Don't think that this only takes place in Africa and South America. My wife used to work for a private all-girls Catholic junior high school in New York. One year, she was teaching health and needed to cover sex education. They brought in someone else to teach it (which, honestly, my wife welcomed since teaching sex ed in a private Catholic school is kind of like grabbing a dangling power line and hoping it isn't live). This person proceeded to tell the girls a bunch of lies like all condoms have tiny holes in them that let sperm and viruses through.
My wife complained to the principal. Telling the girls not to have sex before marriage because God says so would be one thing. It is a religious school, after all. But spreading blatant lies like this is just wrong. The principal was shocked (or acted so) and promised to look into it. We don't know if this speaker was ever brought back because soon after this we had our second child and my wife quit her job to stay at home with him.
Still, the fact that there's someone who sells their services going from school to school spreading lies to scare kids into not having sex is frustrating. All this will do is cause kids to have unprotected sex which will lead to teen pregnancy and STDs. Even if they find out the truth, it means they'll be less likely to trust what an adult tells them and might not listen to another piece of advice that could have been life-saving.
Actually, my Slashdot ID took place long before my Identity Theft. For most sites, nowadays, I actually use a pseudonym. Giving out your name isn't going to lead to Identity Theft. My case involved someone signing up for a credit card in my name with my date of birth, social security number, and address. How they got this information, I don't know (and will likely never know), but it definitely wasn't from Slashdot.
I tried New York's system and it kept insisting that I wasn't a real person. This was after I entered in personal information which, as the victim of identity theft, made me very uncomfortable entering into an online form (Social Security number, date of birth, etc) but that I rationalized was needed for this process. I did eventually get in, but via a roundabout way that involved signing up for an account with the DMV. Don't ask me what the DMV has to do with health care (beyond using the same login schema).
As far as TVs go, our living room TV is still a standard definition set and will remain so until it dies. While I'd love to upgrade the the newest shiny thing every time some trivial upgrade comes out, my bank account has different ideas. So we'll run the standard definition TV into the ground before upgrading. (We have a small HD set in our bedroom because our SD set there died.) As far as 4K TVs go? I'll probably wind up upgrading to one of those sometime around 2030. Maybe by then they'll have content for it.
Predicting that someone in the future might do something is one thing. Setting laws in place regulating the at-the-moment-imaginary technology is something else. Should we be crafting laws right now to deal with who gets an intelligent, sentient robot's estate when it becomes too damaged to function? After all, at some point we might make robots that are intelligent enough to be considered self-sufficient people. And these robots might be able to earn money and have estates. So shouldn't we be making the law handle this situation now?
Of course not.
Laws are reactionary, not visionary. We don't know the particulars of what the robots would be like, when the technology will reach that point, or even *IF* they will reach that point. The 50's also saw people thinking that nuclear reactors would be miniaturized, and used as batteries for toys. Should we have put laws on the books regulating AA sized Nuclear Batteries versus D Cell Nuclear Batteries?
If and when a situation comes up, the law will be modified to handle those cases. Creating new laws based solely on "I can imagine that things might be like this one day" would only result in an unmanageable mess that would make the current laws look sane by comparison.
The problem is that laws can't be designed with future technology in mind as you never know where future technology will lead. Who could have envisioned, 50 years ago, that we would have cars that drove themselves? A law isn't poorly designed if some future technology isn't handled by it. In cases like that, the law needs to be updated, completely rewritten, or repealed (depending on the new situation). That's just the reality of laws and technology.
I used to work on a review site a decade ago (which is forever in Internet terms). At the time, I processed all reviews by hand to weed out spam submissions. (The site was small enough to allow this at the time. Obviously, looking back, it wasn't a scalable solution.) Along with spam submissions, I'd occasionally get a wave of positive reviews for products. These reviews would have similar wording and would invariably come from the same IP address. After a decade, I'm sure the shills have gotten less obvious about their glowing product/service reviews so I don't envy people who need to weed the shills out from the actual reviews.
The other side of this coin is that people could submit negative reviews that weren't earned whether out of spite for unrelated company actions (e.g. I don't like the founder's political stance so I'll post that his business's service stinks) or as a method of unfair competition (e.g. If we ruin their rating on Yelp, our competing carpet cleaning business will pick up). I can understand a business being afraid of phony negative reviews hurting their reputation. That being said, the names shouldn't be released to the business itself but to a third party who would also get the business' customer list and could compare them to weed out anyone who wasn't a customer. This third party would be forbidden from revealing the real names of the Yelp users - or the business' customer list - to anyone and would only report back which online screen names were not customers.
In fact, I'd go so far as to say that the court is setting up a huge legal risk. Let's, for a second, accept the following as true:
The Virginia Court of Appeals agreed this week, ruling that the comments were not protected First Amendment opinions if the Yelp users were not customers and thus were making false claims.
Now let's say Yelp releases the names of these 7 commenters and none were customers. Fine, no rights violated. (Again, for the moment, we're accepting the court's ruling.) However, if at least one of those comments came from an actual customer, then those people's rights will have been violated. The court has basically stated that no rights will be violated by assuming an outcome where no rights are violated. (Circular reasoning at its finest!)
I'm sure a Creationist would have an answer for this, but how exactly does a flood kill sea animals? More specifically, how does it kill some sea animals but not others? Or did Noah also load up his ark with giant fishbowls full of every sea animal as well so that the horrible sea-animal killing flood didn't kill off the dolphins? I can see it now. Noah enters the Whale Room and climbs a very big ladder to be able to sprinkle dried plankton flakes into the whale tank. (Diorama of this scene coming soon to a Creationist museum near you!)
And how many of those incumbents who come back year after year do so thanks to using gerrymandering to redraw district lines to eliminate any chance that they could lose an election?
That's because, sadly, too many people fall for the "I might be bad, but that person's worse" fallacy. They think not voting for the major party that claims to best represent their views is essentially voting for the major party that doesn't claim to best represent their views. Since (once you buy into this fallacy) having "That Guy" in office seems so horrible, voting for "This Guy" is all but ensured. Add in campaigns geared to demonize "That Guy" and gerrymandering designed by the winning party designed to keep the winning party in office and it's not hard to see how Congressfolks keep their jobs.
I had a PO Box cancelled on me because the post office it was located at didn't notify me when the payment for it was due. They just waited until it was past due, moved my mail to a box, and shut down my PO Box. I switched post offices (new one was actually closer to where I work) and the new place also doesn't do notifications. It's up to me to remember to pay my PO Box bill. A PO Box isn't a guarantee of a once a year notification.
let's assume that the company had one of their photographers take the photo so that they owned the copyright, and the only issue is the unfair use of your likeness.
Yes, they would own the copyright, but using it in any meaningful way would require them to get me to sign a model release form authorizing them to use my image. Of course, Facebook's TOS probably has text along the lines of "you consent to your image being used by any company we partner with for any purpose we decide" to cover the model release case. Just like they likely have text forcing you to grant them a worldwide right to your photos with the option to sell rights to whatever third parties they decide to.
The decision for the courts would be: Is a simple TOS enough for a model release? What if they use a photo of someone not on Facebook? Say my wife, who is on Facebook, posts a photo of me - not on Facebook - and a company decides to use it for their ads. Obviously, I've never agreed to Facebook's TOS so I didn't "sign the model release." It just seems too risky, legally, for a company to grab a Facebook-posted image and assume that the Facebook TOS covers their rear.
I don't think they are mutually exclusive. There's a difference between volunteering information about yourself and withholding information about yourself. Just because you are on social media, it doesn't mean you tell everyone everything there is to know about you. (Example, on social media I never mention what school district my kids go to.) There's also the situation that, if you give a company some private information that they say will remain private and then they make it public, that's a privacy violation. It doesn't matter if the company is a social media website or a brick-and-mortar store. If a place says that information will only be kept within the company and they don't do so, they should be taken to task for it, not let off the hook because some people are posting "selfies" at home with GPS data in the EXIF.
To add to this, the horrors of war used to only be known to the few who actually fought in it. Yes, they might have told stories, but it's one thing to hear a story from grandpa about the horrible war he fought in and another to see it for yourself. As technology improved, we began to get photographs from the front lines (or near enough to them) and people saw for themselves how horrible war could be. Then we got video and real-time reporting. Faced with the real horrors of war, people didn't as readily support it. They weren't willing to put their sons and daughters into that situation for just any cause. Especially when the situation was half a world away and the cause didn't have a direct bearing on their lives at home.
Technology like drones could solve this public support "problem." After all, who cares if Johnny is "shot down" when the net effect is that his drone has crashed and he switches to drone #15 and continues the fight? What's the worst that will happen? He'll come home with "battlefield carpal tunnel syndrome"? There will still be monetary concerns over war, but those are more easily argued against versus the lives of people's relatives.
This technology could actually make us a more war-mongering nation since we'll be removing one of the big downsides to war - casualties on our side.
True, though think by "bandwidth of their users", LandDolphin was referring to paying twice. So Google pays once for YouTube to have enough bandwidth to serve content across the Internet. Customers pay their ISP for enough bandwidth to stream the YouTube content. Now, however, AT&T wants Google to pay for the customer's bandwidth as well as Google's own. Plus, since they'll still be charging the customer for their bandwidth, AT&T will effectively be paid twice for the same bandwidth. (More if Amazon and Facebook, and others pay as well.)
Win-Win for AT&T but lose-lose for small companies. Say I found a new online video service. As it is, I'll have a tough time competing with YouTube, but suppose I provide amazing service so I get a loyal following. Now, all of a sudden, AT&T asks if I want to pay them extra so that their customers' data caps won't be impacted if they use my service. Being a small company, I can't afford it, but Google sure can. They pay and YouTube use is now "free" data-wise. My service, though, still costs users their data. Small companies will have an even harder time now competing against the big boys. (This will only get worse if Verizon and Sprint hop on board as well.)
It's lose-lose for customers as well since this turns using an online service from a sure "data hit" to an uncertain one. Did this service pay to exempt their data? Maybe they did or maybe they didn't. Maybe they did and you get used to using a lot of this service but then they dropped the "caps bypass surcharge" and suddenly your data cap is reached.
Here I thought the financial crisis was caused by lenders approving loans they knew people wouldn't be able to pay off and then packaging those loans together and pawning them off on other people and so on through the pyramid until the entire scheme inevitably collapsed. Nope. It wasn't greed on the part of the bankers and lenders. It was the Internet! Technology is to blame. And do you know who's behind technology? Scientists! Yup, if we'd all go back to being completely ignorant and subservient to the rich folks who tell us what to think then everything would go back to those wonderful days when everyone was happy.
[/sarcasm]
Wait... who put these extra-strength rose colored glasses on my face?
I'm not saying Global Warming doesn't exist, it does! However given this cold spell, I fail to see how the earth is warming up.
Also known as the "It's cold in this one location at this one time so how can the entire Earth be warmer" argument against global warming. Easy to disprove. First off, climate isn't the same as weather. Secondly, let's say the temperature in your location went down by 20 degrees, but the temperature in a few other places (say, Pretoria, South Africa, Paris, France, and Hong Kong) have gone up by 10 degrees each. The average temperature across these four locations would be +2.5 degrees - or warmer on average. Even though you are shivering now, it doesn't mean that everyone is or that everyone will always be shivering. It just means that the temperatures dropped in one location for one period of time.
I have a BlackBerry Bold (given to me by my work). I compared the keyboard on that vs the Typo one to see which keys had the same functionality. Ignoring the obvious QWERTY similarities (which would be true of pretty much any mobile keyboard), the first row had 8 keys exactly the same and 2 different. The second row had all 10 keys the same. The third row was 7 same and 3 different. And the last row was 2.5 the same and 4.5 different. (The "half" coming from a Bluetooth function on the Typo that isn't on my Blackberry's keyboard yet having the zero key in the same spot.) In total, that's 27.5 keys the same and 9.5 different.
Functionality-wise, the keyboard is about 74% the same as the Blackberry Bold's keyboard. This is close, but gives enough room to speculate that it's not close enough to be covered under any patents Blackberry might have. Plus, other mobile keyboards might have similar layouts which would bolster Typo's case that they were just following some "industry standard" layout and not a patented Blackberry layout.
Everything in celestial terms is much, much bigger. Therefore, I'd expect celestial bacon to be five light years across and twenty five light years long.
There's no need to "fix that for you" because claiming "terrorism" is widely known here to be political shorthand for "we want more power and don't question us or else". Now if only everyone not on Slashdot would realize this, perhaps we could patch the "terrorism root hole" in our government.
We're similar in our library trips. For my kids, we'll still sometimes browse the shelves to see what they want to read, but for us we reserve the titles we want on the library's website. We're notified when the titles are in, pick them up, and then are ready to leave (once the kids pick out some books and/or DVDs). Just because we're not spending hours browsing the shelves doesn't mean we're not heavily utilizing our library system. To be honest, I don't think we've had zero books/DVDs checked out of the library for months. Every time we return some, we take more out.
Cost may be an issue for e-readers today, but you already can get some pretty damn cheap e-readers if you are willing to buy something other than the big name brands.
Even with name brands, Amazon's cheapest Kindle is $69 which is pretty affordable. That comes "with special offers" but in my experience the ads are completely unobtrusive. (They appear when the device is off - in which case you most likely have it in a carrying case - and when browsing through your book listing - which is easily ignored. No ads appear while you read books.)
Slashdot Mirror
Don't think that this only takes place in Africa and South America. My wife used to work for a private all-girls Catholic junior high school in New York. One year, she was teaching health and needed to cover sex education. They brought in someone else to teach it (which, honestly, my wife welcomed since teaching sex ed in a private Catholic school is kind of like grabbing a dangling power line and hoping it isn't live). This person proceeded to tell the girls a bunch of lies like all condoms have tiny holes in them that let sperm and viruses through.
My wife complained to the principal. Telling the girls not to have sex before marriage because God says so would be one thing. It is a religious school, after all. But spreading blatant lies like this is just wrong. The principal was shocked (or acted so) and promised to look into it. We don't know if this speaker was ever brought back because soon after this we had our second child and my wife quit her job to stay at home with him.
Still, the fact that there's someone who sells their services going from school to school spreading lies to scare kids into not having sex is frustrating. All this will do is cause kids to have unprotected sex which will lead to teen pregnancy and STDs. Even if they find out the truth, it means they'll be less likely to trust what an adult tells them and might not listen to another piece of advice that could have been life-saving.
Actually, my Slashdot ID took place long before my Identity Theft. For most sites, nowadays, I actually use a pseudonym. Giving out your name isn't going to lead to Identity Theft. My case involved someone signing up for a credit card in my name with my date of birth, social security number, and address. How they got this information, I don't know (and will likely never know), but it definitely wasn't from Slashdot.
I tried New York's system and it kept insisting that I wasn't a real person. This was after I entered in personal information which, as the victim of identity theft, made me very uncomfortable entering into an online form (Social Security number, date of birth, etc) but that I rationalized was needed for this process. I did eventually get in, but via a roundabout way that involved signing up for an account with the DMV. Don't ask me what the DMV has to do with health care (beyond using the same login schema).
Married Slashdotter with kids and my own house (within which I do not live in the basement) here.
I love the sound of stereotypes smashing to pieces.
As far as TVs go, our living room TV is still a standard definition set and will remain so until it dies. While I'd love to upgrade the the newest shiny thing every time some trivial upgrade comes out, my bank account has different ideas. So we'll run the standard definition TV into the ground before upgrading. (We have a small HD set in our bedroom because our SD set there died.) As far as 4K TVs go? I'll probably wind up upgrading to one of those sometime around 2030. Maybe by then they'll have content for it.
Predicting that someone in the future might do something is one thing. Setting laws in place regulating the at-the-moment-imaginary technology is something else. Should we be crafting laws right now to deal with who gets an intelligent, sentient robot's estate when it becomes too damaged to function? After all, at some point we might make robots that are intelligent enough to be considered self-sufficient people. And these robots might be able to earn money and have estates. So shouldn't we be making the law handle this situation now?
Of course not.
Laws are reactionary, not visionary. We don't know the particulars of what the robots would be like, when the technology will reach that point, or even *IF* they will reach that point. The 50's also saw people thinking that nuclear reactors would be miniaturized, and used as batteries for toys. Should we have put laws on the books regulating AA sized Nuclear Batteries versus D Cell Nuclear Batteries?
If and when a situation comes up, the law will be modified to handle those cases. Creating new laws based solely on "I can imagine that things might be like this one day" would only result in an unmanageable mess that would make the current laws look sane by comparison.
The problem is that laws can't be designed with future technology in mind as you never know where future technology will lead. Who could have envisioned, 50 years ago, that we would have cars that drove themselves? A law isn't poorly designed if some future technology isn't handled by it. In cases like that, the law needs to be updated, completely rewritten, or repealed (depending on the new situation). That's just the reality of laws and technology.
I used to work on a review site a decade ago (which is forever in Internet terms). At the time, I processed all reviews by hand to weed out spam submissions. (The site was small enough to allow this at the time. Obviously, looking back, it wasn't a scalable solution.) Along with spam submissions, I'd occasionally get a wave of positive reviews for products. These reviews would have similar wording and would invariably come from the same IP address. After a decade, I'm sure the shills have gotten less obvious about their glowing product/service reviews so I don't envy people who need to weed the shills out from the actual reviews.
The other side of this coin is that people could submit negative reviews that weren't earned whether out of spite for unrelated company actions (e.g. I don't like the founder's political stance so I'll post that his business's service stinks) or as a method of unfair competition (e.g. If we ruin their rating on Yelp, our competing carpet cleaning business will pick up). I can understand a business being afraid of phony negative reviews hurting their reputation. That being said, the names shouldn't be released to the business itself but to a third party who would also get the business' customer list and could compare them to weed out anyone who wasn't a customer. This third party would be forbidden from revealing the real names of the Yelp users - or the business' customer list - to anyone and would only report back which online screen names were not customers.
In fact, I'd go so far as to say that the court is setting up a huge legal risk. Let's, for a second, accept the following as true:
Now let's say Yelp releases the names of these 7 commenters and none were customers. Fine, no rights violated. (Again, for the moment, we're accepting the court's ruling.) However, if at least one of those comments came from an actual customer, then those people's rights will have been violated. The court has basically stated that no rights will be violated by assuming an outcome where no rights are violated. (Circular reasoning at its finest!)
I'm sure a Creationist would have an answer for this, but how exactly does a flood kill sea animals? More specifically, how does it kill some sea animals but not others? Or did Noah also load up his ark with giant fishbowls full of every sea animal as well so that the horrible sea-animal killing flood didn't kill off the dolphins? I can see it now. Noah enters the Whale Room and climbs a very big ladder to be able to sprinkle dried plankton flakes into the whale tank. (Diorama of this scene coming soon to a Creationist museum near you!)
And how many of those incumbents who come back year after year do so thanks to using gerrymandering to redraw district lines to eliminate any chance that they could lose an election?
That's because, sadly, too many people fall for the "I might be bad, but that person's worse" fallacy. They think not voting for the major party that claims to best represent their views is essentially voting for the major party that doesn't claim to best represent their views. Since (once you buy into this fallacy) having "That Guy" in office seems so horrible, voting for "This Guy" is all but ensured. Add in campaigns geared to demonize "That Guy" and gerrymandering designed by the winning party designed to keep the winning party in office and it's not hard to see how Congressfolks keep their jobs.
I had a PO Box cancelled on me because the post office it was located at didn't notify me when the payment for it was due. They just waited until it was past due, moved my mail to a box, and shut down my PO Box. I switched post offices (new one was actually closer to where I work) and the new place also doesn't do notifications. It's up to me to remember to pay my PO Box bill. A PO Box isn't a guarantee of a once a year notification.
True, but nowhere in that whole mess was "The Internet" like the article claimed.
Yes, they would own the copyright, but using it in any meaningful way would require them to get me to sign a model release form authorizing them to use my image. Of course, Facebook's TOS probably has text along the lines of "you consent to your image being used by any company we partner with for any purpose we decide" to cover the model release case. Just like they likely have text forcing you to grant them a worldwide right to your photos with the option to sell rights to whatever third parties they decide to.
The decision for the courts would be: Is a simple TOS enough for a model release? What if they use a photo of someone not on Facebook? Say my wife, who is on Facebook, posts a photo of me - not on Facebook - and a company decides to use it for their ads. Obviously, I've never agreed to Facebook's TOS so I didn't "sign the model release." It just seems too risky, legally, for a company to grab a Facebook-posted image and assume that the Facebook TOS covers their rear.
I don't think they are mutually exclusive. There's a difference between volunteering information about yourself and withholding information about yourself. Just because you are on social media, it doesn't mean you tell everyone everything there is to know about you. (Example, on social media I never mention what school district my kids go to.) There's also the situation that, if you give a company some private information that they say will remain private and then they make it public, that's a privacy violation. It doesn't matter if the company is a social media website or a brick-and-mortar store. If a place says that information will only be kept within the company and they don't do so, they should be taken to task for it, not let off the hook because some people are posting "selfies" at home with GPS data in the EXIF.
To add to this, the horrors of war used to only be known to the few who actually fought in it. Yes, they might have told stories, but it's one thing to hear a story from grandpa about the horrible war he fought in and another to see it for yourself. As technology improved, we began to get photographs from the front lines (or near enough to them) and people saw for themselves how horrible war could be. Then we got video and real-time reporting. Faced with the real horrors of war, people didn't as readily support it. They weren't willing to put their sons and daughters into that situation for just any cause. Especially when the situation was half a world away and the cause didn't have a direct bearing on their lives at home.
Technology like drones could solve this public support "problem." After all, who cares if Johnny is "shot down" when the net effect is that his drone has crashed and he switches to drone #15 and continues the fight? What's the worst that will happen? He'll come home with "battlefield carpal tunnel syndrome"? There will still be monetary concerns over war, but those are more easily argued against versus the lives of people's relatives.
This technology could actually make us a more war-mongering nation since we'll be removing one of the big downsides to war - casualties on our side.
True, though think by "bandwidth of their users", LandDolphin was referring to paying twice. So Google pays once for YouTube to have enough bandwidth to serve content across the Internet. Customers pay their ISP for enough bandwidth to stream the YouTube content. Now, however, AT&T wants Google to pay for the customer's bandwidth as well as Google's own. Plus, since they'll still be charging the customer for their bandwidth, AT&T will effectively be paid twice for the same bandwidth. (More if Amazon and Facebook, and others pay as well.)
Win-Win for AT&T but lose-lose for small companies. Say I found a new online video service. As it is, I'll have a tough time competing with YouTube, but suppose I provide amazing service so I get a loyal following. Now, all of a sudden, AT&T asks if I want to pay them extra so that their customers' data caps won't be impacted if they use my service. Being a small company, I can't afford it, but Google sure can. They pay and YouTube use is now "free" data-wise. My service, though, still costs users their data. Small companies will have an even harder time now competing against the big boys. (This will only get worse if Verizon and Sprint hop on board as well.)
It's lose-lose for customers as well since this turns using an online service from a sure "data hit" to an uncertain one. Did this service pay to exempt their data? Maybe they did or maybe they didn't. Maybe they did and you get used to using a lot of this service but then they dropped the "caps bypass surcharge" and suddenly your data cap is reached.
Here I thought the financial crisis was caused by lenders approving loans they knew people wouldn't be able to pay off and then packaging those loans together and pawning them off on other people and so on through the pyramid until the entire scheme inevitably collapsed. Nope. It wasn't greed on the part of the bankers and lenders. It was the Internet! Technology is to blame. And do you know who's behind technology? Scientists! Yup, if we'd all go back to being completely ignorant and subservient to the rich folks who tell us what to think then everything would go back to those wonderful days when everyone was happy.
[/sarcasm]
Wait... who put these extra-strength rose colored glasses on my face?
Also known as the "It's cold in this one location at this one time so how can the entire Earth be warmer" argument against global warming. Easy to disprove. First off, climate isn't the same as weather. Secondly, let's say the temperature in your location went down by 20 degrees, but the temperature in a few other places (say, Pretoria, South Africa, Paris, France, and Hong Kong) have gone up by 10 degrees each. The average temperature across these four locations would be +2.5 degrees - or warmer on average. Even though you are shivering now, it doesn't mean that everyone is or that everyone will always be shivering. It just means that the temperatures dropped in one location for one period of time.
I have a BlackBerry Bold (given to me by my work). I compared the keyboard on that vs the Typo one to see which keys had the same functionality. Ignoring the obvious QWERTY similarities (which would be true of pretty much any mobile keyboard), the first row had 8 keys exactly the same and 2 different. The second row had all 10 keys the same. The third row was 7 same and 3 different. And the last row was 2.5 the same and 4.5 different. (The "half" coming from a Bluetooth function on the Typo that isn't on my Blackberry's keyboard yet having the zero key in the same spot.) In total, that's 27.5 keys the same and 9.5 different.
Functionality-wise, the keyboard is about 74% the same as the Blackberry Bold's keyboard. This is close, but gives enough room to speculate that it's not close enough to be covered under any patents Blackberry might have. Plus, other mobile keyboards might have similar layouts which would bolster Typo's case that they were just following some "industry standard" layout and not a patented Blackberry layout.
Everything in celestial terms is much, much bigger. Therefore, I'd expect celestial bacon to be five light years across and twenty five light years long.
There's no need to "fix that for you" because claiming "terrorism" is widely known here to be political shorthand for "we want more power and don't question us or else". Now if only everyone not on Slashdot would realize this, perhaps we could patch the "terrorism root hole" in our government.
We're similar in our library trips. For my kids, we'll still sometimes browse the shelves to see what they want to read, but for us we reserve the titles we want on the library's website. We're notified when the titles are in, pick them up, and then are ready to leave (once the kids pick out some books and/or DVDs). Just because we're not spending hours browsing the shelves doesn't mean we're not heavily utilizing our library system. To be honest, I don't think we've had zero books/DVDs checked out of the library for months. Every time we return some, we take more out.
Even with name brands, Amazon's cheapest Kindle is $69 which is pretty affordable. That comes "with special offers" but in my experience the ads are completely unobtrusive. (They appear when the device is off - in which case you most likely have it in a carrying case - and when browsing through your book listing - which is easily ignored. No ads appear while you read books.)