I'm sorry for having to say it in such a direct way, but your argumentation is apologetic.
1) Why is there only suspected fraud on the part of the Republican Party? I'm totally serious here - are the Democrats too stupid to cheat themselves?
2) If the Democratic Party seriously believed cheating had occured, why didn't they make a really big deal of it? Wouldn't they stand to gain by convincing people that the election was rigged?
3) Why isn't the Democratic Party pushing harder for an end to Diebold voting machines? Who'd want to use them if they thought that doing so was in their worst interests?
1. Why, the Republicans won this election! Hence they are the ones under scrutiny. It's useless to argue about what would have happened, had the Democrats won. Why do we only distrust the one player at the poker table who has won the past ten rounds? Why not the other ones? Your argument is eristic, in Schopenhauer's sense: Under attack, you simply return the attack and hope for your opponent to try to defend himself.
2. In the aftermath of the election, it would have looked ridiculous if Gore had accused Bush of election fraud. His spin-doctors certainly told him to do so. The study showing statistical correlation between Diebold-usage and Bush-majority was done much later, when it was juristically impossible to change the outcome of the election.
3. Maybe, just maybe, the Democrats don't want to look like bad losers? What happened in Mexico after the last election is a warning example of how to destroy your reputation by crying foul. It's the people's job to find out if they are cheated for their basic rights, not the opposition's.
Finally, of course it is possible for Diebold to rig the machines without much outside notice. Diebold may have 16.000 employees, but I assume only about ten were ever able to look at the whole source-code for the machines. Sorry, but that's not enough scrutiny to rest America's well-being on.
Thank you very much for this post. Good to hear not everyone at the other side of the pond has lost their mind. Would you do me a favor and vote in the mid-terms? Bring your friends.
Let's assume for a moment that this guy is actually brilliant, not just cramming stuff (which should be hard in a Maths course, but I don't know how the courses at this university are organised). Then the fact that he wants to be an attorney shows what a horribly shallow personality he must have.
I mean, a true genius would be eager to use his cognitive abilities for the advancement of mankind. Start an academic career, change the way we think about the world. Live in fancy old College rooms, sip on a glass of Port, write thoughtful books.
No, he doesn't want to do that. He wants to earn a lot of money. How sad.
Ah, okay, now I see what you mean. You're right, denial of the Holocaust is indeed forbidden. But that's due to the special historic situation in Germany. I didn't actually count that into the "free speech" problem, which is why I didn't mention it in the following posts.
The reality of the Holocaust is a fact. It has been proven in the Nuremberg trials, probably two thirds of all German pupils have had a field trip to a concentration camp, a whole generation of writers, including Reich-Ranicki and Grass (two of the most prominent intellectuals in Germany), have elaborated on it, there is simply not the smallest doubt to it's existence. It is also forbidden in Germany to publicly display the official signs of the Third Reich (flag, seal, swastika, SS-runes, etc.). This is not an issue of free speech, but of dealing with the atrocious sins of our grandfathers.
The German supreme court found in 1994 that denial of the Holocaust is not protected by the consitutional right to free speech. Since it is a misstatement of a proven fact, it is a form of libel and is punishable under the German 'Volksverhetzung' law (paragraph 130 of the federal penal code). The court argued that the right to free speech (paragraph 5 of the German constitution) was trumped in this special case by an even higher human right, that to human dignity (paragraph 1 of the German constitution) of the victims.
But actually, Germany is not alone with this ruling. Denial of the Holocaust has been forbidden in Austria (not surprisingly) since 1945 (and punishable by up to 20 years in prison). Switzerland and France made it punishable in 1990, and even the British High Court of Justice, one of the bastions of free speech, in 2000 called David Irwine a 'Liar, Racist and Anti-Semite' for denying the Shoa.
In short, this is a very special case, I don't think it should be included into a general discussion about free speech.
Oh, and as to the words you not so kindly put in my mouth. I -do- freely acknowledge that speech can hurt. If I tell my best friend to fuck off, it's going to hurt. If I tell someone who loves me the feeling is not mutual, it's going to hurt. But we do not ban these things. Rights stop where someone's -life-, -health-, or -property- (in that order) may be endangered, not where someone's feelings might get hurt.
That's why I wrote physically harm and not emotionally. I think we quite agree, since you wrote:
Now, granted, I might cross the line should I say "Kill those people!" to a group who I know is likely to obey me.
as exactly this is what is forbidden by German law (It's called Volksverhetzung -- 'incitement of the people'). You can say "I hate Blacks" all you like. Most probably you will be very alone afterwards (or in very bad company), but you cannot be arrested for doing so. That's exactly what I meant: Speech designed to lead to violence is what needs to be forbidden, and that's exactly what is forbidden. Those who incite others to be violent have to be made responsible for doing so, and there should be no chance for them to hide behind 'free speech'.
Regarding your comment on Goebbels audience: Unfortunately, at the time of his famous address in the Sportpalast ('Do you want total war?' etc.) there was no free speech anymore, and basically everyone brave enough to speak their mind had been deported to concentration camps. What remained was a brainwashed brown mass of flesh, one of the kind that you can find to this very day at any party rally anywhere in the world. (Imagine what would happen if Bush asked the Republican Convention 'Do you support the troops?')
I assume the discussion ends here? It seems we have reached mutual understanding. Thank you very much for your thoughts.
Free speech -is- the right for the KKK and the neo-Nazis to hold their rallies and say what they've got to say. (Of course, it's also my and your right to say that they're a bunch of morons.)
I expected a response like this when I wrote the line about the limits of free speech, and I am willing to defend it. Germany has had those laws limiting "free" speech since 1948 and we've been rather alone with it for a while. But more recently, countries like Great Britain (with their "hate speech" laws) have joined this point of view.
At the core of a liberal society stand several fundamental rights of the individual, and free speech is just one of them. The second paragraph of the German constitution reads "Everyone has the right and liberty to do what ever he or she wishes, as long as this does not interfere with the rights of others."
I think we agree that black and jewish people have just the same rights and dignity as any other person. So the difference between your and my argument for or against unrestricted free speech is that you are convinced that speech cannot physically hurt anyone and therefore cannot interfere with the rights of Blacks, Jews, Muslims or whoever is being attacked. My opinion (in which I feel supported by the parliamentary council, the "Founding Fathers" of federal, republican Germany) is that it can indeed: Ask someone who was hunted down by the KKK or a bunch of brainless Nazis (who would most certainly not come up with shit like that if they weren't incited by their leaders). Listen to a recording of Goebbels speeches and you know what I mean.
Free speech is the right to use your mind and voice your opinion in a civilized manner (Of course that allows you to talk about Communism all you like). It's not the right to spout verbal atrocities that are designed to directly lead to physical harm for others and then hide cowardly behind your "right to free speech" instead of taking responsibility for your words. Just like freedom of movement is not the freedom to walk over your neighbours flower patch or run over a kid in the street with your car.
Dude. Critisizing government is one thing. But your rant is bordering on a conspiracy theory.
Of course helping people in the third world is important. That's why the German government spent 4 billion Euros on developmental aid last year. (Sorry, German link, but we write in arabic numbers, too). How much do you think a hundred cops searching for child pornography cost? Policing is one of the most important tasks of the State, and I am actually rather pleased with the performance of the German police. (And yes, I have actually met quite a few of them. I've even worked with them on a daily basis, although not with the internet crime division.)
Now, concerning Tor: Anyone who runs a Tor node on his or her machine knows what they are doing (it's way too complicated for non-nerds) and that their machine can be used by malicious users as a safe gateway to illegal content. That's the problem with Tor. Of course it is annoying or embarrassing for the Tor providers if they thence happen to get caught in the web of the police, but, as an earlier poster noted: None of the Tor providers has been sued. Their machines have simply been seized and will most likely be returned to their owners. It's not like they were arrested and treated as enemy combattants or something.
Finally, regarding the right to critisize government: It's not like the German government was without opposition. Thanks to the heroic actions of the American, Russian and British nations during the second world war, Germany is not a dictatorship any more. If Germans wish to critisize their government, they can write blogs and open letters, publish articles or, goodness me, simply go out into the streets of Berlin and shout out their criticism at any passing politician. All without having to fear _any_ consequences what so ever (as long as their speech isn't racist, attacking the constitution or denying the Holocaust). This is what we call `Free Speech' over here. Fortunately, the term 'UnAmerican' has not been translated into our language, yet.
YouTube could easily alienate its users by overwhelming them with ads.
This has in my experience been proven unfounded with Yahoo, Google, eBay and slashdot as examples. Bring on the ads.
A previous poster already mentioned that adverts before or during the video stream are highly annoying to users. But there is another concern that even remains valid if you thought about text-based ads next to the video (if you like, the Google model):
As the Economist recently pointed out, the trouble for advertisers on youtube is that you simply don't know what's in the video next to which you are advertising. Google is highly effective in putting not only the adverts in context to the search, but also the search in context to the adverts. This, of course, is because Google shows you text.
In a Video, however, there are no keywords. Imagine you are, say, Nike. Would you like your advert being found next to a video of someone stumbling over his feet and breaking his leg in the process (YouTube is full of crap like that)? Or say you are Microsoft, and YouTube manages to put your advert next to the video of a guy rambling on about how shitty Vista will be. Worse, what if your advert shows up next to a video of someone making a racist slur?
The real trouble with YouTube, from the advertisers point of view, is that the content comes from random people, not YouTube, and that unlike in Google's case, there is no way (yet) for a machine to match the content to the advert and the viewer.
We trust these same individuals to count our paper votes by hand or fed into a machine? Why?
Because the counting is being done "in public", in the sense that there are several people around during the count, several people with different backgrounds, with differing party affiliations, all under oath (at least in my country, I have no idea whether it's different in the US).
If, on the other hand, we let a single voting official take these machines with them, to their homes, over night, without any surveillance whatsoever, there goes your last bit of accountability.
From a lawyer's point of view, you are perfectly right. Unfortunately, it seems that society has, somewhere along the way, diluted the concept of a trademark to "I own this word".
If everybody would understand the term "trademark" in the way you do it, why is this even on/.? Scroll down the comments: More than half of the readers seem to think O'Reilly has somehow seized the words "website". Sometimes, we need to be remembered of the way laws were meant to be.
I agree that companies should be allowed to protect the names of their products to make sure they are not used by other companies for their products, be they similar to the Original (in which case we would speak of plagiarism) or completely different (in which case they might still make unfair use of the original companie's product's fame). That's what trademarks are for.
But I think this is a very limited scope. A trademark should, in my opinion, not allow you to forbid anyone to simply _use_ the name of your product (as opposed to stick it to their own products). Words are symbolic representations of the sounds we make with our tongues while speaking. They are free like the wind. Imagine Microsoft would sue a carpenter because he sold windows. The fine line lies in the difference between using a word as a name and a word as a word. You cannot trademark words. If you could, Shakespeare's heirs would have a nice source of income from about every native English-speaker in the world. How is a "maker fair" or a "web site" a name? They are just words. "Microsoft Windows" is a name. "Windows" is not. "Dodge Ram" is a name. "dodge" and "ram" are words.
There are other problems with flash, aside from the issues with low-user-base browsers. The biggest one for me is that it breaks the page metaphor.
You see, the whole point of the hyper-text machine language is that it lets you link content between sites in a consistent manner (that's why it's 'hyper-text'. Otherwise it would simply be 'formatted text with pictures'). Flash doesn't let you do that. Just imagine Amazon or eBay had a Flash interface and you'll see what I mean.
UK Slashdotters: let's make sure we punish these lunatics at the next general election.
May I remind you of the first rule of the first-past-the-post voting system: Either Labour or the Tories will always win, and whoever wins will get a majority in the house of commons. None of the two are of any help with the problem at hand. Imagine what sort of revolution it would take to get the LibDems voted into the power.
I'd say this country needs a change of constitution, but given it has one of the oldest constitutions in the world (the Magna Carta), I am not very confident of any change, any time soon.
Dasher is, albeit still in development, a very promising input tool for people with disabilities of varying degree, from Carpal Tunnel Syndrome to Quadraplegy (it has already been used to type complete BSc thesises), and it promises to soon provide a speedup in typing speed even for normal users. Check it out.
No, I'm not affiliated with the project in any way, I only had my nose poked at it by a friend. And I must say, it's impressive. And it is FOSS.
If you're a project leader (or part of the management, which you were, as I understand) and you receive >200 emails per day from your team members (about 10 per team member, assuming you mostly got the mails from the programmers), your mail client is not the issue. Your micro-management is.
A friend of mine is teaching at university, but also co-owns a few servers and does ISP for small businesses. The servers are located about 300km away from where the university is and he does more or less everything via ssh, while a buddy of his who lives next to the site does hardware stuff when needed. You can see where this is headed, can't you?
The other day he gives an introduction to ssh in one of his classes, using an ssh connection to one of his servers as an example. "See, it's like you were there, although the machine is 300km away!" At the end of the lesson, he has about eight different terminal windows open on his X. Wants to shut down his computer, types in "sudo shutdown -h now", his password and wonders why his computer doesn't shut down.
He had about thirty seconds from realising what he had done to the first call on his mobile. Needless to say, his buddy is on holidays for the day, so he has to jump into his car and race through half the country to switch the stupid thing back on.
Goes to show: Don't use mission critical machines for educational purposes. (And don't use the same password twice...)
Since you're being bashed all the way through the children posts, let me back up your opinion: Firefox is ugly as hell, especially in OS X.
It doesn't fit into the look and feel of the native apps, even the best skins still look like hastily scrapped together icon collections. I use Firefox as my main browser (goes to show that I am not too picky about the eye candy) but would really appreciate if someone sat down and at least created a decent skin. Better still (because that would allow us to get rid of the stupid window title bar as well), create an OS X - only version of Firefox that has a look comparable to the current iTunes and all the other Tiger apps.
To one of the children posters: Well, yeah, this is all about opinions. Of course it is. No need to point that out like you just discovered a deep philosophical truth, since we're posting to a story about "the 10 most beautiful OS X apps"...
Of course you're right. The only power strong enough to indict the American President for war crimes is the American people. And, fortunately, living in one of the greates democracies this planet has ever seen, the American people actually has the powers to do so (impeachment, post-term prosecution, open rebellion).
Unfortunately, it seems the public conscience in the States has forgotten Benjamin Franklin's bed-time lectures. They hide behind phrases like "support the troops" or "disagreeing with the president during war times is treason". If the French president did what Bush did (ie. an open breach of the constitution), he would be dragged out of his office by an angry mob within hours. What ever happened to the land of the free?
This PowerBook should last me a couple years at least into Law School at which point all the major software applications (office, PS, Pro Tools, etc.) will be converted...
Sorry, did I get this right? You're training to be a lawyer and you are using Microsoft Office and Adobe Photoshop? You know, like, both of them together cost you about $1000? Either you're quite well stuffed (ie. you actually bought them, although you are probably never going to use any of the features that distinct these professional tools from open-source alternatives), or you're training for the wrong job (ie. you pirated them).
Come to think of it: How perverse must this world be, where even lawyers so casually break the very laws that other lawyers are so eager to make money on?
Physics is the science of patterns in nature. It's not limited to astronomy and particle physics, but embraces any question that can be posed in a quantified way.
Everytime you see something you don't quite understand and say to yourself "Gee, how does that work?", the little physicist in you jumps up and down, crying "Me, me, me, memememeeee, oh, take me, I'm so smart, goddamnit!"
All science is either physics or stamp collecting.
(Earnest Rutherford)
I'm sitting in front of my white 2004 iBook G4 right now and I just tried your eraser proposal. You're right, the faint dark spots on the palm rests of my machine can indeed be brushed away with a rubber eraser.
But I have another problem: Over the course of the past two years, the keyboard has slowly lost its imprints. First on the "s" (where my ring finger rests during touch-typing), then on the "e", "a" and "c" keys (for the first two, it's probably the frequency with which they're hit, for the "c" it might be because of the angle at which my index finger hits it: with the nail). It doesn't seem to be a common problem, but Apple won't replace the keyboard (despite my AppleCare contract), because it is a standard usage effect, they claim. Granted, I don't need to see the keys during typing, but it sure looks ugly. Let's see how this problem turns out with the new machines.
1. Getting tips from a pro - If you watch a world cup soccer match, it doesnt make you a world cup soccer player. But it can give you ideas on how to better yourself, and if you watch it over and over, you understand how it works, then you can just go practice it.
Claiming to have learned useful sex techniques from a porn movie:
On Slashdot: +4 interesting.
For the nice girl at the party: -1 not even funny.
Methycillin is a standard antibiotic. Vancomycin and Oxacyllin (or however you want to spell it) are already restricted to resistant stems, that is you only get them once it has become clear that your bug is M-resistant. If your doctor is worth even half his salary, he will make sure you actually continue the treatment until full recovery has been achieved. It's not like you could just walk into Boot's around the corner and ask for "that new superantibiotic", you know.
I hate to break it to people, but Maths and Physics make computing look like a liberal arts degree.
Especially the maths we are talking about here. Modern pure mathematical research is carried out by a tiny little global group of people devoting their whole lives to a single problem. Even worse, the different mathematical disciplines are far more detached than, say, physics is.
I have an MSc in Quantum Field Theory and am working on a degree in computational neuroscience. Five years of world class education in theoretical physics. But my friend, the pure mathematician, needn't even try to explain me what he is working on -- I literally wouldn't understand a single word.
Rest assured, the people who are capable of solving any of these "Millenium Problems" are already working together. They don't need a wiki. Wikis are good for problems that need a lot of different views on one subject. They are useless for questions that take years of daily full time mental effort just to be understood, let alone solved.
Slashdot Mirror
1. Why, the Republicans won this election! Hence they are the ones under scrutiny. It's useless to argue about what would have happened, had the Democrats won. Why do we only distrust the one player at the poker table who has won the past ten rounds? Why not the other ones? Your argument is eristic, in Schopenhauer's sense: Under attack, you simply return the attack and hope for your opponent to try to defend himself.
2. In the aftermath of the election, it would have looked ridiculous if Gore had accused Bush of election fraud. His spin-doctors certainly told him to do so. The study showing statistical correlation between Diebold-usage and Bush-majority was done much later, when it was juristically impossible to change the outcome of the election.
3. Maybe, just maybe, the Democrats don't want to look like bad losers? What happened in Mexico after the last election is a warning example of how to destroy your reputation by crying foul. It's the people's job to find out if they are cheated for their basic rights, not the opposition's.
Finally, of course it is possible for Diebold to rig the machines without much outside notice. Diebold may have 16.000 employees, but I assume only about ten were ever able to look at the whole source-code for the machines. Sorry, but that's not enough scrutiny to rest America's well-being on.
Thank you very much for this post. Good to hear not everyone at the other side of the pond has lost their mind. Would you do me a favor and vote in the mid-terms? Bring your friends.
Let's assume for a moment that this guy is actually brilliant, not just cramming stuff (which should be hard in a Maths course, but I don't know how the courses at this university are organised). Then the fact that he wants to be an attorney shows what a horribly shallow personality he must have.
I mean, a true genius would be eager to use his cognitive abilities for the advancement of mankind. Start an academic career, change the way we think about the world. Live in fancy old College rooms, sip on a glass of Port, write thoughtful books.
No, he doesn't want to do that. He wants to earn a lot of money. How sad.
Ah, okay, now I see what you mean. You're right, denial of the Holocaust is indeed forbidden. But that's due to the special historic situation in Germany. I didn't actually count that into the "free speech" problem, which is why I didn't mention it in the following posts.
The reality of the Holocaust is a fact. It has been proven in the Nuremberg trials, probably two thirds of all German pupils have had a field trip to a concentration camp, a whole generation of writers, including Reich-Ranicki and Grass (two of the most prominent intellectuals in Germany), have elaborated on it, there is simply not the smallest doubt to it's existence. It is also forbidden in Germany to publicly display the official signs of the Third Reich (flag, seal, swastika, SS-runes, etc.). This is not an issue of free speech, but of dealing with the atrocious sins of our grandfathers.
The German supreme court found in 1994 that denial of the Holocaust is not protected by the consitutional right to free speech. Since it is a misstatement of a proven fact, it is a form of libel and is punishable under the German 'Volksverhetzung' law (paragraph 130 of the federal penal code). The court argued that the right to free speech (paragraph 5 of the German constitution) was trumped in this special case by an even higher human right, that to human dignity (paragraph 1 of the German constitution) of the victims.
But actually, Germany is not alone with this ruling. Denial of the Holocaust has been forbidden in Austria (not surprisingly) since 1945 (and punishable by up to 20 years in prison). Switzerland and France made it punishable in 1990, and even the British High Court of Justice, one of the bastions of free speech, in 2000 called David Irwine a 'Liar, Racist and Anti-Semite' for denying the Shoa.
In short, this is a very special case, I don't think it should be included into a general discussion about free speech.
as exactly this is what is forbidden by German law (It's called Volksverhetzung -- 'incitement of the people'). You can say "I hate Blacks" all you like. Most probably you will be very alone afterwards (or in very bad company), but you cannot be arrested for doing so. That's exactly what I meant: Speech designed to lead to violence is what needs to be forbidden, and that's exactly what is forbidden. Those who incite others to be violent have to be made responsible for doing so, and there should be no chance for them to hide behind 'free speech'.
Regarding your comment on Goebbels audience: Unfortunately, at the time of his famous address in the Sportpalast ('Do you want total war?' etc.) there was no free speech anymore, and basically everyone brave enough to speak their mind had been deported to concentration camps. What remained was a brainwashed brown mass of flesh, one of the kind that you can find to this very day at any party rally anywhere in the world. (Imagine what would happen if Bush asked the Republican Convention 'Do you support the troops?')
I assume the discussion ends here? It seems we have reached mutual understanding. Thank you very much for your thoughts.
At the core of a liberal society stand several fundamental rights of the individual, and free speech is just one of them. The second paragraph of the German constitution reads "Everyone has the right and liberty to do what ever he or she wishes, as long as this does not interfere with the rights of others."
I think we agree that black and jewish people have just the same rights and dignity as any other person. So the difference between your and my argument for or against unrestricted free speech is that you are convinced that speech cannot physically hurt anyone and therefore cannot interfere with the rights of Blacks, Jews, Muslims or whoever is being attacked. My opinion (in which I feel supported by the parliamentary council, the "Founding Fathers" of federal, republican Germany) is that it can indeed: Ask someone who was hunted down by the KKK or a bunch of brainless Nazis (who would most certainly not come up with shit like that if they weren't incited by their leaders). Listen to a recording of Goebbels speeches and you know what I mean.
Free speech is the right to use your mind and voice your opinion in a civilized manner (Of course that allows you to talk about Communism all you like). It's not the right to spout verbal atrocities that are designed to directly lead to physical harm for others and then hide cowardly behind your "right to free speech" instead of taking responsibility for your words. Just like freedom of movement is not the freedom to walk over your neighbours flower patch or run over a kid in the street with your car.
Dude. Critisizing government is one thing. But your rant is bordering on a conspiracy theory.
Of course helping people in the third world is important. That's why the German government spent 4 billion Euros on developmental aid last year. (Sorry, German link, but we write in arabic numbers, too). How much do you think a hundred cops searching for child pornography cost? Policing is one of the most important tasks of the State, and I am actually rather pleased with the performance of the German police. (And yes, I have actually met quite a few of them. I've even worked with them on a daily basis, although not with the internet crime division.)
Now, concerning Tor: Anyone who runs a Tor node on his or her machine knows what they are doing (it's way too complicated for non-nerds) and that their machine can be used by malicious users as a safe gateway to illegal content. That's the problem with Tor. Of course it is annoying or embarrassing for the Tor providers if they thence happen to get caught in the web of the police, but, as an earlier poster noted: None of the Tor providers has been sued. Their machines have simply been seized and will most likely be returned to their owners. It's not like they were arrested and treated as enemy combattants or something.
Finally, regarding the right to critisize government: It's not like the German government was without opposition. Thanks to the heroic actions of the American, Russian and British nations during the second world war, Germany is not a dictatorship any more. If Germans wish to critisize their government, they can write blogs and open letters, publish articles or, goodness me, simply go out into the streets of Berlin and shout out their criticism at any passing politician. All without having to fear _any_ consequences what so ever (as long as their speech isn't racist, attacking the constitution or denying the Holocaust). This is what we call `Free Speech' over here. Fortunately, the term 'UnAmerican' has not been translated into our language, yet.
A previous poster already mentioned that adverts before or during the video stream are highly annoying to users. But there is another concern that even remains valid if you thought about text-based ads next to the video (if you like, the Google model): As the Economist recently pointed out, the trouble for advertisers on youtube is that you simply don't know what's in the video next to which you are advertising. Google is highly effective in putting not only the adverts in context to the search, but also the search in context to the adverts. This, of course, is because Google shows you text.
In a Video, however, there are no keywords. Imagine you are, say, Nike. Would you like your advert being found next to a video of someone stumbling over his feet and breaking his leg in the process (YouTube is full of crap like that)? Or say you are Microsoft, and YouTube manages to put your advert next to the video of a guy rambling on about how shitty Vista will be. Worse, what if your advert shows up next to a video of someone making a racist slur?
The real trouble with YouTube, from the advertisers point of view, is that the content comes from random people, not YouTube, and that unlike in Google's case, there is no way (yet) for a machine to match the content to the advert and the viewer.
Because the counting is being done "in public", in the sense that there are several people around during the count, several people with different backgrounds, with differing party affiliations, all under oath (at least in my country, I have no idea whether it's different in the US).
If, on the other hand, we let a single voting official take these machines with them, to their homes, over night, without any surveillance whatsoever, there goes your last bit of accountability.
From a lawyer's point of view, you are perfectly right. Unfortunately, it seems that society has, somewhere along the way, diluted the concept of a trademark to "I own this word".
/.? Scroll down the comments: More than half of the readers seem to think O'Reilly has somehow seized the words "website". Sometimes, we need to be remembered of the way laws were meant to be.
If everybody would understand the term "trademark" in the way you do it, why is this even on
I agree that companies should be allowed to protect the names of their products to make sure they are not used by other companies for their products, be they similar to the Original (in which case we would speak of plagiarism) or completely different (in which case they might still make unfair use of the original companie's product's fame). That's what trademarks are for.
But I think this is a very limited scope. A trademark should, in my opinion, not allow you to forbid anyone to simply _use_ the name of your product (as opposed to stick it to their own products). Words are symbolic representations of the sounds we make with our tongues while speaking. They are free like the wind. Imagine Microsoft would sue a carpenter because he sold windows. The fine line lies in the difference between using a word as a name and a word as a word. You cannot trademark words. If you could, Shakespeare's heirs would have a nice source of income from about every native English-speaker in the world. How is a "maker fair" or a "web site" a name? They are just words. "Microsoft Windows" is a name. "Windows" is not. "Dodge Ram" is a name. "dodge" and "ram" are words.
There are other problems with flash, aside from the issues with low-user-base browsers. The biggest one for me is that it breaks the page metaphor.
You see, the whole point of the hyper-text machine language is that it lets you link content between sites in a consistent manner (that's why it's 'hyper-text'. Otherwise it would simply be 'formatted text with pictures'). Flash doesn't let you do that. Just imagine Amazon or eBay had a Flash interface and you'll see what I mean.
I'd say this country needs a change of constitution, but given it has one of the oldest constitutions in the world (the Magna Carta), I am not very confident of any change, any time soon.
Dasher is, albeit still in development, a very promising input tool for people with disabilities of varying degree, from Carpal Tunnel Syndrome to Quadraplegy (it has already been used to type complete BSc thesises), and it promises to soon provide a speedup in typing speed even for normal users. Check it out.
No, I'm not affiliated with the project in any way, I only had my nose poked at it by a friend. And I must say, it's impressive. And it is FOSS.
If you're a project leader (or part of the management, which you were, as I understand) and you receive >200 emails per day from your team members (about 10 per team member, assuming you mostly got the mails from the programmers), your mail client is not the issue. Your micro-management is.
A friend of mine is teaching at university, but also co-owns a few servers and does ISP for small businesses. The servers are located about 300km away from where the university is and he does more or less everything via ssh, while a buddy of his who lives next to the site does hardware stuff when needed. You can see where this is headed, can't you?
The other day he gives an introduction to ssh in one of his classes, using an ssh connection to one of his servers as an example. "See, it's like you were there, although the machine is 300km away!" At the end of the lesson, he has about eight different terminal windows open on his X. Wants to shut down his computer, types in "sudo shutdown -h now", his password and wonders why his computer doesn't shut down.
He had about thirty seconds from realising what he had done to the first call on his mobile. Needless to say, his buddy is on holidays for the day, so he has to jump into his car and race through half the country to switch the stupid thing back on.
Goes to show: Don't use mission critical machines for educational purposes. (And don't use the same password twice...)
Since you're being bashed all the way through the children posts, let me back up your opinion: Firefox is ugly as hell, especially in OS X.
It doesn't fit into the look and feel of the native apps, even the best skins still look like hastily scrapped together icon collections. I use Firefox as my main browser (goes to show that I am not too picky about the eye candy) but would really appreciate if someone sat down and at least created a decent skin. Better still (because that would allow us to get rid of the stupid window title bar as well), create an OS X - only version of Firefox that has a look comparable to the current iTunes and all the other Tiger apps.
To one of the children posters: Well, yeah, this is all about opinions. Of course it is. No need to point that out like you just discovered a deep philosophical truth, since we're posting to a story about "the 10 most beautiful OS X apps"...
Of course you're right. The only power strong enough to indict the American President for war crimes is the American people. And, fortunately, living in one of the greates democracies this planet has ever seen, the American people actually has the powers to do so (impeachment, post-term prosecution, open rebellion).
Unfortunately, it seems the public conscience in the States has forgotten Benjamin Franklin's bed-time lectures. They hide behind phrases like "support the troops" or "disagreeing with the president during war times is treason". If the French president did what Bush did (ie. an open breach of the constitution), he would be dragged out of his office by an angry mob within hours. What ever happened to the land of the free?
Come to think of it: How perverse must this world be, where even lawyers so casually break the very laws that other lawyers are so eager to make money on?
Physics is the science of patterns in nature. It's not limited to astronomy and particle physics, but embraces any question that can be posed in a quantified way.
Everytime you see something you don't quite understand and say to yourself "Gee, how does that work?", the little physicist in you jumps up and down, crying "Me, me, me, memememeeee, oh, take me, I'm so smart, goddamnit!"
All science is either physics or stamp collecting. (Earnest Rutherford)
I'm sitting in front of my white 2004 iBook G4 right now and I just tried your eraser proposal. You're right, the faint dark spots on the palm rests of my machine can indeed be brushed away with a rubber eraser.
But I have another problem: Over the course of the past two years, the keyboard has slowly lost its imprints. First on the "s" (where my ring finger rests during touch-typing), then on the "e", "a" and "c" keys (for the first two, it's probably the frequency with which they're hit, for the "c" it might be because of the angle at which my index finger hits it: with the nail). It doesn't seem to be a common problem, but Apple won't replace the keyboard (despite my AppleCare contract), because it is a standard usage effect, they claim. Granted, I don't need to see the keys during typing, but it sure looks ugly. Let's see how this problem turns out with the new machines.
On Slashdot: +4 interesting.
For the nice girl at the party: -1 not even funny.
You must be new here. :-)
Methycillin is a standard antibiotic. Vancomycin and Oxacyllin (or however you want to spell it) are already restricted to resistant stems, that is you only get them once it has become clear that your bug is M-resistant. If your doctor is worth even half his salary, he will make sure you actually continue the treatment until full recovery has been achieved. It's not like you could just walk into Boot's around the corner and ask for "that new superantibiotic", you know.
I have an MSc in Quantum Field Theory and am working on a degree in computational neuroscience. Five years of world class education in theoretical physics. But my friend, the pure mathematician, needn't even try to explain me what he is working on -- I literally wouldn't understand a single word.
Rest assured, the people who are capable of solving any of these "Millenium Problems" are already working together. They don't need a wiki. Wikis are good for problems that need a lot of different views on one subject. They are useless for questions that take years of daily full time mental effort just to be understood, let alone solved.