I'd also argue that Schulz understood, better than most, the human condition, while Wiley seems to only understand humans as caricatures. Peanuts is Bonhoeffer; B.C. is James Dobson.
The thing with religion in the US is, people will attend services but are embarassed to say so.
Quite the opposite -- Americans tend to overreport their observances; actual church attendance tends to run 10-20% lower than self-reported figures.
As for religious music, the last few thousand years suggest you may not be right. More recently, how do you feel about a group like U2, whose music is deeply influenced by Catholicism? The Violent Femmes? Leonard Cohen, whose music feeds upon his Jewish heritage and Buddhist beliefs?
I do agree that music that places ideology before artistry suffers, but the same is true of any medium -- consider the Left Behind series, which manages to be both terrible theology and terrible writing. Those soi disant Christians who use their poorly-conceived theologies to hide from the ethical, moral, and emotional turmoil of being human are all but incapable of making decent art, but don't mistake their crude passion plays for all religiously-infused works.
The court's analogy was only made relative to 1-800-Contacts' argument that they somehow had a protected space when their webpage was displayed on a user's screen. The court assumed inter alia that the user and adware have an identity of interest, but it wasn't germane to their ruling (which, again, was on narrow Lanham Act grounds).
So, you're right that this ruling has nothing to do with clickwrap installs or the like, but it is important -- imagine if Doubleclick could sue because popup blockers were blocking anything coming from a trademark-protected "doubleclick.com." The mind boggles.
The opinion, first of all, is an interlocutory appeal that challenges a preliminary injunction ordered by the district court. The issue at hand has to do with whether the adware violated the Lanham Act: the court found that including 1-800 Contacts' URL in its trigger file ("unpublished directory of terms") did not constitute a violation, nor does the company violate trademark rights when it "causes *** pop-up ads to appear on a *** user's computer screen."
So the ruling only says that it is legal to trigger actions on a local system based on access of URLs, and that displaying competing advertisements on a system displaying the website of a company is not illegal.
It says nothing about the legality of installing adware without a user's permission. As far as the court is concerned, it is dealing with cases when adware is installed and run with the user's permission. ("Moreover, contrary to 1-800's repeated admonitions, WhenU's pop-up ads are authorized -- if unwittingly -- by the C-user who has downloaded the SaveNow software.")
It's the basic legality of this software that's at stake, and this is why the ruling should be celebrated by the Slashdot community. I think you believe that this case somehow deals with whether adware that is installed with "unwitting" permission is illegal, but that is not an issue that was ever approached by this court.
Why is this important? Although the opinion is fairly limited (since the only issue preserved for review was Lanham Act violations, and the district court still has other issues in front of it), it does stop a trend of expanding "use-in-commerce" to a large number of 'Net activities involving trademarks (including Google Adwords and metatags).
Furthermore, it upholds the argument that no website owner has claim on the actions of a client computer:
Not surprisingly, 1-800 cites no legal authority for the proposition that advertisements, software applications, or any other visual image that can appear on a C-user's computer screen must be authorized by the owner of any website that will appear contemporaneously with that image. The fact is that WhenU does not need 1-800's authorization to display a separate window containing an ad any more than Corel would need authorization from Microsoft to display its WordPerfect word-processor in a window contemporaneously with a Word word-processing window.
It's a good ruling. A narrow ruling on a narrow issue, as most are, but a good ruling.
One mistake many people make is confusing the legal precedent with the litigant. In this case, the case may benefit a fairly nasty adware company, but the case law upholds the concept that the owner of a website does not hold any special claim on your computer.
There are a lot of spurious comparisons being made here to brick and mortar stores -- basically, "This is as if Burger King went in and put ads up all over a McDonald's." But that comparison is only true if the website owner has some kind of claim to your system.
Think for a moment about where that ruling would take you. For one thing, take that pop-up blocker off your system.
As I said in an anonymous post earlier, you don't get to choose the litigant, just the legal principle you wish enshrined. In this case: bad litigant, good outcome.
[Digital Praise's] ''Odyssey'' is the name of an imaginary and ruthlessly idealized Midwestern town in which kids solve mysteries with the help of a kindly old local inventor and ice-cream-shop owner named Whit, who in his spare time is a consultant for the U.S. Department of Defense.
They still could be good games, but I have to admit, I don't think Christ would have been on Rumsfeld's payroll. To steal a line from a bumper sticker, "Who Would Jesus Bomb?"
And then there's this:
The Christian gamers' position is that, while you may fight the Devil and lose, you may not fight as the Devil.
Speaking of syncretism, wasn't Kamthaka the Buddha's horse? Benedict XVI would like to have a word with you....
Well. In any case, I think that Christianity was, let's not say 'corrupted,' but certainly significantly changed by its fusion with Imperial cult and circumstance, beginning in 312 CE and reaching a violent apotheosis around 415 CE. It's a pretty long historical haul (roughly another two centuries) before the Germans and Gauls had a significant influence on Church doctrine, and violence had become an often-preferred addition to the Church's toolbox long before. (This doesn't obviate your core point -- that modern Christianity has a bit of the Norse in it -- but I think the blame extends further back.)
As for the idea of "Christian videogames," I tend to blanch at the idea of "Christian media" in general. Such works usually end up either puerile or proselytizing, and rarely any good at all -- they turn Christianity into something about as powerful as an Amway pamphlet.
From just looking over the companies' websites, it looks like N'Lightning is pretty awful (one of its games includes a miserably literal interpretation of Ephesians 6, and I shudder at how they must treat other cultures and religions encountered in the course of that game); Digital Praise could be pretty good; and Brethren's only got vaporware.
The reasonable middle is fairly silent on these issues, and so it is the whackjob-fringe groups that get all the press and the air time.
It's been my experience that, first, the reasonable middle isn't aware that there are perfectly valid interpretations of the Bible that do not excoriate homosexuality (it helps if you learn enough Koine Greek to read Romans and know enough about first century culture to understand Paul's worldview). Consequently, they're afraid to take on the anti-gay groups on a Biblical level, and in fact are not usually aware that there are plenty of theologians and scholars who have studied homosexuality as a valid lifestyle within the Christian faith. Oddly enough, the Catholics are one of the denominations out in front of this issue, though the Curia has aggressively shut down theological discussion (vide Curran, Father Charles).
Second, I do believe that most national-level journalists just don't understand Christianity, and consequently they tend to box Christians into the "conservative faithful" and "liberal heretics" mold. For them, Christianity is not what's studied and taught in the seminaries; it's what someone like James Dobson (who has no theological background) thunders on the radio. As always, loud and ugly beats down soft and reasonable in the media.
Actually, their source comes from Microsoft employees (part of a company LBGT -- is that the right acronym? -- group) reporting a conversation in which an exec specifically told them the company was dropping support because they were threatened with an evangelical boycott. So it's sourced, at least, though I suppose there's always the possibility their sources were lying to them.
Nonetheless, it's remarkable to see Microsoft cave so quickly, given that they've faced down much more serious threats in the past. But, as long as American Christianity remains defined by a absurd focus on sexual behavior, these kinds of stories will remain depressingly common.
According to the press release at Macrovision, the survey appears to have been conducted online at "various game-related websites." An online survey is inherently flawed; an online survey conducted by a company with a vested financial interest in the outcome is marketing.
Nonetheless, bless you for actually paying attention in statistics class.
Richard Clarke is some kind of expert on computer security? Where are his credentials on the subject?
Well, he handled CIP during his time with NSC, and was cybersecurity czar after being shoved out of his counterterror role. 'Czars' of various sorts are, given their lack of power, perhaps the most ironically-named figures in Washington, but Clarke was certainly the best-informed computer security layman in the nation. So, yes, when the former Cybersecurity Czar specifically singles out Microsoft as a source of major vulnerabilities, I think he's qualified to pass judgment.
It's not really science fiction at this point, either. Northwestern is doing an interesting clinical trial with Crohn's patients. Since Crohn's is an autoimmune gut disorder, the idea behind the study is to do a peripheral stem cell collection from the patient, then do immunoablation, effectively killing off the immune system's "memory." The harvested stem cells are then re-seeded to create new lymphocytes. Neat stuff, but they seem to have trouble attracting patients -- in part because there are so many therapies that it's hard to find patients who don't respond to *something*, and in part because the treatment is so extreme.
Still, it's neater than futzing around with TNF-alpha antagonists and NF-kappa-b inhibitors (in a mad scientist kinda way).
It's a technique developed by Xenogen; I've seen it show up in several recent conferences and papers, but I'm not up on the details. It does use in vivo expression of luciferase plus intraperitoneal administration of luciferin, plus what I assume is a *very* sensitive photon detector. There was an article in PNAS a few months ago where they used this technique.
I do agree that the article is badly done, but Wired isn't really known for its rigor.
You're absolutely right on the mark about the nature of the viral therapy. P-glycoprotein is an ATP-dependent drug efflux pump (part of the ATP-binding cassette family) present in a small number of cancer cells. Its main action is to remove drugs from cells before they reach their target, thus conferring multidrug resistance upon some cancers. (The name of the gene expressing P-glycoprotein says it all: MDR1, or "multidrug resistance 1.") Clinically, this means that physicians either have to abandon certain drug regimens, or increase drug levels in (often futile) efforts to get enough drugs into the cancer cells. Needless to say, oncologists *hate* Pgp.
It wasn't until the mid-1990s that researchers were able to grow enough Pgp to analyze it using traditional methods, so we're really in the infancy of Pgp antagonists. This approach, if clinically successful, should radically improve the chances of many cancer patients.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd also argue that Schulz understood, better than most, the human condition, while Wiley seems to only understand humans as caricatures. Peanuts is Bonhoeffer; B.C. is James Dobson.
Quite the opposite -- Americans tend to overreport their observances; actual church attendance tends to run 10-20% lower than self-reported figures.
As for religious music, the last few thousand years suggest you may not be right. More recently, how do you feel about a group like U2, whose music is deeply influenced by Catholicism? The Violent Femmes? Leonard Cohen, whose music feeds upon his Jewish heritage and Buddhist beliefs?
I do agree that music that places ideology before artistry suffers, but the same is true of any medium -- consider the Left Behind series, which manages to be both terrible theology and terrible writing. Those soi disant Christians who use their poorly-conceived theologies to hide from the ethical, moral, and emotional turmoil of being human are all but incapable of making decent art, but don't mistake their crude passion plays for all religiously-infused works.
The court's analogy was only made relative to 1-800-Contacts' argument that they somehow had a protected space when their webpage was displayed on a user's screen. The court assumed inter alia that the user and adware have an identity of interest, but it wasn't germane to their ruling (which, again, was on narrow Lanham Act grounds).
So, you're right that this ruling has nothing to do with clickwrap installs or the like, but it is important -- imagine if Doubleclick could sue because popup blockers were blocking anything coming from a trademark-protected "doubleclick.com." The mind boggles.
I read the opinion, not the article.
The opinion, first of all, is an interlocutory appeal that challenges a preliminary injunction ordered by the district court. The issue at hand has to do with whether the adware violated the Lanham Act: the court found that including 1-800 Contacts' URL in its trigger file ("unpublished directory of terms") did not constitute a violation, nor does the company violate trademark rights when it "causes *** pop-up ads to appear on a *** user's computer screen."
So the ruling only says that it is legal to trigger actions on a local system based on access of URLs, and that displaying competing advertisements on a system displaying the website of a company is not illegal.
It says nothing about the legality of installing adware without a user's permission. As far as the court is concerned, it is dealing with cases when adware is installed and run with the user's permission. ("Moreover, contrary to 1-800's repeated admonitions, WhenU's pop-up ads are authorized -- if unwittingly -- by the C-user who has downloaded the SaveNow software.")
It's the basic legality of this software that's at stake, and this is why the ruling should be celebrated by the Slashdot community. I think you believe that this case somehow deals with whether adware that is installed with "unwitting" permission is illegal, but that is not an issue that was ever approached by this court.
Why is this important? Although the opinion is fairly limited (since the only issue preserved for review was Lanham Act violations, and the district court still has other issues in front of it), it does stop a trend of expanding "use-in-commerce" to a large number of 'Net activities involving trademarks (including Google Adwords and metatags).
Furthermore, it upholds the argument that no website owner has claim on the actions of a client computer:
It's a good ruling. A narrow ruling on a narrow issue, as most are, but a good ruling.There are a lot of spurious comparisons being made here to brick and mortar stores -- basically, "This is as if Burger King went in and put ads up all over a McDonald's." But that comparison is only true if the website owner has some kind of claim to your system.
Think for a moment about where that ruling would take you. For one thing, take that pop-up blocker off your system.
As I said in an anonymous post earlier, you don't get to choose the litigant, just the legal principle you wish enshrined. In this case: bad litigant, good outcome.
And then there's this:
Screwtape would be proud.Well. In any case, I think that Christianity was, let's not say 'corrupted,' but certainly significantly changed by its fusion with Imperial cult and circumstance, beginning in 312 CE and reaching a violent apotheosis around 415 CE. It's a pretty long historical haul (roughly another two centuries) before the Germans and Gauls had a significant influence on Church doctrine, and violence had become an often-preferred addition to the Church's toolbox long before. (This doesn't obviate your core point -- that modern Christianity has a bit of the Norse in it -- but I think the blame extends further back.)
As for the idea of "Christian videogames," I tend to blanch at the idea of "Christian media" in general. Such works usually end up either puerile or proselytizing, and rarely any good at all -- they turn Christianity into something about as powerful as an Amway pamphlet.
From just looking over the companies' websites, it looks like N'Lightning is pretty awful (one of its games includes a miserably literal interpretation of Ephesians 6, and I shudder at how they must treat other cultures and religions encountered in the course of that game); Digital Praise could be pretty good; and Brethren's only got vaporware.
It's been my experience that, first, the reasonable middle isn't aware that there are perfectly valid interpretations of the Bible that do not excoriate homosexuality (it helps if you learn enough Koine Greek to read Romans and know enough about first century culture to understand Paul's worldview). Consequently, they're afraid to take on the anti-gay groups on a Biblical level, and in fact are not usually aware that there are plenty of theologians and scholars who have studied homosexuality as a valid lifestyle within the Christian faith. Oddly enough, the Catholics are one of the denominations out in front of this issue, though the Curia has aggressively shut down theological discussion (vide Curran, Father Charles).
Second, I do believe that most national-level journalists just don't understand Christianity, and consequently they tend to box Christians into the "conservative faithful" and "liberal heretics" mold. For them, Christianity is not what's studied and taught in the seminaries; it's what someone like James Dobson (who has no theological background) thunders on the radio. As always, loud and ugly beats down soft and reasonable in the media.
Nonetheless, it's remarkable to see Microsoft cave so quickly, given that they've faced down much more serious threats in the past. But, as long as American Christianity remains defined by a absurd focus on sexual behavior, these kinds of stories will remain depressingly common.
Err -- as opposed to the veritable explosion of low-budget, independent gaming that we see today?
Nonetheless, bless you for actually paying attention in statistics class.
Well, he handled CIP during his time with NSC, and was cybersecurity czar after being shoved out of his counterterror role. 'Czars' of various sorts are, given their lack of power, perhaps the most ironically-named figures in Washington, but Clarke was certainly the best-informed computer security layman in the nation. So, yes, when the former Cybersecurity Czar specifically singles out Microsoft as a source of major vulnerabilities, I think he's qualified to pass judgment.
Still, it's neater than futzing around with TNF-alpha antagonists and NF-kappa-b inhibitors (in a mad scientist kinda way).
I do agree that the article is badly done, but Wired isn't really known for its rigor.
It wasn't until the mid-1990s that researchers were able to grow enough Pgp to analyze it using traditional methods, so we're really in the infancy of Pgp antagonists. This approach, if clinically successful, should radically improve the chances of many cancer patients.