Thats the problem, OUR instincts are different from what THEIR instincts are, for the same reason: How many people will believe whatever their pastor/priest/deacon/whatnot says? Why is that any different for Islam?
The "we fucked up" part is where we haven't accounted for this difference. Why are we not in control of the media? If it takes the CIA days to figure out whether a bin Laden tape was "authentic" or not, why have we not slipped a few fakes into the hands of the pro-islam media there in the hopes we can dupe them for long enough to sow major confusion and distrust: "Our glorious troops are now amassing in insert some podunk town here to wipe out the American infidels once and for all", where said town has been turned into the terrorist roach motel by the American army? "We have suffered our American invaders for too long, we have no choice but to strike at the cities they occupy, the holy hand of god will deliver our nuclear bombs into the hearts of the camps" (well, the second is probably not good for troop morale, so there's probably good reason we haven't tried that;) The vast majority of Iraqi civilians are peaceful people, but they are afraid of both the terrorists and the Americans. All that is needed is to make the terrorists significantly scarier, to the point where civilians can no longer say "if I don't go near the base I will be safe" they'll work a little harder at ratting out the terrorists, in exchange for not being there when the cruise missile hits.
I'll argue that there are less terrorists than before, and that their attacks are much less murdersome than before.
Except that there aren't. Someone else in this story quoted the US Government numbers that there have been more terrorist attacks so far this year than in all of 2004. Someone else posted a link to a pretty graphic showing the number of Americans who died of terrorism overseas (so as to exclude the WTC attacks) during Clinton's 8 years, and Bush's era has already managed to beat him in 5.
Different plans? Bush is right, we need to "stay the course". And by that, I mean fix Afghanistan, fix Iraq, and reach the ending point of "the course". Not go around and piss off even more fundamentalist groups. It's very reasonable to believe that Iran has The Bomb (despite their insistence that their nuclear program is entirely peaceful), and it's entirely possible that their new extra-fundamentalist (it was bad enough before) government may have enough psychotic people who believe their god will swat down any return fire to use it (if its like the movies, you only need one person on each key and a supercomputer to give you the code). We get Iraq a working army, a working police force. We get the country stable and self-sufficient enough that its new government can actually meet without someone getting assassinated.
Meanwhile, we sell off American interest in Iraq. Yeah, I'm sorry you don't get the cheap oil and I'm sure Halliburton will be pissed Cheney couldn't save it, but we set up Iraqi companies to pump the oil, Iraqi companies to run the pipelines. We trade reasonable contracts for business startup loans and the power to audit those companies and make sure that they're not producing crude and plastique. Suddenly that supply caravan isn't such a fun target when they're run by Iraqis, not Americans. A man pumping oil for a wage to support his family is no longer quite so desparate to blow himself up.
Finally, and this is the one we REALLY fucked up on, you cannot kill an idea with a bullet. You can only kill an idea with a better idea, the only way to win this war is to win everyone's minds. Do you know what idea we're fighting here? "America is Evil". Every day the kids go to their religious schools where they're told "America is Evil". Then they go home and turn on the news and see the latest bombing of someplace or another, always spun to make sure that "America is Evil". Finally, their best friend gets shot in the street, probably he didn't see who did it, these days it probably wasn't even an American. But what does that kid scream? "America is Evil!" It is this that we are fighting against. If we are to win, we must change that droning chant in their mind to something preferrably less malign, or at least so something along the lines of "Terrorist fundamentalists are Evil"
After the war, Allied soldiers stood around at German schools handing out nutrition bars. Why? 1: Warm fuzzies all around 2: Had any remaining psycho German holdouts decided to strike, they'd have inevitably killed German kids. Had they killed German kids, FULL ON MEDIA BLITZ! Headline after headline, broadcast after broadcast denouncing the child killers. ARE THERE ANY NEAR YOU? ARE YOUR KIDS SAFE? Hotline phones would be ringing off the hook while the last of it was mopped up. The vast majority of Afghanistan's army not forced to fight at gunpoint by the Taliban special forces rolled over for us after a few leaflet bombing runs. People actually went around disarming booby-trapped oil wells. In Iraq, we can't even muster anything more than a weak cry of "You're killing other Muslims" when an insurgent strike kills innocent civilians. We can't even get so far as to strip them of their "freedom fighter" glorification by labelling them child slaughterers in the eyes of the media.
We probably could have had the "dancing in the streets" reception in Iraq we dreamed of had we played our cards right. Now we're stuck with the old maid, and our leadership can't pull off a poker face to save anyone's life.
I'm sure you enjoy bitterly denouncing a government that won't try to have you done in for speaking your mind.
You haven't been watching the news much. What with Bush and DeLay demanding that they be given the right to be the final arbiter of life and death in this country with the power to hold back the Grim Reaper himself, plus many Senators and Representatives condemning any public figure that dares speak out against the war on terror (One senator from Alabama called for treason charges against Bill Maher), I don't think it will be much longer before the "secret kangaroo^Wtrials" called for by the anti-terrorism laws begin, and they'll probably all be capital cases.
Interesting, slashcode now automatically converts URLs to links in the Plain Old Text setting. Didn't know that. Not my fault if someone registers that domain and puts something bad there.
You block everything except the few things you know you need or want.
You probably want http, so the firmware could do http://www.laptopjack.com/report.pl?laptopid=AF314 229B2C&gps=55N33E or whatever the hell it sends. If the result comes back "you've been stolen!" it halts the computer and prints FBI! on the screen or whatever. If theres no network or the laptop is not stolen yet, it boots normally and waits until next time.
The whole logic could be embedded in a boot rom on the card, with DHCP and all. Or, if you custom-made the ethernet card, it could even store the last IP address and gateway, and use that next time you boot if DHCP failed. You could even theoretically set it to do this every few hours or something when the network is idle-ish, so that if someone nabs it while its running and keeps it on all the time, it still gets a chance to report.
If you wanted to be REALLY tricky, you could hit other sites first and test for the presence of proxies or what not, then go through a few options, like SSL client authentication using a stored certificate to identify the laptop if a direct connection can be established. Or using just normal client SSL if a proxy that will allow it is detected. Or last ditch, http:
Light pen input has been around a VERY long time. The C64 had a lightpen, and I'm sure pen+tablet input (or even pressure-sensitive touchscreens) has been around longer (in fact, I think the C64 Koalapad was out before the lightpen). It certainly wasn't something you'd compare to a tabletPC now, but who knows what would have happened if Go had not been crushed, or even if Microsoft had followed through with it's "Pen Windows" threat and actually created a market for innovation in these devices?
Because you'll still see longshot speculators who have cash to burn buying up stock in the tiny miniscule chance that a miracle will occur. To that kind of investor, it's like playing the lotto, if they lose... oh well, pick different numbers next week.
One would think that with a naming convention that allows two or more alphabetic names plus a possibility of a trailing number that parents would manage to name the people they create in a non-colliding fashion. Obviously we need to create namespaces to further subdivide the population of names to help disambiguate such conflicts.
I propose that we begin using a word to identify said namespaces. Let's call it a "title". When we then refer to a specific person, we then refer to them by title. For example, and I'm just making this up here, we may want to have several committee meetings before we settle on these namespace titles, we could refer to this person as "Comedian David Alan Grier". This would disambiguate references to that person from another person... lets call him "Professor David Alan Grier".
Of course this is just an idea in formation stages. We'll need to hold off on any action until we have an RFC with approvals from the appropriate naming organizations and an ISO standard to help ensure worldwide compatibility.
The problem is in the definition of prior art. If it's not written down, then it doesn't count. So, if your mom&pop general store has recommended products to customers because thats the way your greatgrandpappy did it a century ago, if it's not written in the training manual your daddy gave you when you started sweeping the floors, then it doesn't exist.
Oh sure, Amazon throws the words "database" and "web" and "click" around like they invented them or something, but the fundamental operation of commerce hasn't changed in centuries. Whether its recommending the latest fashion to your best customers, or putting everything someone bought at the grocery into as few bags as possible while making sure to pack things so nothing gets crushed, it's been done for so long, the patent system has no defense against patenting it.
So what you are saying is Bush should appoint a moderate who only 5% of the population agrees with.
Why would a moderate only have 5% of the population's support? I can say it's pretty safe to assume that with 48% of the public voting democrat, far more than 5% of the public would support someone who isn't right-wing. In fact, I suspect that even with 51% voting Republican, there are at least a few people that would favor moderate justices to right-wing justices. I can see popular support for a moderate-to-slightly-right justice being far more than support for a far right justice.
I'm sure that when the Republicans inevitably lose power again, the people who are crying for blood now will be crying for moderation too.
Precisely why the senators should go back to being appointed by the state governments to represent them
The EU shows exactly how bad this kind of idea works. Without some way for the public to control the Senate, they'll do whatever the hell they want to do. Replacing the state government that put them there will take an election cycle, then replacing the senator would take the rest of the senator's term.
This kind of setup is where the ability to have a public vote of no confidence leading to a replacement mid-term would be useful, though, but the state could still abuse the system until the state was replaced.
The problem is that at the level of the Supreme Court, there is no more "conservative" or "liberal" or "Democratic" or "Republican". You have Federalism and Constitutionalism. The Federalists seek to understand how the constitution can be expanded to cover new issues and give new powers that weren't even imaginable in the 1700's (paved streets stretching thousands of miles? Jefferson would have headgibbed! But lets see... trucks carry goods on roads, roads cross state lines, why yes, I think we can allow the feds to regulate the roads). The Strict Constitutionalists seek to interpret the Constitution literally (10th amendment for the win!). It tends to be that in the past, most conservatives believed in limited federal powers, while most liberals believed in expanded federal powers, which is how the "liberal" and "conservative" lables got stuck on the camps, but anyone watching Bush and DeLay whine on and on about how the courts aren't letting them pass a law concerning the life or death of a single human being (try finding THAT power in the US Constitution) it's pretty clear that labels are as meaningless as ever.
The justices write majority and minority opinions based on whether they were on the "winning" or "losing" side of the argument. Typically one on each side will write the opinion and everyone else endorses it, although sometimes some justices will write their own opinion by themselves.
Looks like his search engine is no more evil than google's, it indexes everything alike. Try searching for go_open or any other media legally distributed on bittorrent.
Slashdot has a fanatical hatered and subversive attitude towards Microsoft, not Communism.
Thats actually due to the 100 million Chinese residents that are required to post flames about capitalist societies on slashdot in order to keep their computer license.
He's a Senior Programmer, and he's writing as if he were a Partner. He's confrontational and adversarial in the same breath, and somehow expects to remain employed
You assume, of course, that he wants to remain employed.
There is, however, a difference between being fired, and having your employer lie to the police in order to have you arrested and your computer equipment seized.
20 years ago that was true. 5 years ago that was arguably true. The reality now is that a hojillion kids are watching Yu-Gi-Oh and Pokemon on TV, their parents are buying up the toys and dvds like mad, and if all the fansubbers had a heart attack and died, there'd still be a hojillion kids watching anime on tv. At this point, the market generates itself. When Cartoon Network wanted to show its kids more Big O, what did it do? It paid to have Big O 2 made, since otherwise it would not have materialized. No amount of fansubs will ever match that. No Japanese executive is ever going to look at a torrent site and say "Wow! 50 thousand leeches for Naruto! We better make another season!"
Now here is where fate diverges. In one path, the dominant force for money becomes American TV. Companies churn out Naruto 2, Naruto 3, Naruto 4... because 4kids or cartoon network tell them to, and then throw bags of money at them for it. When the only money left in the market is the millions of dollars spent on kiddie show franchises, what shows will you be watching? If you say fansubs, what studio will be producing anything but said kiddie shows for American TV audiences?
In the other future, kiddie shows will continue to be made, but there will still be money in the market. Fansubbing returns to what it was 20 years ago: a way for people to discover niche gems, rather than today's dickwaving contest where people compete for popularity and compare how "badass" they are to how anime companies in the US were 5 years ago. (Aside: if you think anime companies are "sitting on licenses" for "five fucking years", Girls Bravo was announced February 11, Released June 14th. Just over 4 months. DearS clocks in just under 6 months. Doki Doki School Hours, a week or two over. No, this is not a new trend. Hit "D" and see that Dokkoida?! took just over 4 months in 2004.) Good titles that have appeal not easily quantified in "number of toys sold" or "number of cardgames bought", will continue to be produced, licensed by the likes of ADV, Geneon, Bandai, and so on, and will continue to be bought, if not by the hundreds of thousands of moms trying to quell their screaming brats, by thousands of the rest of us looking for quality entertainment. And then the fansubs. The fansubs will still be there, people will subtitle older classics that just don't have the bright colors and sparkle that new series do. Like Violinist of Hameln. Or they'll subtitle newer niche shows whose niche is so tiny as to be commercially unviable. Like Kokoro Toshokan.
You don't seem to understand what everyone is saying.
Photoshop graphics effects: Novel. Nothing you did in a darkroom would ever approximate, simulate, or otherwise operate anything close to what photoshop does. They may or may not be "obvious" (for instance, making a photo brighter on a scale of 0 to 255 is obviously done by addition), but they are definitely novel.
Programming languages were novel at the time. Structured descriptions of what the computer was to do in a language closer to english than assembly or simply entering in the opcodes in binary by hand, that was new.
But guess what! Assuming that math can be novel again (which I still insist that unless you invent a totally new field of math, it's the same old, same old), that novelity wore off when the programming language inventor "invented" var x=y+2;. You claim that visicalc makes it novel because its "B2=A1+2" instead of x and y, yet variable names have been in use in algebra for hundreds of years. Substituting A1 for an unknown number is no more novel than substituting x for an unknown number.
The fact that it automates something isn't one of them.
The problem is that in so many cases that we hear about, it is. VisiCalc simply performed the exact same calculations an accountant did by hand (or on a calculator). This is not ground breaking, this is just doing math faster.
I'm not arguing that "automation" is grounds for automatic dismissal of a patent, after all, Photoshop's lightening process isn't the same as increasing the exposure on some piece of film. But that doesn't mean it should be grounds for automatic approval of a patent, as the patent office seems so fond of doing.
Slashdot Mirror
but forget all that, go with your instincts
;) The vast majority of Iraqi civilians are peaceful people, but they are afraid of both the terrorists and the Americans. All that is needed is to make the terrorists significantly scarier, to the point where civilians can no longer say "if I don't go near the base I will be safe" they'll work a little harder at ratting out the terrorists, in exchange for not being there when the cruise missile hits.
Thats the problem, OUR instincts are different from what THEIR instincts are, for the same reason: How many people will believe whatever their pastor/priest/deacon/whatnot says? Why is that any different for Islam?
The "we fucked up" part is where we haven't accounted for this difference. Why are we not in control of the media? If it takes the CIA days to figure out whether a bin Laden tape was "authentic" or not, why have we not slipped a few fakes into the hands of the pro-islam media there in the hopes we can dupe them for long enough to sow major confusion and distrust: "Our glorious troops are now amassing in insert some podunk town here to wipe out the American infidels once and for all", where said town has been turned into the terrorist roach motel by the American army? "We have suffered our American invaders for too long, we have no choice but to strike at the cities they occupy, the holy hand of god will deliver our nuclear bombs into the hearts of the camps" (well, the second is probably not good for troop morale, so there's probably good reason we haven't tried that
messed up priorities?
That depends. Wouldn't you rather know that the patch doesn't make YOUR website go down in flames before you patch your company's main webserver?
Therefore, the testing tree.
Or Final Fantasy Legends 1 on the Gameboy. Nothing like meeting the creator, and then killing him in one hit with the chainsaw.
I'll argue that there are less terrorists than before, and that their attacks are much less murdersome than before.
Except that there aren't. Someone else in this story quoted the US Government numbers that there have been more terrorist attacks so far this year than in all of 2004. Someone else posted a link to a pretty graphic showing the number of Americans who died of terrorism overseas (so as to exclude the WTC attacks) during Clinton's 8 years, and Bush's era has already managed to beat him in 5.
Different plans? Bush is right, we need to "stay the course". And by that, I mean fix Afghanistan, fix Iraq, and reach the ending point of "the course". Not go around and piss off even more fundamentalist groups. It's very reasonable to believe that Iran has The Bomb (despite their insistence that their nuclear program is entirely peaceful), and it's entirely possible that their new extra-fundamentalist (it was bad enough before) government may have enough psychotic people who believe their god will swat down any return fire to use it (if its like the movies, you only need one person on each key and a supercomputer to give you the code). We get Iraq a working army, a working police force. We get the country stable and self-sufficient enough that its new government can actually meet without someone getting assassinated.
Meanwhile, we sell off American interest in Iraq. Yeah, I'm sorry you don't get the cheap oil and I'm sure Halliburton will be pissed Cheney couldn't save it, but we set up Iraqi companies to pump the oil, Iraqi companies to run the pipelines. We trade reasonable contracts for business startup loans and the power to audit those companies and make sure that they're not producing crude and plastique. Suddenly that supply caravan isn't such a fun target when they're run by Iraqis, not Americans. A man pumping oil for a wage to support his family is no longer quite so desparate to blow himself up.
Finally, and this is the one we REALLY fucked up on, you cannot kill an idea with a bullet. You can only kill an idea with a better idea, the only way to win this war is to win everyone's minds. Do you know what idea we're fighting here? "America is Evil". Every day the kids go to their religious schools where they're told "America is Evil". Then they go home and turn on the news and see the latest bombing of someplace or another, always spun to make sure that "America is Evil". Finally, their best friend gets shot in the street, probably he didn't see who did it, these days it probably wasn't even an American. But what does that kid scream? "America is Evil!" It is this that we are fighting against. If we are to win, we must change that droning chant in their mind to something preferrably less malign, or at least so something along the lines of "Terrorist fundamentalists are Evil"
After the war, Allied soldiers stood around at German schools handing out nutrition bars. Why? 1: Warm fuzzies all around 2: Had any remaining psycho German holdouts decided to strike, they'd have inevitably killed German kids. Had they killed German kids, FULL ON MEDIA BLITZ! Headline after headline, broadcast after broadcast denouncing the child killers. ARE THERE ANY NEAR YOU? ARE YOUR KIDS SAFE? Hotline phones would be ringing off the hook while the last of it was mopped up. The vast majority of Afghanistan's army not forced to fight at gunpoint by the Taliban special forces rolled over for us after a few leaflet bombing runs. People actually went around disarming booby-trapped oil wells. In Iraq, we can't even muster anything more than a weak cry of "You're killing other Muslims" when an insurgent strike kills innocent civilians. We can't even get so far as to strip them of their "freedom fighter" glorification by labelling them child slaughterers in the eyes of the media.
We probably could have had the "dancing in the streets" reception in Iraq we dreamed of had we played our cards right. Now we're stuck with the old maid, and our leadership can't pull off a poker face to save anyone's life.
I'm sure you enjoy bitterly denouncing a government that won't try to have you done in for speaking your mind.
You haven't been watching the news much. What with Bush and DeLay demanding that they be given the right to be the final arbiter of life and death in this country with the power to hold back the Grim Reaper himself, plus many Senators and Representatives condemning any public figure that dares speak out against the war on terror (One senator from Alabama called for treason charges against Bill Maher), I don't think it will be much longer before the "secret kangaroo^Wtrials" called for by the anti-terrorism laws begin, and they'll probably all be capital cases.
I'm all for killing every God-damned one of 'em.
That's funny, so are they. Welcome to the moral low ground.
Interesting, slashcode now automatically converts URLs to links in the Plain Old Text setting. Didn't know that. Not my fault if someone registers that domain and puts something bad there.
You block everything except the few things you know you need or want.
4 229B2C&gps=55N33E or whatever the hell it sends. If the result comes back "you've been stolen!" it halts the computer and prints FBI! on the screen or whatever. If theres no network or the laptop is not stolen yet, it boots normally and waits until next time.
You probably want http, so the firmware could do http://www.laptopjack.com/report.pl?laptopid=AF31
The whole logic could be embedded in a boot rom on the card, with DHCP and all. Or, if you custom-made the ethernet card, it could even store the last IP address and gateway, and use that next time you boot if DHCP failed. You could even theoretically set it to do this every few hours or something when the network is idle-ish, so that if someone nabs it while its running and keeps it on all the time, it still gets a chance to report.
If you wanted to be REALLY tricky, you could hit other sites first and test for the presence of proxies or what not, then go through a few options, like SSL client authentication using a stored certificate to identify the laptop if a direct connection can be established. Or using just normal client SSL if a proxy that will allow it is detected. Or last ditch, http:
An intern -does- get something : Experience.
"Yeah, I see here on your resume that you got coffee for some pretty important people."
It's not as if the jobs those farmer-teens are doing is worth mentioning in their next job interview.
"Yeah, I see here that you spend 20 hours a day glued to a computer doing whatever you have to do to make money."
Light pen input has been around a VERY long time. The C64 had a lightpen, and I'm sure pen+tablet input (or even pressure-sensitive touchscreens) has been around longer (in fact, I think the C64 Koalapad was out before the lightpen). It certainly wasn't something you'd compare to a tabletPC now, but who knows what would have happened if Go had not been crushed, or even if Microsoft had followed through with it's "Pen Windows" threat and actually created a market for innovation in these devices?
Because you'll still see longshot speculators who have cash to burn buying up stock in the tiny miniscule chance that a miracle will occur. To that kind of investor, it's like playing the lotto, if they lose... oh well, pick different numbers next week.
One would think that with a naming convention that allows two or more alphabetic names plus a possibility of a trailing number that parents would manage to name the people they create in a non-colliding fashion. Obviously we need to create namespaces to further subdivide the population of names to help disambiguate such conflicts.
I propose that we begin using a word to identify said namespaces. Let's call it a "title". When we then refer to a specific person, we then refer to them by title. For example, and I'm just making this up here, we may want to have several committee meetings before we settle on these namespace titles, we could refer to this person as "Comedian David Alan Grier". This would disambiguate references to that person from another person... lets call him "Professor David Alan Grier".
Of course this is just an idea in formation stages. We'll need to hold off on any action until we have an RFC with approvals from the appropriate naming organizations and an ISO standard to help ensure worldwide compatibility.
The problem is in the definition of prior art. If it's not written down, then it doesn't count. So, if your mom&pop general store has recommended products to customers because thats the way your greatgrandpappy did it a century ago, if it's not written in the training manual your daddy gave you when you started sweeping the floors, then it doesn't exist.
Oh sure, Amazon throws the words "database" and "web" and "click" around like they invented them or something, but the fundamental operation of commerce hasn't changed in centuries. Whether its recommending the latest fashion to your best customers, or putting everything someone bought at the grocery into as few bags as possible while making sure to pack things so nothing gets crushed, it's been done for so long, the patent system has no defense against patenting it.
So what you are saying is Bush should appoint a moderate who only 5% of the population agrees with.
Why would a moderate only have 5% of the population's support? I can say it's pretty safe to assume that with 48% of the public voting democrat, far more than 5% of the public would support someone who isn't right-wing. In fact, I suspect that even with 51% voting Republican, there are at least a few people that would favor moderate justices to right-wing justices. I can see popular support for a moderate-to-slightly-right justice being far more than support for a far right justice.
I'm sure that when the Republicans inevitably lose power again, the people who are crying for blood now will be crying for moderation too.
Precisely why the senators should go back to being appointed by the state governments to represent them
The EU shows exactly how bad this kind of idea works. Without some way for the public to control the Senate, they'll do whatever the hell they want to do. Replacing the state government that put them there will take an election cycle, then replacing the senator would take the rest of the senator's term.
This kind of setup is where the ability to have a public vote of no confidence leading to a replacement mid-term would be useful, though, but the state could still abuse the system until the state was replaced.
The problem is that at the level of the Supreme Court, there is no more "conservative" or "liberal" or "Democratic" or "Republican". You have Federalism and Constitutionalism. The Federalists seek to understand how the constitution can be expanded to cover new issues and give new powers that weren't even imaginable in the 1700's (paved streets stretching thousands of miles? Jefferson would have headgibbed! But lets see... trucks carry goods on roads, roads cross state lines, why yes, I think we can allow the feds to regulate the roads). The Strict Constitutionalists seek to interpret the Constitution literally (10th amendment for the win!). It tends to be that in the past, most conservatives believed in limited federal powers, while most liberals believed in expanded federal powers, which is how the "liberal" and "conservative" lables got stuck on the camps, but anyone watching Bush and DeLay whine on and on about how the courts aren't letting them pass a law concerning the life or death of a single human being (try finding THAT power in the US Constitution) it's pretty clear that labels are as meaningless as ever.
Do the justices reveal their deliberation process?
Yes.
The justices write majority and minority opinions based on whether they were on the "winning" or "losing" side of the argument. Typically one on each side will write the opinion and everyone else endorses it, although sometimes some justices will write their own opinion by themselves.
Looks like his search engine is no more evil than google's, it indexes everything alike. Try searching for go_open or any other media legally distributed on bittorrent.
Slashdot has a fanatical hatered and subversive attitude towards Microsoft, not Communism.
Thats actually due to the 100 million Chinese residents that are required to post flames about capitalist societies on slashdot in order to keep their computer license.
Corporate logos have always been protected for as long as they were in use. That's why they're trademarked, not copyrighted.
He's a Senior Programmer, and he's writing as if he were a Partner. He's confrontational and adversarial in the same breath, and somehow expects to remain employed
You assume, of course, that he wants to remain employed.
There is, however, a difference between being fired, and having your employer lie to the police in order to have you arrested and your computer equipment seized.
20 years ago that was true. 5 years ago that was arguably true. The reality now is that a hojillion kids are watching Yu-Gi-Oh and Pokemon on TV, their parents are buying up the toys and dvds like mad, and if all the fansubbers had a heart attack and died, there'd still be a hojillion kids watching anime on tv. At this point, the market generates itself. When Cartoon Network wanted to show its kids more Big O, what did it do? It paid to have Big O 2 made, since otherwise it would not have materialized. No amount of fansubs will ever match that. No Japanese executive is ever going to look at a torrent site and say "Wow! 50 thousand leeches for Naruto! We better make another season!"
Now here is where fate diverges. In one path, the dominant force for money becomes American TV. Companies churn out Naruto 2, Naruto 3, Naruto 4... because 4kids or cartoon network tell them to, and then throw bags of money at them for it. When the only money left in the market is the millions of dollars spent on kiddie show franchises, what shows will you be watching? If you say fansubs, what studio will be producing anything but said kiddie shows for American TV audiences?
In the other future, kiddie shows will continue to be made, but there will still be money in the market. Fansubbing returns to what it was 20 years ago: a way for people to discover niche gems, rather than today's dickwaving contest where people compete for popularity and compare how "badass" they are to how anime companies in the US were 5 years ago. (Aside: if you think anime companies are "sitting on licenses" for "five fucking years", Girls Bravo was announced February 11, Released June 14th. Just over 4 months. DearS clocks in just under 6 months. Doki Doki School Hours, a week or two over. No, this is not a new trend. Hit "D" and see that Dokkoida?! took just over 4 months in 2004.) Good titles that have appeal not easily quantified in "number of toys sold" or "number of cardgames bought", will continue to be produced, licensed by the likes of ADV, Geneon, Bandai, and so on, and will continue to be bought, if not by the hundreds of thousands of moms trying to quell their screaming brats, by thousands of the rest of us looking for quality entertainment. And then the fansubs. The fansubs will still be there, people will subtitle older classics that just don't have the bright colors and sparkle that new series do. Like Violinist of Hameln. Or they'll subtitle newer niche shows whose niche is so tiny as to be commercially unviable. Like Kokoro Toshokan.
I know which future I want to be in.
If it's a story that's compelling to Americans, we'll buy a lot of it. Period.
So, an anime series where people phone in to vote the worst character off? Brilliant!
You don't seem to understand what everyone is saying.
Photoshop graphics effects: Novel. Nothing you did in a darkroom would ever approximate, simulate, or otherwise operate anything close to what photoshop does. They may or may not be "obvious" (for instance, making a photo brighter on a scale of 0 to 255 is obviously done by addition), but they are definitely novel.
Programming languages were novel at the time. Structured descriptions of what the computer was to do in a language closer to english than assembly or simply entering in the opcodes in binary by hand, that was new.
But guess what! Assuming that math can be novel again (which I still insist that unless you invent a totally new field of math, it's the same old, same old), that novelity wore off when the programming language inventor "invented" var x=y+2;. You claim that visicalc makes it novel because its "B2=A1+2" instead of x and y, yet variable names have been in use in algebra for hundreds of years. Substituting A1 for an unknown number is no more novel than substituting x for an unknown number.
The fact that it automates something isn't one of them.
The problem is that in so many cases that we hear about, it is. VisiCalc simply performed the exact same calculations an accountant did by hand (or on a calculator). This is not ground breaking, this is just doing math faster.
I'm not arguing that "automation" is grounds for automatic dismissal of a patent, after all, Photoshop's lightening process isn't the same as increasing the exposure on some piece of film. But that doesn't mean it should be grounds for automatic approval of a patent, as the patent office seems so fond of doing.