For what it is (electrolysis via PV) it's true. I think if there is potential in hydrogen (and I'm not at all sure hydrogen is THE energy solution for the future... though given the amount of research in it it's bound to have some place in the scheme of things), it will either be some wacky catalytic conversion of water to hydrogen and oxygen - I acutally researched something like this for my senior project in chemistry in college - or else conversion of organic compounds to hydrogen (later I researched the conversion of biomass to hydrogen). Basic chemistry tells us it is easier to break a Carbon-Hydrogen bond than to break an Oxygen-Hydrogen bond, so the latter ultimately strikes me as more feasible - but only time will tell, and amazing things are possible through catalysis.
But this project isn't meant to push technical boundaries - it's meant to get kids excited about alternative energy, demonstrate technologies that are already available, and stimulate conversation, which it clearly has. It's still a pretty neat accomplishment.
The interesting part of this to me is how specific activities are targetted with the "addiction" tag while others haven't. If you go from the other direction - i.e., start noodling over case studies of people with severe personality problems and cataloging how they use their time, think of the gripping new addictions you would discover! Spy novel addicition! Daytime soap opera addiciton! Game show addiction! Crossword puzzle addiction!
People who have personal and mental problems often gravitate towards excessive, obsessive engagement in activities that provide them with a state of escape from painful everyday life. I'm sure most of us have done it on a small scale. The only reason video gaming gets the "scary specter of addicition" treatment is because they're still a relatively new phenomenon.
Yeah, the whole thing teeters on the edge of that ol' uncanny valley. The sample clips were almost intriguing enough to get me to sign up to another fricking content site. Almost.
See, now your actual beliefs become more clear. The thing is, you started out trying to argue with a person who does not believe that the law prohibiting cannabis use is just on the basis that their obligation is to follow the law, right or wrong, and that the punishment they receive under the law is just because it is the law. Your actual belief is that this particular law is just because you morally judge this particular action.
Of course I did not morally equate slavery and the prohibition of cannabis and said so explicitely; I merely drew certain parallels between two laws that I consider to be unjust. Can I seriously believe that someone has a moral obligation to smoke weed? Not in my experience, though I cannot speak for how people elect to pursue the modification of their own consciousnesses. I can judge the morality of incarcerating individuals for making choices of how they elect to modify their consciousnesses, how they elect to pursue happiness, if you will, and I judge it to be immoral.
When a society elects to legislate how individuals alter their inner states it is treading a very fine line. Various forms of religious expression, artistic expression, and sexual expression, and alteration of consciousness through the use of substances (including coffee, alcohol and tobacco) have all been deemed illegal in various societies at various times, using the same basic justification you use to support your beliefs about cannabis.
You say you were not "espousing the complete following of the law," okay, that certainly sounded what you were saying in the first place: specific. You were actually saying, you think smoking weed is a selfish act existing only for recreation and therefore you think it's okay for the cops to pick someone's ass up, I believe was your sentiment, for doing it. Thanks for clearing that up.
I apologize for rhetorically putting words in your mouth. But you don't actually argue with the substance of my reply. I want to know if you are arguing that it is never appropriate to break an unjust law. People who helped slaves to escape were breaking the law. They were unwilling to wait for the law to be changed. Now, it isn't a very good comparison, I admit, because one can control whether they smoke cannabis (though the level of control some drug users can exercise without professional assistance and treatment is questionable). But it is a reasonable comparison in that the law is capricious, unfounded in fact, and results in people innocent of causing harm to society losing their freedom unjustly (I'll correlate that in one respect - supporting a black market - illegal drug users do harm society. This is a condition created by the law, and not everyone supports a black market, especially to smoke cannabis which can be easily home grown).
And I'll ask a corrollary question: are only those affected by an unjust law bound by social and moral obligations to work to change them? What if those laws do significant harm to society?
Incidentally, I already do all the things you suggest and quite a bit more. I also never said that I broke the law.
I'll expand on the issue. I do not consider the right to smoke weed to be equivalent to the right to freedom. But there is no genuine difference in the attitude that hey - it's the law, so cart 'em off to jail. That's the problem with that black and white kind of viewpoint - it doesn't work so well except when you already agree with a preexisting viewpoint on the "it's the law so hey that's the way it is" issue in the first place.
What I'd like to see is an acknowledgement of the racist, xenophobic attitudes that laid the foundations of the war on drugs, not to mention the disinformation and outright lies. I'd like to see some consideration of the huge cost, in money alone, that the War on Drugs exacts from society, for absolutely no gain. I'd like to see acknowledgement that cannabis is less harmful from any objective standard than alcohol, and has proven medical applications, and yet is classified in the same legal category as heroin. I'd like more people to really think about the facts of how civil and property rights have been eroded by the war on drugs. I'd like discussion about how to really gain the benefit of the proven reality that a treatment dollar is better spent than an incarceration dollar. I'd like to see people acknowledge that in cigarettes you see a proven strategy for an addictive substances: by treating it as a public health program, promoting education and social control, and raising prices through taxation, smoking has decreased significantly in the USA over the last decades. The law is the law but as the saying goes the law is an ass. I'd like to see less people sitting on their asses and accepting that as simply the way it is.
George W. Bush: Drugs are terrorists. We have to fight these terrorists, to keep our families safe, like the thousands who lost loved ones in the vicious, terrorist attacks of 9-11. That's why we're winning the war for freedom for the people of Iraq.
Laura Bush: Just say no, dear (thanks again for lending me your play book, Nancy!).
Kerry: My party enjoys the benefits of getting voters like you on our side because we're the "liberal" party - but when it comes down to it we also like the benefits of being able to rush some more insane mandatory minimum sentencing and revisions to the bill of rights through congress any time we feel we need to have a "we're tough on crime" pissing contest with the GOP. So I'm just going to keep treating that issue like Kryptonite so I can play both sides.
Teresa Heinz-Kerry: Oh god, we all smoked dope like it was going out of style back in the day! I never said that... you're twisting my words... stuff it! You can just stuff it!
John Edwards - uh, what Kerry said, but with my own little rhetorical spin so you know that I'm not just the man's little sidekick, in case we somehow get the next 8 years outta this, or if he tanks it and I get to go for the gold in four.
I agree with you. When I first looked at this I thought, yeesh, do they honestly think they're going to get me to replace iTunes?
On consideration, no, I doubt it. I think this reality is somewhat opaque to the average slashdotter, but there are a whole lot of people out there who do not recognize their computer as an appliance for playing music, or at best know they can stick a CD in the tray and WMP will play it more or less like a CD player. I think this kind of thing is an attempt to get a piece of that as-yet untapped market rather than an attempt to compete directly with current consumers of products like iTunes.
An outfit like Yahoo is in the same bind as everybody that had a real spiffy business model when they were the only ones doing anything to make things online truly accessible to the masses: there isn't very much money in being a portal. But what they do have is a user base. So I think you're exactly right - they're hoping to get all those people who still have Yahoo as their home page, their webmail, hosting their little personal web page, IM client or whatever who are deciding hey, I want to try something out with music on my computer.
Animals don't like robots
on
Animal Robots
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
When I first read the article description I thought it said a NY Times article "all about how animalS like robots," and I thought, well that's BS - my friends have a roomba and their dog HATES and FEARS that thing. Whenever it goes into action it's total stress (and barking) time.
Oh, and I forgot the approach they took at a warehouse where my brother worked, where empty containers (i.e. semi trailers) often came locked with a padlock the key for which was long lost. They called it the BFH - The Big F'ing Hammer. A solid hit destroyed most padlocks.
Re:So what locks ARE good?!?
on
Steel Bolt Hacking
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Really all locks are vulnerable - locks are sort of like DRM or encryption - there has to be a protocol to get through the security and protocols can be hacked. In general there are three issues with locks: the complexity of the mechanism (that reduces the effectiveness of hacks, i.e. a five number combo is better than a three number against simply trying every combo), the precision and quality of the engineering (i.e a lot of cheap combo cable locks are vulnerable to very simple hacks of "feeling out" the combo hot spots caused by cheap, poor engineering - most lock packs including picking are aided by "play" in the mechanism itself, which is exploited), and the strength and quality of the securing (versus the locking) mechanism (to resist against brute force attack, far and away the most common way theives get past locks: they simply break them. It's hard to make a mechanism that a two inch piece of metal can open truly strong).
There's no simple answer. Ask a locksmith for help chosing the best bet for a particular job and be prepared to spend some money because top quality locks are expensive. And remember for the most part locks keep honest people honest and at best deter, slow or diver thieves (number one way thieves enter domiciles is doors and windows left open. Number two is straight force i.e. the swift kick or broken window).
Years ago I lived in a crummy apartment and there were a bunch of storage rooms past renters had put padlocks on and then abandoned. I was to clear these out for current renters. None of the locks were top of the line but they ranged from hardware store cheapies that cost a couple dollars to heavy duty name brands that might have been upwards of ten. In each case I opened the lock by inserting a short iron prybar about 3/4 inch diameter between the shackle and the body and just wrenching the shackle right out of the body of the lock. I was amazed by how easy it was with a little force and leverage, and not caring that I was wrecking the lock.
Yeah, the idea that you are either for a total free for all WRT intellectual property, or else you support the sort of proprietary mayhem much of the IP-selling giants push in social and legislative venues, is typical diversionary B.S. Any true proponent of free software recognizes that strong copyright protection (and the most basic and fundamental protection of the copyright is very broad and very strong) is fundamental for any kind of license based distribution strategy. In fact, tactics like SCO's floated and extremely offensive suggestion that copyright based license strategies might be illegal by copyright law expose a real underlying conflict - between individual creator ownership and control of IP as the fundamental basis of intellectual property versus the preferential legal treatment for corporate IP ownership that has accreted into the law over the years.
I wholly agree about piracy, however. Too many of us are far too easy going about jacking the intellectual property of others strictly because it's easy to do so. On the other hand, few are pure (who doesn't have/hasn't made a few mix tapes? Straight up illegal, don't even argue about it. Illegal reproduction and distribution, totally unprotected by fair use).
That being said, it may be true that the only thing he did wrong was not telling people what he was about to do to them - caveat emptor, after all, particularly when you didn't actually emptor it in the first place - but that was a very big wrong thing to do considering the scope of the retribution. He deserves the knocking he took and it will hurt his reputation as a developer for a long time to come. Part of the price of working as a creator is you gotta deal with unlawful use of your IP, and if you do it in a way that burns bridges you better look to your future. That goes for one-man development shops just as much as it goes for the RIAA.
Yeah, that cap thing - bad idea. Contacting your legislators when bad legislation is being considered is a good idea. This campaign looks pretty straightforward. While I don't support everything DB does, by a long shot, they're doing something. All your comments do is discourage people from acting without offering any alternative. Also, you offer a single example of action and then draw a general conclusion from it. In other words, your post is poor and the people who modded it interesting oughta get slapped.
Number one dumb thing about this is, handwritten notes are not even remotely the issue. I mean, I'm a notepad addict, I admit. Constantly have four or five legal pads going to keep track of things at work. So? Maybe I use half a dozen a month, maybe. Meantime, the office chews through about five times that weekly, pure waste, why? Wasteful printing, people who cannot negotiate an email or a spreadsheet unless it is printed out, people printing stuff and totally forgetting about it so it sits around for a few days before being tossed, people clumsily hitting the wrong toggle, causing some report robot to spew five hundred pages of useless data out, and being too lazy to torque their fat asses out of their chairs to go hit the cancel button somewhere around page fourteen (duh, there's a cancel button? okay, gettin' into pet peeves now). Saw this one yesterday - somebody took an online form, meant to be filled out and delivered electronically, printed it, filled it out by hand, and faxed it. For a while do to some dumb setup some people were printing a ridiculous and pointless cover sheet every single print job. Oh yeah, gotta call IT about that, get to that tomorrow, easy enough just to toss it. Oh, make a dozen copies of these powerpoint handouts, yeah so everybody at that meeting can doodle on them, write a couple of pointless points, and then toss them out within a couple days of the meeting. I mean, show of hands, how many find that too much paper on their desk is a problem?
It's just too damn easy to generate paper, and people are lazy, and set in their ways. I think a probable and sad component is that making stuff into hard copy gives a false sense of productivity (that presentation may have been a bunch of malarky but everyone got a handout!) I bet almost any office could reduce it's paper use at least by half if it enforced strict policies to eliminate waste and curb questionable reproduction and printing. Yeah, show of hands, who wants to be in charge of that one?
As far as I can tell, one thing you can bank on is that a person who will make a sort of black and white, blanket statement about certain things (i.e. paper recycling is worse for the environment than harvesting new growth) is guaranteed to be a person who doesn't know shit about it. Some people are incapable of discerning the differnece between a political, rhetorical argument and a rational, scientific one. Do I know shit about it? A little - a past job was research as a chemist into alternative materials for a think tank based in Washington, they did work on both paper and recycling.
These questions are REALLY complicated. Even the statement paper recycling is actually WORSE for the environment displays a profound depth of ignorance in its tacit assumption that what is "good" or "bad" for the environment is easily measured. Consumes more or less energy? Uses more or less chemicals? Uses more or less toxic/persistant/bioavailable chemicals? What's the downstream net pollution? What is the lifecycle net environmental impact of a tree - or cutting one down? Some of these questions are simple to answer, some are really complicated, maybe impossible at our current levels of knowledge. What's the point of arguing it on the slash, tho? Some dip makes a totally unsupported statement, gets modded up informative? Note to kids: if you're working on a research paper, better hit some primary sources.
Not all Christians love Lewis - and the VAST majority of Christians (like myself) don't seek to get books banned - honest. I like the Harry Potter books.
Note that A Wrinkle in Time appears on the list - L'Engle is also a Christian author and there are direct references to Christianity in the book.
Don't expect people who want to outlaw ideas to make sense. You can't, as my friend Dave L. used to say, polish a turd.
Yeah, I was thinking I could get a tiny little extra lower AND upper mandible grown, then I could have that freaky double mouth action thing from Alien going on...
(yeah we can laugh now, when our kids come home with a double ring of Doberman teeth circling their skulls 'cause it's the krezappy style of the day we'll be singing a different tune.
too late to matter, but after further research (I don't really do P2P so I'm not familiar with players or organizations within it) I have a lot more sympathy for those involved. I have seen no credible evidence to contradict that the fed dropped on a bunch of people who were basically just help managing hubs, and had nothing to do with any actual illegal file sharing. The bottom line seems to once again be that they just don't get it.
They are clearly directing and operating an enterprise which countenances illegal activity and makes as a condition of membership the willingness to make available material to be stolen
Yeah, I mean, I gotta admit, I find it difficult to dredge up that much sympathy for people who knowingly and egregiously violate the law... I mean they're not running the underground railroad here, you known? But it's pretty damn dissapointing when your attorney general doesn't know the legal definition of theft.
I don't see that Ludlow has admitted that "This Land" is in the public domain - they settled, Jib Jab can distribute their parody all they want, nobody pursues an actual ruling that this song reverted to the public domain in "Ludlow believes its copyright -- initially filed in 1956 and renewed in 1984 -- remains valid and disputes EFF's claims." This is not simple, it's pretty sticky, I imagine Ludlow sees a double threat (and nothing but resentment to gain from it) because it likely could get by as protected satire, and just wants the whole thing to go away. But rest assured they'll keep insisting they own it and selling it as their own. The question is, will they ever manage to enforce it again?
A coordinated online strike against Internet servers by terrorists, dubbed "electronic jihad," may or may not strike this week...
Am I the only person deeply annoyed by this sort of non-statement? In addition to just being stupid ("this thing will either happen, or else it won't! don't you feel informed?"), the word may intrinsically contains the will-or-will-not option. That's what "may" means. Dammit.
Slashdot Mirror
For what it is (electrolysis via PV) it's true. I think if there is potential in hydrogen (and I'm not at all sure hydrogen is THE energy solution for the future... though given the amount of research in it it's bound to have some place in the scheme of things), it will either be some wacky catalytic conversion of water to hydrogen and oxygen - I acutally researched something like this for my senior project in chemistry in college - or else conversion of organic compounds to hydrogen (later I researched the conversion of biomass to hydrogen). Basic chemistry tells us it is easier to break a Carbon-Hydrogen bond than to break an Oxygen-Hydrogen bond, so the latter ultimately strikes me as more feasible - but only time will tell, and amazing things are possible through catalysis.
But this project isn't meant to push technical boundaries - it's meant to get kids excited about alternative energy, demonstrate technologies that are already available, and stimulate conversation, which it clearly has. It's still a pretty neat accomplishment.
The interesting part of this to me is how specific activities are targetted with the "addiction" tag while others haven't. If you go from the other direction - i.e., start noodling over case studies of people with severe personality problems and cataloging how they use their time, think of the gripping new addictions you would discover! Spy novel addicition! Daytime soap opera addiciton! Game show addiction! Crossword puzzle addiction!
People who have personal and mental problems often gravitate towards excessive, obsessive engagement in activities that provide them with a state of escape from painful everyday life. I'm sure most of us have done it on a small scale. The only reason video gaming gets the "scary specter of addicition" treatment is because they're still a relatively new phenomenon.
Yeah, the whole thing teeters on the edge of that ol' uncanny valley. The sample clips were almost intriguing enough to get me to sign up to another fricking content site. Almost.
See, now your actual beliefs become more clear. The thing is, you started out trying to argue with a person who does not believe that the law prohibiting cannabis use is just on the basis that their obligation is to follow the law, right or wrong, and that the punishment they receive under the law is just because it is the law. Your actual belief is that this particular law is just because you morally judge this particular action.
Of course I did not morally equate slavery and the prohibition of cannabis and said so explicitely; I merely drew certain parallels between two laws that I consider to be unjust. Can I seriously believe that someone has a moral obligation to smoke weed? Not in my experience, though I cannot speak for how people elect to pursue the modification of their own consciousnesses. I can judge the morality of incarcerating individuals for making choices of how they elect to modify their consciousnesses, how they elect to pursue happiness, if you will, and I judge it to be immoral.
When a society elects to legislate how individuals alter their inner states it is treading a very fine line. Various forms of religious expression, artistic expression, and sexual expression, and alteration of consciousness through the use of substances (including coffee, alcohol and tobacco) have all been deemed illegal in various societies at various times, using the same basic justification you use to support your beliefs about cannabis.
You say you were not "espousing the complete following of the law," okay, that certainly sounded what you were saying in the first place: specific. You were actually saying, you think smoking weed is a selfish act existing only for recreation and therefore you think it's okay for the cops to pick someone's ass up, I believe was your sentiment, for doing it. Thanks for clearing that up.
I apologize for rhetorically putting words in your mouth. But you don't actually argue with the substance of my reply. I want to know if you are arguing that it is never appropriate to break an unjust law. People who helped slaves to escape were breaking the law. They were unwilling to wait for the law to be changed. Now, it isn't a very good comparison, I admit, because one can control whether they smoke cannabis (though the level of control some drug users can exercise without professional assistance and treatment is questionable). But it is a reasonable comparison in that the law is capricious, unfounded in fact, and results in people innocent of causing harm to society losing their freedom unjustly (I'll correlate that in one respect - supporting a black market - illegal drug users do harm society. This is a condition created by the law, and not everyone supports a black market, especially to smoke cannabis which can be easily home grown).
And I'll ask a corrollary question: are only those affected by an unjust law bound by social and moral obligations to work to change them? What if those laws do significant harm to society?
Incidentally, I already do all the things you suggest and quite a bit more. I also never said that I broke the law.
I'll expand on the issue. I do not consider the right to smoke weed to be equivalent to the right to freedom. But there is no genuine difference in the attitude that hey - it's the law, so cart 'em off to jail. That's the problem with that black and white kind of viewpoint - it doesn't work so well except when you already agree with a preexisting viewpoint on the "it's the law so hey that's the way it is" issue in the first place.
What I'd like to see is an acknowledgement of the racist, xenophobic attitudes that laid the foundations of the war on drugs, not to mention the disinformation and outright lies. I'd like to see some consideration of the huge cost, in money alone, that the War on Drugs exacts from society, for absolutely no gain. I'd like to see acknowledgement that cannabis is less harmful from any objective standard than alcohol, and has proven medical applications, and yet is classified in the same legal category as heroin. I'd like more people to really think about the facts of how civil and property rights have been eroded by the war on drugs. I'd like discussion about how to really gain the benefit of the proven reality that a treatment dollar is better spent than an incarceration dollar. I'd like to see people acknowledge that in cigarettes you see a proven strategy for an addictive substances: by treating it as a public health program, promoting education and social control, and raising prices through taxation, smoking has decreased significantly in the USA over the last decades. The law is the law but as the saying goes the law is an ass. I'd like to see less people sitting on their asses and accepting that as simply the way it is.
We just slashdotted the World.
Yeah, that's what I said about those dirty bastards that ran the underground railroad.
You may now go off about my comparing slavery to incarcerating people for their choice of intoxicant.
Never drank underage I presume. I want to see THOSE little punks tried as adults and carted off to jail. They certainly kill more people.
George W. Bush: Drugs are terrorists. We have to fight these terrorists, to keep our families safe, like the thousands who lost loved ones in the vicious, terrorist attacks of 9-11. That's why we're winning the war for freedom for the people of Iraq.
Laura Bush: Just say no, dear (thanks again for lending me your play book, Nancy!).
Kerry: My party enjoys the benefits of getting voters like you on our side because we're the "liberal" party - but when it comes down to it we also like the benefits of being able to rush some more insane mandatory minimum sentencing and revisions to the bill of rights through congress any time we feel we need to have a "we're tough on crime" pissing contest with the GOP. So I'm just going to keep treating that issue like Kryptonite so I can play both sides.
Teresa Heinz-Kerry: Oh god, we all smoked dope like it was going out of style back in the day! I never said that... you're twisting my words... stuff it! You can just stuff it!
John Edwards - uh, what Kerry said, but with my own little rhetorical spin so you know that I'm not just the man's little sidekick, in case we somehow get the next 8 years outta this, or if he tanks it and I get to go for the gold in four.
Dick Cheney: Go fuck yourself.
I agree with you. When I first looked at this I thought, yeesh, do they honestly think they're going to get me to replace iTunes?
On consideration, no, I doubt it. I think this reality is somewhat opaque to the average slashdotter, but there are a whole lot of people out there who do not recognize their computer as an appliance for playing music, or at best know they can stick a CD in the tray and WMP will play it more or less like a CD player. I think this kind of thing is an attempt to get a piece of that as-yet untapped market rather than an attempt to compete directly with current consumers of products like iTunes.
An outfit like Yahoo is in the same bind as everybody that had a real spiffy business model when they were the only ones doing anything to make things online truly accessible to the masses: there isn't very much money in being a portal. But what they do have is a user base. So I think you're exactly right - they're hoping to get all those people who still have Yahoo as their home page, their webmail, hosting their little personal web page, IM client or whatever who are deciding hey, I want to try something out with music on my computer.
When I first read the article description I thought it said a NY Times article "all about how animalS like robots," and I thought, well that's BS - my friends have a roomba and their dog HATES and FEARS that thing. Whenever it goes into action it's total stress (and barking) time.
Oh, and I forgot the approach they took at a warehouse where my brother worked, where empty containers (i.e. semi trailers) often came locked with a padlock the key for which was long lost. They called it the BFH - The Big F'ing Hammer. A solid hit destroyed most padlocks.
Really all locks are vulnerable - locks are sort of like DRM or encryption - there has to be a protocol to get through the security and protocols can be hacked. In general there are three issues with locks: the complexity of the mechanism (that reduces the effectiveness of hacks, i.e. a five number combo is better than a three number against simply trying every combo), the precision and quality of the engineering (i.e a lot of cheap combo cable locks are vulnerable to very simple hacks of "feeling out" the combo hot spots caused by cheap, poor engineering - most lock packs including picking are aided by "play" in the mechanism itself, which is exploited), and the strength and quality of the securing (versus the locking) mechanism (to resist against brute force attack, far and away the most common way theives get past locks: they simply break them. It's hard to make a mechanism that a two inch piece of metal can open truly strong).
There's no simple answer. Ask a locksmith for help chosing the best bet for a particular job and be prepared to spend some money because top quality locks are expensive. And remember for the most part locks keep honest people honest and at best deter, slow or diver thieves (number one way thieves enter domiciles is doors and windows left open. Number two is straight force i.e. the swift kick or broken window).
Years ago I lived in a crummy apartment and there were a bunch of storage rooms past renters had put padlocks on and then abandoned. I was to clear these out for current renters. None of the locks were top of the line but they ranged from hardware store cheapies that cost a couple dollars to heavy duty name brands that might have been upwards of ten. In each case I opened the lock by inserting a short iron prybar about 3/4 inch diameter between the shackle and the body and just wrenching the shackle right out of the body of the lock. I was amazed by how easy it was with a little force and leverage, and not caring that I was wrecking the lock.
Yeah, the idea that you are either for a total free for all WRT intellectual property, or else you support the sort of proprietary mayhem much of the IP-selling giants push in social and legislative venues, is typical diversionary B.S. Any true proponent of free software recognizes that strong copyright protection (and the most basic and fundamental protection of the copyright is very broad and very strong) is fundamental for any kind of license based distribution strategy. In fact, tactics like SCO's floated and extremely offensive suggestion that copyright based license strategies might be illegal by copyright law expose a real underlying conflict - between individual creator ownership and control of IP as the fundamental basis of intellectual property versus the preferential legal treatment for corporate IP ownership that has accreted into the law over the years.
I wholly agree about piracy, however. Too many of us are far too easy going about jacking the intellectual property of others strictly because it's easy to do so. On the other hand, few are pure (who doesn't have/hasn't made a few mix tapes? Straight up illegal, don't even argue about it. Illegal reproduction and distribution, totally unprotected by fair use).
That being said, it may be true that the only thing he did wrong was not telling people what he was about to do to them - caveat emptor, after all, particularly when you didn't actually emptor it in the first place - but that was a very big wrong thing to do considering the scope of the retribution. He deserves the knocking he took and it will hurt his reputation as a developer for a long time to come. Part of the price of working as a creator is you gotta deal with unlawful use of your IP, and if you do it in a way that burns bridges you better look to your future. That goes for one-man development shops just as much as it goes for the RIAA.
Yeah, that cap thing - bad idea. Contacting your legislators when bad legislation is being considered is a good idea. This campaign looks pretty straightforward. While I don't support everything DB does, by a long shot, they're doing something. All your comments do is discourage people from acting without offering any alternative. Also, you offer a single example of action and then draw a general conclusion from it. In other words, your post is poor and the people who modded it interesting oughta get slapped.
Then I'm gonna break out those HR Puffinstuff Betas ion the box in the basement and rock the roof off my house, man!
Number one dumb thing about this is, handwritten notes are not even remotely the issue. I mean, I'm a notepad addict, I admit. Constantly have four or five legal pads going to keep track of things at work. So? Maybe I use half a dozen a month, maybe. Meantime, the office chews through about five times that weekly, pure waste, why? Wasteful printing, people who cannot negotiate an email or a spreadsheet unless it is printed out, people printing stuff and totally forgetting about it so it sits around for a few days before being tossed, people clumsily hitting the wrong toggle, causing some report robot to spew five hundred pages of useless data out, and being too lazy to torque their fat asses out of their chairs to go hit the cancel button somewhere around page fourteen (duh, there's a cancel button? okay, gettin' into pet peeves now). Saw this one yesterday - somebody took an online form, meant to be filled out and delivered electronically, printed it, filled it out by hand, and faxed it. For a while do to some dumb setup some people were printing a ridiculous and pointless cover sheet every single print job. Oh yeah, gotta call IT about that, get to that tomorrow, easy enough just to toss it. Oh, make a dozen copies of these powerpoint handouts, yeah so everybody at that meeting can doodle on them, write a couple of pointless points, and then toss them out within a couple days of the meeting. I mean, show of hands, how many find that too much paper on their desk is a problem?
It's just too damn easy to generate paper, and people are lazy, and set in their ways. I think a probable and sad component is that making stuff into hard copy gives a false sense of productivity (that presentation may have been a bunch of malarky but everyone got a handout!) I bet almost any office could reduce it's paper use at least by half if it enforced strict policies to eliminate waste and curb questionable reproduction and printing. Yeah, show of hands, who wants to be in charge of that one?
As far as I can tell, one thing you can bank on is that a person who will make a sort of black and white, blanket statement about certain things (i.e. paper recycling is worse for the environment than harvesting new growth) is guaranteed to be a person who doesn't know shit about it. Some people are incapable of discerning the differnece between a political, rhetorical argument and a rational, scientific one. Do I know shit about it? A little - a past job was research as a chemist into alternative materials for a think tank based in Washington, they did work on both paper and recycling.
These questions are REALLY complicated. Even the statement paper recycling is actually WORSE for the environment displays a profound depth of ignorance in its tacit assumption that what is "good" or "bad" for the environment is easily measured. Consumes more or less energy? Uses more or less chemicals? Uses more or less toxic/persistant/bioavailable chemicals? What's the downstream net pollution? What is the lifecycle net environmental impact of a tree - or cutting one down? Some of these questions are simple to answer, some are really complicated, maybe impossible at our current levels of knowledge. What's the point of arguing it on the slash, tho? Some dip makes a totally unsupported statement, gets modded up informative? Note to kids: if you're working on a research paper, better hit some primary sources.
Alex programmes live on stage
Programmes? Programmes? By god I smell a limey in our midst! Get 'im!
Not all Christians love Lewis - and the VAST majority of Christians (like myself) don't seek to get books banned - honest. I like the Harry Potter books.
Note that A Wrinkle in Time appears on the list - L'Engle is also a Christian author and there are direct references to Christianity in the book.
Don't expect people who want to outlaw ideas to make sense. You can't, as my friend Dave L. used to say, polish a turd.
Yeah, I was thinking I could get a tiny little extra lower AND upper mandible grown, then I could have that freaky double mouth action thing from Alien going on...
(yeah we can laugh now, when our kids come home with a double ring of Doberman teeth circling their skulls 'cause it's the krezappy style of the day we'll be singing a different tune.
too late to matter, but after further research (I don't really do P2P so I'm not familiar with players or organizations within it) I have a lot more sympathy for those involved. I have seen no credible evidence to contradict that the fed dropped on a bunch of people who were basically just help managing hubs, and had nothing to do with any actual illegal file sharing. The bottom line seems to once again be that they just don't get it.
They are clearly directing and operating an enterprise which countenances illegal activity and makes as a condition of membership the willingness to make available material to be stolen
Yeah, I mean, I gotta admit, I find it difficult to dredge up that much sympathy for people who knowingly and egregiously violate the law... I mean they're not running the underground railroad here, you known? But it's pretty damn dissapointing when your attorney general doesn't know the legal definition of theft.
I don't see that Ludlow has admitted that "This Land" is in the public domain - they settled, Jib Jab can distribute their parody all they want, nobody pursues an actual ruling that this song reverted to the public domain in "Ludlow believes its copyright -- initially filed in 1956 and renewed in 1984 -- remains valid and disputes EFF's claims." This is not simple, it's pretty sticky, I imagine Ludlow sees a double threat (and nothing but resentment to gain from it) because it likely could get by as protected satire, and just wants the whole thing to go away. But rest assured they'll keep insisting they own it and selling it as their own. The question is, will they ever manage to enforce it again?
A coordinated online strike against Internet servers by terrorists, dubbed "electronic jihad," may or may not strike this week...
Am I the only person deeply annoyed by this sort of non-statement? In addition to just being stupid ("this thing will either happen, or else it won't! don't you feel informed?"), the word may intrinsically contains the will-or-will-not option. That's what "may" means. Dammit.