No, they didn't say it's true. They talked to a number of hotel representatives who said it was not true and never had been, and the only person claiming it had ever been true (but wasn't any more) was someone with the Pasadena police department who apparently didn't even have firsthand knowledge of the matter.
And given how long that scare story has been around, you'd think that if it was true, there would have been numerous examples of that data being exploited. Crooks do things as technically elaborate as putting little scanners over the slots on ATMs, so they'd certainly be taking and using the keycard information if it was there. The fact that while there have been many case of things like ATM-mounted scanners, entire fake online businesses, phishing sites, and various other ways of getting card numbers, but no reports of this happening with a hotel keycard in the years since that email started circulating, gives a lot of support to the contention that it's just another groundless scare story.
It's quite easy, with a bit of practice, to learn to memorize credit card numbers for a few minutes. It's a fairly common way for credit card numbers to be stolen, in fact. Remember the customer's name and hometown and the phone book can provide his address, phone number, etc. Unscrupulous employees can memorize your card number while you're standing right there, and remember it long enough to write it down where you can't see them.
I remember, about ten years ago, a housemate who worked at a store in a mall talking about the exciting thing that had happened at work that day: the cops arresting an acquaintance who worked in a nearby store. Seems she had been doing exactly that -- memorizing CC numbers -- and was stupid enough to try to use one to pay for a purchase at the store where she worked. She got caught ringing up her own purchase (against store policy) and the jig was up.
If I distribute a web browser that has includes a handy way for any random person on the planet who knows the right port number to connect and have full privileged access to your system, but I ignore or deny reports that it exists, then that is not a "vendor-confirmed vulnerability" in Symantec's terms. Counting the number of flaws that Mozilla admits to (all of them) versus the number that Microsoft admits to (a minority of them) is not a valid comparison.
Unless you're Symantec, which has been in bed with Microsoft for a very long time, primarily because there is very little market for their products in a Linux-centered world.
So this guy puts up a website on the World Wide Web and expects it to be a totally standalone structure, with nobody linking to it, because, y'know, it's not like the Web involves, y'know, like, links or anything.
And when he finds that not only has someone done this terrible thing and linked to him, but they're sending traffic to his website, and you know that's not what this Web thing is is all about, he decides that instead of contacting the company and telling them he really wants to keep his public website a secret, so please don't link to it, he's gonna try to upset that company's customers' children: the people who had the least to do with the decision to do such a terrible thing as linking to another website. And when he succeeds at that, he brags about making little kids cry.
And some of you people think this is a GOOD THING?
Leaving out the fact that this guy, to start with, was committing major copyright infringement, I've seen people here saying that Fuddrucker's should not have linked to his website, they should have stolen his content instead, and put it on their own server. Excuse me? Now that is wrong. You don't jack other people's content, you link to it. Links are the whole bloody point of the Web in the first place.
By their actions ye shall know them... and someone who brags about making little kids cry is not someone I want to know.
There are roughly 25 million businesses in the US alone. Let's say each of them sent just one spam per year. Let's also assume that your software automatically junks any further mail from someone who has spammed you already. That would be 68,493 emails hitting you per day.
Let's say you could opt out at the rate of one every 5 seconds. That would be 12 per minute, 720 per hour, or 28,800 per 40-hour work week.
Assuming you take a couple of weeks vacation a year, in 50 weeks you can deal with 1,440,000 out of the 25,000,000 spam emails you got this year.
At that rate, it will take you 17.36 years to opt out of just the first year's spam.
But wait! There's more! New businesses open up every year. Just pulling a number out of the air here, let's say that they are established (and send out their annual spam) at a rate of 1 million per year. So by the time you've cleaned out your first year's spam, you have 17,360,000 more to go.
That's another 12 years of opting out... at the end of which you have 12,055,555 more... 8.37 more years... another 5.8 years... another 4 years... another 2.8 years... another 1.9 years... another 1.35 years... at the end of which, you're actually caught up.
So, 53 years from the date every business in the USA sent you one single spam, you've finally opted out of all of their lists.
You're still getting new ones, of course, at a rate of 2,740 per day, or 4,000 per working day. The first five and a half hours of every working day -- 70% of your workday -- you spend cleaning that day's spam out of your work email account. When you get home, you spend another 3.8 hours cleaning your home account.
And that's assuming ONLY spam from US-based spammers, and ONLY one from each, and ALL of them honor opt-out instructions (which are, of course, usually just verification of a live address)
53 years to opt out of all of it.
If you start work at age 18, you'll be 71... past when most people retire... by the time you're breaking even on the spam. (and still, remember, opting out for 5.5 hours a day, and 3.8 more at home)
The Yes-You-Can-Spam act was a Bad Thing.
I want to be able to use my emailbox for EMAIL. Not to provide free advertising services for companies I want nothing whatsoever to do with.
I can refill my inkjet cartridges cheaply. Refilling color laser toner is not an option.
I looked into getting a color laser ($300 at Sam's Club) before my most recent inkjet ($69 at Circuit city) and also investigated the price of replacement toner cartridges for when the "starter" ones included with it ran out. After thinking of how many bottles of ink, and the occasional new cartridge when the actual print mechanism begins to wear, I could get for the cost of a full set of color toner cartridges (roughly the price of the laser printer) I decided to stick with my b&w laser and buy a color inkjet.
That said, the article impressed me as being utterly terrible. It was amateurishly written, the kind of thing I expect to see in linkfarm pages or high school newspapers. It didn't provide much useful information. It mostly said "look at the specs and see if they match what you need" over and over again in many different ways. If there was something about, for instance, how to calculate TCO when comparing printers, I missed it. (the fact that the site is being heavily slashdotted at the moment doesn't help) I fail to see how this article was deemed worthy of a link from Slashdot, especially since most of the readers could have written it, and written it better besides.
Remeber, the who point of capitalism is that if the telco's start to get greedy and turn up the prices too much, some other company will come along and find a way to provide the same or better service for a lower price. There's a natural equilibrium.
The telcos were given, by the government, a monopoly on telephone service. They had government assent, and in some cases assistance, in installing their infrastructure. They had an advantage that no competitor could possibly have. This advantage raises the cost of entry to the market to staggering levels. A classic free market depends on that market being accessible to competitors -- and due to the required and pre-existing infrastructure, this one isn't.
No company is going to be able to install the nationwide infrastructure that the telcos have -- it would be a multi-trillion-dollar investment if it was even possible given the amount of disruption to everyday life (digging up streets, etc.) that would be required. It was built piece by piece during the monopoly era, funded by a combination of tax money and monopoly profits, over a period of 90 years. The only way to participate in the DSL market is through the existing infrastructure.
To anyone who thinks Bell Telephone was a benign monopoly, well, you're wrong. I remember all too well the days when you had one choice of long distance carrier -- AT&T -- and you paid whatever they felt like charging. I remember when a 3-minute call to a town 15 miles away cost $1.63 (my parents made sure I'd remember). I remember when you were legally prohibited from owning a telephone; you had to rent them from the phone company, and since they had a monopoly there, too, they had no reason to offer anything more than desk, wall, and "princess" styles, and a handful of colors (about 5), so they didn't. I remember when long distance calls were something you made on special occasions, birthdays and holidays, not how you chatted with your friends for hours. I remember when they required you to get permission before connecting so much as an answering machine, and argued that allowing people to plug in their own hardware would cause the entire national phone network to collapse. (funny, it's still there) The Bell monopoly was never benevolent.
It is just mind-blowing that the federal government is redefining "competition" as "closing down multiple profitable companies competing in a given market and turning that market over to a single monopoly."
What's the problem? Well, the big question of whether science classes should teach science or teach religion. By its very nature, science is the process of figuring out how things work. Religion, at least this type of religion, has nothing to figure out because it already knows.
But yes, if we're going to teach divine creation in schools on the grounds of "equal time" and "alternative ideas" (though it's funny how the fundamentalists don't seem to want to make time for any alternatives to their ideas) then obviously we need to make sure all the alternatives are covered. I'd give a lot to be a fly on the wall when some fundamentalist's kid comes home from school... "Daddy, can you help me write an essay on Audhumla for science class?"
Once you start teaching religion as science, not because it can be proved, but because it can't be disproved, then you have to treat the dogma of religions equally. If you can't disprove that YHWH made Adam out of dust, then you likewise can't disprove that Audhumla licked Buri out of ice or Raven found the first humans inside a clam. There is equally valid evidence for all of them, and hence (using the fundamentalists' own logic) they should all be taught as science.
The commonly overlooked aspect of accepting creationism as science is that it invalidates many other sciences. Geology, palentology, astronomy, astrophysics, archaeology, and many other fields all depend on the Earth and the universe being far older than the Book of Genesis can account for. If they're invalid, then even physics itself, the most fundamental science, is necessarily invalid.
Of course, people in all the other countries of the world will still be studying science instead of religion. They'll be turning out scientists when the US is turning out religious disciples. The effects on US competitiveness and position in the world economy and balance of power will be interesting in the worst sense of the word.
They override browser settings and force underlining on links.
Not everyone has 19-year-old eyes that can read big blocks of underlined text, especially low-contrast text. The only skin that doesn't have the underlines is "granite" but the bright blue is even harder to read.
Let the user choose if they want underlines or not. That's why there's a setting for it. (even in IE)
Depends on if you're talking about the actual court filings (and if so which ones), or about the SCOX management's public statements such as the claims of millions of lines of identical code and other hogwash. They're definitely telling the judge one thing and the press another.
For the non-clueful: I take a picture of your new puppy with my digital camera. I burn it on a CD and give it to you. You use it as your screen wallpaper. How would you go about giving me that picture back? Give me the CD? Sure, but you're still using it as wallpaper. Burn another CD with the picture on it and give me that, too? Fine, but you still have it. No matter how many times you "give" it to me, you still have that picture.
You can delete the picture, or the source code, from your computer. But you can't "give it back" like it was a borrowed umbrella.
Ethical people tend to believe that others are ethical until and unless (and sometimes even after) they are faced with incontrovertible proof to the contrary. If you tell an ethical person that he's doing something wrong, his response will be "oops, lemme fix that." So, assuming Chip is an ethical person (and the fact that he tried to resolve the matter internally is evidence of that) it's logical to assume that he expected them to say "oops, we'll get right on fixing that" and, in fact, fix the oversights -- not retaliate against him for bringing up the intentional violations of either legal or ethical standards.
You may think you are creating the perfect society. However, your customers thought they were playing a game.
Because you did not tell them up front that they would be excluded from some aspects of the game if they played female characters, they naturally felt cheated when they discovered, although they were paying as much for the game as the next player was, they weren't getting as much game for their money.
Managing customer expectations: it isn't just for buzzwords anymore.
Now that I am an old fart of 46 I can also see the University's side of this as well.
SEEING the university's side isn't the problem. Most of us (except a couple AC's with puberty issues) can see the university's side very clearly: There is a website that is critical of them, and they want it shut down. They looked around for weapons that they could use to force it to shut down, and found lawyers. That's not at all hard to see.
But, that whole process of growing up and learning helped me to see opposing points of view and to even come to respect them.
As someone else said, what you did isn't called growing up -- it's called selling out. Seeing opposing points of view, and respecting the rights of their proponents to hold those points of view, is not the same thing as agreeing that those points of view are valid.
In this case, you're agreeing that students do not have the right to use the university's name when they say something critical of it, you're agreeing that the university owns the rights to all pictures taken of its buildings, and you're agreeing that it is right and just to use malicious litigation to force students not to say anything critical of the university. That's rather a lot to agree with -- and it goes far beyond seeing the university's side or respecting their right to have one.
This is an age old battle that will be enacted over and over again so long as we have young people and old institutions (and a few old farts like myself.)
I'm in my early 40's myself, so I suppose I also count as an "old fart" -- but at least I haven't sold out my principles. At least I haven't rolled over and said that civil liberties take second place to the demands of corporations, because those "corporate persons" deserve more rights than the flesh and blood persons that the Bill of Rights was written to protect. I'm as establishment as they come in some ways... married, own a small business, registered Republican, the whole nine yards... but I still think that individual freedom matters. I still think that the right to freedom of speech matters. I still think that the Constitution matters. And most of all, I think that people matter.
Hopefully the end results is that people learn and become increasingly more respectful of, and tolerant of, opposing points of view.
We agree on something there, certainly. But I don't think we agree on what that point of view is. You seem to think that people who want the freedom to criticize a public institution should become respectful of that institution's desire to prevent any criticism of it, and accepting of that institution's misuse and abuse of the copyright and trademark laws to squelch their freedom of speech. I, on the other hand, think that the university (dare I even use its name here?) should be the one to develop that tolerance and respect, and not try to stifle any and all opinions that its administrators do not agree with.
Actually, I think more people than not want to watch something, they don't really care what it is. I know people who just flip through the channels trying to find something worth watching. They're not in front of the TV because there's a show they want to watch -- they're there because it's their default mode of existence, and they try to find a show they can tolerate watching. I suspect a fair percentage of the "reality" TV watchers are the same: they're watching it because it's what's on, not because it's anything they would watch if there was something better competing with it. The creators make it because it's cheap and easy, so it's what's on. The viewers are making a choice between "reality" TV and no TV, not "reality" TV and something else worth watching.
They just won't bother developing at all and the people will die of the disease instead of being cured.
I think that $2,000,000,000 of profits or thereabouts is more than enough incentive to motivate any pharmaceutical company. If they'd gotten the funding from a venture capital firm, they would have had to give the investors some sort of return on their investment. So why shouldn't they do the same if they're spending MY money?
You can bet your boots that China will not share the results of any valuable lines of investigation with us, but they are perfectly happy to take what we make available for free
And what makes you think that China doesn't have a subscription to every scientific journal in existance? This is not about whether or not the information is secret or not -- it isn't secret now, and never has been. This is about whether citizens whose taxes pay for the research (and their schools, libraries, etc.) can see the results, or whether it's restricted to those who have thousands of dollars available to pay for commercially published journals... like the government of China.
You paid for the Space Shuttle too. That doesn't mean you can take it out for a joy ride whenever you want, much less go for a ride along next time they head to the ISS.
First, the per-user costs for Shuttle launches are huge. The per-user costs for research publication online are trivial. That makes a significant difference right there.
Second, the purpose of the space program is not public entertainment. The purpose of research is to generate knowledge. Using the Shuttle for joy rides, as much as most of us would want to go, detracts from the real purpose -- the reason we're paying for it in the first place. Making scientific knowledge available to the public is consistent with the purpose for its funding.
As for the space program overall... you think we don't get the benefit of it? Ask the people in Florida, who knew where and when Frances was going to smack into the state, thanks to it being tracked by satellite every inch of the way. Compare the effects of Frances or Charley to, say, the 6,000 deaths in the Galveston hurricane of 1900, when a category 4 storm took the city by surprise. (by way of comparison, if Frances had caused equivalent loss of life, that would have been about thirteen thousand deaths just in West Palm Beach alone this weekend -- Galveston had a population at the time of 37,789)
If the research is published on teh internet then what mechnisms are going to be put in place to ensure its protection?
The same mechanisms that exist for paper journals: None. The papers have always been available to anyone who is willing to pay.
And thereby hangs the problem. A thousand-dollar subscription fee doesn't slow down a government or a corporation for a split second, but it brings school, library, and private citizen access to a screeching halt.
The people who didn't die of cancer reaped most of the rewards.
And the people whose tax dollars funded the research, then couldn't afford the drugs to save their lives? What reward did they get out of it?
It seems to me that if public money funds development of something, whether it's a drug or a widget or a standrad, then it should be available to the people who paid for it -- namely the citizens of the country in question -- for the cost of production and distribution. They already paid for its development. If a company wants to rake in huge profits off of something, then they should spend their money to develop it, not mine.
Look at it another way: I want to create a computer game. You're a venture capitalist, and you put up the money for development. I hire some coders, some artists, etc., and bring out a really kickass computer game. Then I tell you no, you can't have your investment back. No, you don't own any stake in the company. No, you don't even get a copy of the game you just paid to develop. If you want it, go to GameStop and pay full retail like everyone else. Would you consider that reasonable? Or would your hands be around the throat of your attorney who approved the contract?
However, it will make the results of U.S.-backed research that much more accessible to other nations and foreign organizations, many of whom will likely not be as generous.
The papers in question are already available to those "other nations and foreign organizations" -- they simply buy subscriptions to the journals in question. Subscriptions costing hundreds or thousands of dollars a year are trivial to, say, the government of China. They're far less trivial to schools, libraries, and Joe Average who's interested in science, and would like to see the results of the research his tax money is paying for.
Option 1. She stands up for the book, gets fired, and then someone who believes 100% in the official party line gets the job and teaches accordingly.
Option 2. She lets the bad guys win this fight, but keeps on teaching so that she can do some good, whereas if she wasn't there she could do no good at all.
It's a matter of picking your fights and deciding what your goals really are. Perhaps her goals were more far-reaching than teaching her students about one particular book, and she could do more to achieve those goals by continuing teaching than by defying the administration over a single book.
Slashdot Mirror
Um, did you read the Snopes article?
No, they didn't say it's true. They talked to a number of hotel representatives who said it was not true and never had been, and the only person claiming it had ever been true (but wasn't any more) was someone with the Pasadena police department who apparently didn't even have firsthand knowledge of the matter.
And given how long that scare story has been around, you'd think that if it was true, there would have been numerous examples of that data being exploited. Crooks do things as technically elaborate as putting little scanners over the slots on ATMs, so they'd certainly be taking and using the keycard information if it was there. The fact that while there have been many case of things like ATM-mounted scanners, entire fake online businesses, phishing sites, and various other ways of getting card numbers, but no reports of this happening with a hotel keycard in the years since that email started circulating, gives a lot of support to the contention that it's just another groundless scare story.
It's quite easy, with a bit of practice, to learn to memorize credit card numbers for a few minutes. It's a fairly common way for credit card numbers to be stolen, in fact. Remember the customer's name and hometown and the phone book can provide his address, phone number, etc. Unscrupulous employees can memorize your card number while you're standing right there, and remember it long enough to write it down where you can't see them.
I remember, about ten years ago, a housemate who worked at a store in a mall talking about the exciting thing that had happened at work that day: the cops arresting an acquaintance who worked in a nearby store. Seems she had been doing exactly that -- memorizing CC numbers -- and was stupid enough to try to use one to pay for a purchase at the store where she worked. She got caught ringing up her own purchase (against store policy) and the jig was up.
If I distribute a web browser that has includes a handy way for any random person on the planet who knows the right port number to connect and have full privileged access to your system, but I ignore or deny reports that it exists, then that is not a "vendor-confirmed vulnerability" in Symantec's terms. Counting the number of flaws that Mozilla admits to (all of them) versus the number that Microsoft admits to (a minority of them) is not a valid comparison.
Unless you're Symantec, which has been in bed with Microsoft for a very long time, primarily because there is very little market for their products in a Linux-centered world.
So this guy puts up a website on the World Wide Web and expects it to be a totally standalone structure, with nobody linking to it, because, y'know, it's not like the Web involves, y'know, like, links or anything.
... and someone who brags about making little kids cry is not someone I want to know.
And when he finds that not only has someone done this terrible thing and linked to him, but they're sending traffic to his website, and you know that's not what this Web thing is is all about, he decides that instead of contacting the company and telling them he really wants to keep his public website a secret, so please don't link to it, he's gonna try to upset that company's customers' children: the people who had the least to do with the decision to do such a terrible thing as linking to another website. And when he succeeds at that, he brags about making little kids cry.
And some of you people think this is a GOOD THING?
Leaving out the fact that this guy, to start with, was committing major copyright infringement, I've seen people here saying that Fuddrucker's should not have linked to his website, they should have stolen his content instead, and put it on their own server. Excuse me? Now that is wrong. You don't jack other people's content, you link to it. Links are the whole bloody point of the Web in the first place.
By their actions ye shall know them
Some numbers to scare yourself to sleep with:
... at the end of which you have 12,055,555 more ... 8.37 more years ... another 5.8 years ... another 4 years ... another 2.8 years ... another 1.9 years ... another 1.35 years ... at the end of which, you're actually caught up.
... past when most people retire ... by the time you're breaking even on the spam. (and still, remember, opting out for 5.5 hours a day, and 3.8 more at home)
There are roughly 25 million businesses in the US alone. Let's say each of them sent just one spam per year. Let's also assume that your software automatically junks any further mail from someone who has spammed you already. That would be 68,493 emails hitting you per day.
Let's say you could opt out at the rate of one every 5 seconds. That would be 12 per minute, 720 per hour, or 28,800 per 40-hour work week.
Assuming you take a couple of weeks vacation a year, in 50 weeks you can deal with 1,440,000 out of the 25,000,000 spam emails you got this year.
At that rate, it will take you 17.36 years to opt out of just the first year's spam.
But wait! There's more! New businesses open up every year. Just pulling a number out of the air here, let's say that they are established (and send out their annual spam) at a rate of 1 million per year. So by the time you've cleaned out your first year's spam, you have 17,360,000 more to go.
That's another 12 years of opting out
So, 53 years from the date every business in the USA sent you one single spam, you've finally opted out of all of their lists.
You're still getting new ones, of course, at a rate of 2,740 per day, or 4,000 per working day. The first five and a half hours of every working day -- 70% of your workday -- you spend cleaning that day's spam out of your work email account. When you get home, you spend another 3.8 hours cleaning your home account.
And that's assuming ONLY spam from US-based spammers, and ONLY one from each, and ALL of them honor opt-out instructions (which are, of course, usually just verification of a live address)
53 years to opt out of all of it.
If you start work at age 18, you'll be 71
The Yes-You-Can-Spam act was a Bad Thing.
I want to be able to use my emailbox for EMAIL. Not to provide free advertising services for companies I want nothing whatsoever to do with.
I can refill my inkjet cartridges cheaply. Refilling color laser toner is not an option.
I looked into getting a color laser ($300 at Sam's Club) before my most recent inkjet ($69 at Circuit city) and also investigated the price of replacement toner cartridges for when the "starter" ones included with it ran out. After thinking of how many bottles of ink, and the occasional new cartridge when the actual print mechanism begins to wear, I could get for the cost of a full set of color toner cartridges (roughly the price of the laser printer) I decided to stick with my b&w laser and buy a color inkjet.
That said, the article impressed me as being utterly terrible. It was amateurishly written, the kind of thing I expect to see in linkfarm pages or high school newspapers. It didn't provide much useful information. It mostly said "look at the specs and see if they match what you need" over and over again in many different ways. If there was something about, for instance, how to calculate TCO when comparing printers, I missed it. (the fact that the site is being heavily slashdotted at the moment doesn't help) I fail to see how this article was deemed worthy of a link from Slashdot, especially since most of the readers could have written it, and written it better besides.
No company is going to be able to install the nationwide infrastructure that the telcos have -- it would be a multi-trillion-dollar investment if it was even possible given the amount of disruption to everyday life (digging up streets, etc.) that would be required. It was built piece by piece during the monopoly era, funded by a combination of tax money and monopoly profits, over a period of 90 years. The only way to participate in the DSL market is through the existing infrastructure.
To anyone who thinks Bell Telephone was a benign monopoly, well, you're wrong. I remember all too well the days when you had one choice of long distance carrier -- AT&T -- and you paid whatever they felt like charging. I remember when a 3-minute call to a town 15 miles away cost $1.63 (my parents made sure I'd remember). I remember when you were legally prohibited from owning a telephone; you had to rent them from the phone company, and since they had a monopoly there, too, they had no reason to offer anything more than desk, wall, and "princess" styles, and a handful of colors (about 5), so they didn't. I remember when long distance calls were something you made on special occasions, birthdays and holidays, not how you chatted with your friends for hours. I remember when they required you to get permission before connecting so much as an answering machine, and argued that allowing people to plug in their own hardware would cause the entire national phone network to collapse. (funny, it's still there) The Bell monopoly was never benevolent.
It is just mind-blowing that the federal government is redefining "competition" as "closing down multiple profitable companies competing in a given market and turning that market over to a single monopoly."
Who created God?
What's the problem? Well, the big question of whether science classes should teach science or teach religion. By its very nature, science is the process of figuring out how things work. Religion, at least this type of religion, has nothing to figure out because it already knows.
... "Daddy, can you help me write an essay on Audhumla for science class?"
But yes, if we're going to teach divine creation in schools on the grounds of "equal time" and "alternative ideas" (though it's funny how the fundamentalists don't seem to want to make time for any alternatives to their ideas) then obviously we need to make sure all the alternatives are covered. I'd give a lot to be a fly on the wall when some fundamentalist's kid comes home from school
Once you start teaching religion as science, not because it can be proved, but because it can't be disproved, then you have to treat the dogma of religions equally. If you can't disprove that YHWH made Adam out of dust, then you likewise can't disprove that Audhumla licked Buri out of ice or Raven found the first humans inside a clam. There is equally valid evidence for all of them, and hence (using the fundamentalists' own logic) they should all be taught as science.
The commonly overlooked aspect of accepting creationism as science is that it invalidates many other sciences. Geology, palentology, astronomy, astrophysics, archaeology, and many other fields all depend on the Earth and the universe being far older than the Book of Genesis can account for. If they're invalid, then even physics itself, the most fundamental science, is necessarily invalid.
Of course, people in all the other countries of the world will still be studying science instead of religion. They'll be turning out scientists when the US is turning out religious disciples. The effects on US competitiveness and position in the world economy and balance of power will be interesting in the worst sense of the word.
They override browser settings and force underlining on links.
Not everyone has 19-year-old eyes that can read big blocks of underlined text, especially low-contrast text. The only skin that doesn't have the underlines is "granite" but the bright blue is even harder to read.
Let the user choose if they want underlines or not. That's why there's a setting for it. (even in IE)
Depends on if you're talking about the actual court filings (and if so which ones), or about the SCOX management's public statements such as the claims of millions of lines of identical code and other hogwash. They're definitely telling the judge one thing and the press another.
Just how exactly do you give source code back?
For the non-clueful: I take a picture of your new puppy with my digital camera. I burn it on a CD and give it to you. You use it as your screen wallpaper. How would you go about giving me that picture back? Give me the CD? Sure, but you're still using it as wallpaper. Burn another CD with the picture on it and give me that, too? Fine, but you still have it. No matter how many times you "give" it to me, you still have that picture.
You can delete the picture, or the source code, from your computer. But you can't "give it back" like it was a borrowed umbrella.
Clean up their act, maybe?
Ethical people tend to believe that others are ethical until and unless (and sometimes even after) they are faced with incontrovertible proof to the contrary. If you tell an ethical person that he's doing something wrong, his response will be "oops, lemme fix that." So, assuming Chip is an ethical person (and the fact that he tried to resolve the matter internally is evidence of that) it's logical to assume that he expected them to say "oops, we'll get right on fixing that" and, in fact, fix the oversights -- not retaliate against him for bringing up the intentional violations of either legal or ethical standards.
What we have here is a failure to communicate.
You may think you are creating the perfect society. However, your customers thought they were playing a game.
Because you did not tell them up front that they would be excluded from some aspects of the game if they played female characters, they naturally felt cheated when they discovered, although they were paying as much for the game as the next player was, they weren't getting as much game for their money.
Managing customer expectations: it isn't just for buzzwords anymore.
Now that I am an old fart of 46 I can also see the University's side of this as well.
... married, own a small business, registered Republican, the whole nine yards ... but I still think that individual freedom matters. I still think that the right to freedom of speech matters. I still think that the Constitution matters. And most of all, I think that people matter.
SEEING the university's side isn't the problem. Most of us (except a couple AC's with puberty issues) can see the university's side very clearly: There is a website that is critical of them, and they want it shut down. They looked around for weapons that they could use to force it to shut down, and found lawyers. That's not at all hard to see.
But, that whole process of growing up and learning helped me to see opposing points of view and to even come to respect them.
As someone else said, what you did isn't called growing up -- it's called selling out. Seeing opposing points of view, and respecting the rights of their proponents to hold those points of view, is not the same thing as agreeing that those points of view are valid.
In this case, you're agreeing that students do not have the right to use the university's name when they say something critical of it, you're agreeing that the university owns the rights to all pictures taken of its buildings, and you're agreeing that it is right and just to use malicious litigation to force students not to say anything critical of the university. That's rather a lot to agree with -- and it goes far beyond seeing the university's side or respecting their right to have one.
This is an age old battle that will be enacted over and over again so long as we have young people and old institutions (and a few old farts like myself.)
I'm in my early 40's myself, so I suppose I also count as an "old fart" -- but at least I haven't sold out my principles. At least I haven't rolled over and said that civil liberties take second place to the demands of corporations, because those "corporate persons" deserve more rights than the flesh and blood persons that the Bill of Rights was written to protect. I'm as establishment as they come in some ways
Hopefully the end results is that people learn and become increasingly more respectful of, and tolerant of, opposing points of view.
We agree on something there, certainly. But I don't think we agree on what that point of view is. You seem to think that people who want the freedom to criticize a public institution should become respectful of that institution's desire to prevent any criticism of it, and accepting of that institution's misuse and abuse of the copyright and trademark laws to squelch their freedom of speech. I, on the other hand, think that the university (dare I even use its name here?) should be the one to develop that tolerance and respect, and not try to stifle any and all opinions that its administrators do not agree with.
people WANT to watch realityshit.. sad truth.
Actually, I think more people than not want to watch something, they don't really care what it is. I know people who just flip through the channels trying to find something worth watching. They're not in front of the TV because there's a show they want to watch -- they're there because it's their default mode of existence, and they try to find a show they can tolerate watching. I suspect a fair percentage of the "reality" TV watchers are the same: they're watching it because it's what's on, not because it's anything they would watch if there was something better competing with it. The creators make it because it's cheap and easy, so it's what's on. The viewers are making a choice between "reality" TV and no TV, not "reality" TV and something else worth watching.
They just won't bother developing at all and the people will die of the disease instead of being cured.
I think that $2,000,000,000 of profits or thereabouts is more than enough incentive to motivate any pharmaceutical company. If they'd gotten the funding from a venture capital firm, they would have had to give the investors some sort of return on their investment. So why shouldn't they do the same if they're spending MY money?
You can bet your boots that China will not share the results of any valuable lines of investigation with us, but they are perfectly happy to take what we make available for free
... like the government of China.
And what makes you think that China doesn't have a subscription to every scientific journal in existance? This is not about whether or not the information is secret or not -- it isn't secret now, and never has been. This is about whether citizens whose taxes pay for the research (and their schools, libraries, etc.) can see the results, or whether it's restricted to those who have thousands of dollars available to pay for commercially published journals
You paid for the Space Shuttle too. That doesn't mean you can take it out for a joy ride whenever you want, much less go for a ride along next time they head to the ISS.
... you think we don't get the benefit of it? Ask the people in Florida, who knew where and when Frances was going to smack into the state, thanks to it being tracked by satellite every inch of the way. Compare the effects of Frances or Charley to, say, the 6,000 deaths in the Galveston hurricane of 1900, when a category 4 storm took the city by surprise. (by way of comparison, if Frances had caused equivalent loss of life, that would have been about thirteen thousand deaths just in West Palm Beach alone this weekend -- Galveston had a population at the time of 37,789)
First, the per-user costs for Shuttle launches are huge. The per-user costs for research publication online are trivial. That makes a significant difference right there.
Second, the purpose of the space program is not public entertainment. The purpose of research is to generate knowledge. Using the Shuttle for joy rides, as much as most of us would want to go, detracts from the real purpose -- the reason we're paying for it in the first place. Making scientific knowledge available to the public is consistent with the purpose for its funding.
As for the space program overall
If the research is published on teh internet then what mechnisms are going to be put in place to ensure its protection?
The same mechanisms that exist for paper journals: None. The papers have always been available to anyone who is willing to pay.
And thereby hangs the problem. A thousand-dollar subscription fee doesn't slow down a government or a corporation for a split second, but it brings school, library, and private citizen access to a screeching halt.
The people who didn't die of cancer reaped most of the rewards.
And the people whose tax dollars funded the research, then couldn't afford the drugs to save their lives? What reward did they get out of it?
It seems to me that if public money funds development of something, whether it's a drug or a widget or a standrad, then it should be available to the people who paid for it -- namely the citizens of the country in question -- for the cost of production and distribution. They already paid for its development. If a company wants to rake in huge profits off of something, then they should spend their money to develop it, not mine.
Look at it another way: I want to create a computer game. You're a venture capitalist, and you put up the money for development. I hire some coders, some artists, etc., and bring out a really kickass computer game. Then I tell you no, you can't have your investment back. No, you don't own any stake in the company. No, you don't even get a copy of the game you just paid to develop. If you want it, go to GameStop and pay full retail like everyone else. Would you consider that reasonable? Or would your hands be around the throat of your attorney who approved the contract?
However, it will make the results of U.S.-backed research that much more accessible to other nations and foreign organizations, many of whom will likely not be as generous.
The papers in question are already available to those "other nations and foreign organizations" -- they simply buy subscriptions to the journals in question. Subscriptions costing hundreds or thousands of dollars a year are trivial to, say, the government of China. They're far less trivial to schools, libraries, and Joe Average who's interested in science, and would like to see the results of the research his tax money is paying for.
Get Firefox. Get text/plain. Stop worrying about links. :)
Perhaps she looked at it this way:
Option 1. She stands up for the book, gets fired, and then someone who believes 100% in the official party line gets the job and teaches accordingly.
Option 2. She lets the bad guys win this fight, but keeps on teaching so that she can do some good, whereas if she wasn't there she could do no good at all.
It's a matter of picking your fights and deciding what your goals really are. Perhaps her goals were more far-reaching than teaching her students about one particular book, and she could do more to achieve those goals by continuing teaching than by defying the administration over a single book.
The irony of this whole thing reminds me of something I said long ago to a fundamentalist who was giving me a rough time about playing D&D:
We play games about monsters and magic. You think it's all real. Now which one of us has the problems with reality, again?
She didn't have much to say after that.