Maybe the moderator thought that the classification was "droll".
What an unbiased article... not.
on
XBox Released
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I think this line from the article says it best:
So for the first time, I actually dared to entertain warm thoughts toward Microsoft.
Yeah, no kidding that he doesn't normally like Microsoft. I would never have guessed it from the consistently cynical tone of his article.
I'm no big fan of MS either, but jeez. Would a little unbiased journalistic integrity be appropriate? Hmm.
As it is, I don't think that I know anything more about how good the XBox is after reading the article than I did beforehand -- because I don't even begin to trust the opinions of the journalist with his obvious baggage of preconceptions.
If you have your personal identity (ie. age) verified for a certificate and then use that certificate to sign your approval to access a site, that should be good enough.
Keep your certificate on a Smart Card, and it's portable, safe, and convenient.
I'm not talking about science fiction here. I'm talking about technology already being used all over the world for mostly security and corporate applications.
The only other thing I'd like to see is for the system to be more anonymous.
With ION engines, the fuel mass to velocity ratio is higher than with more conventional methods.
With less fuel needed during the ion engine phase, less fuel is needed to get the thing into orbit, which greatly reduces the cost and difficulty of doing so.
Those sons of bitches are a huge reason for why we've spent so much money supporting the Israelies with their talk of "We must help the Jews retake the Holy Land because it is prophesied".
This terrorist attack was a direct result of our activities in the Middle East, activities that have been greatly motivated by religious concerns -- and they blame it on the secularization of America? These assholes were practically at the controls of the airplane, and they blame it on people like me who don't believe in their gods and wish for nothing more than for us to butt out of the Middle East's quagmire of endless religious battles?
Oh, man. I've been trying to avoid casting aspersions on Christians during this event, but speech like that forces me to respond. Blaming "us" is so intellectually dishonest and tragically unfair.
But it's a copyright violation because it goes against the terms set out in the GPL. Correcting people for calling them 'GPL violations' seems needlessly pedantic and actually wrong.
If the GPL were worded differently, it could possibly not be a violation at all. Given the importance of the GPL to the whole issue, calling it a 'GPL violation' seems to be quite appropriate.
Correct me if i'm wrong, but the cockpit has a door that locks. Ideally, this door probably is designed to withstand a lot of force, so trying to force your way into the cockpit would be a bad idea mmmkaaay?
Actually, I was talking with a commercial airline pilot friend of mine today, and he said that those doors are specifically designed to be flimsy. They're supposed to blow out easily in case of explosive cabin depressurization or something.
I'd personally like to see the cockpit isolated from the rest of the plane, a big metal shield.
Yeah, my pilot friend mentioned that he'd like to see the same thing.
Something like this happens, and suddenly we're more willing to be lax on our liberties.
I think of it more as examining the total cost of ownership of liberties. Ironically, liberty isn't free, it must be paid for in a myriad of ways. And which liberty we're paying for, when we make choices, isn't even clear. One person's liberty to not be filmed in a public place sacrifices another person's liberty to be free from a violent terrorist attack. This isn't a black and white issue.
We can't let events like this damage the values and ideals that we live by.
If we do, then they win.
Damage of these things is inevitable. Every day when you manage keys to lock your doors or passwords to access your servers, you're dealing with the damage that is done to us by the unscrupulous. This is no different.
Perhaps you really think it could help to do this kind of crap but it really wont.
Sez you, but it stands to reason that if our law enforcement agencies already stop X number of such attacks every year (where X > 0, which we already know that they do), then giving them more tools to do their jobs wills most likely stop some number greater than X such attacks.
Then they (assuming they arent headless cells) can send in someone that hasnt ever been arrrested
But we have operatives in some of those terrorist organizations, operatives who could in many cases get pictures of terrorist agents back to our own surveillance system. We don't need to sit around and let these guys be arrested before looking out for them.
stop thinking that group profiling or anything on the same note would help
Uh, straw man? Who said anything about group profiling?
We sacrifice our liberty by subjecting ourselves to metal detectors at airports now. We sacrifice our liberty by giving our policemen the power to stop us in our vehicles for various probable infractions. The question isn't whether or not we sacrifice some liberty for some freedom, because we do. Ben Franklin was engaging in a bit of hyperbolic rhetoric in his oft-quoted line about "he who sacrifices liberty for security deserves neither."
The question we have to ask is "how much?" liberty should we sacrifice, and "in what ways?"
It's pretty easy for us on/. to decry law enforcement aids like facial recognition hardware and software when times are good. However, it's at times of senseless tragedy like this when we really need to stop and think about letting law enforcement have the tools they need to prevent wanton acts of distruction like this.
Abuses of those tools should be another discussion entirely -- an important discussion, but not a paranoid paralyzing one.
I'm usually fairly detached during times like this, but by myself, watching the coverage, and imagining the enormity of the loss of life, mental health, peace, property, and productivity -- I couldn't help but cry in frustration at not being able to do anything.
I'm sure I wasn't the only one. To those of you who felt likewise, don't forget that feeling. When the time comes when you're able to voice your support for tools and methods to stop these methods of terrorism, don't be silent.
First he wins the White House right when the US economy is spiraling into recession. Now we have the most significant terrorist attack on US soil in history.
Al Gore is probably having a big sigh of relief this morning thinking, "Maybe trying again in 2004 won't be such a bad thing afterall."
This is about the content providers using "piracy" as a means to justify threatening and bullying an uninformed public into letting them help themselves to a bigger slice of the pie.
I'm sure you're right on the money about some of those publishers. But how can we on/. deny that piracy is a legitimate concern of content producers? Who here doesn't know how to obtain tons of pirated content: MP3's, DivX's, Images, books, etc.?
Why paint all content producers as just a bunch of greedy SOB's on the one hand while condoning napster and other content theives on the other? Where's the middle ground here where a solution might lie?
One thing you might try is to suggest that management charge for "extras" whereby the customer can somewhat pay for quality, or at least explicitly decide against it. For example, charge for some things like "Developer Documentation", "hours of QA", or certain "Robustness Guidelines".
That way, you can be assured that you're not pulling one over on your customers, and your management can be happy that they're able to sell extra services.
Well, I'm sure if little boys were interested in programming pink unicorns to run around kissing daisies in meadows, then a wonderful teaching tool could be constructed around that very concept. As it is, though, a "battle" provides a setting that motivates young boys to get into the educational activity enough to make it worthwhile.
Besides, having grown up in a house where my parents didn't really censor my cable access, I find it hard to believe that shielding kids from all possible influences really makes a difference. I never got into fights in highschool or college, despite watching Rocky I - V. I've always felt that an intellectual approach to conflict is far better than a violent one.
How could that be, when I watched The Exorcist and Jaws before I was even a teenager! Why, I even used to watch The Roadrunner back when old Wile E Coyote used to actually hit the ground!
The key to raising your kids to avoid exerting violent behavior isn't to shield them from all possible observations of it. It isn't even that helpful to have them avoid board and video games where violence is a goal.
The key is to teach your kids the difference between fantasy and reality. "Yeah, it's fine to go watch a Jackie Chan movie, but when you leave the theatre, don't kick your friends and pretend that you're in a karate fight." "Play Quake and Duke Nuke'em, but remember that they're just video games."
Additionally, build loving trusting relationships with your children and encourage them to build similar relationships with others. Teach them how to think their ways through problems, rather than giving up and reacting violently.
earlobes and chin as someone will get you taken down in a public place..... well, I wouldn't want it to happen to me.
Imagine instead that the software recognizes a known terrorist illegally in the country at some event. Imagine that the software is correct this time, and allows the police to apprehend the terrorist before he would have set off a bomb that would have killed a hundred people -- including your daughter. Hmm, then the decision probably isn't so easy.
The reality of deployment of these systems will be somewhere inbetween the worst case and best case scenarios. Where the "normal" case is will determine the systems' usefulness, but we won't determine that here on/..
That's a bit of a non-sequitur, saying that since the police aren't at your place to protect you directly, they're not keeping you safe. The police are keeping you safe by putting criminals behind bars. Sure, they can't always get somewhere in time to stop someone from being victimized, but by catching a criminal after one crime, they protect us from subsequent crimes by the same criminal.
Take a look at the development tools for MacOSX (the ones they got from NeXT: Project Builder and Interface Builder). The way that Interface Builder allow you to almost completely separate the GUI of your program from your data modeling code is beyond amazing.
I can't believe that the computer industry has been so slow in copying it.
More bullshit. They're held accountable by the American Bar Association, their own brethren.
Until this, I assumed that you were merely misinformed and rabid. But now I see that you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.
The ABA has *absolutely* no power over individual lawyers. The overwhelming majority of lawyers have nothing to do with the ABA. This is handled by the Supreme Courts of the individual states, often by delegation (and by federal courts for matters in those courts).
Oh, jeez. Yeah, the key part of what you were saying is delegated. And who are they delegated to? A bunch of lawyers! Like the State Bar Courts rather than the American Bar Association. Sorry for the factual error, I don't know every lawyerly detail, but I know enough of lawyers and how they work to know that our system is flawed to so heavily rely upon them and allow them to run as much as they do.
Just like you don't seem to know enough about HTML to set off your comments from mine, I may not know every little legal body's name and authority - but my knowledge is sufficient to know that there's a problem that we typically ignore in this country, and I won't be ridiculed to silence by someone just because my terminology may be off, when the gist of what I'm saying is true.
THese are not isolated incidents when in California. Lawyers are regularly disbarred and suspended for actual misconduct.
HAH! Those lawyers weren't disbarred for what they did, they were slapped on the wrist, and those cases do appear to be fairly isolated.
Take a look at what it takes to be disbarred here from a link I pulled up in Google. You've got to practically be a repeat child molester and the scum of the earth before the bar court will prevent you from practicing law on hapless victims.
Re:An opposing view on lawyers
on
eBay Beats DMCA
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Lawyers are the closest thing we have to a conscience in this country; without them, big government and big corporations would run roughshod over us.
And how would they do such a thing? With Lawyers! You think it's not "big government's" lawyers with their no holds barred attitudes pursuing Skylarov? It's certainly not a compromising attitude filled with compassion and a desire to settle the issue without litigation.
Lawyers are our conscience? Wow, are those just words, or what? At best, lawyers are a necessary evil in our society. Typically, though, they're a morass of sharks, eager to create more work for themselves by filing suits and pushing for legislation that gives them more opportunities to file suits.
Unlike journalists, lawyers are held to a code of ethics and when they violate it, they can lose their butts.
More bullshit. They're held accountable by the American Bar Association, their own brethren. That's like saying that the Direct Marketing Association holds its members accountable for spamming.
let's remember that they're human beings
So was Timothy McVeigh. What's your point?
As I said before, at best, lawyers are a necessary evil in our society, like hydrogen bombs. As with hydrogen bombs, ways should be sought to minimize their use in our country. Instead, the foxes are running the chicken coop in Washington, turning out as much legalistic soup as they can to keep us all dependent upon them.
Re:We need more court cases like this.
on
eBay Beats DMCA
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
If he'd done things the acceptable way instead of trying to let lawyers solve his problem, he'd probably have the problem solved already. America needs more lessons like this.
Hear hear. The problem is that the US has so many damned lawyers, and our law schools are churning out tons more all the time. A few years back, the statistic I heard was that the US has 5% of the world's population, but 75% of the world's lawyers. Makes me wake up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night.
The problem with churning out all these lawyers is that the law is a self-germinating profession. For example, what happens if you have too many house painters in an area? Well, prices go down, service levels probably go up, and some of those painters have to diversify or move into other fields to make a living. Like most professions, an over-abundance of practitioners yields negative pressure for an increase of practitioners.
What happens when you have too many lawyers in an area? Well, they just start taking on more frivolous cases and filing more suits, which does what? Creates work for opposing lawyers, which actually increases the demand for lawyers! They clog our legal system with crap like a credit card company clogs your email box with spam.
Worse yet, having lost most of their senses of morality and ethics plying the legal trade, these bastards are the first ones likely to go into politics. That's where they really start creating extra opportunities for their fellow attorneys.
Lawyers are pure evil. Oppose the sharks that are the Association of Trial Lawyers of America, and any politicians in their back pockets. They make the RIAA and the MPAA look like a bunch of guppies by comparison.
Unfortunately, they're only going to drop judgments where the ruling is not in favor of big companies making money
To be fair (something you don't see on/. very often), we're talking about the entertainment industry here. If any party has sold its soul to them for campaign contributions lately, it's been the Democrats. The Clintons basically rented out the Lincoln Bedroom for every big star and producer in Hollywood in exchange for a few bucks.
Perhaps the Bush administration will deal the entertainment industry a blow for being such loyal Democrats and cripple their revenues by taking the teeth out of the DMCA.:)
The Justice Department is expected to have a certain degree of independence from the administration, and rightfully so.
The Excite article that I read even explicitly mentions that GWB has gone out of his way to not influence the issue. That may not be true, but it's misleading, irresponsible, and extremely biased journalism to report otherwise.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe the moderator thought that the classification was "droll".
I think this line from the article says it best:
So for the first time, I actually dared to entertain warm thoughts toward Microsoft.
Yeah, no kidding that he doesn't normally like Microsoft. I would never have guessed it from the consistently cynical tone of his article.
I'm no big fan of MS either, but jeez. Would a little unbiased journalistic integrity be appropriate? Hmm.
As it is, I don't think that I know anything more about how good the XBox is after reading the article than I did beforehand -- because I don't even begin to trust the opinions of the journalist with his obvious baggage of preconceptions.
Heh, Mr. Perfect Software typed in the subject of "sfotware".
;^)
If it was intended to be a joke, the body of the message went on for way way way too long.
Ain't easy being perfect, is it?
If you have your personal identity (ie. age) verified for a certificate and then use that certificate to sign your approval to access a site, that should be good enough.
Keep your certificate on a Smart Card, and it's portable, safe, and convenient.
I'm not talking about science fiction here. I'm talking about technology already being used all over the world for mostly security and corporate applications.
The only other thing I'd like to see is for the system to be more anonymous.
With ION engines, the fuel mass to velocity ratio is higher than with more conventional methods.
With less fuel needed during the ion engine phase, less fuel is needed to get the thing into orbit, which greatly reduces the cost and difficulty of doing so.
Oh my uh... God!
That article is absolutely infuriating!
Those sons of bitches are a huge reason for why we've spent so much money supporting the Israelies with their talk of "We must help the Jews retake the Holy Land because it is prophesied".
This terrorist attack was a direct result of our activities in the Middle East, activities that have been greatly motivated by religious concerns -- and they blame it on the secularization of America? These assholes were practically at the controls of the airplane, and they blame it on people like me who don't believe in their gods and wish for nothing more than for us to butt out of the Middle East's quagmire of endless religious battles?
Oh, man. I've been trying to avoid casting aspersions on Christians during this event, but speech like that forces me to respond. Blaming "us" is so intellectually dishonest and tragically unfair.
But it's a copyright violation because it goes against the terms set out in the GPL. Correcting people for calling them 'GPL violations' seems needlessly pedantic and actually wrong.
If the GPL were worded differently, it could possibly not be a violation at all. Given the importance of the GPL to the whole issue, calling it a 'GPL violation' seems to be quite appropriate.
Correct me if i'm wrong, but the cockpit has a door that locks. Ideally, this door probably is designed to withstand a lot of force, so trying to force your way into the cockpit would be a bad idea mmmkaaay?
Actually, I was talking with a commercial airline pilot friend of mine today, and he said that those doors are specifically designed to be flimsy. They're supposed to blow out easily in case of explosive cabin depressurization or something.
I'd personally like to see the cockpit isolated from the rest of the plane, a big metal shield.
Yeah, my pilot friend mentioned that he'd like to see the same thing.
Something like this happens, and suddenly we're more willing to be lax on our liberties.
I think of it more as examining the total cost of ownership of liberties. Ironically, liberty isn't free, it must be paid for in a myriad of ways. And which liberty we're paying for, when we make choices, isn't even clear. One person's liberty to not be filmed in a public place sacrifices another person's liberty to be free from a violent terrorist attack. This isn't a black and white issue.
We can't let events like this damage the values and ideals that we live by.
If we do, then they win.
Damage of these things is inevitable. Every day when you manage keys to lock your doors or passwords to access your servers, you're dealing with the damage that is done to us by the unscrupulous. This is no different.
Perhaps you really think it could help to do this kind of crap but it really wont.
Sez you, but it stands to reason that if our law enforcement agencies already stop X number of such attacks every year (where X > 0, which we already know that they do), then giving them more tools to do their jobs wills most likely stop some number greater than X such attacks.
Then they (assuming they arent headless cells) can send in someone that hasnt ever been arrrested
But we have operatives in some of those terrorist organizations, operatives who could in many cases get pictures of terrorist agents back to our own surveillance system. We don't need to sit around and let these guys be arrested before looking out for them.
stop thinking that group profiling or anything on the same note would help
Uh, straw man? Who said anything about group profiling?
We sacrifice our liberty by subjecting ourselves to metal detectors at airports now. We sacrifice our liberty by giving our policemen the power to stop us in our vehicles for various probable infractions. The question isn't whether or not we sacrifice some liberty for some freedom, because we do. Ben Franklin was engaging in a bit of hyperbolic rhetoric in his oft-quoted line about "he who sacrifices liberty for security deserves neither."
The question we have to ask is "how much?" liberty should we sacrifice, and "in what ways?"
It's pretty easy for us on /. to decry law enforcement aids like facial recognition hardware and software when times are good. However, it's at times of senseless tragedy like this when we really need to stop and think about letting law enforcement have the tools they need to prevent wanton acts of distruction like this.
Abuses of those tools should be another discussion entirely -- an important discussion, but not a paranoid paralyzing one.
I'm usually fairly detached during times like this, but by myself, watching the coverage, and imagining the enormity of the loss of life, mental health, peace, property, and productivity -- I couldn't help but cry in frustration at not being able to do anything.
I'm sure I wasn't the only one. To those of you who felt likewise, don't forget that feeling. When the time comes when you're able to voice your support for tools and methods to stop these methods of terrorism, don't be silent.
First he wins the White House right when the US economy is spiraling into recession. Now we have the most significant terrorist attack on US soil in history.
Al Gore is probably having a big sigh of relief this morning thinking, "Maybe trying again in 2004 won't be such a bad thing afterall."
This is about the content providers using "piracy" as a means to justify threatening and bullying an uninformed public into letting them help themselves to a bigger slice of the pie.
/. deny that piracy is a legitimate concern of content producers? Who here doesn't know how to obtain tons of pirated content: MP3's, DivX's, Images, books, etc.?
I'm sure you're right on the money about some of those publishers. But how can we on
Why paint all content producers as just a bunch of greedy SOB's on the one hand while condoning napster and other content theives on the other? Where's the middle ground here where a solution might lie?
One thing you might try is to suggest that management charge for "extras" whereby the customer can somewhat pay for quality, or at least explicitly decide against it. For example, charge for some things like "Developer Documentation", "hours of QA", or certain "Robustness Guidelines".
That way, you can be assured that you're not pulling one over on your customers, and your management can be happy that they're able to sell extra services.
Well, I'm sure if little boys were interested in programming pink unicorns to run around kissing daisies in meadows, then a wonderful teaching tool could be constructed around that very concept. As it is, though, a "battle" provides a setting that motivates young boys to get into the educational activity enough to make it worthwhile.
Besides, having grown up in a house where my parents didn't really censor my cable access, I find it hard to believe that shielding kids from all possible influences really makes a difference. I never got into fights in highschool or college, despite watching Rocky I - V. I've always felt that an intellectual approach to conflict is far better than a violent one.
How could that be, when I watched The Exorcist and Jaws before I was even a teenager! Why, I even used to watch The Roadrunner back when old Wile E Coyote used to actually hit the ground!
The key to raising your kids to avoid exerting violent behavior isn't to shield them from all possible observations of it. It isn't even that helpful to have them avoid board and video games where violence is a goal.
The key is to teach your kids the difference between fantasy and reality. "Yeah, it's fine to go watch a Jackie Chan movie, but when you leave the theatre, don't kick your friends and pretend that you're in a karate fight." "Play Quake and Duke Nuke'em, but remember that they're just video games."
Additionally, build loving trusting relationships with your children and encourage them to build similar relationships with others. Teach them how to think their ways through problems, rather than giving up and reacting violently.
Robots are just modern versions of the ancient "golem" myth.
At this point, it's kind of hard to claim true originality for very much
earlobes and chin as someone will get you taken down in a public place..... well, I wouldn't want it to happen to me.
/. .
Imagine instead that the software recognizes a known terrorist illegally in the country at some event. Imagine that the software is correct this time, and allows the police to apprehend the terrorist before he would have set off a bomb that would have killed a hundred people -- including your daughter. Hmm, then the decision probably isn't so easy.
The reality of deployment of these systems will be somewhere inbetween the worst case and best case scenarios. Where the "normal" case is will determine the systems' usefulness, but we won't determine that here on
That's a bit of a non-sequitur, saying that since the police aren't at your place to protect you directly, they're not keeping you safe. The police are keeping you safe by putting criminals behind bars. Sure, they can't always get somewhere in time to stop someone from being victimized, but by catching a criminal after one crime, they protect us from subsequent crimes by the same criminal.
Take a look at the development tools for MacOSX (the ones they got from NeXT: Project Builder and Interface Builder). The way that Interface Builder allow you to almost completely separate the GUI of your program from your data modeling code is beyond amazing.
I can't believe that the computer industry has been so slow in copying it.
More bullshit. They're held accountable by the American Bar Association, their own brethren.
Until this, I assumed that you were merely misinformed and rabid. But now I see that you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.
The ABA has *absolutely* no power over individual lawyers. The overwhelming majority of lawyers have nothing to do with the ABA. This is handled by the Supreme Courts of the individual states, often by delegation (and by federal courts for matters in those courts).
Oh, jeez. Yeah, the key part of what you were saying is delegated. And who are they delegated to? A bunch of lawyers! Like the State Bar Courts rather than the American Bar Association. Sorry for the factual error, I don't know every lawyerly detail, but I know enough of lawyers and how they work to know that our system is flawed to so heavily rely upon them and allow them to run as much as they do.
Just like you don't seem to know enough about HTML to set off your comments from mine, I may not know every little legal body's name and authority - but my knowledge is sufficient to know that there's a problem that we typically ignore in this country, and I won't be ridiculed to silence by someone just because my terminology may be off, when the gist of what I'm saying is true.
THese are not isolated incidents when in California. Lawyers are regularly disbarred and suspended for actual misconduct.
HAH! Those lawyers weren't disbarred for what they did, they were slapped on the wrist, and those cases do appear to be fairly isolated.
Take a look at what it takes to be disbarred here from a link I pulled up in Google. You've got to practically be a repeat child molester and the scum of the earth before the bar court will prevent you from practicing law on hapless victims.
Lawyers are the closest thing we have to a conscience in this country; without them, big government and big corporations would run roughshod over us.
And how would they do such a thing? With Lawyers! You think it's not "big government's" lawyers with their no holds barred attitudes pursuing Skylarov? It's certainly not a compromising attitude filled with compassion and a desire to settle the issue without litigation.
Lawyers are our conscience? Wow, are those just words, or what? At best, lawyers are a necessary evil in our society. Typically, though, they're a morass of sharks, eager to create more work for themselves by filing suits and pushing for legislation that gives them more opportunities to file suits.
Unlike journalists, lawyers are held to a code of ethics and when they violate it, they can lose their butts.
More bullshit. They're held accountable by the American Bar Association, their own brethren. That's like saying that the Direct Marketing Association holds its members accountable for spamming.
let's remember that they're human beings
So was Timothy McVeigh. What's your point?
As I said before, at best, lawyers are a necessary evil in our society, like hydrogen bombs. As with hydrogen bombs, ways should be sought to minimize their use in our country. Instead, the foxes are running the chicken coop in Washington, turning out as much legalistic soup as they can to keep us all dependent upon them.
If he'd done things the acceptable way instead of trying to let lawyers solve his problem, he'd probably have the problem solved already. America needs more lessons like this.
Hear hear. The problem is that the US has so many damned lawyers, and our law schools are churning out tons more all the time. A few years back, the statistic I heard was that the US has 5% of the world's population, but 75% of the world's lawyers. Makes me wake up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night.
The problem with churning out all these lawyers is that the law is a self-germinating profession. For example, what happens if you have too many house painters in an area? Well, prices go down, service levels probably go up, and some of those painters have to diversify or move into other fields to make a living. Like most professions, an over-abundance of practitioners yields negative pressure for an increase of practitioners.
What happens when you have too many lawyers in an area? Well, they just start taking on more frivolous cases and filing more suits, which does what? Creates work for opposing lawyers, which actually increases the demand for lawyers! They clog our legal system with crap like a credit card company clogs your email box with spam.
Worse yet, having lost most of their senses of morality and ethics plying the legal trade, these bastards are the first ones likely to go into politics. That's where they really start creating extra opportunities for their fellow attorneys.
Lawyers are pure evil. Oppose the sharks that are the Association of Trial Lawyers of America, and any politicians in their back pockets. They make the RIAA and the MPAA look like a bunch of guppies by comparison.
Unfortunately, they're only going to drop judgments where the ruling is not in favor of big companies making money
/. very often), we're talking about the entertainment industry here. If any party has sold its soul to them for campaign contributions lately, it's been the Democrats. The Clintons basically rented out the Lincoln Bedroom for every big star and producer in Hollywood in exchange for a few bucks.
:)
To be fair (something you don't see on
Perhaps the Bush administration will deal the entertainment industry a blow for being such loyal Democrats and cripple their revenues by taking the teeth out of the DMCA.
The Justice Department is expected to have a certain degree of independence from the administration, and rightfully so.
The Excite article that I read even explicitly mentions that GWB has gone out of his way to not influence the issue. That may not be true, but it's misleading, irresponsible, and extremely biased journalism to report otherwise.