
1. Better regulation of the "invention promotion services" industry (ie. the "Do you have an idea?" TV spot guys).
2. Any 3rd party can request the reexamination of a patent based on prior art. (this IS DEFINITELY a step in the right direction...)
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.