My favorite beginner's CS assignment was from an intro class in college (might work for high school students too, I don't know what their ability level is). It was a simple program that read in/usr/dict/words and then was supposed to enter a loop in which it would take two 5-letter words from input and produce as output the smallest list of words that were each one letter apart from each other that went from the first input word to the second input word. So, for example:
One of the requirements was that it had to be somewhat efficient, so we had to compute the one-letter permutations of a word at most once and preferably not at all (in the case that program never needs to know).
It was a terribly fun project: it was possible for me even when I didn't have much programming experience but it made me stretch my brain a bit, and it was a whole lot of fun to play with. -- -jacob
Not if you want to parse command lines, for example, or use many of the C library functions (e.g., printf). Of course, in your own, 100% new code, you can use STL and stuff like that, but when you're interfacing with existing code or trying to use (a few of) the language's features, you have to use the unsafe constructs at least a little. That's particularly true when it comes to user input, which is (naturally) where buffer overflows come from. -- -jacob
A typo-based domain serves absolutely NO purpose other than to snag traffic intended for other pages.
Obviously, this would (in theory) be protected by free speech...
Why? Just because you have a right to free speech doesn't mean that everything that you do by talking is legal. After all, con artists and social engineers are just talking, but they are talking with intent to deceive someone else into doing something that they wouldn't otherwise do (give them money, sensitive data, etc). If one could prove that a particular typo site (such as PayPai.com) was deliberately trying to mislead people, I don't see any reason why they ought to be constitutionally protected in doing so. -- -jacob
The problem wasn't that somebody did something naughty. The problem was that somebody did something naughty, they fixed it, somebody did something else naughty, they fixed that too, then somebody did something else naughty, and they had to restore their database, and finally somebody did yet another naughty thing that apparently was one naughty thing too much. I don't blame rusty for getting fed up after a stream of abuse. -- -jacob
Congratulations! You've just invented a secondary meaning of the word 'slashdotted!'
Slashdot, v.
1. To bring an Internet site, esp. one with an HTTP server, offline due to excessive demand for its contents as a result of its mention on Slashdot. "Let's hope that memepool doesn't get slashdotted by this..."
2. To destroy what might otherwise be an intelligent public discourse by flooding it with nonsense or deliberately offensive or stupid garbage. "Looks like George and Al are trying to slashdot the election." -- -jacob
I don't know what domain you program in, but if you write good Scheme or Lisp code, you use recursion instead of any looping construct (which, I would say, is applicable "in the real world"). True, you can indeed prove that any time you write a recursive function you could have written a loop, but if you're writing in a purely functional way the recursion will be easier to write and more legible. That is, after you get past the shock of it. -- -jacob
The two goals- ease of parsing and ease of programming, are not necessarily opposed to each other, and in fact they're usually complementary.
If the source code for your parser is 2 megabytes, that means that there are two megabytes worth of syntax rules that the computer needs to know to parse the language correctly- and if a programmer wants to write good code that uses all the features of the language, that programmer has to have 2 megabytes worth of syntax rules in his or her head. Even though I've been programming in C++ for a lot longer than I've been programming in Scheme, I still go to the reference manuals for C++ syntax far more frequently than I go to the manuals for Scheme syntax. (Incidentally, I once wrote a parser for a language that had the same syntax as Scheme, and it was about 300 lines long.) -- -jacob
While everybody knows that Microsoft likes to take standards an mess with them, I find it kind of funny that people around here are claiming that it's this sort of action that isolates Netscape users. I use Netscape myself, but I'm also a web developer, and the more I hear about Microsoft's browser dominance, the less I want to continue to support Netscape.
That's because supporting Netscape and IE doesn't mean maintaining strict standards compliance- all of my pages adhere to strict standards- but working around a list of bugs and horrid design decisions the size of your arm just so that Netscape won't mangle your page while IE users can see it just fine. Even though Netscape invented Javascript (as a way to lock out IE users? I don't know), IE does it better- I'm not talking about the incompatible DOMs, I'm talking about simple things like the fact that Netscape won't let you dynamically change the size of form widgets without a PAGE REFRESH, something that I'm sure my users would love.
It's quickly becoming an IE-only world, but it's not because Microsoft uses proprietary tags- honestly, why would Microsoft care about squashing Netscape 4.7 at this point? The only people who use it are die-hards and people without any IE option anyway. It's because as bad as IE's compliance is, Netscape's is ten times worse. Netscape is just suffering from the fact that it used to be the big dog and so it thought it could get away with anything, and it was right, but now it's not the big dog anymore, and developers are tired of putting up with it.
I think that you are making a naive assumption about what online voting would do to voting patterns, specifically that if the government allowed people to vote online, more people would vote, and those extra people would be a representative cross-sample of eligible voters. While I think the former assumption is probably true, the second doesn't seem to follow. In fact, there is ample direct evidence that people with Internet access aren't a representative cross-section, as Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf is well aware =).
Seriously, the key to making voting fair is to make it, so far as possible, equally difficult for everybody to vote. Think about it: what if I took the richest fifth of the country and installed wireless secure voting antennas in their heads, so that they could vote just by thinking about it, and let the poorest four-fifths go to the polls normally. You would clearly expect the results to be unbiased towards the richest fifth? Naturally you would, because they will have close to 100% voter turn-out, whereas the poorer section will have the same voter turnout that they have always had (what are the figures for the last election? 20% or something like that?).
That is obviously undemocratic, and no sane politician would suggest implementing it. But, for some reason, when you change "wireless secure voting antenna" to "internet voting," people forget about it. But Internet access is still unevenly distributed across the economic scope of Americans, with the more wealthy spending far more time online per day than the less wealthy (think about it- what percent of people making over $100,000 a year have a computer with Internet access on their desks? What percent of people making $15,000 a year?). Online voting, even if implemented securely (which doesn't seem to be possible- security in voting means that you also have to be sure that nobody is buying votes, that the vote actually came from the person you think it is, not just their computer, and that a person votes only once, without at any point being able to link a person to a vote, authenticating that the person voting is eligible to vote, and a whole host of other problems that are not just a matter of finding a more secure crypto protocol) will actually tend away from democratic election and towards rule by people with easy ubiquitous internet access, which naturally are the IT professionals and not the grocery-store clerks.
In short, online voting is a bad idea that is impossible to implement anyway. -- -jacob
As a matter of fact, it was from this site. The Internet Auditing Project, posted here on August 14, 1999. It's a really good article, certainly worth a read.
You meant to say vastly smaller. Whether it's superior or not depends on what you want to do. For example, your sample XML had 126 bytes more overhead than the equivalent HTTP, and 126 extra bytes is likely quite acceptable when sending documents that are usually several kilobytes in length, and those bytes buy you all sorts of XML goodies that the HTTP version doesn't have. On the other hand, if your document is on the order of a few bytes and you're sending a jillion of them, you clearly couldn't accept that much overhead. -- -jacob
Does anybody know any more about why the GA the researcher used had such a small population size? Population of 4 + 1 elite seems mighty small to me- 50 or 60 sounds more like it, even if it takes ten times longer per round to evaluate, because you typically want more diversity. Or in this problem did he find that the diversity wasn't worth it? Does anybody know? -- -jacob
Well, as a matter of fact, PETA does have a right to trademark "PETA," and they do not have the right to stifle every organization that has uses "P," "E," "T," and "A," just the ones that try to use those letters to mislead people into thinking that they're going to PETA's web site. Just like you have the right to start a company called "Ich Bin Monkey!", but if you start selling products with the IBM logo, you may be in legal high water (the question would be whether or not your product is easily identifiable as a parody or not). And you can't sue someone else for having your name, but you can sue them for misleading people into thinking that they are you.
This can get tricky, particularly on the Internet- domain names are a rather low-bandwidth form of communication- but it would be silly to say that they don't have some sort of store-front quality to them. How should the law resolve that store-front nature, the legitimate confusion that will arise if an organization has a domain name that you would normally associate with another organization, and the heretofore separate namespaces of various organizations that now have to collide? That's the legal curiosity that this case highlights, though not particularly well. In this case, it was just some guy who was trying to piss off PETA and neglected to consider that PETA has a lot of money and not much sense of humor. -- -jacob
Good point. Since the only three sites on the internet are peta.org, peta.com, and slashdot.org, taking peta.org from this guy was a crushing blow to his constitutional rights. I should have seen it all along.
The fact that those guys hacked slashdot long ago is what allowed you to hear their voices. The fact that spammers have your e-mail address is what allows you to hear their voices. If it were the 80's and I were use my cordless phone outside your window, your long-distance would be what allowed my friend in Japan to hear my voice. None of those things have more than a tangential relationship to free speech, though. Since there are legal ways for the PEatingTA guy to publish his parody, the argument that he had to have peta.org to be able to express his free speech is just silly. Sure, he had a prominent place for his parody, just as I would if I made parody CD's of Microsoft Windows and swapped out the real CD for my fake one in every Windows box (perhaps leaving a card so people could mail me and get the real one, to make the analogy a little more apt). Or, as I said before, if I were to steal your clothes to make my funny impression of you even funnier.
I certainly agree that some sort of.reg or something like that would be beneficial, though I'm not positive that that exact implementation is a good idea- there are a whole lot of registered trademarks in the world. I imagine that they're sometimes going to conflict. -- -jacob
Ah. Then you've never subscribed to the PETA magazine, then. Having been tangentially involved with PETA for a number of years, I can tell you that saying that PETA has some sort of hidden nefarious plot is sort of like saying that Sassy magazine is secretly trying to take over the world. They would never have the creativity or the balls to be what you're suggesting they are. They're utter airheads. Their idea of powerful activism is a mildly funny slogan next to a picture of a dead animal on a bumper-sticker. And besides, 95% of PETA members (my made-up figure) would be utterly aghast to even imagine that they could possibly be doing anything to support the ALF. And as I said elsewhere, "the ALF" is not really an anything, but rather a more-or-less make-believe organization that serves as an umbrella for people who are pissed off about animal rights and are willing to break the law- basically, that sort of people has got a pre-made name and logo all ready for them. Not that there does not exist any organization, but it's really not comparable to the IRA. (For example, on the ALF FAQ, they advise activists never to communicate any of their upcoming activities, only to communicate descriptions of what they've already done, anonymously, to a central repository. That is, nobody in "the ALF" has any idea what anybody else is going to do, or even who anybody else is.) And besides, none of PETA's money goes to anything remotely related to any known ALF activities. And, the PETA people publicly denounce violence in the name of animal rights all the time, both to the external world and internally. They sell books that denounce violence in the name of animal rights, too (of course, in the context of arguing for greater animal rights- I'm thinking of Peter Singer's Animal Liberation specifically, but there are others).
In short, the only thing that relates PETA to the ALF is that they both have the word "animal" in their names. (That, and I don't like either of them. But that's beside the point.) -- -jacob
I am getting extremely sick of this, but since ignorance persists unchecked, I must push ever onward. I will say this slowly and clearly.
PETA did not sue peta.org over being an unflattering parody. They did not try to take away the peta.org maintainer's right to post to the Internet a parody of them. The idea that the maintainer of the peta.org web site has a Constitutional right to parody PETA was never questioned by anyone. He still has that right. He has not lost it. It is completely intact. If there's one thing that the peta.org maintainer has, it's the right to parody PETA.
Got it?
Now here's the tricky part: the domain name "peta.org" is not a parody of PETA, the organization. The information that your browser displays when it accesses that site may be, but the domain name is not. If the domain name itself were a parody of PETA in some way- say, perhaps, he registered "PETAphile.org" or "PETArd.org" or something- that would be a parody, and ought to be protected speech. But the name "peta.org" is not a parody, any more than "ibm.com" is a parody of IBM the computer company. ("Ha ha ha! Ed, look at this! 'peta.org'! That's hilarious! Man, they got PETA good by saying 'peta.org!'")
So---
those of you who are all smugly saying that PETA is a bunch of hypocrites for making use of parody themselves, maybe you should consider that perhaps a legal scholar such as a judge might possibly have understood the law better than you. Consider further what you would be posting now had Microsoft registered linux.org in 1995 and put anti-linux materials on it, and the judge had now ruled that Microsoft had to turn it over to Linus. (Saw that analogy elsewhere on this message board- good job, whoever came up with it.) Consider that perhaps you just think that the site was funny (which it was, of course) and that you dislike PETA because you disagree with their political views.
But even if you refuse to consider that, as I'm sure most of you will (this is Slashdot, after all) please please please for the love of God please stop confusing this case with a case that set some kind of precedent about whether you're allowed to parody something or not.
Note that this post in no way says that PETA ought to or ought not to be able to appropriate the 'peta.org' domain name from its prior owner. I'm just trying to establish where the legal argument actually is.
(By the way, to the author of the post I'm replying to- don't consider this a directed attack against you, but rather the result of me passing a critical threshold in reading what I saw as the same incorrect argument repeated one too many times just as I read your post. Nothing personal against you.) -- -jacob
Perhaps you didn't read what I wrote. I was arguing that there is at least some prior precedent that says that you own your name, even in a new medium. The Toys 'R Us case way back when was an example of that. By that standard, even though PETA had not registered peta.org (it didn't cost money when this happened or I would say "laid down their $35" or whatever), they still own their name, and thus someone else using their name in a new medium could be construed as misusing something that rightfully belongs to them. Yes, this opens up a whole interesting can of legal worms- what about conflicting namespaces, under what conditions you lose the right to a name you've established somewhere else, etc etc etc. However, these are not issues of free speech, and since I was trying to establish that that this case is not, as the Slashdot population seems to think, a precedent against free speech, I think I've done my job. -- -jacob
I didn't quote the dictionary for fun, I did it because the original poster asked me to define what a terrorist was. So I gave him a definition. That's all. By going into more detail I was trying to show what a ridiculous statement it really was: the IRA is a terrorist group and the PLO has been a terrorist group. PETA is not and has never been a terrorist group. The fact that that some members have on occasion thrown pies and paint at a few people doesn't mean that you shouldn't feel safe turning the keys in your ignition tomorrow morning because you're afraid that PETA's gonna get you. -- -jacob
About the ALF, they're not exactly a terrorist organization. They're a kind-of quasi-terrorist quasi-organization. For one thing, there is no such thing as "the ALF," IIRC: if you do anything illegal to mess with the meat/animal exploitation industries, you become part of the ALF just by claiming you are. There isn't any central organization. However, one of the rules is that you can't actually hurt any animals, "human or otherwise," though you are allowed (and encouraged) to damage property. Not quite terrorism in the traditional sense, because the people who came up with the ALF definitely did not want to hurt people physically, only economically.
So, like I say, they're kind of terrorists and kind of an organization. They also have a cool logo.:) -- -jacob
Slashdot Mirror
My favorite beginner's CS assignment was from an intro class in college (might work for high school students too, I don't know what their ability level is). It was a simple program that read in /usr/dict/words and then was supposed to enter a loop in which it would take two 5-letter words from input and produce as output the smallest list of words that were each one letter apart from each other that went from the first input word to the second input word. So, for example:
Input
Word 1: slash
Word 2: troll
Output
slash
flash
flask
flank
blank
bland
blend
bleed
breed
bread
tread
triad
trial
trill
troll
One of the requirements was that it had to be somewhat efficient, so we had to compute the one-letter permutations of a word at most once and preferably not at all (in the case that program never needs to know).
It was a terribly fun project: it was possible for me even when I didn't have much programming experience but it made me stretch my brain a bit, and it was a whole lot of fun to play with.
--
-jacob
If everybody showed such grace, Slashdot would get a maximum of three replies to every story.
:)
--
-jacob
Not if you want to parse command lines, for example, or use many of the C library functions (e.g., printf). Of course, in your own, 100% new code, you can use STL and stuff like that, but when you're interfacing with existing code or trying to use (a few of) the language's features, you have to use the unsafe constructs at least a little. That's particularly true when it comes to user input, which is (naturally) where buffer overflows come from.
--
-jacob
:) Ah, thanks for clarifying.
--
-jacob
Why? Just because you have a right to free speech doesn't mean that everything that you do by talking is legal. After all, con artists and social engineers are just talking, but they are talking with intent to deceive someone else into doing something that they wouldn't otherwise do (give them money, sensitive data, etc). If one could prove that a particular typo site (such as PayPai.com) was deliberately trying to mislead people, I don't see any reason why they ought to be constitutionally protected in doing so.
--
-jacob
The problem wasn't that somebody did something naughty. The problem was that somebody did something naughty, they fixed it, somebody did something else naughty, they fixed that too, then somebody did something else naughty, and they had to restore their database, and finally somebody did yet another naughty thing that apparently was one naughty thing too much. I don't blame rusty for getting fed up after a stream of abuse.
--
-jacob
Congratulations! You've just invented a secondary meaning of the word 'slashdotted!'
Slashdot, v.
1. To bring an Internet site, esp. one with an HTTP server, offline due to excessive demand for its contents as a result of its mention on Slashdot. "Let's hope that memepool doesn't get slashdotted by this..."
2. To destroy what might otherwise be an intelligent public discourse by flooding it with nonsense or deliberately offensive or stupid garbage. "Looks like George and Al are trying to slashdot the election."
--
-jacob
I don't know what domain you program in, but if you write good Scheme or Lisp code, you use recursion instead of any looping construct (which, I would say, is applicable "in the real world"). True, you can indeed prove that any time you write a recursive function you could have written a loop, but if you're writing in a purely functional way the recursion will be easier to write and more legible. That is, after you get past the shock of it.
--
-jacob
The two goals- ease of parsing and ease of programming, are not necessarily opposed to each other, and in fact they're usually complementary.
If the source code for your parser is 2 megabytes, that means that there are two megabytes worth of syntax rules that the computer needs to know to parse the language correctly- and if a programmer wants to write good code that uses all the features of the language, that programmer has to have 2 megabytes worth of syntax rules in his or her head. Even though I've been programming in C++ for a lot longer than I've been programming in Scheme, I still go to the reference manuals for C++ syntax far more frequently than I go to the manuals for Scheme syntax. (Incidentally, I once wrote a parser for a language that had the same syntax as Scheme, and it was about 300 lines long.)
--
-jacob
While everybody knows that Microsoft likes to take standards an mess with them, I find it kind of funny that people around here are claiming that it's this sort of action that isolates Netscape users. I use Netscape myself, but I'm also a web developer, and the more I hear about Microsoft's browser dominance, the less I want to continue to support Netscape.
That's because supporting Netscape and IE doesn't mean maintaining strict standards compliance- all of my pages adhere to strict standards- but working around a list of bugs and horrid design decisions the size of your arm just so that Netscape won't mangle your page while IE users can see it just fine. Even though Netscape invented Javascript (as a way to lock out IE users? I don't know), IE does it better- I'm not talking about the incompatible DOMs, I'm talking about simple things like the fact that Netscape won't let you dynamically change the size of form widgets without a PAGE REFRESH, something that I'm sure my users would love.
It's quickly becoming an IE-only world, but it's not because Microsoft uses proprietary tags- honestly, why would Microsoft care about squashing Netscape 4.7 at this point? The only people who use it are die-hards and people without any IE option anyway. It's because as bad as IE's compliance is, Netscape's is ten times worse. Netscape is just suffering from the fact that it used to be the big dog and so it thought it could get away with anything, and it was right, but now it's not the big dog anymore, and developers are tired of putting up with it.
Sorry, it had to be said.
--
-jacob
I think that you are making a naive assumption about what online voting would do to voting patterns, specifically that if the government allowed people to vote online, more people would vote, and those extra people would be a representative cross-sample of eligible voters. While I think the former assumption is probably true, the second doesn't seem to follow. In fact, there is ample direct evidence that people with Internet access aren't a representative cross-section, as Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf is well aware =).
Seriously, the key to making voting fair is to make it, so far as possible, equally difficult for everybody to vote. Think about it: what if I took the richest fifth of the country and installed wireless secure voting antennas in their heads, so that they could vote just by thinking about it, and let the poorest four-fifths go to the polls normally. You would clearly expect the results to be unbiased towards the richest fifth? Naturally you would, because they will have close to 100% voter turn-out, whereas the poorer section will have the same voter turnout that they have always had (what are the figures for the last election? 20% or something like that?).
That is obviously undemocratic, and no sane politician would suggest implementing it. But, for some reason, when you change "wireless secure voting antenna" to "internet voting," people forget about it. But Internet access is still unevenly distributed across the economic scope of Americans, with the more wealthy spending far more time online per day than the less wealthy (think about it- what percent of people making over $100,000 a year have a computer with Internet access on their desks? What percent of people making $15,000 a year?). Online voting, even if implemented securely (which doesn't seem to be possible- security in voting means that you also have to be sure that nobody is buying votes, that the vote actually came from the person you think it is, not just their computer, and that a person votes only once, without at any point being able to link a person to a vote, authenticating that the person voting is eligible to vote, and a whole host of other problems that are not just a matter of finding a more secure crypto protocol) will actually tend away from democratic election and towards rule by people with easy ubiquitous internet access, which naturally are the IT professionals and not the grocery-store clerks.
In short, online voting is a bad idea that is impossible to implement anyway.
--
-jacob
As a matter of fact, it was from this site. The Internet Auditing Project, posted here on August 14, 1999. It's a really good article, certainly worth a read.
Your friendly karma whore,
--
-jacob
Compared to the vastly superior: ...
You meant to say vastly smaller. Whether it's superior or not depends on what you want to do. For example, your sample XML had 126 bytes more overhead than the equivalent HTTP, and 126 extra bytes is likely quite acceptable when sending documents that are usually several kilobytes in length, and those bytes buy you all sorts of XML goodies that the HTTP version doesn't have. On the other hand, if your document is on the order of a few bytes and you're sending a jillion of them, you clearly couldn't accept that much overhead.
--
-jacob
Knock the monkey flat on his ass next time. Junkbusters.
No, I don't work for them, yes I use it, and yes, it kicks major ass. I haven't seen an ad in months.
--
-jacob
Does anybody know any more about why the GA the researcher used had such a small population size? Population of 4 + 1 elite seems mighty small to me- 50 or 60 sounds more like it, even if it takes ten times longer per round to evaluate, because you typically want more diversity. Or in this problem did he find that the diversity wasn't worth it? Does anybody know?
--
-jacob
Well, as a matter of fact, PETA does have a right to trademark "PETA," and they do not have the right to stifle every organization that has uses "P," "E," "T," and "A," just the ones that try to use those letters to mislead people into thinking that they're going to PETA's web site. Just like you have the right to start a company called "Ich Bin Monkey!", but if you start selling products with the IBM logo, you may be in legal high water (the question would be whether or not your product is easily identifiable as a parody or not). And you can't sue someone else for having your name, but you can sue them for misleading people into thinking that they are you.
This can get tricky, particularly on the Internet- domain names are a rather low-bandwidth form of communication- but it would be silly to say that they don't have some sort of store-front quality to them. How should the law resolve that store-front nature, the legitimate confusion that will arise if an organization has a domain name that you would normally associate with another organization, and the heretofore separate namespaces of various organizations that now have to collide? That's the legal curiosity that this case highlights, though not particularly well. In this case, it was just some guy who was trying to piss off PETA and neglected to consider that PETA has a lot of money and not much sense of humor.
--
-jacob
Good point. Since the only three sites on the internet are peta.org, peta.com, and slashdot.org, taking peta.org from this guy was a crushing blow to his constitutional rights. I should have seen it all along.
.reg or something like that would be beneficial, though I'm not positive that that exact implementation is a good idea- there are a whole lot of registered trademarks in the world. I imagine that they're sometimes going to conflict.
The fact that those guys hacked slashdot long ago is what allowed you to hear their voices. The fact that spammers have your e-mail address is what allows you to hear their voices. If it were the 80's and I were use my cordless phone outside your window, your long-distance would be what allowed my friend in Japan to hear my voice. None of those things have more than a tangential relationship to free speech, though. Since there are legal ways for the PEatingTA guy to publish his parody, the argument that he had to have peta.org to be able to express his free speech is just silly. Sure, he had a prominent place for his parody, just as I would if I made parody CD's of Microsoft Windows and swapped out the real CD for my fake one in every Windows box (perhaps leaving a card so people could mail me and get the real one, to make the analogy a little more apt). Or, as I said before, if I were to steal your clothes to make my funny impression of you even funnier.
I certainly agree that some sort of
--
-jacob
Ah. Then you've never subscribed to the PETA magazine, then. Having been tangentially involved with PETA for a number of years, I can tell you that saying that PETA has some sort of hidden nefarious plot is sort of like saying that Sassy magazine is secretly trying to take over the world. They would never have the creativity or the balls to be what you're suggesting they are. They're utter airheads. Their idea of powerful activism is a mildly funny slogan next to a picture of a dead animal on a bumper-sticker. And besides, 95% of PETA members (my made-up figure) would be utterly aghast to even imagine that they could possibly be doing anything to support the ALF. And as I said elsewhere, "the ALF" is not really an anything, but rather a more-or-less make-believe organization that serves as an umbrella for people who are pissed off about animal rights and are willing to break the law- basically, that sort of people has got a pre-made name and logo all ready for them. Not that there does not exist any organization, but it's really not comparable to the IRA. (For example, on the ALF FAQ, they advise activists never to communicate any of their upcoming activities, only to communicate descriptions of what they've already done, anonymously, to a central repository. That is, nobody in "the ALF" has any idea what anybody else is going to do, or even who anybody else is.) And besides, none of PETA's money goes to anything remotely related to any known ALF activities. And, the PETA people publicly denounce violence in the name of animal rights all the time, both to the external world and internally. They sell books that denounce violence in the name of animal rights, too (of course, in the context of arguing for greater animal rights- I'm thinking of Peter Singer's Animal Liberation specifically, but there are others).
In short, the only thing that relates PETA to the ALF is that they both have the word "animal" in their names. (That, and I don't like either of them. But that's beside the point.)
--
-jacob
I am getting extremely sick of this, but since ignorance persists unchecked, I must push ever onward. I will say this slowly and clearly.
PETA did not sue peta.org over being an unflattering parody. They did not try to take away the peta.org maintainer's right to post to the Internet a parody of them. The idea that the maintainer of the peta.org web site has a Constitutional right to parody PETA was never questioned by anyone. He still has that right. He has not lost it. It is completely intact. If there's one thing that the peta.org maintainer has, it's the right to parody PETA.
Got it?
Now here's the tricky part: the domain name "peta.org" is not a parody of PETA, the organization. The information that your browser displays when it accesses that site may be, but the domain name is not. If the domain name itself were a parody of PETA in some way- say, perhaps, he registered "PETAphile.org" or "PETArd.org" or something- that would be a parody, and ought to be protected speech. But the name "peta.org" is not a parody, any more than "ibm.com" is a parody of IBM the computer company. ("Ha ha ha! Ed, look at this! 'peta.org'! That's hilarious! Man, they got PETA good by saying 'peta.org!'")
So---
those of you who are all smugly saying that PETA is a bunch of hypocrites for making use of parody themselves, maybe you should consider that perhaps a legal scholar such as a judge might possibly have understood the law better than you. Consider further what you would be posting now had Microsoft registered linux.org in 1995 and put anti-linux materials on it, and the judge had now ruled that Microsoft had to turn it over to Linus. (Saw that analogy elsewhere on this message board- good job, whoever came up with it.) Consider that perhaps you just think that the site was funny (which it was, of course) and that you dislike PETA because you disagree with their political views.
But even if you refuse to consider that, as I'm sure most of you will (this is Slashdot, after all) please please please for the love of God please stop confusing this case with a case that set some kind of precedent about whether you're allowed to parody something or not.
Note that this post in no way says that PETA ought to or ought not to be able to appropriate the 'peta.org' domain name from its prior owner. I'm just trying to establish where the legal argument actually is.
(By the way, to the author of the post I'm replying to- don't consider this a directed attack against you, but rather the result of me passing a critical threshold in reading what I saw as the same incorrect argument repeated one too many times just as I read your post. Nothing personal against you.)
--
-jacob
Both statements are extreme, but that does not necessarily make them untrue.
That, and saying either is likely to make reasonable people think you're an idiot.
--
-jacob
Perhaps you didn't read what I wrote. I was arguing that there is at least some prior precedent that says that you own your name, even in a new medium. The Toys 'R Us case way back when was an example of that. By that standard, even though PETA had not registered peta.org (it didn't cost money when this happened or I would say "laid down their $35" or whatever), they still own their name, and thus someone else using their name in a new medium could be construed as misusing something that rightfully belongs to them. Yes, this opens up a whole interesting can of legal worms- what about conflicting namespaces, under what conditions you lose the right to a name you've established somewhere else, etc etc etc. However, these are not issues of free speech, and since I was trying to establish that that this case is not, as the Slashdot population seems to think, a precedent against free speech, I think I've done my job.
--
-jacob
I didn't quote the dictionary for fun, I did it because the original poster asked me to define what a terrorist was. So I gave him a definition. That's all. By going into more detail I was trying to show what a ridiculous statement it really was: the IRA is a terrorist group and the PLO has been a terrorist group. PETA is not and has never been a terrorist group. The fact that that some members have on occasion thrown pies and paint at a few people doesn't mean that you shouldn't feel safe turning the keys in your ignition tomorrow morning because you're afraid that PETA's gonna get you.
--
-jacob
Read what I said again. Anyone who decides they're part of the ALF is part of the ALF. Saying "they" did something is not meaningful.
--
-jacob
Actually, the "Hitler was a vegetarian" thing isn't quite true.
--
-jacob
Should have said this the first time:
:)
About the ALF, they're not exactly a terrorist organization. They're a kind-of quasi-terrorist quasi-organization. For one thing, there is no such thing as "the ALF," IIRC: if you do anything illegal to mess with the meat/animal exploitation industries, you become part of the ALF just by claiming you are. There isn't any central organization. However, one of the rules is that you can't actually hurt any animals, "human or otherwise," though you are allowed (and encouraged) to damage property. Not quite terrorism in the traditional sense, because the people who came up with the ALF definitely did not want to hurt people physically, only economically.
So, like I say, they're kind of terrorists and kind of an organization. They also have a cool logo.
--
-jacob