"Who do you think the early adopters for iPods were? Geeks were definitely among them."
Of course they were. Even geeks like to listen to music, after all ! Apple weren't (and still aren't) actively targetting the geek dollar, though. That's all I meant.
No, they're not actively courting the geek dollar. They're actively courting people who want a fairly straightforward experience with their player, and don't want to muck around with it.
I've had iPods for probably 5-6 years now, and they just work, and provide a lot of features I find really nice. The iTunes software is really nice (IMO) to work with, and tracking things like play count/last played etc are really nice features -- in fact, they're some of my favorite features as I have playlists which are partly defined by least recently played. Smart playlists in iTunes completely changed the way I listen to music, and I wouldn't go back. (That's not to say other music software doesn't have such things or other cool features.)
Seriously, other that whining about Ogg Vorbis and other geeky things in relation to music... in exactly what way is the iPod deficient from a geek point of view? Are you upset there's no Haskell port or Emacs for it? It can't run a SNES emulator? No TCP stack?? Not enough squirting for you?
Maybe I've been a geek so long I've lost sight of what other people want to do with their music players. I'm just completely not getting what "geek street cred" is missing from the iPod.
It doesn't impose DRM on me, I'm not obligated to use songs bought from the iTunes Music Store, and it's perfectly capable of ripping my CDs into MP3 for use in my collection. I can't think of any features which I think it's lacking in. Overall, I'd say Apple has delivered a consistently pleasant experience in the product.
They just have an extremely casual relationship with objective reality.
No, they lie.
I am seeing an increase in spam messages that have a disclaimer at the bottom indicating that "this message was sent by Fox New Corp" with the mailing address of them in NYC, and if I want to opt out I can go to the following link. Of course, the unsubscribe link is on the same site that the spam is directing you to.
This gives the illusion of complying with CANSPAM, but, in reality, it demonstrates how completely toothless CANSPAM really is.
If they can't track down who is actually sending it, then start punishing the companies who are benefiting from it and make them responsible for how their "affiliates" are marketing their products. Because, really, these companies get to act like they're not spamming, but they're benefiting from it. I'm fairly sure that whatever fake "Canadian Pharmacy" these things point to isn't a legitimate business and shouldn't be able to pretend that a bunch of people they don't know are directing "customers" to their web site.
Unfortunately, I don't have any idea of how we're ever going to reduce the amount of spam -- but, by its very nature, spam is almost always dishonest, and often outright fraudulent.
As I understand it, if Tivo used a different technique of doing on TV than was used in other media, it's patentable. If Dish used a different technique of doing it on TV than Tivo did, Dish should be okay. But if Dish just copied Tivo's patented technique, then Tivo was right to stomp them.
Maybe, but without knowing the details, unless it is more than "patent for a circular buffer with random access", then I just don't get it.
Essentially, once the concept of a buffered stream with pause, rewind, fast forward exists.. patenting it for a specific media seems dumb.
It's like those patents which amount to "something done in the real world forever, but now done online" -- it's a commonly applied mechanism, which is only slightly differentiated by being online. IMO, not differentiated enough to be patentable.
Some of the specific technologies they used to do this could, in fact, be patentable. I'm just not 100% clear on what claims this patent is actually covering.
Being able to pause a live video stream on the home TV? Then fast forward to catch up to the live stream? No one else was doing that in the late 90's.
If I was doing it with any form of media prior to Tivos patent, the ability to buffer and play an incomplete stream as a concept should be void.
You can't take something that someone is already doing, and add "with TV" to it, and expect that "with TV" is magically different from "with a video file on the internet".
If Tivo truly patented this before anyone demonstrated streaming media, then maybe this is a valid patent. If it had been done before on other forms of media, I fail to see how you can patent it for TV and have it be actually novel. I'm just not convinced we didn't have streaming media and video on the internet before Tivo came along.
If you find such a photo and personally identifiable information on facebook you can send them a takedown notice or can sue them in your jurisdiction if they do not comply in a resonable amount of time.
A takedown notice based on what?
As I've said in this thread, if I take a picture of a crowd of people in pubic, and you're in it doing something stupid, you're simply out of luck.
If someone sues me in a different jurisdiction over a photo I posted on the internet, I'm going to ignore it completely, as I don't recognize their right to do so. Otherwise some asshat in a backwards country is going to start suing people who put pictures of women in immodest garb.
The internet doesn't extend jurisdiction to anywhere you can see something from.
I'm glad you think you are right, but you are not. Laws goes in a great extent to define what a libellous or offensive image is
Yes, Libel has to be "false and damaging".
If you were actually humping that sheep in the middle of main street, you're SOL, because at that point, it's simply a matter of reporting fact.
The truth, oddly enough, isn't libel. It may be inconvenient, but that's not the same thing. I actually do know what the law says in regard to photography in public spaces, and what I can do with it.
If your friends post a picture of you on facebook doing something you wish you hadn't, that's not libel. That just means you should have been more careful.
Is this really a novel technology, or a slapping together of a bunch of existing things in a fairly obvious manner. I mean, really, the very first applications on the internet that allowed streaming video and audio supported pause, rewind, and fast forward. I distinctly remember pushing pause on things to allow the buffer to fill up over a slow dialup line. Sometimes, the slow dialup line would enforce a pause for you.;-)
Other than the fact that it's TV, I don't see this as being any different from real player or a bunch of things which predated it.
This patent really should be vacated, I just can't see how "a buffer with forward and backward access" is actually a novel invention. I'm of the opinion that if you can show any application which streamed multimedia ever had pause etc then the whole patent is invalid.
When you watch pictures of cosplayers at events in Japan, if the face of a bystander happens to also appear in the picture, it will be blurred out. If someone takes a picture of a customly decorated car, they will blur the car's ID plate. It is common sense, courtesy, behaviour to protect people's privacy. Even if that was a public event they never asked for you to publish their face online.
Are we talking about television or, for example personal flickr pages here?? I fail to see why if I take a photograph when I'm on vacation I should be obligated to post-process my images that I take in public to remove any mechanism of identifying the people who might have been on vacation in the same place.
Unfortunately, Facebook is kind of an analog to photography in the real world -- you can be incidentally photographed and not be intruded upon. Or, you have linked yourself in with a bunch of friends and one of them photographed you doing stupid and your mom/wife/whatever might see it -- only in the digital world, more people than you expected could see it.
I'm not arguing for a blanket right to directly photograph people without their consent and use those images for commercial purposes -- but if you're just simply 'background' to my photo, I'm not going to edit out your face or license plate, because it's going to make my carefully composed photo look like shit. I bought that camera because it takes nice pictures, not so I can edit out big chunks of it to hide everyone.
But that's too far a concept for your american culture of "me/myself/whatever I want is FIRST", I guess.
No, you mistake me. This isn't about me, per se. But it's not about you either.
I'm specifically defending the equivalent of me posting my vacation pics (or birthday pics) on flickr (or, Facebook) without editing your face or license plate out of my picture. If you were at Judy's Birthday Party, and that was a particularly crazy night, Facebook is not violating your privacy because Judy decided to post pictures of you mooning the boss. I just don't think you can expect that kind of granularity in laws and expect it to work. You'd have to outlaw cameras -- and everybody's phone has a &*^%^& camera.
This isn't about selfish American culture, and, for the record, I'm not an American.
Allowing yourself to be photographed in compromising situations doesn't mean that the people who were also there must have a "gag order" placed upon them for how they use their own photographs. If your friends photographed you "hitting that skull bong" and posted it on the internet, you beef is with them, not Facebook.
I understand your personal preference, but it's worth keeping in mind that Facebook are not immune from data protection rules either. If they are holding personal information about you without your consent, and worse, sharing it with others, then they may well be breaking the law in some jurisdictions.
Is that true, or merely an assertion?
I ask, because if Sue posts a picture she took, to her site, and your face is in it and linked to your profile... then they are holding the information that Sue gave them (legitimately) and the fact that you're incidentally in it is irrelevant to your personal stuff. Because, it's now her personal stuff as well.
In a wired universe, it can get a little more indirect in terms of if it's "your" information or not.
I'm just not sure most privacy laws would be strong enough to cover this case, and it might come down to a matter of whose informed consent is needed. And, moreover, what is the threshold at which Facebook gets to say they acted in good faith and be absolutely correct about it.
Heck, as an avid photographer, I would say that if I took a photo of a crowd or in public, and you were in it (butt naked, vomiting, and with someone other than your wife) then I just have to say... don't do things in public you might not want seen or photographed. Posting it to Facebook all nicely tagged with metadata and cross-referenced with your friends... well, that's just asking for it.
Guitar hero kinda sucks in the first place its just a popular fad.
Sadly, you're missing the point that the gazillion people who are playing Guitar Hero like games legitimately find them to be fun, and are willing to spend money on them. You may dislike them and think they suck. But, seriously, look at the sales figures for these games. This isn't "just a popular fad".
For a lot of people, games like this are fun, and games like FPS are annoying and tedious. These games appeal to "non-gamers". I'm one of them. You're welcome to your FPS on your PC, but you're being shockingly arrogant to think that a game like GH3 which sold 1.4 million copies in October of last year and which seem to drive actual music sales is just a fad.
Like it or not, GH3 and that kind of game are not going to go away anytime soon. I know a ton of people who fall well outside of any realm of what you can call gamers who are absolutely into the instrument rhythm games.
Right. Let the free market do for the environment what it's done for the banking industry.
Well, remember, the people at NASA might not have the skillset we need to look at issues like biodiversity and alternate energy. The engineering and aerospace skills the people have may not translate. MBAs might look at people as fungible goods, but the guy who has been doing extensive research into orbital mechanics might not actually know much about things which are applicable.
I would be in favor of temporarily suspending the NASA program, utilizing those resources to come up with new energy technology, and then licensing that technology to help fund the resurrected space program.
The problem with that is, if you suspend it, and you ever wanted it back... there's a huge ramp-up time to get your space program back on line. There's also a lot of stuff that you need a space program for -- we've become highly dependent on communications satellites and the like. You don't want to give up on that.
I think governments (or anyone) should avoid looking at is as "either we invest in space" or "we invest in alternate energies". We should continue to invest in both, because there is a need for both.
If you're really looking to save money, I bet there's an awful lot of defense and other spending you could look at.
"Per Larry Niven, "The dinosaurs went extinct because they didn't have a space program"."
Strange. I thought the dinosaurs died because they were unable to adapt to a changing environment.
Well, as much as it's a fairly glib quote from Niven, it's not really that opposite to what you said.
In a lot of ways, investing in a space program and investing money in basic scientific research can be looked at as trying to learn how you'd adapt to a changing environment. Only, it's what you do when you have opposable thumbs and frontal lobes instead of waiting for evolution to sort it out for you.
...suppliers will supply it, regardless of any spurious 'WONT SOMEONE THINK OF TEH CHILDREN' type arguments....
As long as parents are footing their own damned costs for this, and the rest of us don't have it foisted on us, I agree with that. Having the entire TV and internet infrastructure set up to do this is stupid.
Parents are already 'enabled' as censors over their children. It's called looking at what they are doing and watching, and preventing them from watching the stuff they disagree with.
Asking the FCC to impose a technical mandate on every piece of communications technology to allow parents to individually censor every thing according to rules is asinine. Because we're all going to end up paying through the nose for our TV and ISPs and consumer electronics which have this stuff in it.
Sadly, parents seem to expect that someone will come up with a technical solution to all of their ills. I think it would be both expensive and ill-advised to try to get this stuff built into all of the technology around us.
This is the worst sort of mandate, because, once again, we look at implementing mechanisms of censorship which will be in place for all of us -- all in the name of the children. Eventually they'll take the choice away from us to watch what they consider to be objectionable as some overly zealous group says that on thing or another should be banned in case some child somewhere sees it.
Author is Joshua Michael Schrei With luck, google will find you a reference which is reachable. Of course, most of them will be on pro-Tibet sites, who knows.
Funny how everyone who wants to make these assertions about Tibet trots out only this article -- which isn't peer reviewed, and is full of assertions that I'm not convinced he can back up. It's certainly written with a lot of innuendo and inference which I don't think is befitting of scholarly work.
"A lie repeated a hundred times becomes the truth." -Chairman Mao
You seem to have a very strong agenda to further the Chinese position on this matter. You'll forgive me if I'm underwhelmed with your tired rhetoric.
Do I seriously believe that Tibet was a perfect Shangri La before the chinese invasion? No. Do I believe that the entire country was a series of atrocities as detailed in the article? Absolutely not. Does this article make me have second thoughts about the sincerity and morality of the Dalai Lama? Not on your fucking life.
I honestly don't understand why people think the Falun Gong is great. They're honestly crazy
Other than your assertion, got anything to back that up? Certainly, other than China saying it, I see no evidence whatsoever of them having any aspects of being a cult.
I've known several people who were practitioners, and they were some of the nicest, kindest, straight up people I've known. I've skimmed their literature, and I don't see anything in it that I would classify as crazy.
We take the Dalai Lhama's word as gospel, even though he definitely has his own incentive to distort the truth.
But, the vast majority of what he says about the situation in Tibet is documented, historical fact. And, we listen to what he says because if you read the huge volume of Buddhist writings he's done, he's a very smart guy with a very broad and inclusive world view.
It's awfully hard to come to the conclusion that he's any of the things that China paints him as in light of the rest of the way he has lived his life. Even though it might appear that he has an incentive to distort the truth, the whole package makes it a little implausible that he's secretly evil and sneaky.
Slashdot Mirror
No, they're not actively courting the geek dollar. They're actively courting people who want a fairly straightforward experience with their player, and don't want to muck around with it.
I've had iPods for probably 5-6 years now, and they just work, and provide a lot of features I find really nice. The iTunes software is really nice (IMO) to work with, and tracking things like play count/last played etc are really nice features -- in fact, they're some of my favorite features as I have playlists which are partly defined by least recently played. Smart playlists in iTunes completely changed the way I listen to music, and I wouldn't go back. (That's not to say other music software doesn't have such things or other cool features.)
Seriously, other that whining about Ogg Vorbis and other geeky things in relation to music ... in exactly what way is the iPod deficient from a geek point of view? Are you upset there's no Haskell port or Emacs for it? It can't run a SNES emulator? No TCP stack?? Not enough squirting for you?
Maybe I've been a geek so long I've lost sight of what other people want to do with their music players. I'm just completely not getting what "geek street cred" is missing from the iPod.
It doesn't impose DRM on me, I'm not obligated to use songs bought from the iTunes Music Store, and it's perfectly capable of ripping my CDs into MP3 for use in my collection. I can't think of any features which I think it's lacking in. Overall, I'd say Apple has delivered a consistently pleasant experience in the product.
Cheers
Sadly, those arguments have been made so damned often that the form seems far too useful.
People just keep making the same arguments that can be ticked off and shown to be something which won't work.
Cheers
No, they lie.
I am seeing an increase in spam messages that have a disclaimer at the bottom indicating that "this message was sent by Fox New Corp" with the mailing address of them in NYC, and if I want to opt out I can go to the following link. Of course, the unsubscribe link is on the same site that the spam is directing you to.
This gives the illusion of complying with CANSPAM, but, in reality, it demonstrates how completely toothless CANSPAM really is.
If they can't track down who is actually sending it, then start punishing the companies who are benefiting from it and make them responsible for how their "affiliates" are marketing their products. Because, really, these companies get to act like they're not spamming, but they're benefiting from it. I'm fairly sure that whatever fake "Canadian Pharmacy" these things point to isn't a legitimate business and shouldn't be able to pretend that a bunch of people they don't know are directing "customers" to their web site.
Unfortunately, I don't have any idea of how we're ever going to reduce the amount of spam -- but, by its very nature, spam is almost always dishonest, and often outright fraudulent.
Cheers
Yup, either I would or I wouldn't. ;-)
Cheers
Maybe, but without knowing the details, unless it is more than "patent for a circular buffer with random access", then I just don't get it.
Essentially, once the concept of a buffered stream with pause, rewind, fast forward exists .. patenting it for a specific media seems dumb.
It's like those patents which amount to "something done in the real world forever, but now done online" -- it's a commonly applied mechanism, which is only slightly differentiated by being online. IMO, not differentiated enough to be patentable.
Some of the specific technologies they used to do this could, in fact, be patentable. I'm just not 100% clear on what claims this patent is actually covering.
Cheers
If I was doing it with any form of media prior to Tivos patent, the ability to buffer and play an incomplete stream as a concept should be void.
You can't take something that someone is already doing, and add "with TV" to it, and expect that "with TV" is magically different from "with a video file on the internet".
If Tivo truly patented this before anyone demonstrated streaming media, then maybe this is a valid patent. If it had been done before on other forms of media, I fail to see how you can patent it for TV and have it be actually novel. I'm just not convinced we didn't have streaming media and video on the internet before Tivo came along.
Cheers
A takedown notice based on what?
As I've said in this thread, if I take a picture of a crowd of people in pubic, and you're in it doing something stupid, you're simply out of luck.
If someone sues me in a different jurisdiction over a photo I posted on the internet, I'm going to ignore it completely, as I don't recognize their right to do so. Otherwise some asshat in a backwards country is going to start suing people who put pictures of women in immodest garb.
The internet doesn't extend jurisdiction to anywhere you can see something from.
Yes, Libel has to be "false and damaging".
If you were actually humping that sheep in the middle of main street, you're SOL, because at that point, it's simply a matter of reporting fact.
The truth, oddly enough, isn't libel. It may be inconvenient, but that's not the same thing. I actually do know what the law says in regard to photography in public spaces, and what I can do with it.
If your friends post a picture of you on facebook doing something you wish you hadn't, that's not libel. That just means you should have been more careful.
How in the hell can you hope to patent this?
Is this really a novel technology, or a slapping together of a bunch of existing things in a fairly obvious manner. I mean, really, the very first applications on the internet that allowed streaming video and audio supported pause, rewind, and fast forward. I distinctly remember pushing pause on things to allow the buffer to fill up over a slow dialup line. Sometimes, the slow dialup line would enforce a pause for you. ;-)
Other than the fact that it's TV, I don't see this as being any different from real player or a bunch of things which predated it.
This patent really should be vacated, I just can't see how "a buffer with forward and backward access" is actually a novel invention. I'm of the opinion that if you can show any application which streamed multimedia ever had pause etc then the whole patent is invalid.
Cheers
I'd probably be in contact with more people from college and a few exes if I'd had that 10 years ago. ;-)
Cheers
Are we talking about television or, for example personal flickr pages here?? I fail to see why if I take a photograph when I'm on vacation I should be obligated to post-process my images that I take in public to remove any mechanism of identifying the people who might have been on vacation in the same place.
Unfortunately, Facebook is kind of an analog to photography in the real world -- you can be incidentally photographed and not be intruded upon. Or, you have linked yourself in with a bunch of friends and one of them photographed you doing stupid and your mom/wife/whatever might see it -- only in the digital world, more people than you expected could see it.
I'm not arguing for a blanket right to directly photograph people without their consent and use those images for commercial purposes -- but if you're just simply 'background' to my photo, I'm not going to edit out your face or license plate, because it's going to make my carefully composed photo look like shit. I bought that camera because it takes nice pictures, not so I can edit out big chunks of it to hide everyone.
No, you mistake me. This isn't about me, per se. But it's not about you either.
I'm specifically defending the equivalent of me posting my vacation pics (or birthday pics) on flickr (or, Facebook) without editing your face or license plate out of my picture. If you were at Judy's Birthday Party, and that was a particularly crazy night, Facebook is not violating your privacy because Judy decided to post pictures of you mooning the boss. I just don't think you can expect that kind of granularity in laws and expect it to work. You'd have to outlaw cameras -- and everybody's phone has a &*^%^& camera.
This isn't about selfish American culture, and, for the record, I'm not an American.
Allowing yourself to be photographed in compromising situations doesn't mean that the people who were also there must have a "gag order" placed upon them for how they use their own photographs. If your friends photographed you "hitting that skull bong" and posted it on the internet, you beef is with them, not Facebook.
Cheers
Is that true, or merely an assertion?
I ask, because if Sue posts a picture she took, to her site, and your face is in it and linked to your profile ... then they are holding the information that Sue gave them (legitimately) and the fact that you're incidentally in it is irrelevant to your personal stuff. Because, it's now her personal stuff as well.
In a wired universe, it can get a little more indirect in terms of if it's "your" information or not.
I'm just not sure most privacy laws would be strong enough to cover this case, and it might come down to a matter of whose informed consent is needed. And, moreover, what is the threshold at which Facebook gets to say they acted in good faith and be absolutely correct about it.
Heck, as an avid photographer, I would say that if I took a photo of a crowd or in public, and you were in it (butt naked, vomiting, and with someone other than your wife) then I just have to say ... don't do things in public you might not want seen or photographed. Posting it to Facebook all nicely tagged with metadata and cross-referenced with your friends ... well, that's just asking for it.
Cheers
Sadly, you're missing the point that the gazillion people who are playing Guitar Hero like games legitimately find them to be fun, and are willing to spend money on them. You may dislike them and think they suck. But, seriously, look at the sales figures for these games. This isn't "just a popular fad".
For a lot of people, games like this are fun, and games like FPS are annoying and tedious. These games appeal to "non-gamers". I'm one of them. You're welcome to your FPS on your PC, but you're being shockingly arrogant to think that a game like GH3 which sold 1.4 million copies in October of last year and which seem to drive actual music sales is just a fad.
Like it or not, GH3 and that kind of game are not going to go away anytime soon. I know a ton of people who fall well outside of any realm of what you can call gamers who are absolutely into the instrument rhythm games.
Cheers
There ... are ... four ... lights
(OK, there may actually be only three, but, come on ... I had to.)
Cheers
And, here I was thinking it might be pronounced as "Low Brow". :-P
Cheers
Well, remember, the people at NASA might not have the skillset we need to look at issues like biodiversity and alternate energy. The engineering and aerospace skills the people have may not translate. MBAs might look at people as fungible goods, but the guy who has been doing extensive research into orbital mechanics might not actually know much about things which are applicable.
The problem with that is, if you suspend it, and you ever wanted it back ... there's a huge ramp-up time to get your space program back on line. There's also a lot of stuff that you need a space program for -- we've become highly dependent on communications satellites and the like. You don't want to give up on that.
I think governments (or anyone) should avoid looking at is as "either we invest in space" or "we invest in alternate energies". We should continue to invest in both, because there is a need for both.
If you're really looking to save money, I bet there's an awful lot of defense and other spending you could look at.
Well, as much as it's a fairly glib quote from Niven, it's not really that opposite to what you said.
In a lot of ways, investing in a space program and investing money in basic scientific research can be looked at as trying to learn how you'd adapt to a changing environment. Only, it's what you do when you have opposable thumbs and frontal lobes instead of waiting for evolution to sort it out for you.
Cheers
That's the funniest thing I've read all week. :-P
As long as parents are footing their own damned costs for this, and the rest of us don't have it foisted on us, I agree with that. Having the entire TV and internet infrastructure set up to do this is stupid.
Cheers
Parents are already 'enabled' as censors over their children. It's called looking at what they are doing and watching, and preventing them from watching the stuff they disagree with.
Asking the FCC to impose a technical mandate on every piece of communications technology to allow parents to individually censor every thing according to rules is asinine. Because we're all going to end up paying through the nose for our TV and ISPs and consumer electronics which have this stuff in it.
Sadly, parents seem to expect that someone will come up with a technical solution to all of their ills. I think it would be both expensive and ill-advised to try to get this stuff built into all of the technology around us.
This is the worst sort of mandate, because, once again, we look at implementing mechanisms of censorship which will be in place for all of us -- all in the name of the children. Eventually they'll take the choice away from us to watch what they consider to be objectionable as some overly zealous group says that on thing or another should be banned in case some child somewhere sees it.
Cheers
If I'm going to go bright blue, WTF is the point in having a partner? The point is to not go blue. ;-)
Cheers
Author is Joshua Michael Schrei
With luck, google will find you a reference which is reachable. Of course, most of them will be on pro-Tibet sites, who knows.
Cheers
Oh, look, it's the Michael Parenti article.
Funny how everyone who wants to make these assertions about Tibet trots out only this article -- which isn't peer reviewed, and is full of assertions that I'm not convinced he can back up. It's certainly written with a lot of innuendo and inference which I don't think is befitting of scholarly work.
His article has been excellently refuted here.
You seem to have a very strong agenda to further the Chinese position on this matter. You'll forgive me if I'm underwhelmed with your tired rhetoric.
Do I seriously believe that Tibet was a perfect Shangri La before the chinese invasion? No. Do I believe that the entire country was a series of atrocities as detailed in the article? Absolutely not. Does this article make me have second thoughts about the sincerity and morality of the Dalai Lama? Not on your fucking life.
Cheers
Other than your assertion, got anything to back that up? Certainly, other than China saying it, I see no evidence whatsoever of them having any aspects of being a cult.
I've known several people who were practitioners, and they were some of the nicest, kindest, straight up people I've known. I've skimmed their literature, and I don't see anything in it that I would classify as crazy.
But, the vast majority of what he says about the situation in Tibet is documented, historical fact. And, we listen to what he says because if you read the huge volume of Buddhist writings he's done, he's a very smart guy with a very broad and inclusive world view.
It's awfully hard to come to the conclusion that he's any of the things that China paints him as in light of the rest of the way he has lived his life. Even though it might appear that he has an incentive to distort the truth, the whole package makes it a little implausible that he's secretly evil and sneaky.
Cheers
But, there will be depravity, right? :-P
Cheers
Wow, typography humor. That's something you don't see every day. =)
Next, an in depth discussion on kerning. ;-)
Cheers