the Kindle is essentially subsidised by their ebooks.
This is not an Xbox we're talking about, this isn't even an eMachine, this is a Kindle! Even the Kindle 2 is not all that.
If I can mail-order one of those powerful cute little PCs for less than $400 -- with no strings attached, then I would expect far more freedom from a device in the same price range -- that's vastly simpler and cheaper to produce.
If the Kindle is still the property of Amazon after you've taken it home with you, then they should make that perfectly clear when you're first paying $400 for it. They should say, $400 only gets you the option to lease the device, Amazon reserves the right to repossess its private property whenever it feels like it, for whatever reason, etc. Again, this is a lease or a loan, but not a sale, the way Amazon is treating it.
Think of it like a badge of honor. It's like a restaurant that renames itself to "Quality Food", or a dry cleaner that calls itself "Best Cleaners". It's a subtle way to admit that there was once a huge problem, for instance that Office Depot was a major drug operation, or that crack whores were working the copy machine at the back counter, but now it's a show of good faith that says -- we used to be bad, but everything is taken care of now -- because now there is a sign that says that it is.
...that the criminal was actually allowed to subpoena anything so completely unrelated to the charge.
Actually he wasn't, at least not initially. It's after the defense lawyer found these public comments that he was allowed to subpoena his accounts.
Then Mr. Lesher tracked down comments Officer Ettienne had made on the Internet about video clips of arrests. An officer should not have punched a handcuffed man, Officer Ettienne wrote. "If he wanted to tune him up some, he should have delayed cuffing him."
He added: "If you were going to hit a cuffed suspect, at least get your money's worth 'cause now he's going to get disciplined for" a relatively light punch.
The defense was originally going to be your straight the-cop-was-under-the-influence-of-steroids defense, which is kind of unfair as well. There is actually lots of prejudice against muscle-heads in general, and the fact that the steroids were legal doesn't help that cop too much. There is a lot of prejudice against hormonally-enhanced athletes, just as much as there is a lot of prejudice against police men under the influence of steroids being allowed to carry guns. If you ask me, if we're going to have people carrying guns in my neighborhood, I'd prefer that they be weed-users -- not steroids users, but may be that's just me.
Local trivia was suggested. This private key on paper is a second idea. A third is that you use an invite-only system, just like gmail did at the beginning.
Also, I'd place an invisible link in your web site somewhere, to catch the spiders refusing to follow your robots.txt guidelines (note that even the googlebot sometimes does not always follow that directive, or that many illegitimate spiders will sometimes label themselves as the googlebot to avoid getting blocked, so be careful if you don't want to mess with your current search engine placement).
Who needs a botnet? The University of Washington has already proven this could be done with just one computer and one fake GET request (through spoofing an IP address, apparently the RIAA/MediaSentry doesn't seem to be too interested in even checking whether the GET request is valid or not). Now just imagine one computer and just one entire month of broadcasting fake GET requests to suspected RIAA/MediaSentry servers, you could easily incriminate millions of people you didn't know that way, but I doubt that the perception would change that much (unless you really were one of those persons falsely accused of course).
I feel gift certificates are stupid anyway -- why give somebody the equivalent of cash that can only be used at one store and which becomes worthless if that store declares bankruptcy
It depends. Are you self-employed? Do you itemize? Do you make any gift for people who work for you or with you? To tell you the truth, I don't know the first thing about doing taxes, I just focus on keeping good records (which is damn difficult for me as it is), and then I just let someone else decide whether those gifts I made can be deducted -- or not.
Also where it comes to family, I think gift certificates are a subtle way to try to impose judgment and control your relatives. For instance, if you think your nieces and nephews are getting way too many toys all the freaking time, give them a gift certificate to a type of store you're sure has no toys in them. Or if you have a relative who happens to hate Walmart, be sure to give her a gift certificate to Walmart.
So when it comes to family, it's really the underlying judgmental message that counts, and it's not nearly as fun for the giver to give just cash.
more or less clever than detecting traffic speeds (and thus jams) by tracking cellphone signals from the stations - as is already used / in trials?
It would be much easier to track the unique id of the bluetooth signals many cell phones are broadcasting in this case, there would be no need for fancy cell phone tower triangulation (which doesn't even really work as it is supposed to anyway).
In any case, if you have fasttrack on your car, that information is already being tracked and published publicly, and not just from the toll booths where your fasttrack beeps -- sensors that don't make your fasttrack beep are located at many freeway/highway locations (although a third of them are down/broken most of the time, the system still works pretty well). The id number is encrypted to remain anonymous (at least to the public), but it stays constant, so you do know where the cars are coming and going, and at what speed -- all in almost real-time.
Speaking of which, have you noticed how Hollywood movies, television shows, and news shows are becoming more and more like computer games, with one player vs. another player, with simpler plot lines, with a good vs. a bad guy, with killer bees that actually don't kill, with water droughts that don't actually materialise, with more blood than usual, with less employees/newscasters than before, with more animations and more blue screen usage than before, with more fake paid audience members/fake digital audience laughs/applauses than before, with most of the background video clips or news clips being recycled day after day -- week after week, and getting shorter and shorter/choppier over time.
You sir are a genius. I was going to suggest some kind of random number generator based on some non-copyrighted number sequence (may be, something like the Fibonacci sequence), but your idea is much better -- it's even CSI worthy.
That being said, I think a wiki, or better yet just a couple of handwritten notes of actual times from his user base would actually be enough, at least for now. In the meantime, I'd just post a copy of the letter on the web app, plus I'd post the contact information of all the lawyers, plus all the names and all the phone numbers of the employees/officials with any say on this matter.
If worse comes to worse, he could just use his app, Transit Sidney, as a web app with absolutely no time tables, but just complaints about delays. Such a service would be just as valuable, in my opinion.
Note that the sheriff isn't trying to shut down Craigslist; his office sent 5 letters to Craigslist asking them to better police the "erotic services" section or shut it down.
The "erotic services" section? You mean the "personals" section right? The problem with the complaint of the Sheriff is that it claims that all the ads posted there are from prostitutes. And I'm sorry, but that's just not the case. Even if just 10% of them are prostitutes, and 30% you just don't know, how is Craigslist supposed to police that? Craigslist doesn't serve millions of ads, it serves billions of them.
And then, what's next, match.com? yahoo.com? twitter.com? skype.com? AT&T? Verizon? I'm sure that those sites/services/those phones facilitate prostitution in some way as well. I've certainly be solicited by hotties wanting to be friends with me completely out of the blue on skype. Did I think those women were prostitutes? or possibly spam-bots? Sure, I did. Did I know for sure. No. What do you want? A button that says "prostitute" on each profile/ad? Do you think that would really work?
Please remove the "Mormons" tag. Not all Mormons think that way. San Francisco has liberal Mormons, Texas has conservative Mormons, and there are libertarians dispersed throughout.
Please mod the parent down and cease and desist, that Mormon is an impostor, a real Mormon[registered trademark pending] wouldn't call that polygamist splinter group in Texas Mormons. Furthermore, associating the name Mormon with people who marry multiple women, molest children, and intermarry each other, is grounds for libel and defamation lawsuits.
Following the 'Book of Mormon' does not make one a real Mormon, you have to check for the official trademark symbol to make sure that the so-called Mormon you're speaking to is the really authentic authorised genuine kind of Mormon.
What were they thinking!! The next thing they'll do is try to sell used books or something.
It's a slippery slope I tell you. The next thing we'll have is stores trying to sell used books, used music CDs/tapes, used movies, etc. It's like the World is going to Hell in a hand basket! Don't they realize that this is going to mean the end of book authors, the end of musicians, and the end of film-makers!!!
It will be soooo bad, the only authors making money will have to put their books beyond a bullet proof glass pane window, the kind that's used to protect Obama (or the Mona Lisa), and there will be someone constantly looking over your shoulders making sure that you're not trying to memorize the book or try to take pictures of its content.
No, not everyone has that problem, only ISPs owned by cable providers or media-producing companies have that problem (granted, those couple of players have the largest market share of the broadband market, but if you convince enough of your friends -- it doesn't necessarily have to remain that way for too long).
For me for instance, I still have unlimited DSL, but instead of decreasing my service, or capping it, my ISP has only been increasing my speed as the technology improved (without extra charge each time). And a friend of mine, he's been getting outrageous speeds, faster than cable and faster than DSL, through radio signals (it just cost him more to get the initial equipment, and permission from his landlord to mount it on his roof).
If you stay with your current provider however, expect something like $15 for each 10 GB over your cap (if you live in the US). Comcast has currently been testing that price point in a few select areas. I think they're just trying to find the sweet spot where the new customer attrition rate they'll incur is going to be offset by the much anticipated extra revenue this new (cell phone like) overage model brings in.
We kill 40,000 of ourselves (in round numbers) in traffic accidents *every year*:
http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx
That's approximately 10 times the current US death toll in Iraq. Every year!
I think you meant to say, the US death toll of US Soldiers killed in Iraq.
The 4,000 US death toll figure excludes the number of American contractors killed, the number of allied Iraqi soldiers/translators/government/police men killed, the number of international allies killed (yes, there were some), the number of American soldiers seriously wounded but evacuated across the border before shortly dying, and last but not least the number of actual Iraqi civilians (non-combatants) killed, or permanently disappeared.
After all, when you're citing that number of deaths by car accidents in the US to compare to that 4,000 figure with, you're not just limiting yourself to counting just the people employed by the military who happen to get into car accidents on US soil, nor are you just limiting yourself to counting the number of Swedish people that happen to get killed on US soil as a result of car accidents, you're counting everyone; men, women, children, babies, civilians, non-civilians, foreigners, Iraqis, non-foreigners, etc.
I told them their policy was BS, since 1 in 30 employees must start on the first day of the month, assuming people's contracts are as likley to start on day 1 as any other day. They didn't respond.
But the really nice part is today, when everybody on Slashdot gets to read about it.
When did this happen? Personally, I would have sent them (their satellite office, their HQ, and their corporate counsel) a registered letter telling them that I would take this up with the US Department of Labor and I would have worked in the words "class action lawsuit" somewhere in my letter. From what I understand, the US Department of Labor takes these issues of unpaid compensation quite seriously. And also, the mere threat of a class action lawsuit is sometimes enough to scare a corporate lawyer, because it may be a lot cheaper to settle confidentially with one person, than potentially having to settle with thousands of former and current employees. And last but not least, if my letter campaign hadn't worked, I would have probably just taken them to Small Claims Court, and tried to at least attempt a partial recovery.
PS: And yes, this was just legal advice. As a non-lawyer lay person, I can give out as much (right or wrong) legal advice as I feel like it.
Better yet, I would write an article depicting the incident in detail and give it to the reporter of a local newspaper. The reporter can just double-check the veracity of your story, and then add his name to the story -- taking full credit for having written it. No full time reporter in his right mind would refuse a well written story about a topic like this.
And then, do as the parent says, write a blurb about it on Wikipedia, and cite the newspaper article as your source, because I really don't think that starting a lawsuit with someone who clearly made a mistake, would enhance your professional reputation in any way.
If anything, you should enlist that person's help, the one who made the mistake, in helping you make sure this thing doesn't surface again. When I worked for a big corporation, that's what our PR department eventually learned to do. Initially, whenever a false internet rumor started about our company, our PR department was just too slow to respond to it and the false rumor had already made its way around the world in a few hours. Eventually, our PR department enlisted the very help of the people who were the most vocal in spreading this kind of false information around, those types of people are usually the information hubs of some political activist communities, and if you can get those guys to be on your side -- they'll probably be the first ones most able to keep an eye out for it -- and they'll also be the most able to squash it again before it does even more damage to you.
What sounds a LOT more plausible is that this is all an attempt to further demonize P2P. And, I say this with my tinfoil hat still on the hat rack.
And these could also be fake plans, just like the French did with the Concorde. The French leaked fake plans of the Concorde to the Russians. The Russians built it to spec in secret, and the Russian Concorde crashed the first day it ever flew (in its first test flight). Now just imagine, now that those helicopter plans are out there, every dictator or prime minister is going to want one of those helicopters as one of their own, mostly for their own egos, and will start putting considerable resources behind the production of it.
And this type of activity would be nothing new, even putting aside the story of the Concorde, in the UK during WWII, planting purposefully false information for the Germans to find was one of the more successful intelligence strategies used by the UK during the War.
Open source and even free software is very capitalist.
Also, if it weren't for second sourcing, a "possible" cousin of open source, the PC revolution would never have happened in the accelerated way that it did. It was the Federal government's defense requirement to have a "second source" for every defense supplier -- that made Intel share all its expertise and advances with AMD (not to mention a host of other companies). Requiring to have a second competing supplier, it really doesn't get more capitalistic than that.
And it's only recently that capitalism has been redefined as handing out no-bid contracts to your friends, and that Medicare Purchasing has been prevented from using its larger size to negotiate better supplier contracts for itself.
BB advantage is that not only do you get videos by mail but you can return at stores for an instore rental plus 2x month I get free game/video rental coupons. As a result, BB is a better deal since I get about 2x the DVDs at a time, plus a large mail back catalog of stuff not in the store.
With the Netflix online offering, I'm watching 5x the number of movies I would normally watch. Netflix has not only replaced Blockbuster, it has also completely replaced TV. And since I'm on DSL, I have no risk of getting my bandwidth capped, in fact my DSL provider just doubled my speed while keeping the price the same -- since the technology is improving in that area. Now, I guess that if I had cable, I might have a problem, but I really doubt it. If I had cable, I would probably be watching a lot more cable, and so my consumption of Netflix movies would be automatically smaller. And as it stands, Netflix doesn't censor movies like Blockbuster does, so I've been re-watching many of my favorite movies that I had watched during my Blockbuster days -- to see the parts that I've been missing.
Re:You can't win if you don't play
on
Linked In Or Out?
·
· Score: 1
I think that speaks more to the quality of your Facebook friends (or your perception of Facebook friends) than anything else.
I would be perfectly comfortable asking favors of almost anyone I have as a Facebook friend.
I agree. For instance, if you really want to focus on the quality of your network, you should avoid accepting invitations from people you don't know (or can't remember). On face book, those usually are cute girls two thousand miles away that I couldn't possibly know. And on linkedin, those usually are recruiters with 500+ contacts already that I don't know and I really couldn't care to know either.
Well, this is the perfect situation for justifying the desire for what is now often considered excessive privacy.
[...]
For example, the only way I'd submit my playlists to Last.FM is if it were done in an anonymous fashion, such that my user account doesn't link back to me, my IP, or any other personally-identifying info.
That solution may be fine for you, and that's all and good, but what about the exhibitionists among us? After all, it's the exhibitionists who are affected by this, not you.
Personally, I'd just like an easy way to falsify this information (if desired). For instance with FireEagle, I can let everyone know where I'm located, but I can also lie about my location for whatever reason.
The same goes with my play list, I should be able to publish my current play list, but I should also be able to import my amazon wish list of songs I am going to buy (as soon as they become available) and publish it as a my current play list. I should also be allowed to make up song names and artists names to throw all my friends and family for a loop. And let's say, should I ever decide to listen to "The New Kids on The Block" (or some other god-awful boy band that for some reason plays incessantly in my head), I should have a way to filter it out so that I can avoid the very public embarrassment of everyone of my friends finding out about it.
And when I said "should", I really meant "I'd like to". I do realize that no web site is obligated to fulfill my every wish. And I also do realize that my opinion only represents a very tiny portion of users on the internet, and that for most users -- sharing no information publicly whatsoever is the default move -- and for those users -- I have no problem -- I don't even have any desire to change their minds on this matter.
Slashdot Mirror
This is not an Xbox we're talking about, this isn't even an eMachine, this is a Kindle! Even the Kindle 2 is not all that. If I can mail-order one of those powerful cute little PCs for less than $400 -- with no strings attached, then I would expect far more freedom from a device in the same price range -- that's vastly simpler and cheaper to produce.
If the Kindle is still the property of Amazon after you've taken it home with you, then they should make that perfectly clear when you're first paying $400 for it. They should say, $400 only gets you the option to lease the device, Amazon reserves the right to repossess its private property whenever it feels like it, for whatever reason, etc. Again, this is a lease or a loan, but not a sale, the way Amazon is treating it.
Think of it like a badge of honor. It's like a restaurant that renames itself to "Quality Food", or a dry cleaner that calls itself "Best Cleaners". It's a subtle way to admit that there was once a huge problem, for instance that Office Depot was a major drug operation, or that crack whores were working the copy machine at the back counter, but now it's a show of good faith that says -- we used to be bad, but everything is taken care of now -- because now there is a sign that says that it is.
Actually he wasn't, at least not initially. It's after the defense lawyer found these public comments that he was allowed to subpoena his accounts.
The defense was originally going to be your straight the-cop-was-under-the-influence-of-steroids defense, which is kind of unfair as well. There is actually lots of prejudice against muscle-heads in general, and the fact that the steroids were legal doesn't help that cop too much. There is a lot of prejudice against hormonally-enhanced athletes, just as much as there is a lot of prejudice against police men under the influence of steroids being allowed to carry guns. If you ask me, if we're going to have people carrying guns in my neighborhood, I'd prefer that they be weed-users -- not steroids users, but may be that's just me.
Yes, that's the way the law would be written, if God had any say in it.
Local trivia was suggested. This private key on paper is a second idea. A third is that you use an invite-only system, just like gmail did at the beginning.
Also, I'd place an invisible link in your web site somewhere, to catch the spiders refusing to follow your robots.txt guidelines (note that even the googlebot sometimes does not always follow that directive, or that many illegitimate spiders will sometimes label themselves as the googlebot to avoid getting blocked, so be careful if you don't want to mess with your current search engine placement).
Who needs a botnet? The University of Washington has already proven this could be done with just one computer and one fake GET request (through spoofing an IP address, apparently the RIAA/MediaSentry doesn't seem to be too interested in even checking whether the GET request is valid or not). Now just imagine one computer and just one entire month of broadcasting fake GET requests to suspected RIAA/MediaSentry servers, you could easily incriminate millions of people you didn't know that way, but I doubt that the perception would change that much (unless you really were one of those persons falsely accused of course).
It depends. Are you self-employed? Do you itemize? Do you make any gift for people who work for you or with you? To tell you the truth, I don't know the first thing about doing taxes, I just focus on keeping good records (which is damn difficult for me as it is), and then I just let someone else decide whether those gifts I made can be deducted -- or not.
Also where it comes to family, I think gift certificates are a subtle way to try to impose judgment and control your relatives. For instance, if you think your nieces and nephews are getting way too many toys all the freaking time, give them a gift certificate to a type of store you're sure has no toys in them. Or if you have a relative who happens to hate Walmart, be sure to give her a gift certificate to Walmart.
So when it comes to family, it's really the underlying judgmental message that counts, and it's not nearly as fun for the giver to give just cash.
It would be much easier to track the unique id of the bluetooth signals many cell phones are broadcasting in this case, there would be no need for fancy cell phone tower triangulation (which doesn't even really work as it is supposed to anyway).
In any case, if you have fasttrack on your car, that information is already being tracked and published publicly, and not just from the toll booths where your fasttrack beeps -- sensors that don't make your fasttrack beep are located at many freeway/highway locations (although a third of them are down/broken most of the time, the system still works pretty well). The id number is encrypted to remain anonymous (at least to the public), but it stays constant, so you do know where the cars are coming and going, and at what speed -- all in almost real-time.
Speaking of which, have you noticed how Hollywood movies, television shows, and news shows are becoming more and more like computer games, with one player vs. another player, with simpler plot lines, with a good vs. a bad guy, with killer bees that actually don't kill, with water droughts that don't actually materialise, with more blood than usual, with less employees/newscasters than before, with more animations and more blue screen usage than before, with more fake paid audience members/fake digital audience laughs/applauses than before, with most of the background video clips or news clips being recycled day after day -- week after week, and getting shorter and shorter/choppier over time.
You sir are a genius. I was going to suggest some kind of random number generator based on some non-copyrighted number sequence (may be, something like the Fibonacci sequence), but your idea is much better -- it's even CSI worthy.
That being said, I think a wiki, or better yet just a couple of handwritten notes of actual times from his user base would actually be enough, at least for now. In the meantime, I'd just post a copy of the letter on the web app, plus I'd post the contact information of all the lawyers, plus all the names and all the phone numbers of the employees/officials with any say on this matter.
If worse comes to worse, he could just use his app, Transit Sidney, as a web app with absolutely no time tables, but just complaints about delays. Such a service would be just as valuable, in my opinion.
The "erotic services" section? You mean the "personals" section right? The problem with the complaint of the Sheriff is that it claims that all the ads posted there are from prostitutes. And I'm sorry, but that's just not the case. Even if just 10% of them are prostitutes, and 30% you just don't know, how is Craigslist supposed to police that? Craigslist doesn't serve millions of ads, it serves billions of them.
http://sfbay.craigslist.org/w4m/
And then, what's next, match.com? yahoo.com? twitter.com? skype.com? AT&T? Verizon? I'm sure that those sites/services/those phones facilitate prostitution in some way as well. I've certainly be solicited by hotties wanting to be friends with me completely out of the blue on skype. Did I think those women were prostitutes? or possibly spam-bots? Sure, I did. Did I know for sure. No. What do you want? A button that says "prostitute" on each profile/ad? Do you think that would really work?
Please mod the parent down and cease and desist, that Mormon is an impostor, a real Mormon[registered trademark pending] wouldn't call that polygamist splinter group in Texas Mormons. Furthermore, associating the name Mormon with people who marry multiple women, molest children, and intermarry each other, is grounds for libel and defamation lawsuits.
Following the 'Book of Mormon' does not make one a real Mormon, you have to check for the official trademark symbol to make sure that the so-called Mormon you're speaking to is the really authentic authorised genuine kind of Mormon.
What were they thinking!! The next thing they'll do is try to sell used books or something.
It's a slippery slope I tell you. The next thing we'll have is stores trying to sell used books, used music CDs/tapes, used movies, etc. It's like the World is going to Hell in a hand basket! Don't they realize that this is going to mean the end of book authors, the end of musicians, and the end of film-makers!!!
It will be soooo bad, the only authors making money will have to put their books beyond a bullet proof glass pane window, the kind that's used to protect Obama (or the Mona Lisa), and there will be someone constantly looking over your shoulders making sure that you're not trying to memorize the book or try to take pictures of its content.
No, not everyone has that problem, only ISPs owned by cable providers or media-producing companies have that problem (granted, those couple of players have the largest market share of the broadband market, but if you convince enough of your friends -- it doesn't necessarily have to remain that way for too long).
For me for instance, I still have unlimited DSL, but instead of decreasing my service, or capping it, my ISP has only been increasing my speed as the technology improved (without extra charge each time). And a friend of mine, he's been getting outrageous speeds, faster than cable and faster than DSL, through radio signals (it just cost him more to get the initial equipment, and permission from his landlord to mount it on his roof).
If you stay with your current provider however, expect something like $15 for each 10 GB over your cap (if you live in the US). Comcast has currently been testing that price point in a few select areas. I think they're just trying to find the sweet spot where the new customer attrition rate they'll incur is going to be offset by the much anticipated extra revenue this new (cell phone like) overage model brings in.
I think you meant to say, the US death toll of US Soldiers killed in Iraq.
The 4,000 US death toll figure excludes the number of American contractors killed, the number of allied Iraqi soldiers/translators/government/police men killed, the number of international allies killed (yes, there were some), the number of American soldiers seriously wounded but evacuated across the border before shortly dying, and last but not least the number of actual Iraqi civilians (non-combatants) killed, or permanently disappeared.
After all, when you're citing that number of deaths by car accidents in the US to compare to that 4,000 figure with, you're not just limiting yourself to counting just the people employed by the military who happen to get into car accidents on US soil, nor are you just limiting yourself to counting the number of Swedish people that happen to get killed on US soil as a result of car accidents, you're counting everyone; men, women, children, babies, civilians, non-civilians, foreigners, Iraqis, non-foreigners, etc.
When did this happen? Personally, I would have sent them (their satellite office, their HQ, and their corporate counsel) a registered letter telling them that I would take this up with the US Department of Labor and I would have worked in the words "class action lawsuit" somewhere in my letter. From what I understand, the US Department of Labor takes these issues of unpaid compensation quite seriously. And also, the mere threat of a class action lawsuit is sometimes enough to scare a corporate lawyer, because it may be a lot cheaper to settle confidentially with one person, than potentially having to settle with thousands of former and current employees. And last but not least, if my letter campaign hadn't worked, I would have probably just taken them to Small Claims Court, and tried to at least attempt a partial recovery.
PS: And yes, this was just legal advice. As a non-lawyer lay person, I can give out as much (right or wrong) legal advice as I feel like it.
p2p was designed to cause congestion in the same way that carpool* was designed to cause traffic jams.
* note. "carpool", not "carpool lanes"
Better yet, I would write an article depicting the incident in detail and give it to the reporter of a local newspaper. The reporter can just double-check the veracity of your story, and then add his name to the story -- taking full credit for having written it. No full time reporter in his right mind would refuse a well written story about a topic like this.
And then, do as the parent says, write a blurb about it on Wikipedia, and cite the newspaper article as your source, because I really don't think that starting a lawsuit with someone who clearly made a mistake, would enhance your professional reputation in any way.
If anything, you should enlist that person's help, the one who made the mistake, in helping you make sure this thing doesn't surface again. When I worked for a big corporation, that's what our PR department eventually learned to do. Initially, whenever a false internet rumor started about our company, our PR department was just too slow to respond to it and the false rumor had already made its way around the world in a few hours. Eventually, our PR department enlisted the very help of the people who were the most vocal in spreading this kind of false information around, those types of people are usually the information hubs of some political activist communities, and if you can get those guys to be on your side -- they'll probably be the first ones most able to keep an eye out for it -- and they'll also be the most able to squash it again before it does even more damage to you.
And these could also be fake plans, just like the French did with the Concorde. The French leaked fake plans of the Concorde to the Russians. The Russians built it to spec in secret, and the Russian Concorde crashed the first day it ever flew (in its first test flight). Now just imagine, now that those helicopter plans are out there, every dictator or prime minister is going to want one of those helicopters as one of their own, mostly for their own egos, and will start putting considerable resources behind the production of it.
And this type of activity would be nothing new, even putting aside the story of the Concorde, in the UK during WWII, planting purposefully false information for the Germans to find was one of the more successful intelligence strategies used by the UK during the War.
This is spoken by someone who has never staid in a Japanese-built house, a traditional Japanese-style hotel may be, but not a real Japanese house.
Also, if it weren't for second sourcing, a "possible" cousin of open source, the PC revolution would never have happened in the accelerated way that it did. It was the Federal government's defense requirement to have a "second source" for every defense supplier -- that made Intel share all its expertise and advances with AMD (not to mention a host of other companies). Requiring to have a second competing supplier, it really doesn't get more capitalistic than that.
And it's only recently that capitalism has been redefined as handing out no-bid contracts to your friends, and that Medicare Purchasing has been prevented from using its larger size to negotiate better supplier contracts for itself.
With the Netflix online offering, I'm watching 5x the number of movies I would normally watch. Netflix has not only replaced Blockbuster, it has also completely replaced TV. And since I'm on DSL, I have no risk of getting my bandwidth capped, in fact my DSL provider just doubled my speed while keeping the price the same -- since the technology is improving in that area. Now, I guess that if I had cable, I might have a problem, but I really doubt it. If I had cable, I would probably be watching a lot more cable, and so my consumption of Netflix movies would be automatically smaller. And as it stands, Netflix doesn't censor movies like Blockbuster does, so I've been re-watching many of my favorite movies that I had watched during my Blockbuster days -- to see the parts that I've been missing.
I agree. For instance, if you really want to focus on the quality of your network, you should avoid accepting invitations from people you don't know (or can't remember). On face book, those usually are cute girls two thousand miles away that I couldn't possibly know. And on linkedin, those usually are recruiters with 500+ contacts already that I don't know and I really couldn't care to know either.
That solution may be fine for you, and that's all and good, but what about the exhibitionists among us? After all, it's the exhibitionists who are affected by this, not you.
Personally, I'd just like an easy way to falsify this information (if desired). For instance with FireEagle, I can let everyone know where I'm located, but I can also lie about my location for whatever reason. The same goes with my play list, I should be able to publish my current play list, but I should also be able to import my amazon wish list of songs I am going to buy (as soon as they become available) and publish it as a my current play list. I should also be allowed to make up song names and artists names to throw all my friends and family for a loop. And let's say, should I ever decide to listen to "The New Kids on The Block" (or some other god-awful boy band that for some reason plays incessantly in my head), I should have a way to filter it out so that I can avoid the very public embarrassment of everyone of my friends finding out about it.
And when I said "should", I really meant "I'd like to". I do realize that no web site is obligated to fulfill my every wish. And I also do realize that my opinion only represents a very tiny portion of users on the internet, and that for most users -- sharing no information publicly whatsoever is the default move -- and for those users -- I have no problem -- I don't even have any desire to change their minds on this matter.
And it's not what I would call a rant either, it's actually quite specific and actionable.