"On the other hand, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control found in 2004 that about 20% high school seniors had used marijuana in the preceding month. This was down from nearly 34% in 1980, but up from 14% in 1990. The long-term decline probably owes something to high-schoolers knowing more about the potential harmful effects of the drug. And sophisticated border surveillance techniques employed by the Homeland Security Dept.'s Customs and Border Protection Division may have affected the decline."
statistics and correlations - pah!
kids in the 00's are just less likely than kids in the 80's to *admit* to their drug use on a government sponsored survey. no surprise if you consider that mandatory minimums for drugs charges just keep going up.
i agree with the parent post. it doesn't seem appropriate to make claims of ownership to ALL the submitted designs since only the top two designs are being compensated ("work for hire"). please correct me if i'm wrong, but it seems that the only way slashdot legally owns your submission is if you sign their hard copy.
"(f) You agree that if you are chosen as a Prize winner you shall promptly sign any documents reasonably requested by Sponsor to evidence or perfect its rights in the Design, such as a hard copy of these Official Rules, before you are eligible to collect the Prize."
clearly, signing away your rights would not be a hard decision if you won, and i would definitely have no problem giving up my rights in exchange for a macbook - pretty fair situation, there. but otherwise, why would someone want to give up their complete rights to a design that they may have spent hours/days working on? i doubt all these well-informed slashdot readers will meekly give up complete intellectual property rights to their designs unless they won the contest.
This game was so awesome. It had a whole slew of vicious attacks and particularly gruesome fatalities, like any decent fighting game, but it didn't end there. It had more original, freaky, fun characters than you could shake a stick at. You could play as a pair of siamese twins, a french maid with a cattleprod, a midget on stilts, a man in a straightjacket, a butcher, and a few others. But the coolest thing about it was that FOUR people could play these twisted characters at the same time. Man, my friends and I couldn't WAIT for that game to enter into our weekly video game battles. Lunchtime discussions over who would play which characters first practically came to blows and the game wasn't even out yet.
Thrill Kill was highly anticipated by gamers as the most graphically brutal and violent game of its time. This, of course, was EA's excuse to cancel it only days before the public release, soulless bastids and Haters of Fun that they are.
The 20th century Dada artist Marcel DuChamp took what many consider to be the most famous painting in the world, Leonardo DaVinci's "Mona Lisa", made a few small changes to it (such as adding a moustache and manipulating the hairline on Ms. Lisa's forehead), and titled it "L.H.O.O.Q."
The title, when read quickly, sounds very similar to a phrase which translates roughly (ie: a pun/colloquialism) as "she has a hot ass" in French. It's not clear if DuChamp was challenging the boundaries of art simply for personal pleasure or to challenge the status quo (or both), but he certainly pissed off some people with his ideas and artwork.
Clearly, Google was not attempting to make some sort of grand social or artistic statement with their logo design and it certainly falls within the boundaries of legal use. If I painted that exact logo on a 4 foot by 8 foot canvas and sold it on the open market for $100,000, nobody could say a word. The lawyers are just jumping on it because they see dollar signs. Google backed down quickly because they don't feel like wasting money on legal costs to prove that they are not in the wrong, although they (and everyone else) knows Google didn't violate any copyrights.
I suspect that someone at Google digs Miro and wanted to introduce a few (million) people to Miro's work. Who doesn't click on the Google logo when it is an unusual one? I always do. It's like stopping for a few minutes to check out a show about bee colonies or Napoleon on the discovery/history channel. Google has a forum for giving millions of people the opportunity to learn a little more about the world via their creative logos. It really is a very clever and simple public service that lacks any ulterior motives and I think that it would be difficult to prove otherwise.
Regardless, whether due to a controversial work like DuChamp's L.H.O.O.Q. or an innocuous work like Google's Miro inspired logo design, you can always depend upon someone to be outraged at an homage to any great artist of the past. The people representing Miro have shown not just Miro but all of Google's millions of users a great disservice with their attack.
Doubtless, Miro is turning over in his grave thanks to these snooty, money-gobbling pricks.
Whenever I see "let's push through this law to protect the children" I always assume it is bad legislation. You know that it's especially bad when "child porn" is used as the justification for taking away privacy rights. Basically, "we can't even make up a semi-clever story to hide our ulterior motives... time to play the Sicko Child Pornographer Card!"
This is great! Now if only they could help me keep tabs on my glass pipe, too. After the first couple of twenty rocks I always seem to lose track of the pipe and then I end up having to smoke out of an old lightbulb.
It's the brokers who ruined it for everyone and it is such a good thing that craigslist finally implemented this fee. You can avoid the brokers in other boroughs, even Brooklyn most of the time, but the way it works in Manhattan is that you HAVE to go through a broker to find a place and you always end up paying them a hefty fee (usually at least a month's rent). I had a friend who was hired part time to work for a broker in the summer (via a job posting on craigslist) and her job was to simply create listings on craigslist every day for apartments. All of these apartments were listed on the broker's company website - she would log on to the website and copy the pictures and text directly over to a craigslist ad, sometimes cleaning up the copy a bit but often just posting it as-is. She was paid $100 a week to post 20 ads a day and theoretically would get 10% of the broker fee (the broker would get let's say $3500 and she would get $300) if anyone rented one of the apartments that she listed online, which turned out to be not very often. (ie: never).
After a while she realized that she was posting many of the same apartments multiple times and the broker didn't even care what apartment people called about or what the actual ads said, as long as 20 ads were posted with his contact information on it every day. The people who called about an ad would pretty much never see that actual apartment - the broker would ask what you wanted to pay and then proceed to show you whatever apartments were available that week that were $200-$500 over your price range. After a month or so, my friend quit because the broker was always late to pay the measly $100 per week and the whole operation seemed shady. There were several other people who worked for the same broker just posting ads, so this one broker probably had 100 ads posted per day on craigslist just for him. This guy worked at a company with around 20 other brokers, who probably all had their own minions doing the same thing. Just imagine multiple companies doing the same thing with all their brokers and you realize how useless it is to look for an apartment on craigslist in Manhattan.
I personally have used craigslist to find some great apartments in cities like San Francisco, but in Manhattan it is primarily a form of free advertising that the brokers exploit. The system here is already crappy enough with the brokers, but even more so as long as they are free to render craigslist into a useless spam hole.
i can't believe the parent to my comment here got modded up to a 5. the fact that it did underlines the ignorance of this issue.
let's take everyone's favorite tack on this: the analogy. you open a phonebook and look up the word "apple". by some people's reasoning, we can't make things too complicated or confusing for the unwashed masses, right? so there should only be one page for "apple" in the phone book and in the center of it there should be one phone number for the single most popular (socially, politically, or economically) entity associated with the word "apple". would that be apple computer, perhaps? or apple records? or apple plumbing? or fiona apple? either way, it seems obvious that there are hundreds of other people who use the word "apple" to describe something important enough to have a phone number OR a website, all with equal rights to that word. my point, why should there only be a handful of possible apple websites?.com,.net,.org,.info, etc? there should be hundreds of possibilities as there are hundreds of apples out there. my favorite apple site is not everyone else's.
> > >"...The point of domain names is to provide a quick and easy way to remember and communicate internet locations..."
there isn't any "quick and easy" way to find anything within ANY sizable informational database. if you want to find the best cookbook for making apple pie at your local library, you can't just walk down to the Pie Isle and pick it up. you have to search around because there are a lot of cookbooks out there. perhaps you come across one you like, or have one recommended to you. then you take note of all the relavent information, such as title, author, publisher, edition, isbn number, etc. is it SO HARD to have to keep track of an extra bit of information to allow so many additional choices? obviously, as the size of a database grows, so does the complexity of data retrieval. but it isn't too bad if you have a logical, yet user-friendly method to extract information and it pays off because you have a much richer resource to retrieve information from. the entire DNS of the internet used to be based on/etc/hosts, a tiny flat text file on any unix box. you can't expect a solution like that to scale well but it started off as a few computers, so that's all they needed at the time. DNS/BIND is technically scalable, but we need to be innovative and allow more complexity (unlimited tlds, non-english domain names, ipv6) in order to enrich the internet for everyone. yeah, so you have to remember two or three words instead of one to find your favorite website. well, at least it's not a huge string of random numbers.
> > >"...Or to put it another way too many non-content related tlds make all domains harder to remember and hence don't solve the problem but just spread out the pain by making every name slightly worse..."
i hate that tld's are still designated as being a category label for the previous string - this concept has caused so many problems. everyone thinks tlds are such a huge deal to divvy out when they are the same freaking thing as a domain name, just on the right side of the "dot" instead of the left. it is NOTHING MORE than a linguistic shortcut to an IP address! you SHOULD be able to label a website what.ever.you.want.to.name.it without regard to what any part of the string is. should the last string be a descriptor for the second to last's business model or organizational structure? who frickin cares what it is? if i go to slashdot.org does it matter that it is a nonprofit or an LLC or goverment entity or privately owned personal website? nope. it could be slashdot.fruitloops for all it matters. there is no economic or technical reason why the tld selection is so limited. it's easy to see that those who own the space in foo.com want to keep it the ONLY name space because they don't want any other foo's getting in sandbox with them.
Slashdot Mirror
"On the other hand, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control found in 2004 that about 20% high school seniors had used marijuana in the preceding month. This was down from nearly 34% in 1980, but up from 14% in 1990. The long-term decline probably owes something to high-schoolers knowing more about the potential harmful effects of the drug. And sophisticated border surveillance techniques employed by the Homeland Security Dept.'s Customs and Border Protection Division may have affected the decline."
statistics and correlations - pah!
kids in the 00's are just less likely than kids in the 80's to *admit* to their drug use on a government sponsored survey. no surprise if you consider that mandatory minimums for drugs charges just keep going up.
i agree with the parent post. it doesn't seem appropriate to make claims of ownership to ALL the submitted designs since only the top two designs are being compensated ("work for hire"). please correct me if i'm wrong, but it seems that the only way slashdot legally owns your submission is if you sign their hard copy.
"(f) You agree that if you are chosen as a Prize winner you shall promptly sign any documents reasonably requested by Sponsor to evidence or perfect its rights in the Design, such as a hard copy of these Official Rules, before you are eligible to collect the Prize."
clearly, signing away your rights would not be a hard decision if you won, and i would definitely have no problem giving up my rights in exchange for a macbook - pretty fair situation, there. but otherwise, why would someone want to give up their complete rights to a design that they may have spent hours/days working on? i doubt all these well-informed slashdot readers will meekly give up complete intellectual property rights to their designs unless they won the contest.
Does anyone remember that playstation game Thrill Kill?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thrill_Kill
This game was so awesome. It had a whole slew of vicious attacks and particularly gruesome fatalities, like any decent fighting game, but it didn't end there. It had more original, freaky, fun characters than you could shake a stick at. You could play as a pair of siamese twins, a french maid with a cattleprod, a midget on stilts, a man in a straightjacket, a butcher, and a few others. But the coolest thing about it was that FOUR people could play these twisted characters at the same time. Man, my friends and I couldn't WAIT for that game to enter into our weekly video game battles. Lunchtime discussions over who would play which characters first practically came to blows and the game wasn't even out yet.
Thrill Kill was highly anticipated by gamers as the most graphically brutal and violent game of its time. This, of course, was EA's excuse to cancel it only days before the public release, soulless bastids and Haters of Fun that they are.
The 20th century Dada artist Marcel DuChamp took what many consider to be the most famous painting in the world, Leonardo DaVinci's "Mona Lisa", made a few small changes to it (such as adding a moustache and manipulating the hairline on Ms. Lisa's forehead), and titled it "L.H.O.O.Q."
http://www.google.com/search?q=lhooq
The title, when read quickly, sounds very similar to a phrase which translates roughly (ie: a pun/colloquialism) as "she has a hot ass" in French. It's not clear if DuChamp was challenging the boundaries of art simply for personal pleasure or to challenge the status quo (or both), but he certainly pissed off some people with his ideas and artwork.
Clearly, Google was not attempting to make some sort of grand social or artistic statement with their logo design and it certainly falls within the boundaries of legal use. If I painted that exact logo on a 4 foot by 8 foot canvas and sold it on the open market for $100,000, nobody could say a word. The lawyers are just jumping on it because they see dollar signs. Google backed down quickly because they don't feel like wasting money on legal costs to prove that they are not in the wrong, although they (and everyone else) knows Google didn't violate any copyrights.
I suspect that someone at Google digs Miro and wanted to introduce a few (million) people to Miro's work. Who doesn't click on the Google logo when it is an unusual one? I always do. It's like stopping for a few minutes to check out a show about bee colonies or Napoleon on the discovery/history channel. Google has a forum for giving millions of people the opportunity to learn a little more about the world via their creative logos. It really is a very clever and simple public service that lacks any ulterior motives and I think that it would be difficult to prove otherwise.
Regardless, whether due to a controversial work like DuChamp's L.H.O.O.Q. or an innocuous work like Google's Miro inspired logo design, you can always depend upon someone to be outraged at an homage to any great artist of the past. The people representing Miro have shown not just Miro but all of Google's millions of users a great disservice with their attack.
Doubtless, Miro is turning over in his grave thanks to these snooty, money-gobbling pricks.
Whenever I see "let's push through this law to protect the children" I always assume it is bad legislation. You know that it's especially bad when "child porn" is used as the justification for taking away privacy rights. Basically, "we can't even make up a semi-clever story to hide our ulterior motives... time to play the Sicko Child Pornographer Card!"
this could be the only situation where you might not mind that your ass is literally owned and protected as state property.
In Soviet Russia, software bootlegs YOU!
This is great! Now if only they could help me keep tabs on my glass pipe, too. After the first couple of twenty rocks I always seem to lose track of the pipe and then I end up having to smoke out of an old lightbulb.
It's the brokers who ruined it for everyone and it is such a good thing that craigslist finally implemented this fee. You can avoid the brokers in other boroughs, even Brooklyn most of the time, but the way it works in Manhattan is that you HAVE to go through a broker to find a place and you always end up paying them a hefty fee (usually at least a month's rent). I had a friend who was hired part time to work for a broker in the summer (via a job posting on craigslist) and her job was to simply create listings on craigslist every day for apartments. All of these apartments were listed on the broker's company website - she would log on to the website and copy the pictures and text directly over to a craigslist ad, sometimes cleaning up the copy a bit but often just posting it as-is. She was paid $100 a week to post 20 ads a day and theoretically would get 10% of the broker fee (the broker would get let's say $3500 and she would get $300) if anyone rented one of the apartments that she listed online, which turned out to be not very often. (ie: never).
After a while she realized that she was posting many of the same apartments multiple times and the broker didn't even care what apartment people called about or what the actual ads said, as long as 20 ads were posted with his contact information on it every day. The people who called about an ad would pretty much never see that actual apartment - the broker would ask what you wanted to pay and then proceed to show you whatever apartments were available that week that were $200-$500 over your price range. After a month or so, my friend quit because the broker was always late to pay the measly $100 per week and the whole operation seemed shady. There were several other people who worked for the same broker just posting ads, so this one broker probably had 100 ads posted per day on craigslist just for him. This guy worked at a company with around 20 other brokers, who probably all had their own minions doing the same thing. Just imagine multiple companies doing the same thing with all their brokers and you realize how useless it is to look for an apartment on craigslist in Manhattan.
I personally have used craigslist to find some great apartments in cities like San Francisco, but in Manhattan it is primarily a form of free advertising that the brokers exploit. The system here is already crappy enough with the brokers, but even more so as long as they are free to render craigslist into a useless spam hole.
i can't believe the parent to my comment here got modded up to a 5. the fact that it did underlines the ignorance of this issue.
.com, .net, .org, .info, etc? there should be hundreds of possibilities as there are hundreds of apples out there. my favorite apple site is not everyone else's.
/etc/hosts, a tiny flat text file on any unix box. you can't expect a solution like that to scale well but it started off as a few computers, so that's all they needed at the time. DNS/BIND is technically scalable, but we need to be innovative and allow more complexity (unlimited tlds, non-english domain names, ipv6) in order to enrich the internet for everyone. yeah, so you have to remember two or three words instead of one to find your favorite website. well, at least it's not a huge string of random numbers.
let's take everyone's favorite tack on this: the analogy. you open a phonebook and look up the word "apple". by some people's reasoning, we can't make things too complicated or confusing for the unwashed masses, right? so there should only be one page for "apple" in the phone book and in the center of it there should be one phone number for the single most popular (socially, politically, or economically) entity associated with the word "apple". would that be apple computer, perhaps? or apple records? or apple plumbing? or fiona apple? either way, it seems obvious that there are hundreds of other people who use the word "apple" to describe something important enough to have a phone number OR a website, all with equal rights to that word. my point, why should there only be a handful of possible apple websites?
> > >"...The point of domain names is to provide a quick and easy way to remember and communicate internet locations..."
there isn't any "quick and easy" way to find anything within ANY sizable informational database. if you want to find the best cookbook for making apple pie at your local library, you can't just walk down to the Pie Isle and pick it up. you have to search around because there are a lot of cookbooks out there. perhaps you come across one you like, or have one recommended to you. then you take note of all the relavent information, such as title, author, publisher, edition, isbn number, etc. is it SO HARD to have to keep track of an extra bit of information to allow so many additional choices? obviously, as the size of a database grows, so does the complexity of data retrieval. but it isn't too bad if you have a logical, yet user-friendly method to extract information and it pays off because you have a much richer resource to retrieve information from. the entire DNS of the internet used to be based on
> > >"...Or to put it another way too many non-content related tlds make all domains harder to remember and hence don't solve the problem but just spread out the pain by making every name slightly worse..."
i hate that tld's are still designated as being a category label for the previous string - this concept has caused so many problems. everyone thinks tlds are such a huge deal to divvy out when they are the same freaking thing as a domain name, just on the right side of the "dot" instead of the left. it is NOTHING MORE than a linguistic shortcut to an IP address! you SHOULD be able to label a website what.ever.you.want.to.name.it without regard to what any part of the string is. should the last string be a descriptor for the second to last's business model or organizational structure? who frickin cares what it is? if i go to slashdot.org does it matter that it is a nonprofit or an LLC or goverment entity or privately owned personal website? nope. it could be slashdot.fruitloops for all it matters. there is no economic or technical reason why the tld selection is so limited. it's easy to see that those who own the space in foo.com want to keep it the ONLY name space because they don't want any other foo's getting in sandbox with them.
eep.
;)
mozilla.org rather.
one word: Mozilla.
(mozilla.com for those of you with modem lines running to your cave/under your rock.)
this is the funniest shit i've ever read on slashdot. :)
just in time to save us from unemployment claims running out and having to find a real job! small claims court, here i come...