The Tolkien estate isn't "censoring speech," it's protecting its trademarks, which it is required to do by law.
Quoting Cory Doctorow, from the BoingBoing coverage: "a writer I admire was forced to put a series of books that in no way infringed upon Tolkien's copyrights out of print because the estate threatened to make her publisher's life a living nightmare (not naming names, because the writer has chosen not to go public with the story)."
Zazzle has a clear policy that it will not sell items that violate copyrights, trademarks, or other intellectual property. These buttons do that.
A very, very dubious claim. Simply using a word is not wholly sufficient for trademark infringement.
More generally, this is a fine example of what's wrong with intellectual property law. The guy's not only making his money from work his father did almost sixty years ago, but preventing others from even using his father's name. Trademarked or not, it's worthwhile stopping and questioning whether the legal framework that allows and encourages this is in the public interest or not. Again, quoting Doctorow "The professional descendants making millions off a long-dead writer have become a serious impediment to living, working writers -- and readers. If this isn't the greatest proof that extending copyright in scope and duration screws living creators and impedes the creation of new works, I don't know what is."
It's a pain in the ass to read punch cards or paper tape, much less run software or understand the data encoded on them. And those media were in use within living memory.
I do agree that dead tree books are, overall, the more robust medium, but your point here is flawed. Punch cards and paper tape didn't have an installed base anything like the size that CDs, hard drives, or many other modern technologies do - as such, both the hardware and the knowledge to decode them is rather sparse. There's also the fact that people now have a fundamentally different attitude to computing than they used to, and the question of data longevity is one that's commonly considered with the benefit of hindsight - back in the punch card days, the technology didn't have enough 'history' for people to learn from. Even so, if I had a stack of cards that I really needed to decode, I'd be able to rig something up with a sheet-feed scanner, image recognition software, and so forth.
Digital data isn't at all apocalypse-proof, but for general archival its strength is in the ease of duplication; storage is cheap and constantly expanding, so it's usually reasonable to copy all of your data to a new format every so often and still leave more space than you would've had in the old system. Open file formats can always be interpreted or converted into newer ones, should that become necessary. It's proprietary formats and DRM that cause the most immediate problems. Basically, if your data needs to be machine readable, you'll generally be fine passing it from machine to machine in [duplicate/triplicate/whatever], with at least one live and one offline copy. If it needs to be human readable to the extent that you might not have a machine available to do the interpreting then yeah, paper's the way to go.
I'd say that it would be a good idea to have computer printers that can output to stone tablets, but then HP's would probably bitch about being low on quartz or something.
CNC machines, of the laser or router variety, should do the job nicely.
Why not let consumers decide what to buy and for what purpose?
This would work iff companies were responsible for negating the environmental impact of their product - the cost would percolate down to the consumer and the market would decide. As it stands, a lot of tax money goes into environmental compliance, and thus the government feels justified in stepping in. Personally I think banning products is a ridiculous way to go about it - in an ideal world, the price of power would include the cost of rendering the plant as close to environmentally neutral as is feasible, and thus the the extra power used by the incandescent would be a non-issue - the market would be making a more accurate and 'informed' decision. In a less ideal but more realistic world, the government would place a surcharge on incandescent bulbs based on their extra lifetime energy usage, and invest the money raised directly into environmental initiatives. Unfortunately, in the world we live in, the government just decided to ban the things instead.
I actually quite liked SG:1, and I still got bored of Universe after a few episodes. Same with Caprica - it was vaguely interesting, but it felt like a cash-in shoehorned in to the established canon, not like a story that someone wanted to tell; again, I'd stopped watching before it was cancelled.
That said, while I don't begrudge Syfy's latest cancellations, I also haven't found any new science fiction that I do like. I had somewhat high hopes for The Event, but the guy in the lead role was intolerable - particularly because he was cast as some kind of hacker genius from MIT, but didn't portray any kind of intelligence or subtlety except when it was flipped on like a light switch as a "it's a Unix system, I know this"-style deus ex machina.
I'm reading a lot of cyberpunk novels at the moment instead, but any recommendations for decent new-ish sci-fi series would nonetheless be gratefully received.
I've said it many times, but I'll say it again: if they really cared about bladed weapons on planes, they wouldn't allow glass.
Incidentally, does anyone know the logic behind having to pick up your duty free at the jet bridge rather than just carrying it out of the shop like you used to be able to do? You've already passed security, meaning you (theoretically) don't have anything too dangerous to allow on the plane, and the purchases themselves still go in the cabin, so I can't work out what the theory is behind preventing you from carrying them around the terminal.
Depends on the airline. Last few transatlantic economy flights I did, Lufthansa didn't even have TVs in the seats, United had personal TVs but just set to a choice of six looping channels, and KLM had an actual on-demand system like you described.
Even with the shiny toys, though, you get treated like cattle in the back of the plane, not to mention the obvious complaints about playing your part in that day's 'security theatre' production. Flying itself generally sucks unless you pay the extra to be treated like a human being by purchasing a business class ticket (in which case you're pretty much guaranteed to get decent tech to play with too), and getting through security sucks pretty much invariably (although it does tend to be better in small regional airports, I've found). Even if it's improved over the last ten years, I'd be hard pressed to recommend it, but unfortunately transatlantic surface crossings are still much more expensive than even business air tickets, and most people don't have the luxury of taking a week to reach their destination.
Perfectly adequate, but I was hoping for a high-DPI option. Not only absolute resolution, but resolution per unit area seems to have long been ignored (especially with the prevalence of '1080p' panels finding their way into monitors, meaning that many 24" displays now have very visible pixels even at a reasonable distance), presumably because it's not something that the vast majority of customers demand or even really understand.
Apple, being the guys who managed to make a 326dpi display in a consumer device a half way worthwhile marketing feature, seem like the only people who might give the market a shove in the right direction. The fact that they create the OS means that they're capable of ensuring things scale smoothly, too, rather than just rendering far too small. Maybe when the next OS revision comes out, the monitors will get an update...
The most marked and worthwhile difference, I felt, was in the increased naturalness in both the sound of instruments and voices, which seemed more organic, human and less ‘electronic’, and in the music’s rhythmical progression, which was also more natural and had the realistic ebb and flow that musicians exhibit when playing live. In short, recordings sounded more like musical performances then recordings.
"Any sufficiently advanced sarcasm is indistinguishable from stupidity."
Although I hope for the former, I'm guessing this is an example of the latter.
...and you won't gore yourself when attempting to replace user-serviceable parts...
Although, having done Apple repairs for a while, I can tell you that parts considered non-user serviceable (which used to include the hard drive in iMacs, don't know if it still does) are often hidden behind a matrix of bear traps and razor blades.
Gutenberg is only for public domain titles (so mostly 19th and some early 20th century work), this library is for lending of in-copyright works. If it's well implemented, it makes a lot of sense - as I've said before, enforcing a short-term loan seems like one of the few valid uses of DRM, and since many libraries now offer eBooks it seems far more sensible to have all the content available from one central resource than to have it tied to geographic location.
I'm not surprised you cancelled, in that case, although I am somewhat surprised that Amazon are treating their premium customers like they don't matter. I would've thought they'd be putting in more effort for people willing to prepay $80 on shipping alone.
But there's no way that I, as an individual, can get the rights to Netflix. They only accept things like that through distributors (as far as I've been able to tell). I _WANT_ to license it to them for streaming but I can't.
I'd be interested in seeing a link with some more info on that - nothing personal, but as some random AC on Slashdot your immediate credibility is low.
Assuming that streaming rights really are only being accepted via a distributor, is this likely to be a widespread problem, or something specific to your circumstances? Is is a side effect of archaic distribution contracts, similar to those dated attempts at geographic price discrimination that now just lead to the infuriating "Not available in your region" message (i.e. still the fault of 'big content'), or is there some more logical reason?
If it goes that way I'd imagine they'd offer separate packages - if it were, say, $70/year for streaming video, $79/year for free shipping, or $120/year for both they'd probably do well. As it stands, making it a 'fringe benefit' increases its perceived value and prevents them from being in direct competition with Netflix, so it's a decent way for them to polish up the product and expand the selection a bit - customers see it as a nice added extra on a separate service, not a poor imitation of the market leader.
What was their response on that one? I'm guessing they'd pin the blame (rightly) on the carrier, but from a customer satisfaction point of view it obviously matters that you get your package on time, not whose fault it is if you don't. Some services (Ryanair immediately spring to mind) can survive a reputation for being crap because they're really, really cheap; although that might be applicable to Amazon in general (but probably not, all things considered), it's certainly not applicable to a 'premium' service like Prime - quality (or, in this case, speed) is what you're paying for, so I imagine they'd actually be reasonably concerned if the service is leaving a bad impression.
My only complaint would be the Kindle. Technically it's perfect but I wish they'd treat books like MP3s and give us DRM free PDFs like O'Reilly.
PDF is good for retaining formatting, but often at the expense of semantic information - the end result is that while you can be fairly sure that your text will end up 1.7 cm from the edge of the page, the software (text to speech, or reflowing for a different font size, for example) might have trouble distinguishing paragraph order in a multi-column layout. For novels and the like, where it's just text, ePub is unquestionably far superior; for textbooks and other instances where formatting matters more you can make an argument either way.
You're the only person who brought race into the picture. He stopped to read, had a chat with some people who were interested in his reader, and concluded that since they liked it so much and could probably benefit from the technology, providing them might be a good idea. What the hell does that have to do with the colour of his skin? How would it be any different if someone of any other race who had grown up in a first world country was making the same comments?
I doubt they'd be grabbing books from the Amazon store over their local 3G connection. Freely licensed content pre-loaded in a DRM free format would be the way to go, whether on Kindle or on another similar reader, and I doubt that the connectivity would be turned on anyway - it'd be an unnecessary drain on the battery.
It's a "teach a man to fish" situation - you say yourself that school books are important, and if it's cheaper/easier to provide hardware to read those books digitally than it is to provide physical books then the tech is not just a gimmick.
Laptops also aid communication and content creation and allow, for example, farmers to keep up to date on the market value of their crops, but ereaders are cheaper and more robust. Dead tree books are cheaper still and significantly more robust, but their cost (in terms of manufacture and distribution) is directly proportional to the amount of information contained, and they do not lend themselves well to information which dates rapidly.
If the charities want to teach people reading, writing and arithmetic then I think paper is still definitely the way to go. If they want to provide large libraries of information to each village, eReaders seem a good choice, but at increased cost and fragility.
I'm an idiot - converters I linked work in the wrong direction. What you need is $150 from the same site or $50 from eBay (the two devices look identical, except for the price - whether they are or not it anybody's guess).
I'm running mad looking for an HDMI-to-RCA downscaler - my laptop has HDMI and DVI outputs, but my church's $12,000 switching/scaling system only does composite.
If your laptop has DVI-I rather than DVI-D (and I've never seen one with only DVI-D), it's already capable of outputting analog component RGB, but not composite. If your input equipment only takes composite, converters go for about $100.
I'm pretty sure that's not the case - the actual timeline of Serenity occurs after the end of the series, but the recording that the operative watches is of Simon breaking her out of the 'school' before they end up on Persephone for the first time (i.e. before the start of the series); its an explanation of how they came to be on the ship in the first place. River was never recaptured by the Alliance after that initial breakout.
Hotz can do what ever he wants to his consoles in his house but the moment he went to the internet with this another issue because it forces Sony's hand. Just like the guy who tinkered with his care enough to not make it street legal and the cops want to arrest and the state wants to take away his license complaining he needs money to fight THE MAN is a giant whatever from me. And again I have to reiterate this isn't a free speech issue either but a dispute between two parties in contract.
He did what he wanted to his own console in his own home. He told others how to do the same. The court silenced him. That sure as hell sounds like a free speech issue to me - not to mention the fact that there never existed a contract between Hotz and Sony (he rejected their EULA and does not use PSN, from what I gather).
To use your analogy: guy modifies car to the extent that it is no longer street legal. Guy has great fun driving around on his private farmland. Guy posts on internet explaining how others can modify their cars for use on private land. Car company sues guy. Guy is silenced by the courts and forced to stop discussing his modifications.
You sound reasonable enough, and obviously I can't make you care about this issue, but I'm surprised that you claim that he had it coming; his 'crime' here is pissing off a big company, and the company is responding with a classic SLAPP suit.
If you want to see a people fight the good fight for free speech, look no further than recent events in the new where people are protesting on the streets of middle eastern countries. Hotz vs Sony isn't even on the same scale.
Absolutely true, but as others said further up, the fact that one fight is more important doesn't render others unimportant.
Three hikers on the border between Iraq and Iran, in a time of war, insecurity and bellicose politics? You seriously believe they're just hikers?
Yes, I do. I've been to Iran, and the same 'circumstantial evidence' could just as well have been applied to me - yet I know I was there simply because I wanted to see things with my own eyes, rather than gleaning a viewpoint from the wrong end of a news report. I see no reason to believe that the same isn't true of these people.
Slashdot Mirror
The Tolkien estate isn't "censoring speech," it's protecting its trademarks, which it is required to do by law.
Quoting Cory Doctorow, from the BoingBoing coverage: "a writer I admire was forced to put a series of books that in no way infringed upon Tolkien's copyrights out of print because the estate threatened to make her publisher's life a living nightmare (not naming names, because the writer has chosen not to go public with the story)."
Zazzle has a clear policy that it will not sell items that violate copyrights, trademarks, or other intellectual property. These buttons do that.
A very, very dubious claim. Simply using a word is not wholly sufficient for trademark infringement.
More generally, this is a fine example of what's wrong with intellectual property law. The guy's not only making his money from work his father did almost sixty years ago, but preventing others from even using his father's name. Trademarked or not, it's worthwhile stopping and questioning whether the legal framework that allows and encourages this is in the public interest or not. Again, quoting Doctorow "The professional descendants making millions off a long-dead writer have become a serious impediment to living, working writers -- and readers. If this isn't the greatest proof that extending copyright in scope and duration screws living creators and impedes the creation of new works, I don't know what is."
Medical liability insurance.
It's a pain in the ass to read punch cards or paper tape, much less run software or understand the data encoded on them. And those media were in use within living memory.
I do agree that dead tree books are, overall, the more robust medium, but your point here is flawed. Punch cards and paper tape didn't have an installed base anything like the size that CDs, hard drives, or many other modern technologies do - as such, both the hardware and the knowledge to decode them is rather sparse. There's also the fact that people now have a fundamentally different attitude to computing than they used to, and the question of data longevity is one that's commonly considered with the benefit of hindsight - back in the punch card days, the technology didn't have enough 'history' for people to learn from. Even so, if I had a stack of cards that I really needed to decode, I'd be able to rig something up with a sheet-feed scanner, image recognition software, and so forth.
Digital data isn't at all apocalypse-proof, but for general archival its strength is in the ease of duplication; storage is cheap and constantly expanding, so it's usually reasonable to copy all of your data to a new format every so often and still leave more space than you would've had in the old system. Open file formats can always be interpreted or converted into newer ones, should that become necessary. It's proprietary formats and DRM that cause the most immediate problems. Basically, if your data needs to be machine readable, you'll generally be fine passing it from machine to machine in [duplicate/triplicate/whatever], with at least one live and one offline copy. If it needs to be human readable to the extent that you might not have a machine available to do the interpreting then yeah, paper's the way to go.
I'd say that it would be a good idea to have computer printers that can output to stone tablets, but then HP's would probably bitch about being low on quartz or something.
CNC machines, of the laser or router variety, should do the job nicely.
Why not let consumers decide what to buy and for what purpose?
This would work iff companies were responsible for negating the environmental impact of their product - the cost would percolate down to the consumer and the market would decide. As it stands, a lot of tax money goes into environmental compliance, and thus the government feels justified in stepping in. Personally I think banning products is a ridiculous way to go about it - in an ideal world, the price of power would include the cost of rendering the plant as close to environmentally neutral as is feasible, and thus the the extra power used by the incandescent would be a non-issue - the market would be making a more accurate and 'informed' decision. In a less ideal but more realistic world, the government would place a surcharge on incandescent bulbs based on their extra lifetime energy usage, and invest the money raised directly into environmental initiatives. Unfortunately, in the world we live in, the government just decided to ban the things instead.
I seem to recall a story about someone in the UK trying exactly that, but I forget what the outcome was.
I actually quite liked SG:1, and I still got bored of Universe after a few episodes. Same with Caprica - it was vaguely interesting, but it felt like a cash-in shoehorned in to the established canon, not like a story that someone wanted to tell; again, I'd stopped watching before it was cancelled.
That said, while I don't begrudge Syfy's latest cancellations, I also haven't found any new science fiction that I do like. I had somewhat high hopes for The Event, but the guy in the lead role was intolerable - particularly because he was cast as some kind of hacker genius from MIT, but didn't portray any kind of intelligence or subtlety except when it was flipped on like a light switch as a "it's a Unix system, I know this"-style deus ex machina.
I'm reading a lot of cyberpunk novels at the moment instead, but any recommendations for decent new-ish sci-fi series would nonetheless be gratefully received.
I've said it many times, but I'll say it again: if they really cared about bladed weapons on planes, they wouldn't allow glass.
Incidentally, does anyone know the logic behind having to pick up your duty free at the jet bridge rather than just carrying it out of the shop like you used to be able to do? You've already passed security, meaning you (theoretically) don't have anything too dangerous to allow on the plane, and the purchases themselves still go in the cabin, so I can't work out what the theory is behind preventing you from carrying them around the terminal.
Depends on the airline. Last few transatlantic economy flights I did, Lufthansa didn't even have TVs in the seats, United had personal TVs but just set to a choice of six looping channels, and KLM had an actual on-demand system like you described.
Even with the shiny toys, though, you get treated like cattle in the back of the plane, not to mention the obvious complaints about playing your part in that day's 'security theatre' production. Flying itself generally sucks unless you pay the extra to be treated like a human being by purchasing a business class ticket (in which case you're pretty much guaranteed to get decent tech to play with too), and getting through security sucks pretty much invariably (although it does tend to be better in small regional airports, I've found). Even if it's improved over the last ten years, I'd be hard pressed to recommend it, but unfortunately transatlantic surface crossings are still much more expensive than even business air tickets, and most people don't have the luxury of taking a week to reach their destination.
Perfectly adequate, but I was hoping for a high-DPI option. Not only absolute resolution, but resolution per unit area seems to have long been ignored (especially with the prevalence of '1080p' panels finding their way into monitors, meaning that many 24" displays now have very visible pixels even at a reasonable distance), presumably because it's not something that the vast majority of customers demand or even really understand.
Apple, being the guys who managed to make a 326dpi display in a consumer device a half way worthwhile marketing feature, seem like the only people who might give the market a shove in the right direction. The fact that they create the OS means that they're capable of ensuring things scale smoothly, too, rather than just rendering far too small. Maybe when the next OS revision comes out, the monitors will get an update...
The most marked and worthwhile difference, I felt, was in the increased naturalness in both the sound of instruments and voices, which seemed more organic, human and less ‘electronic’, and in the music’s rhythmical progression, which was also more natural and had the realistic ebb and flow that musicians exhibit when playing live. In short, recordings sounded more like musical performances then recordings.
"Any sufficiently advanced sarcasm is indistinguishable from stupidity."
Although I hope for the former, I'm guessing this is an example of the latter.
...and you won't gore yourself when attempting to replace user-serviceable parts...
Although, having done Apple repairs for a while, I can tell you that parts considered non-user serviceable (which used to include the hard drive in iMacs, don't know if it still does) are often hidden behind a matrix of bear traps and razor blades.
Gutenberg is only for public domain titles (so mostly 19th and some early 20th century work), this library is for lending of in-copyright works. If it's well implemented, it makes a lot of sense - as I've said before, enforcing a short-term loan seems like one of the few valid uses of DRM, and since many libraries now offer eBooks it seems far more sensible to have all the content available from one central resource than to have it tied to geographic location.
I'm not surprised you cancelled, in that case, although I am somewhat surprised that Amazon are treating their premium customers like they don't matter. I would've thought they'd be putting in more effort for people willing to prepay $80 on shipping alone.
But there's no way that I, as an individual, can get the rights to Netflix. They only accept things like that through distributors (as far as I've been able to tell). I _WANT_ to license it to them for streaming but I can't.
I'd be interested in seeing a link with some more info on that - nothing personal, but as some random AC on Slashdot your immediate credibility is low.
Assuming that streaming rights really are only being accepted via a distributor, is this likely to be a widespread problem, or something specific to your circumstances? Is is a side effect of archaic distribution contracts, similar to those dated attempts at geographic price discrimination that now just lead to the infuriating "Not available in your region" message (i.e. still the fault of 'big content'), or is there some more logical reason?
If it goes that way I'd imagine they'd offer separate packages - if it were, say, $70/year for streaming video, $79/year for free shipping, or $120/year for both they'd probably do well. As it stands, making it a 'fringe benefit' increases its perceived value and prevents them from being in direct competition with Netflix, so it's a decent way for them to polish up the product and expand the selection a bit - customers see it as a nice added extra on a separate service, not a poor imitation of the market leader.
What was their response on that one? I'm guessing they'd pin the blame (rightly) on the carrier, but from a customer satisfaction point of view it obviously matters that you get your package on time, not whose fault it is if you don't. Some services (Ryanair immediately spring to mind) can survive a reputation for being crap because they're really, really cheap; although that might be applicable to Amazon in general (but probably not, all things considered), it's certainly not applicable to a 'premium' service like Prime - quality (or, in this case, speed) is what you're paying for, so I imagine they'd actually be reasonably concerned if the service is leaving a bad impression.
My only complaint would be the Kindle. Technically it's perfect but I wish they'd treat books like MP3s and give us DRM free PDFs like O'Reilly.
PDF is good for retaining formatting, but often at the expense of semantic information - the end result is that while you can be fairly sure that your text will end up 1.7 cm from the edge of the page, the software (text to speech, or reflowing for a different font size, for example) might have trouble distinguishing paragraph order in a multi-column layout. For novels and the like, where it's just text, ePub is unquestionably far superior; for textbooks and other instances where formatting matters more you can make an argument either way.
You're the only person who brought race into the picture. He stopped to read, had a chat with some people who were interested in his reader, and concluded that since they liked it so much and could probably benefit from the technology, providing them might be a good idea. What the hell does that have to do with the colour of his skin? How would it be any different if someone of any other race who had grown up in a first world country was making the same comments?
I doubt they'd be grabbing books from the Amazon store over their local 3G connection. Freely licensed content pre-loaded in a DRM free format would be the way to go, whether on Kindle or on another similar reader, and I doubt that the connectivity would be turned on anyway - it'd be an unnecessary drain on the battery.
It's a "teach a man to fish" situation - you say yourself that school books are important, and if it's cheaper/easier to provide hardware to read those books digitally than it is to provide physical books then the tech is not just a gimmick.
Laptops also aid communication and content creation and allow, for example, farmers to keep up to date on the market value of their crops, but ereaders are cheaper and more robust. Dead tree books are cheaper still and significantly more robust, but their cost (in terms of manufacture and distribution) is directly proportional to the amount of information contained, and they do not lend themselves well to information which dates rapidly.
If the charities want to teach people reading, writing and arithmetic then I think paper is still definitely the way to go. If they want to provide large libraries of information to each village, eReaders seem a good choice, but at increased cost and fragility.
I'm an idiot - converters I linked work in the wrong direction. What you need is $150 from the same site or $50 from eBay (the two devices look identical, except for the price - whether they are or not it anybody's guess).
I'm running mad looking for an HDMI-to-RCA downscaler - my laptop has HDMI and DVI outputs, but my church's $12,000 switching/scaling system only does composite.
If your laptop has DVI-I rather than DVI-D (and I've never seen one with only DVI-D), it's already capable of outputting analog component RGB, but not composite. If your input equipment only takes composite, converters go for about $100.
I'm pretty sure that's not the case - the actual timeline of Serenity occurs after the end of the series, but the recording that the operative watches is of Simon breaking her out of the 'school' before they end up on Persephone for the first time (i.e. before the start of the series); its an explanation of how they came to be on the ship in the first place. River was never recaptured by the Alliance after that initial breakout.
Hotz can do what ever he wants to his consoles in his house but the moment he went to the internet with this another issue because it forces Sony's hand. Just like the guy who tinkered with his care enough to not make it street legal and the cops want to arrest and the state wants to take away his license complaining he needs money to fight THE MAN is a giant whatever from me. And again I have to reiterate this isn't a free speech issue either but a dispute between two parties in contract.
He did what he wanted to his own console in his own home. He told others how to do the same. The court silenced him. That sure as hell sounds like a free speech issue to me - not to mention the fact that there never existed a contract between Hotz and Sony (he rejected their EULA and does not use PSN, from what I gather).
To use your analogy: guy modifies car to the extent that it is no longer street legal. Guy has great fun driving around on his private farmland. Guy posts on internet explaining how others can modify their cars for use on private land. Car company sues guy. Guy is silenced by the courts and forced to stop discussing his modifications.
You sound reasonable enough, and obviously I can't make you care about this issue, but I'm surprised that you claim that he had it coming; his 'crime' here is pissing off a big company, and the company is responding with a classic SLAPP suit.
If you want to see a people fight the good fight for free speech, look no further than recent events in the new where people are protesting on the streets of middle eastern countries. Hotz vs Sony isn't even on the same scale.
Absolutely true, but as others said further up, the fact that one fight is more important doesn't render others unimportant.
Three hikers on the border between Iraq and Iran, in a time of war, insecurity and bellicose politics? You seriously believe they're just hikers?
Yes, I do. I've been to Iran, and the same 'circumstantial evidence' could just as well have been applied to me - yet I know I was there simply because I wanted to see things with my own eyes, rather than gleaning a viewpoint from the wrong end of a news report. I see no reason to believe that the same isn't true of these people.