1) First post!
(a) Huh?
(b) W00t!
(c) Troll, -1
2) The MPAA is an example of:
(a) An evil oppressing soul-stealing euphemism for organized crime
(b) The very hand of satan
(c) Troll, -1
3) Microsoft can best be described as:
(a) Evil
(b) Evil
(c) Troll, -1
4) All your base are belong to:
(a) The RIAA
(b) us
(c) Troll, -1
5) In Communist Russia:
(a) CSS cracks you!
(b) Bill Shatner interviews you!
(c) Troll, -1
6) A computer running linux and another running windows are placed next to each other in an enclosed area,
a) they will do nothing
b) The linux computer will devour the windoze machine with its righteous wrath, and then urinate on its hard drive to symbolize the fate of all non-free software
c) Troll, -1
Here's an example: 1. track all purchases by everyone made in the US 2. put it in one big database 3. Compare each person's purchases against certain profiles...sleeper cell terrorist, arsonist, political dissident 3. Generate a report for each law enforcement division across the country which lists the license plates, names, and descriptions of the twenty most suspect people. 4. Start reading their email and monitoring their library activity 5. Find out the word jihad appears in one of their emails, or they make soem joke about shooting someone, and notice they've checked out a copy of "civil disobedience". Check their web browsing activity, notice they've read the anarchist's cookbook. 6. Conduct a raid, which is legal without a search warrant if terrorist activity is suspected.
Mostly computerized. Efficient enough to implement nationwide. Total invasion of privacy. Guilty until proven inneocent. All legal.
Why don't you just have a little video camera and tracking device into your body? How about in your home too? Then big brother would be able to check and see if you are up to anything. Poof, no more crime. Sounds good?
Those who would trade liberty for security deserve neither. Our liberties must be a firm line in the sand, no compromises are possible. This "big brother knows best" and "what do you have to hide" is exactly the kind of thinking that results in tyrany. What, do you think this is some kind of joke, where oppression only happens in books? Your post is the equivalent of saying..."here ya go big brother, take these freedoms, I dont need 'em."
I don't mean music appreciation like that bullshit class we all took in college. When I say music appreciation I mean the ability to be inspired by music. I believe that when a person has sufficient inspiration from stories, people and music it will find a creative outlet.
After reading that article on digipen, I was quite horrified to read that there are no arts, music and so on. In life there are the foundation disciplines, such as logic, reading, music appreciation; upon these one later builds the skills of interaction and communication: public speaking, writing, programming, social skills and so on. To totally immerse yourself in the pursuit of communication at such a young age (18) is foolish. I really am in favor of a strong classical education in addition to a regimen of computer skills. I've found, at least as far as I'm concerned, that I have separate capacities for learning in different areas. If I do two hours of philosophy and two hours of coding (C++) I am not nearly as toasted as if I did two hours of C++ and two of discrete math. What often passes for "focus" lends little acceleration to one discipline while the rest rot. A well-rounded, well-adjusted person is going to be happier, easier to work with, and therefore more useful to the company on the whole.
If windows developers were using something more portable than directx, you'd be getting your games anyways...and they'd be on linux...and the programmers would have a more elegant, and less restricted API. Some choices are easy and beneficial in the short run, but damaging in the long run. Do we really want to give Microsoft control over the API's that all game developers use?
This will undermine the potential for games on linux. If the Mac market can be addressed using DirectX, there's less reason to develop opengl apps, which are portable to linux.
The DirectX api is cumbersome and very proprietary. This just gives more developers reason to stick with DirectX. I would much rather see work put into expanding the featureset of OpenGL to include some of the more advanced features that have to be implemented as hacks. Even though the OpenGL featureset is a bit behind directx, it is a pleasure to work with, and so I hate to see anything that undermines the reasons for adopting it.
You want to benchmark hand-optomised x86 assembly against java? Do you know how many times a game engine must perform a matrix multiplication per frame? Now try adding even the overhead of a couple stack pushes and a function call to each one of those. Yeah, sure, the last generation of games may be able to deal with it, but instead of wasting performance on portability, let's get real-time dynamic terrain modification or ray-traced lighting or something. 3D math in realtime = assembly. Period. Anything else is wasting processor power.
Besides, look at all of the games that get ported to other platforms...Quake 3 for example. Java has been around for some time, why do you think nobody has ever written a major commercial game in java? Why do you think Carmack would rather port quake 3 more than once than do the whole thing in Java?
When you write a game you have to write to a certain architecture. The fast way to do something under one API is often totally incompatible with the fast way to do it under another API. When you have some virtual machine running interference between the program and the CPU, like java, it always results in a performance hit.
What's up with this constant need in our society to baby-sit the recipient of information? If someone doesn't understand those things, then they are accepting a certain risk when putzing around with them. If you read this guide and screw something up because you didn't know what you were doing, well, too bad. The mere existance of dumb people should not require smart people to talk like friggin lawyers all the time.
Many other posters have stated that great science fiction is great fiction + science. Although science fiction contains both of those things, it is not nearly so simple.
Science fiction is an opportunity for us to look at uncertainties in the world as we see it, and then to draw interesting assumptions that lead us to examine and question the nature of our own lives. Look at the matrix, for example. We cannot prove that our reality is as real as reality can get, therefore there is always an uncertainty as to the true nature of reality.
The matrix draws an assumption: our reality is not real. Then the story builds a good fictional story on top of that assumption, thus causing us not only to be entertained, but to question our original position on the matter at hand. The matrix is good science fiction not because it is a good fictional story with fictional science, but because the assumption used as a plot device (reality is not real) is an interesting suggestion, which causes us to question our own reality.
It's not good science fiction unless you walk out of the theathre / put down the book and wonder if all of that crazy stuff you just saw / read is or could be true.
I can't tell you how enthralled I am to have an opportunity to act as tech support for some guy who wants to get a specific model of cell phone to talk to an old version of a OS that doesn't matter much anyways. What the hell are the chances that this story will benefit any significant chunch of the slashdot crowd?
This license says "if you're going to use my code, you're not going to use it in such a way as to hamper what I believe to be fundamental human rights."
Sure, building homes for armless legless goatless botswanian boys is great, but there's also nothing wrong with giving companies an incentive to be privacy-friendly. Besides, if you're giving your code to promote free software, do you really want that code to be involved in bad free software? If you don't give a damn, then use the GPL. If you do, then use this license.
Its a simple matter of choice, encouraging the software programmers to dictate how they want their software to be used. This has nothing to do with getting things for free, but rather offering an incentive for companies to treat their customers with respect.
You seem to be going on and on just about the term "human rights." This is about how people license their code, and how corporations are allowed to use that code, not a statement for or against the kind of moral fiber that you seem to be overly prideful of.
I can't believe they would be this clueless...don't they realize that if Linux could play DVD's there wouldn't be as much of an argument (or need) for decss? If they just took our fair use rights into account (play it under linux, play it on the computer, on my mp3 player, on my car stereo and so on) nobody would ever need to break their damn encryption.
If you argue that it makes it too easy to copy their work, well, then what they have is an unworkable business model. It's like sheet music. For the really big orchestras who are playing the works of composers who are under copyright protection, they have to buy expensive scores. High-visibility = doing it the right way. This would be equivalent to using music in movies and games and such. On the other hand, if you're going for private lessons, and you need a copy of the blue bells of scotland, the prices of the real thing are going to be cheap enough to make it not worth the trouble of copying it from someone else. This is equivalent to consumers and cd's.
Believe me, I'm all for protection of intellectual property. However, when protection just isn't possible without harassing researchers, threatening consumers, and forcing us to get our songs in a crippled format, it's time for our government to say: "Good luck with that whole music industry thing, you're on your own."
Although previous posters were correct in saying that it's impossible to have the speakers cancel sound on the fly, because the delay would cause the inverse wave to be out of sync, I could definitely see writing some software that would cancel constant or regular, repetitive sounds. My only isse is that the built-in mics are generally very low-quality.
Has anyone considered writing software to filter a computer's fan? That would be really cool, and probably pretty easy to do...some little tray program that constantly runs the inverse sound over your speakers...hmmm.
I don't see Star Trek as having much potential for MMORPGs. The whole series is rather based on the interactions of large groups; the federation versus the romulans, the federation versus the mysterious alien species, and so on. The individuals rarely have much potential. What is there to do in the Star Trek universe? Command a starship, or act as a cog in the galactic machinery? There really is only room for a few characters to actually have human characteristics...everyone else just has to cooperate so the few in command can play out their little pop-philosophy drama. As much as I like star trek, the Star Wars world is much better suited towards individualism, rather than this kind of hive-consciousness that is necessary to run starships. Besides, how would you advance in a Star Trek game?
"where data can be mined between elements which are currently not linkable"
As information is linked together the potential of that information is raised exponentially. It is only the fact that there is relatively little collaboration between the various government and corporate entities. The implied intention in linking our data together is that one will be able to predict who will be a terrorist and who will not. This is the stuff of Orwell, folks. Public libraries know I'm reading "Civil Disobedience" by Thoreau. The government knows I'm registered with some leftist party. I have a registered gun. All of those pieces of data are currently kept with people who need to know them to do our job. Political organizations need to keep mailing lists. Credit card companies need to keep their bills. Libraries need to keep track of their books, and so on. However, it is the mere combination of those pieces of data that causes us to transgress into the realm of oppression. Now, we have men or machines trying to connect the dots, to presume me guilty before I even commit a crime. That's one of the fundamental beliefs of our country, isnt it? Innocent until Proven Guilty? That is totally incompatible with the type of terror we are facing. This war on terror, although it started off with the gunning down of a few hapless, pissed off fundamentalists, must by nature totally consist, from here on out, of catching criminals before they commit crimes. That is the common theme of the government's reaction to 9/11: we should have caught them before they comitted the crime. That means that all advances in this war on terror must come about by knowing more about YOUR life, what YOU buy, and trying to determine whether or not YOU are a terrorist. Unchecked efforts to capture criminals before they commit crimes is the cornerstone of oppression, the very mechanism by which all political distopias create their horror in the reader.
The parent post is totally missing the danger in this advancement. It's very easy to point and laugh and make dumb cracks about tin foil hats, but your liberties are being steadily eroded.
Those who would trade freedom for security deserve neither.
Isn't it amazing how a few guys with box cutters can kill thousands, and then as an added bonus, give our government the excuse to grab powers it will only abuse? Terrorism is hijacking our own government against us. Day by day the costs of September 11th grow. How much longer will there be any question as to whether that was the most damaging attack on the USA?
The war on terrorism is as idiotic as the war on drugs. Only a fool would enter a "war" which has vaguely defined, nearly impossible victory conditions. As long as there are pissed off Palestinians getting capped by bullets fired from American-financed weapons, they are going to continue to sacrafice themselves, eliciting outrage from foreign radicals. These people have nothing to lose, and they have no problem with taking the US down with them. Our gun-toting Texan president needs to realize that this "war on terrorism" is impossible to win. The government will continue to grasp at elusive guerillas hiding in caves halfway along the world, and it will eat up our freedoms out of frustration for the lack of progress.
Thankfully, though, people will not kill themselves for nothing. If we remove the cause driving the foreign animosity for the United States, namely our support for Israel, the problem will be solved.
Does anyone know why we continue to support Israel?
An AC posted a link to this site ( http://www.guppylog.com/ ) , but was modded down...on closer examination, look what I found!
Okay, I'm weighing in on this.
By Scott Lockwood
from the What kind of crap is that??? department, Section News
Posted on Wed Oct 23rd, 2002 at 03:25:29 PM CDT6CST
You will now notice a link at the top of the page in support of the legal defense fund against the SLAPP suits one Robert Novak has filed against people who report having had bad service from his store. Folks, all other arguments aside, as a veteran I find there is nothing more important than our freedom of speech. People like Novak who try to hide alleged shoddy service with $15,000,000.00 lawsuits (yes, that's the right number of zeros!) should go to jail in my opinion.
(1 comment) Comments >>
Find the related lawsuit:
http://petsforum.com/psw/Default.html
The story fits with the poster. Libel on an internet message board. I think that's the other side to our story. In which case the poster is probably a wanker.
First get these definitions out of the way:
http://www.hfac.uh.edu/comm/media_libel/libel/defi nition.html
If it's written, it's libel, if it's spoken it's slander.
Because your friend has access to this message board, he has an opportunity to respond. You can be sued for saying "Joe Smith is a bed-wetter" on television if Joe Smith isn't there to defend himself. However, if Joe can defend himself, such as via your message board, he is a "Limited Public Figure." This means that you must demonstrate that there was actual malice, "the act of publishing or broadcasting statements with prior knowledge of the inaccuracy of the statement or a reckless disregard for the truth."
Furthermore, it must be shown that the aim of this malice was to damage his reputation.
If the party in question said "Your friend is an alcoholic and a pedophile.", knew that he was neither, and did so solely to harm his reputation, that's libel.
If the party in question said "Your friend's product is designed so it will always break after a week.", knowing that was not the case for the sole purpose of harming his reputation, that's libel.
However, if they said "Don't buy this guy's products, they are going to break." and they do so because you have a 50% return rate, then there's truth to what they are saying.
Your post is so vague it's hard to tell, but here's the screnario I'm imagining...
Your buddy sells whatever, he sold someone a broken one, they snagged a leaked memo talking about defective items or whatever, and he decided to to post it on a message board somewhere. Your friend got his panties all in a knot, and here we are.
Why is my guess so skewed against the poster? Well, because the Libel laws are pretty damn clear; had there been a real case of Libel, the poster's buddy would be counting the cash right now, instead of bitching about what 40 year old geeks are saying about him from their mother's basements to ask slashdot.
Either that, or I post on that message board, and am trying to keep you from filing suit.;)
Slashdot Mirror
1) First post! (a) Huh? (b) W00t! (c) Troll, -1 2) The MPAA is an example of: (a) An evil oppressing soul-stealing euphemism for organized crime (b) The very hand of satan (c) Troll, -1 3) Microsoft can best be described as: (a) Evil (b) Evil (c) Troll, -1 4) All your base are belong to: (a) The RIAA (b) us (c) Troll, -1 5) In Communist Russia: (a) CSS cracks you! (b) Bill Shatner interviews you! (c) Troll, -1 6) A computer running linux and another running windows are placed next to each other in an enclosed area, a) they will do nothing b) The linux computer will devour the windoze machine with its righteous wrath, and then urinate on its hard drive to symbolize the fate of all non-free software c) Troll, -1
Here's an example:
1. track all purchases by everyone made in the US
2. put it in one big database
3. Compare each person's purchases against certain profiles...sleeper cell terrorist, arsonist, political dissident
3. Generate a report for each law enforcement division across the country which lists the license plates, names, and descriptions of the twenty most suspect people.
4. Start reading their email and monitoring their library activity
5. Find out the word jihad appears in one of their emails, or they make soem joke about shooting someone, and notice they've checked out a copy of "civil disobedience". Check their web browsing activity, notice they've read the anarchist's cookbook.
6. Conduct a raid, which is legal without a search warrant if terrorist activity is suspected.
Mostly computerized. Efficient enough to implement nationwide. Total invasion of privacy. Guilty until proven inneocent. All legal.
Why don't you just have a little video camera and tracking device into your body? How about in your home too? Then big brother would be able to check and see if you are up to anything. Poof, no more crime. Sounds good?
Those who would trade liberty for security deserve neither. Our liberties must be a firm line in the sand, no compromises are possible. This "big brother knows best" and "what do you have to hide" is exactly the kind of thinking that results in tyrany. What, do you think this is some kind of joke, where oppression only happens in books? Your post is the equivalent of saying..."here ya go big brother, take these freedoms, I dont need 'em."
I don't mean music appreciation like that bullshit class we all took in college. When I say music appreciation I mean the ability to be inspired by music. I believe that when a person has sufficient inspiration from stories, people and music it will find a creative outlet.
After reading that article on digipen, I was quite horrified to read that there are no arts, music and so on. In life there are the foundation disciplines, such as logic, reading, music appreciation; upon these one later builds the skills of interaction and communication: public speaking, writing, programming, social skills and so on. To totally immerse yourself in the pursuit of communication at such a young age (18) is foolish. I really am in favor of a strong classical education in addition to a regimen of computer skills. I've found, at least as far as I'm concerned, that I have separate capacities for learning in different areas. If I do two hours of philosophy and two hours of coding (C++) I am not nearly as toasted as if I did two hours of C++ and two of discrete math. What often passes for "focus" lends little acceleration to one discipline while the rest rot. A well-rounded, well-adjusted person is going to be happier, easier to work with, and therefore more useful to the company on the whole.
If windows developers were using something more portable than directx, you'd be getting your games anyways...and they'd be on linux...and the programmers would have a more elegant, and less restricted API. Some choices are easy and beneficial in the short run, but damaging in the long run. Do we really want to give Microsoft control over the API's that all game developers use?
This will undermine the potential for games on linux. If the Mac market can be addressed using DirectX, there's less reason to develop opengl apps, which are portable to linux.
The DirectX api is cumbersome and very proprietary. This just gives more developers reason to stick with DirectX. I would much rather see work put into expanding the featureset of OpenGL to include some of the more advanced features that have to be implemented as hacks. Even though the OpenGL featureset is a bit behind directx, it is a pleasure to work with, and so I hate to see anything that undermines the reasons for adopting it.
You want to benchmark hand-optomised x86 assembly against java? Do you know how many times a game engine must perform a matrix multiplication per frame? Now try adding even the overhead of a couple stack pushes and a function call to each one of those. Yeah, sure, the last generation of games may be able to deal with it, but instead of wasting performance on portability, let's get real-time dynamic terrain modification or ray-traced lighting or something. 3D math in realtime = assembly. Period. Anything else is wasting processor power.
Besides, look at all of the games that get ported to other platforms...Quake 3 for example. Java has been around for some time, why do you think nobody has ever written a major commercial game in java? Why do you think Carmack would rather port quake 3 more than once than do the whole thing in Java?
When you write a game you have to write to a certain architecture. The fast way to do something under one API is often totally incompatible with the fast way to do it under another API. When you have some virtual machine running interference between the program and the CPU, like java, it always results in a performance hit.
What's up with this constant need in our society to baby-sit the recipient of information? If someone doesn't understand those things, then they are accepting a certain risk when putzing around with them. If you read this guide and screw something up because you didn't know what you were doing, well, too bad. The mere existance of dumb people should not require smart people to talk like friggin lawyers all the time.
Life is painful when you're stupid.
Many other posters have stated that great science fiction is great fiction + science. Although science fiction contains both of those things, it is not nearly so simple.
Science fiction is an opportunity for us to look at uncertainties in the world as we see it, and then to draw interesting assumptions that lead us to examine and question the nature of our own lives. Look at the matrix, for example. We cannot prove that our reality is as real as reality can get, therefore there is always an uncertainty as to the true nature of reality.
The matrix draws an assumption: our reality is not real. Then the story builds a good fictional story on top of that assumption, thus causing us not only to be entertained, but to question our original position on the matter at hand. The matrix is good science fiction not because it is a good fictional story with fictional science, but because the assumption used as a plot device (reality is not real) is an interesting suggestion, which causes us to question our own reality.
It's not good science fiction unless you walk out of the theathre / put down the book and wonder if all of that crazy stuff you just saw / read is or could be true.
I can't tell you how enthralled I am to have an opportunity to act as tech support for some guy who wants to get a specific model of cell phone to talk to an old version of a OS that doesn't matter much anyways. What the hell are the chances that this story will benefit any significant chunch of the slashdot crowd?
This license says "if you're going to use my code, you're not going to use it in such a way as to hamper what I believe to be fundamental human rights."
Sure, building homes for armless legless goatless botswanian boys is great, but there's also nothing wrong with giving companies an incentive to be privacy-friendly. Besides, if you're giving your code to promote free software, do you really want that code to be involved in bad free software? If you don't give a damn, then use the GPL. If you do, then use this license.
Its a simple matter of choice, encouraging the software programmers to dictate how they want their software to be used. This has nothing to do with getting things for free, but rather offering an incentive for companies to treat their customers with respect.
You seem to be going on and on just about the term "human rights." This is about how people license their code, and how corporations are allowed to use that code, not a statement for or against the kind of moral fiber that you seem to be overly prideful of.
Um. If you define counterprogramming as "to use the front end..." shouldn't it be a verb? Just wondering...
Have you considered a career in proofreading for Slashdot?
...but what about every other library in the world? If you're a library, and your domain pisses off the big-brother-ware, you are in trouble.
Because Microsoft sells the Xbox at a loss...and if we find enough uses for Xboxes...enough geeks will buy them....
:)
No ps2?
Thanks for the monkey. *munch*
I can't believe they would be this clueless...don't they realize that if Linux could play DVD's there wouldn't be as much of an argument (or need) for decss? If they just took our fair use rights into account (play it under linux, play it on the computer, on my mp3 player, on my car stereo and so on) nobody would ever need to break their damn encryption.
If you argue that it makes it too easy to copy their work, well, then what they have is an unworkable business model. It's like sheet music. For the really big orchestras who are playing the works of composers who are under copyright protection, they have to buy expensive scores. High-visibility = doing it the right way. This would be equivalent to using music in movies and games and such. On the other hand, if you're going for private lessons, and you need a copy of the blue bells of scotland, the prices of the real thing are going to be cheap enough to make it not worth the trouble of copying it from someone else. This is equivalent to consumers and cd's.
Believe me, I'm all for protection of intellectual property. However, when protection just isn't possible without harassing researchers, threatening consumers, and forcing us to get our songs in a crippled format, it's time for our government to say: "Good luck with that whole music industry thing, you're on your own."
Although previous posters were correct in saying that it's impossible to have the speakers cancel sound on the fly, because the delay would cause the inverse wave to be out of sync, I could definitely see writing some software that would cancel constant or regular, repetitive sounds. My only isse is that the built-in mics are generally very low-quality.
Has anyone considered writing software to filter a computer's fan? That would be really cool, and probably pretty easy to do...some little tray program that constantly runs the inverse sound over your speakers...hmmm.
I don't see Star Trek as having much potential for MMORPGs. The whole series is rather based on the interactions of large groups; the federation versus the romulans, the federation versus the mysterious alien species, and so on. The individuals rarely have much potential. What is there to do in the Star Trek universe? Command a starship, or act as a cog in the galactic machinery? There really is only room for a few characters to actually have human characteristics...everyone else just has to cooperate so the few in command can play out their little pop-philosophy drama. As much as I like star trek, the Star Wars world is much better suited towards individualism, rather than this kind of hive-consciousness that is necessary to run starships. Besides, how would you advance in a Star Trek game?
By collecting more tribbles?
As information is linked together the potential of that information is raised exponentially. It is only the fact that there is relatively little collaboration between the various government and corporate entities. The implied intention in linking our data together is that one will be able to predict who will be a terrorist and who will not. This is the stuff of Orwell, folks. Public libraries know I'm reading "Civil Disobedience" by Thoreau. The government knows I'm registered with some leftist party. I have a registered gun. All of those pieces of data are currently kept with people who need to know them to do our job. Political organizations need to keep mailing lists. Credit card companies need to keep their bills. Libraries need to keep track of their books, and so on. However, it is the mere combination of those pieces of data that causes us to transgress into the realm of oppression. Now, we have men or machines trying to connect the dots, to presume me guilty before I even commit a crime. That's one of the fundamental beliefs of our country, isnt it? Innocent until Proven Guilty? That is totally incompatible with the type of terror we are facing. This war on terror, although it started off with the gunning down of a few hapless, pissed off fundamentalists, must by nature totally consist, from here on out, of catching criminals before they commit crimes. That is the common theme of the government's reaction to 9/11: we should have caught them before they comitted the crime. That means that all advances in this war on terror must come about by knowing more about YOUR life, what YOU buy, and trying to determine whether or not YOU are a terrorist. Unchecked efforts to capture criminals before they commit crimes is the cornerstone of oppression, the very mechanism by which all political distopias create their horror in the reader.
The parent post is totally missing the danger in this advancement. It's very easy to point and laugh and make dumb cracks about tin foil hats, but your liberties are being steadily eroded.
Those who would trade freedom for security deserve neither.
Isn't it amazing how a few guys with box cutters can kill thousands, and then as an added bonus, give our government the excuse to grab powers it will only abuse? Terrorism is hijacking our own government against us. Day by day the costs of September 11th grow. How much longer will there be any question as to whether that was the most damaging attack on the USA?
The war on terrorism is as idiotic as the war on drugs. Only a fool would enter a "war" which has vaguely defined, nearly impossible victory conditions. As long as there are pissed off Palestinians getting capped by bullets fired from American-financed weapons, they are going to continue to sacrafice themselves, eliciting outrage from foreign radicals. These people have nothing to lose, and they have no problem with taking the US down with them. Our gun-toting Texan president needs to realize that this "war on terrorism" is impossible to win. The government will continue to grasp at elusive guerillas hiding in caves halfway along the world, and it will eat up our freedoms out of frustration for the lack of progress.
Thankfully, though, people will not kill themselves for nothing. If we remove the cause driving the foreign animosity for the United States, namely our support for Israel, the problem will be solved. Does anyone know why we continue to support Israel?
An AC posted a link to this site ( http://www.guppylog.com/ ) , but was modded down...on closer examination, look what I found! Okay, I'm weighing in on this. By Scott Lockwood from the What kind of crap is that??? department, Section News Posted on Wed Oct 23rd, 2002 at 03:25:29 PM CDT6CST You will now notice a link at the top of the page in support of the legal defense fund against the SLAPP suits one Robert Novak has filed against people who report having had bad service from his store. Folks, all other arguments aside, as a veteran I find there is nothing more important than our freedom of speech. People like Novak who try to hide alleged shoddy service with $15,000,000.00 lawsuits (yes, that's the right number of zeros!) should go to jail in my opinion. (1 comment) Comments >> Find the related lawsuit: http://petsforum.com/psw/Default.html The story fits with the poster. Libel on an internet message board. I think that's the other side to our story. In which case the poster is probably a wanker.
First get these definitions out of the way: http://www.hfac.uh.edu/comm/media_libel/libel/defi nition.html
If it's written, it's libel, if it's spoken it's slander.
Because your friend has access to this message board, he has an opportunity to respond. You can be sued for saying "Joe Smith is a bed-wetter" on television if Joe Smith isn't there to defend himself. However, if Joe can defend himself, such as via your message board, he is a "Limited Public Figure." This means that you must demonstrate that there was actual malice, "the act of publishing or broadcasting statements with prior knowledge of the inaccuracy of the statement or a reckless disregard for the truth."
Furthermore, it must be shown that the aim of this malice was to damage his reputation.
If the party in question said "Your friend is an alcoholic and a pedophile.", knew that he was neither, and did so solely to harm his reputation, that's libel.
If the party in question said "Your friend's product is designed so it will always break after a week.", knowing that was not the case for the sole purpose of harming his reputation, that's libel.
However, if they said "Don't buy this guy's products, they are going to break." and they do so because you have a 50% return rate, then there's truth to what they are saying.
Your post is so vague it's hard to tell, but here's the screnario I'm imagining...
Your buddy sells whatever, he sold someone a broken one, they snagged a leaked memo talking about defective items or whatever, and he decided to to post it on a message board somewhere. Your friend got his panties all in a knot, and here we are.
Why is my guess so skewed against the poster? Well, because the Libel laws are pretty damn clear; had there been a real case of Libel, the poster's buddy would be counting the cash right now, instead of bitching about what 40 year old geeks are saying about him from their mother's basements to ask slashdot.
Either that, or I post on that message board, and am trying to keep you from filing suit. ;)