Little tip to junk lovers everywhere: Every physics department has a room or two that they don't use for anything. What happens is that equipment that no one needs gets stashed there and forgotten. I've dug up everything from high precision mirrors to fiber optic by the yard, and bits of machined metal I couldn't identify but thought looked cool. It helps if your department hasn't redecorated and refurbished its digs in a long, long time.
One of the things that the pro Microsoft camp at the UofM here likes to claim is that the administrative costs for Unix/Linux is higher than for Windows NT/2000. They also like to claim that one can administer a Windows based server with less knowledge than a comprable Linux/Unix server. Both claims are false. Admin costs for running a Linux web server are basically those of hardware and manpower. Which means that you miss the licensing fees of the various Microsoft servers. I dunno what that's up to these days. The other problem you run into with MS products is falling victim to security bug of the day which may cost you dearly. The linux community is a lot more forthcoming about these things. In so far as books go, I have picked up Linux Unleashed, and this really cool Penguin computing Linux book and those are the only two I've needed. Meanwhile three books on NT later and I still had no idea what I was doing. And that brings me to the learning curve part. Windows can get a novice off to a quicker start because the can kind of stumble around the graphical user interface and start to do things pretty quick, but that's a long way from being able to administer a network connected server. In order to run a windows server, you need to understand the registry, TCP/IP, Netware, process control, security, and well, all the other things you'd have with any server. Meanwhile with Unix/Linux you don't have to deal with the registry. Yee haw! So, yeah you have to memorize obscure command line syntax to run linux, but almost everything works, the registry doesn't self destruct every six months, the documentation matches reality, and you don't have to reboot every few days.
Which sez "Repent, the Internet Will Collapse in 8(crossed out) 7 Days". So, CodeRed is the Internet's crisis dujour. Has anyone noticed that the Net seems beat the odds makers every time? Meanwhile, the SciAM article is unreal. Talk about paranoic speculation and exagaration. "The only remedy is total isolation". C'mon. It's the same as always, don't use outlook, and don't open unknown attachments. And, don't use windows unless you have no better choice. In terms of net traffic, yeah, that's a bummer, but hardly a show stopper. The Internet will be bogged down as thing waxes, but it'll go away. There is one point the SciAM article makes that is worth paying attention to: the need to get ready for the next one. So far, no one has written a worm designed to launch denial of service attacks against backbone routers. This type of attack could be very dangerous. However, it would require a lot knowledge about the current architecture of the Internet, and a good understanding of the TCP/IP protocols. Luckily most of the script kiddies out there haven't read David Comer's series on TCP/IP, but it's only a matter of time before we get someone knowledgeable and malicous.
Anyone have a clue whether the BSA is actually asking an audit of companies who've made some purchases or are they simply going after anyone who's recently filed the appropriate paperwork to start or continue running a business? Reason I'm curious is that ever since I filed my paperwork I've gotten a huge amount of junk mail, much of which has dire warnings about this and that. So, is getting the BSA letter merely a matter of time, or do you have make some purchases to get their attention?
1998 was the peak of the dotcom bubble, if memory serves. Our economy was booming and couldn't produce enough to sate our consumption. People were working long hours under high stress, and were losing time with family and friends not to mention outside interests. A few years previous these same people might have come home, flipped open a can of beer and watched the tube for a couple of hours before hitting the sack. In 1998, they came home exhausted, twisted open a bottle of Trendy-Power-Drink TM and logged onto the Internet for a few hours before turning in. Couple of years later, the boom's gone bust, we aren't putting in the mandatory over time, and we have more free time, perhaps more than we'd like. So we start reconnecting with our friends and family, in person, and online, and dust off all those hobbies we'd been wishing to get back to. The followup study leaves me with more questions than I had after the previous one. The other thought is that maybe some of the depressed, lonely people online a few years back made the connections online that helped them out the hole they were in.
Is that my hands are too big for the controls on most game consoles. If this system is designed to be used by a small to average sized adult, I might actually be able to get past the third level on one of these games.
Lessee, run, run fast, shoot everything that moves, know the terrain. Yep. These lessons mean that I'm in a now in a class of own. 'Course that might also be due to the fact the rest of the league is nursing sucking chest wounds at the moment.
In my opinion the producers of both films, Dune and Akira, made the same mistake: They tried to squeeze a multi volume--with each vol over 1000 pages--print epic into a two or so hour movie. You lose a lot in the process and make the plot almost incomprehensible. The good news is that the manga's being reissued.
As cool as the movie is, the manga is even better because Otomono(spelling?) has the time and space to tell the epic right. I was down at my local comic book shop and noticed the the manga is being re-released in large, phone book sized paperbacks. I have most of the colorized version that Marvel put out and that was a real good read. The new trade paper backs are all in black and white, but that doesn't detract any from the story or the art.
I wonder how many of the analysts who put this together were scolded about too much roleplaying games when they were teenagers? In the eighties they were demon worshipping geeks, now they're high level security advisors. Although I'd guess that this crowd was more into the Avalon Hills games than D&D.
In light of this, I really do wonder what the point of the missile defense is supposed to be. Why would a rogue state fire a very easily tracked missile at the country with the largest--operational--nuclear and most powerful military? Even crazy leaders know that the US response to such an attack would be overwhelming, vindictive and thorough. I don't think so. Even if you had a state with nuclear weapon and a serious grudge, they'd look for a non traceable way to deliver it. Say, like putting it in a container on a ship set to detonate within a couple of miles of port. Then again, why bother with a nuke when you can do something like release plague infected rats in large city? Of course bombs of any kind have a significant terror factor.
At a sci-fi con, I also found a vendor who had reinforced a super soaker to shoot mayonaise. He called it the "ultimate spooge gun". People tended to steer clear of his table.
Here's something to give people new to Seattle the willies! You know those bridges that connect Bellvue to Seattle and some of the other islands and pennisulas? Well, they're floating bridges and they're made of concrete! This freaked me the first time I heard that, then I worked out the whole buyoncy thing and said "Cool!" If I understand the design, the engineers basically made a bunch of concrete hulls, floated them and connected them together with cables and ran the road over the top. Several years ago, one of the bridges did indeed sink, but that was because an inspector at some point in the past had left an access hatch open, then one year there was some really rough water and the structure began taking on water. A couple of days later the whole thing sank. They put a new one in, but when I was last tehre you could still see the remnants of the old bridge right next to the new one.
Yeah, I missed something there too! I wonder if they're envisioning a kind of nozzle that would use reasonance to expel some kind of propellant. I dunno.
Thing that always amazes me about Apple is that they have such well thought out hardware designs, yet they can never seem to turn that into commerical success. Their OSes have also been well made compared to the other mass market system out there.
I for one wouldn't know jack about the way my own government works if I hadn't have been the sort of iconoclast troublemaker that school admins are scared of these days. My government class in HS was spectacularly bad and was taught by a rabid Jon Bircher. However, I actually sent away for a copy of the consitution and read just so I could piss my teacher off. I learned a fair amount that way too. One of the problems with America's speech laws is that its citizens have not been educated in the way their own government works, and they have even less of an interest in finding it out for themselves. All we as Americans tend to do is panic every time there's a bit of shocking news. The politicans gives us quick fixes to placate us, and the rest of the time they feel confident ripping the constitution to shreds because the citizens just don't care and are too ignorant to care. Like I said, a big part of it is the educational system we're stuck with. Growing up we're taught largely by people who are frankly too incompetent to do anything else, working for salaries that don't even amount to the cost of living in a lot of places. And, the textbooks. Yeesh! The number of factual errors I found even as a high schooler were astounding. Recently I looked at a science text book for the Detroit school and was appalled. The authors got every single concept they were trying to teach wrong. And, given that classes like government are considered "extra" they get shorted even worse than the rest.
Re:Terrorism's place in Politics
on
Eco-Terrorism
·
· Score: 2
CIA? CIA? Puleahse... The CIA is not the government's catchall for cynical black operations. The CIA has a fairly narrow mandate and aims its operations at foreign powers. If there are covert government ops infiltrating an organization, they're more likely to be FBI, BATF, DEA, and local law enforcement. The FBI especially has a history of this. However, as someone who's also worked with various left of center organizations, I would advise folks not to underestimate the capablities of their own kind. There's a lot of frustration in the environmental community and it might just be boiling over. I mean, most Americans like to say they're for the environment, and yet, they drive massive gas guzzling SUVs, leave lights on, build new suburbs in wilderness areas, drive more, vote against public transportation, and vote for right wing jackasses. The basic truth seems to be that Americans only care about the enviroment insofar as they don't have give anything up for it. So what's the environmental activist to do? Well, if you lose your temper, you torch car lots, new sub divisions, etc... If you take a deep breath, calm down, the solution is more grass roots organizing, and education. Of course, our current energy jitters might make folks stop and take a look at what our suburban life style is costing, so I'm still hopeful. However, there's a lot of folks out there who've lost their tempers. Oh, and while, we're on the topic of conspiracy theories, don't assume that the provacteurs(I know I can't spell!) are from the government. They could very well be industry plants, right wing politcal plants, or lone maniacs. If you're going to be paranoid, don't stop with the government. I know in one group I volunteered with we had a few plants from a timber company. They did a lot of damage before they got rooted out.
Well, I seem to remember a couple of FPSes that got some bad press for just the reason you mentioned. I haven't any of these, but I saw some stories here and there. The first was Kingpin--I think--where you run around in the inner city blowing away drug dealers who, according to the short piece I read, were invariably black. Then there's another game called Nam. You're running around killing black pajamaed VCs. I mainly heard this game sucked. And, Red Neck Rampage pretty much turned the entire rural South of the US into a caricature. I'm not concerned with Castle Wolfenstein because the target is the uniform rather than a caricature. Even so this is something to look out for. And, hey, if you're offended, don't buy it, talk to your friends and community about it too. Freedom of Speech works both ways.
From what I understand, most contracts written today do include terms about collecting work in digital collections and archives. However, this ruling goes back in time and will force publishers to negotiate terms to display freelance work in these mediums. This may or may not force the removal of older work. If I was a writer who had some freelance stuff published years ago, chances are I've moved on and continued to be a freelance hack, or gotten a staff position or something else. If I'm still writing I'd want copies of my previous good work floating around as a way to entice people to read my current stuff. I dunno how many people would see it this way, but for nonfiction work that's four or more years out of date, it'd be hard to justify its relevance to anyone but scholars--lay or academic. And, I'd certainly want to be a help to these people, especially if they cite me. Fiction on the other hand is fairly timeless and I'd most certainly want to compensation for making that permanently and freely available. I hope that freelance journalists and their kin would step up to the larger cause of knowledge and give permission grant permission for their older works to be collected into online archives.
Well you know with this new AI, the guards have a resting state where they'll 'smoke and check maps'. Still that doesn't mean the poor guys get bathroom breaks. After all, they're nazis.
The article states that they're replacing applix on their unix machines with Star Office. Still, this helps prime the pump. BTW, the new version has got some really handly features like saving as xml. I need to upgrade.
Well, given some of the networks these machines might be on, it's not like they can download it off the Internet. I also think there are security guidelines that ask for a little more assurance that the software's the authentic article. Meaning, you take delivery directly from the vendor rather than assuming your download is safe. Besides, 1.2 mil helps the vendor keep supplying the software you rely on.
Very observant. Anyone who thinks this action is somehow illegal or unwarranted should read our trademark laws. The names of the groups alone violate those laws. By law a company must defend their trademark against all infringement. If a company is lax in defending their trademark another entity may take that trademark over by arguing that it has been abandoned. At least that's my understanding. I dunno if copyrights have the same requirement or not. But even if they do not, the owner of the copyright has every right to sue someone who violates their copyright. I know this means they should go after the individual violator, but that would take effort, so they hit the distributor as a way of cutting off supply.
The business of getting attention is nothing new. There are PR firms that have been in business for almost a century. I'd say that this problem has been around ever since information became industrialized, and that happened late last century. Heck, it probably began to be a problem as soon as reliable telegraph service became available. Suddenly you could information from across the world in time to actually make decsions that could affect the event's outcome. So, one reason that news has become briefer is that an event is no longer reported after the fact, but as it happens. So, detailed after action reports became a series of just in bulletins. This has led to some problems. For instance, most of us have a good idea what's going on right now in the world, but have little idea of the forces that create the situations we read and hear about. And, it's very seldom that we ever see a followup that tells us how everything settled out. I think that the single biggest affect of communications technology is that we tend live in the now in the Western world with little notion of our history or where we're going. This has been the case at least since TV became widespread.
In terms of who to trust, we're actually better off than we were in say the thirties. Unfortunately in America we're slipping. Back in the day, news was a local monopoly controled by the dominant news paper. These days you can read the LATimes, the NY Times, listen to the BBC, and watch Nightline to compare the coverage. Of course, these days, there tends to be little difference between the major news organization is vanishing as national monopolies gobble up diversified local news organizations. Let's not even get into corporate self censorship! So who do we trust? In America, the answer increasingly no one. People are turning off from news simply because we've grown accustomed to the talking heads lying to us. So, we're heading back to the bad old days right quick.
I agree with the bulk of you comment, but the thing to keep in mind here is the outrageous rents in that part of the world. I was looking at starting salaries of $50,000 to $65,000 a couple of years ago when I wanted to go out there. Then I looked at the rents and saw studios going $1200/mo. The mindset when you get laid off is to try and get right back up on the horse and get a new job. Only problem is that can take months, and if don't have huge savings the rent eats up you cash real fast. And, unless you cut and run right away you can get stuck without the resources to move. Mind you, this whole situation made up my mind not go out there. As a native Californian, there's something I know that lot's of people don't. And, that is that the place is great with a dynamic and long term viable economy. However, it's also the land of the Gold Rush. Every few years there's a new one and people charge out, ride high on the wave, and get slammed hard into the sand when it breaks.
Slashdot Mirror
Little tip to junk lovers everywhere: Every physics department has a room or two that they don't use for anything. What happens is that equipment that no one needs gets stashed there and forgotten. I've dug up everything from high precision mirrors to fiber optic by the yard, and bits of machined metal I couldn't identify but thought looked cool. It helps if your department hasn't redecorated and refurbished its digs in a long, long time.
One of the things that the pro Microsoft camp at the UofM here likes to claim is that the administrative costs for Unix/Linux is higher than for Windows NT/2000. They also like to claim that one can administer a Windows based server with less knowledge than a comprable Linux/Unix server. Both claims are false. Admin costs for running a Linux web server are basically those of hardware and manpower. Which means that you miss the licensing fees of the various Microsoft servers. I dunno what that's up to these days. The other problem you run into with MS products is falling victim to security bug of the day which may cost you dearly. The linux community is a lot more forthcoming about these things. In so far as books go, I have picked up Linux Unleashed, and this really cool Penguin computing Linux book and those are the only two I've needed. Meanwhile three books on NT later and I still had no idea what I was doing. And that brings me to the learning curve part. Windows can get a novice off to a quicker start because the can kind of stumble around the graphical user interface and start to do things pretty quick, but that's a long way from being able to administer a network connected server. In order to run a windows server, you need to understand the registry, TCP/IP, Netware, process control, security, and well, all the other things you'd have with any server. Meanwhile with Unix/Linux you don't have to deal with the registry. Yee haw! So, yeah you have to memorize obscure command line syntax to run linux, but almost everything works, the registry doesn't self destruct every six months, the documentation matches reality, and you don't have to reboot every few days.
Which sez "Repent, the Internet Will Collapse in 8(crossed out) 7 Days". So, CodeRed is the Internet's crisis dujour. Has anyone noticed that the Net seems beat the odds makers every time? Meanwhile, the SciAM article is unreal. Talk about paranoic speculation and exagaration. "The only remedy is total isolation". C'mon. It's the same as always, don't use outlook, and don't open unknown attachments. And, don't use windows unless you have no better choice. In terms of net traffic, yeah, that's a bummer, but hardly a show stopper. The Internet will be bogged down as thing waxes, but it'll go away. There is one point the SciAM article makes that is worth paying attention to: the need to get ready for the next one. So far, no one has written a worm designed to launch denial of service attacks against backbone routers. This type of attack could be very dangerous. However, it would require a lot knowledge about the current architecture of the Internet, and a good understanding of the TCP/IP protocols. Luckily most of the script kiddies out there haven't read David Comer's series on TCP/IP, but it's only a matter of time before we get someone knowledgeable and malicous.
Anyone have a clue whether the BSA is actually asking an audit of companies who've made some purchases or are they simply going after anyone who's recently filed the appropriate paperwork to start or continue running a business? Reason I'm curious is that ever since I filed my paperwork I've gotten a huge amount of junk mail, much of which has dire warnings about this and that. So, is getting the BSA letter merely a matter of time, or do you have make some purchases to get their attention?
1998 was the peak of the dotcom bubble, if memory serves. Our economy was booming and couldn't produce enough to sate our consumption. People were working long hours under high stress, and were losing time with family and friends not to mention outside interests. A few years previous these same people might have come home, flipped open a can of beer and watched the tube for a couple of hours before hitting the sack. In 1998, they came home exhausted, twisted open a bottle of Trendy-Power-Drink TM and logged onto the Internet for a few hours before turning in. Couple of years later, the boom's gone bust, we aren't putting in the mandatory over time, and we have more free time, perhaps more than we'd like. So we start reconnecting with our friends and family, in person, and online, and dust off all those hobbies we'd been wishing to get back to. The followup study leaves me with more questions than I had after the previous one. The other thought is that maybe some of the depressed, lonely people online a few years back made the connections online that helped them out the hole they were in.
Is that my hands are too big for the controls on most game consoles. If this system is designed to be used by a small to average sized adult, I might actually be able to get past the third level on one of these games.
Lessee, run, run fast, shoot everything that moves, know the terrain. Yep. These lessons mean that I'm in a now in a class of own. 'Course that might also be due to the fact the rest of the league is nursing sucking chest wounds at the moment.
In my opinion the producers of both films, Dune and Akira, made the same mistake: They tried to squeeze a multi volume--with each vol over 1000 pages--print epic into a two or so hour movie. You lose a lot in the process and make the plot almost incomprehensible. The good news is that the manga's being reissued.
As cool as the movie is, the manga is even better because Otomono(spelling?) has the time and space to tell the epic right. I was down at my local comic book shop and noticed the the manga is being re-released in large, phone book sized paperbacks. I have most of the colorized version that Marvel put out and that was a real good read. The new trade paper backs are all in black and white, but that doesn't detract any from the story or the art.
I wonder how many of the analysts who put this together were scolded about too much roleplaying games when they were teenagers? In the eighties they were demon worshipping geeks, now they're high level security advisors. Although I'd guess that this crowd was more into the Avalon Hills games than D&D.
In light of this, I really do wonder what the point of the missile defense is supposed to be. Why would a rogue state fire a very easily tracked missile at the country with the largest--operational--nuclear and most powerful military? Even crazy leaders know that the US response to such an attack would be overwhelming, vindictive and thorough. I don't think so. Even if you had a state with nuclear weapon and a serious grudge, they'd look for a non traceable way to deliver it. Say, like putting it in a container on a ship set to detonate within a couple of miles of port. Then again, why bother with a nuke when you can do something like release plague infected rats in large city? Of course bombs of any kind have a significant terror factor.
At a sci-fi con, I also found a vendor who had reinforced a super soaker to shoot mayonaise. He called it the "ultimate spooge gun". People tended to steer clear of his table.
Here's something to give people new to Seattle the willies! You know those bridges that connect Bellvue to Seattle and some of the other islands and pennisulas? Well, they're floating bridges and they're made of concrete! This freaked me the first time I heard that, then I worked out the whole buyoncy thing and said "Cool!" If I understand the design, the engineers basically made a bunch of concrete hulls, floated them and connected them together with cables and ran the road over the top. Several years ago, one of the bridges did indeed sink, but that was because an inspector at some point in the past had left an access hatch open, then one year there was some really rough water and the structure began taking on water. A couple of days later the whole thing sank. They put a new one in, but when I was last tehre you could still see the remnants of the old bridge right next to the new one.
Yeah, I missed something there too! I wonder if they're envisioning a kind of nozzle that would use reasonance to expel some kind of propellant. I dunno.
Thing that always amazes me about Apple is that they have such well thought out hardware designs, yet they can never seem to turn that into commerical success. Their OSes have also been well made compared to the other mass market system out there.
I for one wouldn't know jack about the way my own government works if I hadn't have been the sort of iconoclast troublemaker that school admins are scared of these days. My government class in HS was spectacularly bad and was taught by a rabid Jon Bircher. However, I actually sent away for a copy of the consitution and read just so I could piss my teacher off. I learned a fair amount that way too. One of the problems with America's speech laws is that its citizens have not been educated in the way their own government works, and they have even less of an interest in finding it out for themselves. All we as Americans tend to do is panic every time there's a bit of shocking news. The politicans gives us quick fixes to placate us, and the rest of the time they feel confident ripping the constitution to shreds because the citizens just don't care and are too ignorant to care. Like I said, a big part of it is the educational system we're stuck with. Growing up we're taught largely by people who are frankly too incompetent to do anything else, working for salaries that don't even amount to the cost of living in a lot of places. And, the textbooks. Yeesh! The number of factual errors I found even as a high schooler were astounding. Recently I looked at a science text book for the Detroit school and was appalled. The authors got every single concept they were trying to teach wrong. And, given that classes like government are considered "extra" they get shorted even worse than the rest.
CIA? CIA? Puleahse... The CIA is not the government's catchall for cynical black operations. The CIA has a fairly narrow mandate and aims its operations at foreign powers. If there are covert government ops infiltrating an organization, they're more likely to be FBI, BATF, DEA, and local law enforcement. The FBI especially has a history of this. However, as someone who's also worked with various left of center organizations, I would advise folks not to underestimate the capablities of their own kind. There's a lot of frustration in the environmental community and it might just be boiling over. I mean, most Americans like to say they're for the environment, and yet, they drive massive gas guzzling SUVs, leave lights on, build new suburbs in wilderness areas, drive more, vote against public transportation, and vote for right wing jackasses. The basic truth seems to be that Americans only care about the enviroment insofar as they don't have give anything up for it. So what's the environmental activist to do? Well, if you lose your temper, you torch car lots, new sub divisions, etc... If you take a deep breath, calm down, the solution is more grass roots organizing, and education. Of course, our current energy jitters might make folks stop and take a look at what our suburban life style is costing, so I'm still hopeful. However, there's a lot of folks out there who've lost their tempers. Oh, and while, we're on the topic of conspiracy theories, don't assume that the provacteurs(I know I can't spell!) are from the government. They could very well be industry plants, right wing politcal plants, or lone maniacs. If you're going to be paranoid, don't stop with the government. I know in one group I volunteered with we had a few plants from a timber company. They did a lot of damage before they got rooted out.
Well, I seem to remember a couple of FPSes that got some bad press for just the reason you mentioned. I haven't any of these, but I saw some stories here and there. The first was Kingpin--I think--where you run around in the inner city blowing away drug dealers who, according to the short piece I read, were invariably black. Then there's another game called Nam. You're running around killing black pajamaed VCs. I mainly heard this game sucked. And, Red Neck Rampage pretty much turned the entire rural South of the US into a caricature. I'm not concerned with Castle Wolfenstein because the target is the uniform rather than a caricature. Even so this is something to look out for. And, hey, if you're offended, don't buy it, talk to your friends and community about it too. Freedom of Speech works both ways.
From what I understand, most contracts written today do include terms about collecting work in digital collections and archives. However, this ruling goes back in time and will force publishers to negotiate terms to display freelance work in these mediums. This may or may not force the removal of older work. If I was a writer who had some freelance stuff published years ago, chances are I've moved on and continued to be a freelance hack, or gotten a staff position or something else. If I'm still writing I'd want copies of my previous good work floating around as a way to entice people to read my current stuff. I dunno how many people would see it this way, but for nonfiction work that's four or more years out of date, it'd be hard to justify its relevance to anyone but scholars--lay or academic. And, I'd certainly want to be a help to these people, especially if they cite me. Fiction on the other hand is fairly timeless and I'd most certainly want to compensation for making that permanently and freely available. I hope that freelance journalists and their kin would step up to the larger cause of knowledge and give permission grant permission for their older works to be collected into online archives.
Well you know with this new AI, the guards have a resting state where they'll 'smoke and check maps'. Still that doesn't mean the poor guys get bathroom breaks. After all, they're nazis.
The article states that they're replacing applix on their unix machines with Star Office. Still, this helps prime the pump. BTW, the new version has got some really handly features like saving as xml. I need to upgrade.
Well, given some of the networks these machines might be on, it's not like they can download it off the Internet. I also think there are security guidelines that ask for a little more assurance that the software's the authentic article. Meaning, you take delivery directly from the vendor rather than assuming your download is safe. Besides, 1.2 mil helps the vendor keep supplying the software you rely on.
Very observant. Anyone who thinks this action is somehow illegal or unwarranted should read our trademark laws. The names of the groups alone violate those laws. By law a company must defend their trademark against all infringement. If a company is lax in defending their trademark another entity may take that trademark over by arguing that it has been abandoned. At least that's my understanding. I dunno if copyrights have the same requirement or not. But even if they do not, the owner of the copyright has every right to sue someone who violates their copyright. I know this means they should go after the individual violator, but that would take effort, so they hit the distributor as a way of cutting off supply.
The business of getting attention is nothing new. There are PR firms that have been in business for almost a century. I'd say that this problem has been around ever since information became industrialized, and that happened late last century. Heck, it probably began to be a problem as soon as reliable telegraph service became available. Suddenly you could information from across the world in time to actually make decsions that could affect the event's outcome. So, one reason that news has become briefer is that an event is no longer reported after the fact, but as it happens. So, detailed after action reports became a series of just in bulletins. This has led to some problems. For instance, most of us have a good idea what's going on right now in the world, but have little idea of the forces that create the situations we read and hear about. And, it's very seldom that we ever see a followup that tells us how everything settled out. I think that the single biggest affect of communications technology is that we tend live in the now in the Western world with little notion of our history or where we're going. This has been the case at least since TV became widespread.
In terms of who to trust, we're actually better off than we were in say the thirties. Unfortunately in America we're slipping. Back in the day, news was a local monopoly controled by the dominant news paper. These days you can read the LATimes, the NY Times, listen to the BBC, and watch Nightline to compare the coverage. Of course, these days, there tends to be little difference between the major news organization is vanishing as national monopolies gobble up diversified local news organizations. Let's not even get into corporate self censorship! So who do we trust? In America, the answer increasingly no one. People are turning off from news simply because we've grown accustomed to the talking heads lying to us. So, we're heading back to the bad old days right quick.
I agree with the bulk of you comment, but the thing to keep in mind here is the outrageous rents in that part of the world. I was looking at starting salaries of $50,000 to $65,000 a couple of years ago when I wanted to go out there. Then I looked at the rents and saw studios going $1200/mo. The mindset when you get laid off is to try and get right back up on the horse and get a new job. Only problem is that can take months, and if don't have huge savings the rent eats up you cash real fast. And, unless you cut and run right away you can get stuck without the resources to move. Mind you, this whole situation made up my mind not go out there. As a native Californian, there's something I know that lot's of people don't. And, that is that the place is great with a dynamic and long term viable economy. However, it's also the land of the Gold Rush. Every few years there's a new one and people charge out, ride high on the wave, and get slammed hard into the sand when it breaks.