It is their job to go out and read stories from around the world and present the facts to me in a way that I feel is relatively objective.
I think you make an excellent point about the reliability of the major news services; they do the job better than I ever could, and since there are so many eyes looking at them they're subject to to at least some review.
I like the idea of P2P-style (which is to say decentralized) news sources, however, because on this side of the pond our mass-media outlets are becoming increasingly concentrated into the hands of an ever-shrinking pool of owners (I'm too hungry to find links, google for your own evidence - if I'm wrong I'll concede the point). Most of us still trust them, but when all of the radio stations, television stations, and newspapers are owned by the same three or four grandparent corporations (which may not have happened yet, but probably isn't too far away) their motives and their objectivity become increasingly suspect.
Particularly when those organizations do a lot of heavy lobbying to influence the government they are supposed to be watchdogging.
The Dalai LLama ...just my.02 - IANAJ (I am not a journalist)...
Narrator: "A new car built by my company
leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The
automatic driver alert/lane correction system locks up. The car crashes
and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now:
should we initiate a recall? Take the number
of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the
probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the
average out-of-court settlement, C. A times
B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost
of a recall, we don't do one."
Business woman on plane: "Are there a lot of
these kinds of accidents?"
Narrator: "You wouldn't believe."
Business woman on plane: "Which car company do
you work for?"
Narrator: "A major one."
The Dalai Llama ...yeah, yeah, I know... but how much bandwidth did it really waste?...
At this point in the discussion I doubt this will be read by anyone, but I'm going to tell the story anyway.
At the tail end of a stint in the Marines (too short to deploy) I got shipped to a headquarters unit personnel office that had a bunch of computers networked to a couple of shared printers. Since I knew the most about computers (which isn't saying much) people often asked me to help them with small problems.
One of the corporals came to me once and said that her computer wouldn't print. I walked over, fiddled with everything I knew to fiddle with, and when that didn't help I turned to religion.
"Corporal," I said, "Papa Legba is the voodoo god of the crossroads; all communication falls into his domain and he is displeased. We must make a sacrifice. Do you have a floppy disk that you are not using?" She gave me a 3.5" disk, which I held in the air and then tore open. I used a ballpoint pen to mark some arcane-looking but utterly meaningless symbols on the disk's medium, then had her tape it to the side of her monitor. I told her to try it again.
Of course, when she tried again it printed with no problem. I have no idea what changed, but as I walked back to my desk she told me that I was the weirdest man she had ever met.
The "sacrifice" was still taped to the monitor when I rotated out three months later.
The Dalai Llama ...probably reading "Count Zero" at the time...
Conveying this to the Canadian and British authorities is a reasonable activity for our National Security Agency.
You make an excellent and valid point, and I will concede that my intial post was too rabid and vague. Yes, I know that the people arrested were not American citizens.
The intent of my original post was to convey my belief that the U.S. government is going to continue to do everything that it can to increase and expand its ability to limit the rights of its own citizens in the interest of national security.
Was this article perhaps a bad choice to make my point? Maybe. Does the NSA collaborate with agencies that do have the power to fuck up my freedoms? I don't know for sure, but I think they probably do and I'm not alone. Did the NSA do a good thing by catching some bad guys? Yes. Unquestionably. Hooray for us- we got the bad guys.
The tricky part is that I don't get to pick who the bad guys are. You don't either, by the way. The people in power do, and their definition of a bad guy may not always agree with ours.
Muhammad Ah-Ragheed: definitely a bad guy and a terrorist. We should do everything we can to ensure that terrorists don't communicate, don't publish, and don't assemble. If that means limiting some rights or infringing on some freedoms, hey, it's better than a nice cold glass of Anthrax. Go for it.
Joe Smith who believes that income taxes are unconstitutional and won't recognize the authority of any federal court: terrorist. Citizen of the great state of Montana, but he's a terrorist so fuck him and his rights. The NSA can't touch him, but they can hand over their files regarding his correspondence with a source of Canadian prescription drugs to the FBI, which calls into question all of his correspondence and telephone calls, which clearly calls for a wiretap (which the FBI can put in place without any judicial oversight cause, hey, he's a terrorist), which brings to light the fact that he purchased twice as much fertilizer as his 20-acre farm requires, and of course we all know that fertilizer contains ammonium nitrate, which clearly indicates that he's planning a terrorist attack so we get to sieze all of his assests (farm, car, computer, money, etc.) because if we can do it for drug dealers we sure as hell should be able to do it for terrorists, and we'll just go ahead and hold him for a while without actually charging him with anything, I mean, hey, he's a terrorist right?
Bob Jones: terrorist? He met Joe Smith at a gun show and Bob collects a lot of guns. Let's look at him, too. After all, he associates with terrorists.
Oh, did I mention that Bob and Joe both went to a meeting of the local John Birch society? Obviously it's a terrorist organization, so let's disband it.
What you should be concerned about is that a "Lefty" like me might become Attorney General someday. There have been a number of abortion clinics bombed, let's go ahead and put Christians on the "Terrorist" list.
THAT was the original purpose of my post (and, yes, it was sarcasm). It's great that the NSA can fuck up terrorists, and I'm all for that, but when people think that arguments like this:
What if you, or your wife, ended up killed or injured as a result of these towelheads carrying out their plans? Would you still say "OH THANK GOD WE PRESERVED THEIR PRIVACY! YAY!!!"
constitute a valid reason to limit people's rights then we're all in trouble.
The Dalai Llama ...chose to spend four distinguished years as an 03 and did my time on M.O.P. 13 before Gitmo became the hip party spot of the Carribbean so FUCK YOU to anybody who wants to question my patriotism...I believe in freedom.
Golly, headlines like these sure make me glad the United States is just as keen as ever on ensuring that every citizen is afforded due process, has equal access to the law, and that all of the constitutional safeguards protecting our civil liberties will remain in full force.
I know I'm relieved. This type of activity might be really dangerous in the hands of a government that didn't believe in its citizens rights and privacies.
The Dalai Llama I know that I, for one, would certainly sleep better if Ashcroft were head of the NSA...
When I bought my home computer (about 3 years ago), I tried to get into Linux on the advice of my friend. I bought the $45 book-and-CD with the Penguin on the cover, but it was just too overwhelming (command-line what?!?) and I never gave it a fair shot.
Fast-forward 3 years: While trying to get an old (12MB-hard-drive old) laptop going, I heard that Linux was good for older hardware and went to the local LUG meeting where somebody gave me a copy of Knoppix (Psst... over here...Yeah, you... Try it, you'll like it!...The first one's free... all the cool kids are doing it...You wanna be cool, don't you?!?!). Less than six-months later, I use Linux almost exclusively at home.
Critical factors for the Linux switch made by my non-technical ass:
Risk-free trial that is jaw-droppingly cool when it boots up (don't ever undestimate the impact that Knoppix's "Holy crap, that's cool!" start-up routine has on non-technical users). (It also helped that all I had to do was enter my username and password for Knoppix to find my PPP-whatever connection and hook me up to the internet - if that had been a pain in the ass I probably wouldn't have given Linux a second shot).
Free Software (Free GIMP vs. $600 Photoshop)
EASE OF INSTALLATION (I'm using Arklinux)
Stability (Nice computer: $2000; Operating System: $0; Never having to reboot: Fucking Priceless)
Better Software (If Fire-whatever is this cool on Windows, maybe the rest of this "open-source" stuff is worth a look)
*For what it's worth: Security was not on my list prior to making the switch.
That's my experience. Every day Linux becomes not only a truly viable option for more people, but also a truly attractive option for more people.
The Dalai Llama keep your damn command line - I want pretty colors, lots of nifty boxes, and everthing should be accessed through pretty little buttons that look like shiny pieces of candy...
I buy singles because I want the remixes. Lots of good Seal singles out there, but I skip over the ones that are only the single - I already own the CD.
You raise an excellent point, and I do still buy singles, but I think that only serves to emphasize the fact that singles today are not the same as the singles of yesterday.
I put the line about the Chuck Berry 45's in there because I often see allusions to singles in that format. I gather (I wasn't around) that the intent of those singles was to make popular songs available to people who didn't want to buy (or couldn't afford) the full album, and to further the public's familiarity with the artist in question. Today, it seems that most people I talk to buy only the singles of artists that we are already familiar with. You'll buy Seal singles for the remixes and I'll spend $7.00 to hear Tori Amos covering a Tom Waits song, but most people aren't using singles to become familiar with new music.
That function has largely been supplanted by P2P.
I don't listen to the radio, so I've never actually heard the Outkast song "Hey, Ya", but I would like to. I would be willing to go down to Hastings and drop 3 bones on the single, but the last few times I've tried that approach it turned into a nightmare. In the end, I'll wind up checking it out on the net. Outkast's record company not only won't get my three bucks, they'll spend $6 prosecuting the person who made it available to me and $2 more publicizing their repudiation of the parent story.
The Dalai Llama willing to pay a fair price, like most music listeners...
I can believe CD singles have been decimated by P2P filesharing,
I'm sure that your two-cents' worth is absolutely correct regarding the effect that filesharing has had on the sale of singles, but I would also like to add my own pennies and say that I think the sale of singles was already on the skids before P2P made the scene.
Warning: rant commencing in 5...4...3...2...1...
In my experience (i.e. - Take it for what it's worth; I'm not gonna research a bunch of statistics right now and this rant was spawned by a number of incredibly frustrating attempts to go out and buy the single versions of songs that I liked), many albums (dare I say most) only have one or two good tracks anyway. Selling a cheap single of the one track that people will pay to hear probably cuts into the sale of the full album, which many people will buy anyway just to hear the one or two tracks that they like! In addition to that, CD singles cost upwards of $5 (YMMV), so there wasn't a whole lot of incentive to buy them even before P2P. A $6.99 single is an hour's wages for most of Britney's target market, and the added value of some pop princess doing a crappy B-Side live cover of a Stones song that her producer suggested (after telling her who the Rolling Stones are), is not enough incentive to pony up for a single.
Your.02 plus my.02 equals 4 cents that I would rather use as a suppository than contribute to the Rectal Invasion and Assault Association.
The Dalai LLama what the hell happened the old Chuck Berry 45's?
The free advertising is great, the problem comes when your quality name becomes widely associated with shoddy products.
Example (completely fictitious and anecdotal): You spend a lot of time and resources to ensure that your Trampoline(tm) brand exercise products are fun and safe, but you don't pay enough attention to keep your trademarked name secure. The Profit-From-Kidz corporation releases a line of shoddy trampolines responsible for the deaths of 35 tots (really cute, photogenic tots). Global headlines trumpet the dangers of "trampolines", the market collapses, your company folds. If your trademarked name had been protected, headlines about the dangers of the Profit-From-Kidz Suspended Exercise Spring Mat would have had much less impact on your business.
Why do you think the makers of a certain type of interlocking construction toy are so rabid about protecting their trademarks? The PR difference between a headline about a child choking on a "construction brick" and a child choking on a Lego(tm - please don't sue me) is huge.
The Dalai Llama when my cult goes international, I'll want 25 cents everytime somebody says llama...
Now that search has been monetized, the next battleground for big money is in comparison shopping
I may be a little too cynical, but I use Google about a googillion times a day, and the more references I see about the search engines becoming the next playing field for big-money, the more afraid I become. A handful of paid advertisements on the right side of the screen are fine, but with the evil empire stating that they don't want me to be able to even get on the net without seeing a Microsoft ad and all the big money playaz making major announcements about their intent to dominate the search engine field, all I see are bad things headed our way.
A lot of people are spending a lot of money to break in, and there wouldn't be this much interest without some really good plans for making us pay for all of it.
The Dalai Llama remember when MTV used to play music videos?
I'm not up on all the latest crypto/privacy issues, but it seems to me the relative anonymity afforded by the internet would also be a major boon to anyone trying to spread subversive ideas.
The Dalai Llama well, I know, but nobody else mentioned it...
I don't want to get hysterical and overdramatic, but I think this is an issue of freedom of speech.
The greatest thing about the internet is its ability to put real power in the hands of the average citizen. Look at the Russian motorcycle chick's Chernobyl photos to see an example of just how much potential there is for the average person.
I don't know, but I imagine that Hard OCP has its roots with some average guys who thought it would be cool to put out a gaming review and news site. Simple, not much at stake, no big deal.
Except that these guys and their little gaming site brought forth some information that exposed a company that could have been (may still be?) on the way to screwing over average guys like me.
A fairly small site (I'm sure they're big in gaming circles, but they're not CNN or even Hard Copy) harnessed the power of the internet to do this, and it's power that we all have access to. What's at stake here (and I know that this particular lawsuit seems ridiculous) is a precedent that could potentially scare off the average person from attempting to use the power that is at our fingertips.
I can't afford a lawyer to defend against this kind of stuff. The threat of legal action would probably be enough to deter me: I can't afford to risk my home or my car over a BS lawsuit that I wouldn't have the money to even try to mount a defense against.
The Dalai Llama stepping down from his favorite soapbox...
Their website is gorgeous. Takes forever to load, but the eye-candy is sweet.
I'm not a cool-guy web designer, but they list a "Pentium III" as a site requirement. I can't recall seeing another site that listed a processing requirement. Is that legit?
Also interesting to note that, according to the Phantom.net branch of their site,
"On
March 31st, 2004 you will be able to build your high-octane Phantom Game System and for a limited time only purchase lifetime subscriptions." [emphasis added by me]
The Dalai Llama constantly amazed at just how far people will go to get press...wait a minute, nobody visits my site, either. If you're reading this sig, expect to be contacted by my legal team.
That the story is powerful and compelling has been stated by people far more insightful and eloquent than me, but something that I haven't seen is anybody pointing out the fact that we are able to read it at all.
This story is the most perfect example I have seen of how the internet puts the awesome power of truly global communication into the hands of the average person.
These pictures weren't distributed by Clear Channel, the Associated Press, or CNN. Some Russian chick just gassed up her scoot and created a world-class photo essay that thousands of people around the world are able to appreciate for nothing. I mean, for the love of Pete, they're posted on Angelfire!
For what it's worth, this is my yardstick for what is or isn't moral in a post-religious (pan-religious?) society:
Does it infringe on the rights of someone else?
Simple, but (at least for me) it works as far as legislation goes. Killing someone is wrong. Why? Because it infringes on his rights. Homosexuality between consenting adults (in so far as the law is concerned) is not wrong. Why? Nobody's rights are being violated.
My own personal code of ethics is based on another principle: be nice to people. Equally simple and useful as a personal code, but not much good at instructing legislation, unfortunately.
The Dalai Llama a watched sig never gets modded...
I hate to feed the trolls but, goddamn, I just can't let it pass...
He says:
"Most attacks fail during the period of vulnerability."
So you say:
"I expect mindbending insights like: "- Most people die only once - The sun rises at or around sunrise"
So I have to say:
How did you manage to read the sentence you're attacking without managing to read the preceding paragraph where he specifically defined the "period of vulnerability"? He even put it in quotation marks for you:
Special operations types talk about the "period of vulnerability", which begins when the defender notices an attack and ends when the attacker achieves relative superiority.
The entire phrase carries the meaning, not just the word "vulnerability".
You're like a street urchin throwing rocks at an advancing armored column.
The Dalai Llama incidentally, grandparent was a hell of a good post
Slashdot Mirror
I think you make an excellent point about the reliability of the major news services; they do the job better than I ever could, and since there are so many eyes looking at them they're subject to to at least some review.
I like the idea of P2P-style (which is to say decentralized) news sources, however, because on this side of the pond our mass-media outlets are becoming increasingly concentrated into the hands of an ever-shrinking pool of owners (I'm too hungry to find links, google for your own evidence - if I'm wrong I'll concede the point). Most of us still trust them, but when all of the radio stations, television stations, and newspapers are owned by the same three or four grandparent corporations (which may not have happened yet, but probably isn't too far away) their motives and their objectivity become increasingly suspect.
Particularly when those organizations do a lot of heavy lobbying to influence the government they are supposed to be watchdogging.
The Dalai LLama
...just my .02 - IANAJ (I am not a journalist)...
I would also be interested in seeing proof that MS gives licenses to American Non-Profit Orgs, since we've been paying for all of ours.
The Dalai LLama
... the non-profit world: innovators in the fine art of doing more with less...
Hasn't Linux had a similar program in place for a while now?
The Dalai Llama
...nevermind...
Speaking of "somebody had to say it..."
The Dalai Llama
...yeah, yeah, I know... but how much bandwidth did it really waste?...
At this point in the discussion I doubt this will be read by anyone, but I'm going to tell the story anyway.
At the tail end of a stint in the Marines (too short to deploy) I got shipped to a headquarters unit personnel office that had a bunch of computers networked to a couple of shared printers. Since I knew the most about computers (which isn't saying much) people often asked me to help them with small problems.
One of the corporals came to me once and said that her computer wouldn't print. I walked over, fiddled with everything I knew to fiddle with, and when that didn't help I turned to religion.
"Corporal," I said, "Papa Legba is the voodoo god of the crossroads; all communication falls into his domain and he is displeased. We must make a sacrifice. Do you have a floppy disk that you are not using?" She gave me a 3.5" disk, which I held in the air and then tore open. I used a ballpoint pen to mark some arcane-looking but utterly meaningless symbols on the disk's medium, then had her tape it to the side of her monitor. I told her to try it again.
Of course, when she tried again it printed with no problem. I have no idea what changed, but as I walked back to my desk she told me that I was the weirdest man she had ever met.
The "sacrifice" was still taped to the monitor when I rotated out three months later.
The Dalai Llama
...probably reading "Count Zero" at the time...
You make an excellent and valid point, and I will concede that my intial post was too rabid and vague. Yes, I know that the people arrested were not American citizens.
The intent of my original post was to convey my belief that the U.S. government is going to continue to do everything that it can to increase and expand its ability to limit the rights of its own citizens in the interest of national security.
Was this article perhaps a bad choice to make my point? Maybe. Does the NSA collaborate with agencies that do have the power to fuck up my freedoms? I don't know for sure, but I think they probably do and I'm not alone. Did the NSA do a good thing by catching some bad guys? Yes. Unquestionably. Hooray for us- we got the bad guys.
The tricky part is that I don't get to pick who the bad guys are. You don't either, by the way. The people in power do, and their definition of a bad guy may not always agree with ours.
Muhammad Ah-Ragheed: definitely a bad guy and a terrorist. We should do everything we can to ensure that terrorists don't communicate, don't publish, and don't assemble. If that means limiting some rights or infringing on some freedoms, hey, it's better than a nice cold glass of Anthrax. Go for it.
Joe Smith who believes that income taxes are unconstitutional and won't recognize the authority of any federal court: terrorist. Citizen of the great state of Montana, but he's a terrorist so fuck him and his rights. The NSA can't touch him, but they can hand over their files regarding his correspondence with a source of Canadian prescription drugs to the FBI, which calls into question all of his correspondence and telephone calls, which clearly calls for a wiretap (which the FBI can put in place without any judicial oversight cause, hey, he's a terrorist), which brings to light the fact that he purchased twice as much fertilizer as his 20-acre farm requires, and of course we all know that fertilizer contains ammonium nitrate, which clearly indicates that he's planning a terrorist attack so we get to sieze all of his assests (farm, car, computer, money, etc.) because if we can do it for drug dealers we sure as hell should be able to do it for terrorists, and we'll just go ahead and hold him for a while without actually charging him with anything, I mean, hey, he's a terrorist right?
Bob Jones: terrorist? He met Joe Smith at a gun show and Bob collects a lot of guns. Let's look at him, too. After all, he associates with terrorists.
Oh, did I mention that Bob and Joe both went to a meeting of the local John Birch society? Obviously it's a terrorist organization, so let's disband it.
What you should be concerned about is that a "Lefty" like me might become Attorney General someday. There have been a number of abortion clinics bombed, let's go ahead and put Christians on the "Terrorist" list.
THAT was the original purpose of my post (and, yes, it was sarcasm). It's great that the NSA can fuck up terrorists, and I'm all for that, but when people think that arguments like this:
constitute a valid reason to limit people's rights then we're all in trouble.The Dalai Llama
...chose to spend four distinguished years as an 03 and did my time on M.O.P. 13 before Gitmo became the hip party spot of the Carribbean so FUCK YOU to anybody who wants to question my patriotism...I believe in freedom.
Thanks for the link. You answered my question before it even got posted.
The Dalai Llama
This sounds like Echelon stuff. Is "Project Echelon" a real deal or is that a bed-time story for the tin-foil hat crowd?
The Dalai Llama
they're listening to me right now...
Golly, headlines like these sure make me glad the United States is just as keen as ever on ensuring that every citizen is afforded due process, has equal access to the law, and that all of the constitutional safeguards protecting our civil liberties will remain in full force.
I know I'm relieved. This type of activity might be really dangerous in the hands of a government that didn't believe in its citizens rights and privacies.
The Dalai Llama
I know that I, for one, would certainly sleep better if Ashcroft were head of the NSA...
Awww...shucks. I'm flattered.
Consider it a GPL'd sig. Use it however you want, but if you profit from its use I demand the phone numbers of three hot Australian goth chicks.
The Dalai Llama
I think Linux has come a long way.
When I bought my home computer (about 3 years ago), I tried to get into Linux on the advice of my friend. I bought the $45 book-and-CD with the Penguin on the cover, but it was just too overwhelming (command-line what?!?) and I never gave it a fair shot.
Fast-forward 3 years: While trying to get an old (12MB-hard-drive old) laptop going, I heard that Linux was good for older hardware and went to the local LUG meeting where somebody gave me a copy of Knoppix (Psst... over here...Yeah, you... Try it, you'll like it!...The first one's free... all the cool kids are doing it...You wanna be cool, don't you?!?!). Less than six-months later, I use Linux almost exclusively at home.
Critical factors for the Linux switch made by my non-technical ass:
That's my experience. Every day Linux becomes not only a truly viable option for more people, but also a truly attractive option for more people.
The Dalai Llama
keep your damn command line - I want pretty colors, lots of nifty boxes, and everthing should be accessed through pretty little buttons that look like shiny pieces of candy...
You raise an excellent point, and I do still buy singles, but I think that only serves to emphasize the fact that singles today are not the same as the singles of yesterday.
I put the line about the Chuck Berry 45's in there because I often see allusions to singles in that format. I gather (I wasn't around) that the intent of those singles was to make popular songs available to people who didn't want to buy (or couldn't afford) the full album, and to further the public's familiarity with the artist in question. Today, it seems that most people I talk to buy only the singles of artists that we are already familiar with. You'll buy Seal singles for the remixes and I'll spend $7.00 to hear Tori Amos covering a Tom Waits song, but most people aren't using singles to become familiar with new music.
That function has largely been supplanted by P2P.
I don't listen to the radio, so I've never actually heard the Outkast song "Hey, Ya", but I would like to. I would be willing to go down to Hastings and drop 3 bones on the single, but the last few times I've tried that approach it turned into a nightmare. In the end, I'll wind up checking it out on the net. Outkast's record company not only won't get my three bucks, they'll spend $6 prosecuting the person who made it available to me and $2 more publicizing their repudiation of the parent story.
The Dalai Llama
willing to pay a fair price, like most music listeners...
I'm sure that your two-cents' worth is absolutely correct regarding the effect that filesharing has had on the sale of singles, but I would also like to add my own pennies and say that I think the sale of singles was already on the skids before P2P made the scene.
Warning: rant commencing in 5...4...3...2...1...In my experience (i.e. - Take it for what it's worth; I'm not gonna research a bunch of statistics right now and this rant was spawned by a number of incredibly frustrating attempts to go out and buy the single versions of songs that I liked), many albums (dare I say most) only have one or two good tracks anyway. Selling a cheap single of the one track that people will pay to hear probably cuts into the sale of the full album, which many people will buy anyway just to hear the one or two tracks that they like! In addition to that, CD singles cost upwards of $5 (YMMV), so there wasn't a whole lot of incentive to buy them even before P2P. A $6.99 single is an hour's wages for most of Britney's target market, and the added value of some pop princess doing a crappy B-Side live cover of a Stones song that her producer suggested (after telling her who the Rolling Stones are), is not enough incentive to pony up for a single.
Your .02 plus my .02 equals 4 cents that I would rather use as a suppository than contribute to the Rectal Invasion and Assault Association.
The Dalai LLama
what the hell happened the old Chuck Berry 45's?
The free advertising is great, the problem comes when your quality name becomes widely associated with shoddy products.
Example (completely fictitious and anecdotal): You spend a lot of time and resources to ensure that your Trampoline(tm) brand exercise products are fun and safe, but you don't pay enough attention to keep your trademarked name secure. The Profit-From-Kidz corporation releases a line of shoddy trampolines responsible for the deaths of 35 tots (really cute, photogenic tots). Global headlines trumpet the dangers of "trampolines", the market collapses, your company folds. If your trademarked name had been protected, headlines about the dangers of the Profit-From-Kidz Suspended Exercise Spring Mat would have had much less impact on your business.
Why do you think the makers of a certain type of interlocking construction toy are so rabid about protecting their trademarks? The PR difference between a headline about a child choking on a "construction brick" and a child choking on a Lego(tm - please don't sue me) is huge.
The Dalai Llama
when my cult goes international, I'll want 25 cents everytime somebody says llama...
I may be a little too cynical, but I use Google about a googillion times a day, and the more references I see about the search engines becoming the next playing field for big-money, the more afraid I become. A handful of paid advertisements on the right side of the screen are fine, but with the evil empire stating that they don't want me to be able to even get on the net without seeing a Microsoft ad and all the big money playaz making major announcements about their intent to dominate the search engine field, all I see are bad things headed our way.
A lot of people are spending a lot of money to break in, and there wouldn't be this much interest without some really good plans for making us pay for all of it.
The Dalai Llama
remember when MTV used to play music videos?
I'm not up on all the latest crypto/privacy issues, but it seems to me the relative anonymity afforded by the internet would also be a major boon to anyone trying to spread subversive ideas.
The Dalai Llama
well, I know, but nobody else mentioned it...
I don't want to get hysterical and overdramatic, but I think this is an issue of freedom of speech.
The greatest thing about the internet is its ability to put real power in the hands of the average citizen. Look at the Russian motorcycle chick's Chernobyl photos to see an example of just how much potential there is for the average person.
I don't know, but I imagine that Hard OCP has its roots with some average guys who thought it would be cool to put out a gaming review and news site. Simple, not much at stake, no big deal.
Except that these guys and their little gaming site brought forth some information that exposed a company that could have been (may still be?) on the way to screwing over average guys like me.
A fairly small site (I'm sure they're big in gaming circles, but they're not CNN or even Hard Copy) harnessed the power of the internet to do this, and it's power that we all have access to. What's at stake here (and I know that this particular lawsuit seems ridiculous) is a precedent that could potentially scare off the average person from attempting to use the power that is at our fingertips.
I can't afford a lawyer to defend against this kind of stuff. The threat of legal action would probably be enough to deter me: I can't afford to risk my home or my car over a BS lawsuit that I wouldn't have the money to even try to mount a defense against.
The Dalai Llama
stepping down from his favorite soapbox...
Cool. Thank you for the response.
The Dalai LLama
learning something new every day is never a problem when you're as ignorant as I am...
Their website is gorgeous. Takes forever to load, but the eye-candy is sweet.
I'm not a cool-guy web designer, but they list a "Pentium III" as a site requirement. I can't recall seeing another site that listed a processing requirement. Is that legit?
Also interesting to note that, according to the Phantom.net branch of their site,
The Dalai Llama
constantly amazed at just how far people will go to get press...wait a minute, nobody visits my site, either. If you're reading this sig, expect to be contacted by my legal team.
That the story is powerful and compelling has been stated by people far more insightful and eloquent than me, but something that I haven't seen is anybody pointing out the fact that we are able to read it at all.
This story is the most perfect example I have seen of how the internet puts the awesome power of truly global communication into the hands of the average person.
These pictures weren't distributed by Clear Channel, the Associated Press, or CNN. Some Russian chick just gassed up her scoot and created a world-class photo essay that thousands of people around the world are able to appreciate for nothing. I mean, for the love of Pete, they're posted on Angelfire!
The Dalai LLama
power to the people, indeed...
Damn you for beating me to it!
Herbert Kornfeld is the guy's name.
The Dalai LLama
don't forget to guard yo' grill against dem computa bitchez...
if you must, but someone's gotta do it.
Brick Testament
Abston Church of Christ
Brick Movies
The Dalai LLama
glad his kid's old enough to start digging on Legos
For what it's worth, this is my yardstick for what is or isn't moral in a post-religious (pan-religious?) society:
Does it infringe on the rights of someone else?
Simple, but (at least for me) it works as far as legislation goes. Killing someone is wrong. Why? Because it infringes on his rights. Homosexuality between consenting adults (in so far as the law is concerned) is not wrong. Why? Nobody's rights are being violated.
My own personal code of ethics is based on another principle: be nice to people. Equally simple and useful as a personal code, but not much good at instructing legislation, unfortunately.
The Dalai Llama
a watched sig never gets modded...
I hate to feed the trolls but, goddamn, I just can't let it pass...
He says:
So you say:
So I have to say:
How did you manage to read the sentence you're attacking without managing to read the preceding paragraph where he specifically defined the "period of vulnerability"? He even put it in quotation marks for you:
The entire phrase carries the meaning, not just the word "vulnerability".
You're like a street urchin throwing rocks at an advancing armored column.
The Dalai Llama
incidentally, grandparent was a hell of a good post
Did I really just read that?!?
The Dalai LLama
A watched post never gets modded...