There is now a tradition here that people who post article text under their own name should be modded down.
Is there now? How come I've never seen it? (Been reading/. regularly for about two years.) I considered posting it as an AC, but decided that more people would read the article if I used my karma bonus to start it at two. I'm sure you know that more people reading TFA should make for a better discussion.
Most/. troll messageboards advise wannabe trolls to copy the article text in full as it often gets modded up, giving some trolls enough karma to get mod points to abuse.
Nice job checking my posting history. Oh wait, you didn't! I earned "excellent" karma status months ago. I can count the number of times I've been modded down on one hand. If I was going to troll, I would have started a loooooong time ago.
In the future, you might want to check someone's recent posts before making a post that suggests that someone is or might be a troll.
Why do people on/. continue to think that it's OK to copy entire articles ?
There are a variety of reasons, but in this case, it's because most people don't want to go to the hassle of registering with the NY Times to view an article. Sure, you can go to bugmenot (like I did), but that's almost as much hassle as registering.
Yes, it's copyright infringement, but I think that the benefit it provides (more people RTFA, leading to better discussion) outweighs any harm the NY Times suffers.
They lose ad revenue, but they also don't have to pay for the bandwidth of thousands of slashdotters viewing the article on their servers. (Note that this will never happen, unless they remove their registration requirement.)
Unlawful? Yes. Immoral? Maybe, but so is tracking people's reading habits, which is the only reason I can think of for requiring "free" registration.
Which is why you get congestion at points of merging and corners for no apparent reason - nervous/careful people slow down, and it cascades into a near stop for everyone else.
You hit the nail on the head with that one. I really wish there was a way to keep people who are unaware of their impact on the flow of traffic off the freeway. Like the people who decide that it's time to go 40mph when they see their exit ahead. Just one of them can turn the right lane into one big clusterfuck real fast. Of course, people who wait until the last second to change lanes or merge can be just as bad, since their maneuvers often force people to hit their brakes.
He Says He Owns the Word 'Stealth' (Actually, He Claims 'Chutzpah,' Too) By COLIN MOYNIHAN
Can a man own a word? And can he sue to keep other people from using it?
Over the last few years, Leo Stoller has written dozens of letters to companies and organizations and individuals stating that he owns the trademark to "stealth." He has threatened to sue people who have used the word without his permission. In some cases, he has offered to drop objections in exchange for thousands of dollars. And in a few of those instances, people or companies have paid up.
"If a trademark owner doesn't go up to the plate each day and police his mark, he will be overrun by third-party infringers," Mr. Stoller, a 59-year-old entrepreneur, said in a telephone interview from his office in Chicago. "We sue a lot of companies."
Mr. Stoller owns and runs a company called Rentamark.com, which offers, among other things, advice on sending cease-and-desist letters and Mr. Stoller's services as an expert witness in trademark trials. Through Rentamark, Mr. Stoller offers licensing agreements for other words he says he owns and controls, such as bootlegger, hoax and chutzpah, and sells t-shirts and other merchandise through what the Web site calls its "stealth mall."
He is currently in a legal dispute with Sony's Columbia Pictures unit over a film that opens late this month. It is about elite Navy pilots and titled - what else? - "Stealth."
Mr. Stoller said he first registered "stealth" as a trademark in 1985 to cover an array of sporting goods. But in recent years, "stealth" has become widely used in marketing and branding circles to bestow a sense of the subliminal or the subversive or to convey an aura of lurking power.
Companies including the retailer Kmart and the consumer electronics maker JVC have stumbled into Mr. Stoller's territory and have removed "stealth" from their Web sites after hearing from him. Another electronics maker, Panasonic, omitted the word from a product called the "stealth wired remote zoom/pause control" after receiving one of Mr. Stoller's letters.
"If you can solve problems without going to court you're better off," said Russell J. Rotter, a lawyer for Panasonic, a division of Matsushita.
The best-known stealth brand may be the military's B2 stealth bomber, whose main contractor, Northrop Grumman, has fought Mr. Stoller to something of standoff. In 2001, the company paid Mr. Stoller $10 and agreed to abandon its trademark applications to use "stealth bomber" in spinoff products like model airplanes and video games. In return, Mr. Stoller agreed not to oppose Northrop's use of "stealth" in aircraft or defense equipment.
"We resolved it in a way that achieved our business purposes without in any way agreeing that Mr. Stoller's assertions were correct," said Tom Henson, a Northrop Grumman spokesman.
Trademark owners can obtain the right to use a word for commercial purposes and then to prevent others from seeking to use the same word for similar commercial purposes. For instance, the Delta Faucet Company, which has trademarked "Delta," could prevent another faucet company from adopting the name. But it cannot object to Delta Airlines because the two companies' products are not likely to be confused with one another.
A search of United States Patent and Trademark Office records found that Mr. Stoller and companies that share a Chicago post office box with him - Central Mfg., Stealth Industries, and S. Industries - hold at least two dozen registered trademarks for "stealth," covering such diverse products and services as crossbows, pool cues and insurance consultations.
Mr. Stoller said that he also held and administered as many as two dozen other "stealth" trademarks, and insisted that his close association with the word gave him special rights.
"We're entitled to own it with all goods and services," he said. "We were there first."
Some companies do recognize his rights to some uses of the word. Easton Spo
it turned your show-mom into a complete horndog who lived to unf the ghost.
Pak, chooie, unf. Pak, chooie, unf. Pak, chooie, unf-unf-unf-unf!
*ahem*
Y'know, I've always assumed that it was watching Gillian Anderson in the X-Files that made me partial to redheads, but I guess I'd kinda forgotten that Gates McFadden is a redhead. My orginal assumption could be wrong, since I used to watch ST:TNG every night when I was a kid. Gates is 36 years older than me, but if that time travel stuff ever works out.... *grin*
Want to help me? Write an app that catalogs every CD as soon as I insert it and then stores the results in a database and make it part of the OS package.
You forgot the option to rip it while you listen and compress it later using spare cpu cycles. Now *that* would kick ass.
There seems to be quite a vogue for drama-portrayed-as-fact in the UK at the moment. One decent one I saw recently was Supervolcano, a cheery tale in which millions of Americans get buried in a giant volcanic eruption. Others are a bit weirder (there was a bizarre 'documentary' about dragons on Channel 4; I switched off when it started hypothesising about dragon mating rituals) - but sadly I do think a modernised War of the Worlds would be considered a bit 'done-already'.:-/
It's here in the US, too. In fact, it's the reason I stopped watching the Discovery channel. The formula for producing these docudramas seems be:
1) Take an improbable topic we don't know much about 2) Make a lot of assumptions about the topic and present them all as fact 3) Have Patrick Stewart narrate the finished film 5) ??? 6) Profit!
It's all part of the "reality tv" crapflood television has been experiencing for the past four or five years. It makes me want to put on my ninja suit, take my katana down off the wall, and go hunting for TV execs.
The basic idea here was probably workable, and could have started a new era of "letters to the editor" that actually stood a chance of changing things.
I disagree. The idea was a bad one. Wikis are not for discussion. Imagine what Slashdot would be like if every news post and every comment could be edited by anyone.
Anyone who spends any amount of time participating in newsgroups/messageboards/wikis could tell you that this was a bad idea. Some corner office twit at the Times probably "discovered" wikis and decided that it would be a great idea to let readers play at being columnists.
Their reaction to the vandalism (blaming Slashdot) further demonstrates their technical ignorance. What would happen in the real world if the LA Times erected an "art wall" and invited everyone in town to draw on it? Would they be surprised to find it covered in obscene language and drawings of giant penises the next day? I'm not sure, but you can bet they'd blame it on the citizens of LA, not their own short-sightedness.
Yeah, you can do whatever you want with digital, but make sure your printer is up to the task. Epson and HP both have good photo printers that make use of gray and light gray ink in addition to black. It makes a HUGE difference in the quality of B&W prints, and a noticeable difference in color prints.
Actually, astronomy is an absolutely brilliant idea. But get a pair of astrobinoculars, not a telescope. Oberwerk makes amazing binoculars for ~$140, and kids will see ten times what they would through a "good" $500 telescope. In fact, I would recommend getting a pair of astrobinoculars long before I would a gaming console. The stars are far more likely to spark their imagination and make playing video games all the more engaging.
Don't forget a tripod. It doesn't matter how your binoculars are if the view is shaking all over the place.
"Learn to do it without a GUI. Only stupid people need GUIs"
Now, like I say, that's not what you mean to say, but that's how "Learn to do things without pretty GUIs. That's the best way to learn." will be interpreted by a fair percentage of non tech people.
No, the non-technical people be asking, "WTF is a GUI?"
The Founding Fathers would cringe in pain if they knew that Americans were partaking in such censorship and tyranny.
Censorship? Tyranny? Where's your sense of proportion? They're just message boards. You may be getting a poor reception because of hyperbole like that.
Indeed, most of the forums I listed are moderated by people who have basically failed in the real world, and therefore feel the need to moderate others to make themselves feel worthwhile.
And saying something like that will definitely put you at a disadvantage. If the mods are groupthink-perpetuating idiots, find another forum. However, you cannot deny the need for moderation, because some people just want to cause trouble.
The real trolls are the moderators. They are the true enemies of freedom and liberty.
Yes, because everyone should be free to post whatever they want, including links to goatse. [/sarcasm]
That's the trick, isn't it? Convincing people that they know better than some Beltway boob is easy. Getting them to actually act on it is very, very hard.
That's rather ignorant. On most message boards, moderation is only used to keep discussion polite and on-topic. (Slashdot needs a bit more than that, since we have so many active posters.) Have you ever heard of trolltalk? The kind of shit you see there would be in every thread on slashdot if we didn't have moderators.
Also, keep in mind that you are free to say whatever you want, here and anywhere else on the web. However, other people are free to ignore you. Moderators are free to mod down you down, delete your message, or ban you. You don't have a right to be heard. Claiming you have one just makes you sound like an attention whore.
If you really want an unmoderated discussion forum, feel free to start one. I'm quite interested to see how you deal with trolls.
But add a editorial wiki to a bible belt newspaper, and there will surely be dialogue going on indeed.
But is it the right kind of dialogue? With an impersonal medium such as the internet, misunderstandings are easily created. It's also easier to be an asshole. And a wiki is wrong in the first place, since it's endlessly editable. A proper discussion board, moderated with an iron fist (to keep out people who can't be polite), would work better.
Even then, I don't think that the textual medium is entirely adequate. You can learn so much more about someone in face-to-face discussion.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for the link! :)
There is now a tradition here that people who post article text under their own name should be modded down.
/. regularly for about two years.) I considered posting it as an AC, but decided that more people would read the article if I used my karma bonus to start it at two. I'm sure you know that more people reading TFA should make for a better discussion.
/. troll messageboards advise wannabe trolls to copy the article text in full as it often gets modded up, giving some trolls enough karma to get mod points to abuse.
Is there now? How come I've never seen it? (Been reading
Most
Nice job checking my posting history. Oh wait, you didn't! I earned "excellent" karma status months ago. I can count the number of times I've been modded down on one hand. If I was going to troll, I would have started a loooooong time ago.
In the future, you might want to check someone's recent posts before making a post that suggests that someone is or might be a troll.
Why do people on /. continue to think that it's OK to copy entire articles ?
There are a variety of reasons, but in this case, it's because most people don't want to go to the hassle of registering with the NY Times to view an article. Sure, you can go to bugmenot (like I did), but that's almost as much hassle as registering.
Yes, it's copyright infringement, but I think that the benefit it provides (more people RTFA, leading to better discussion) outweighs any harm the NY Times suffers.
They lose ad revenue, but they also don't have to pay for the bandwidth of thousands of slashdotters viewing the article on their servers. (Note that this will never happen, unless they remove their registration requirement.)
Unlawful? Yes. Immoral? Maybe, but so is tracking people's reading habits, which is the only reason I can think of for requiring "free" registration.
What has been happening with Firefox.. err Firebird.. err Pheonix.. err.. That damned new web browser from Mozilla.
Stealthfox?
Which is why you get congestion at points of merging and corners for no apparent reason - nervous/careful people slow down, and it cascades into a near stop for everyone else.
You hit the nail on the head with that one. I really wish there was a way to keep people who are unaware of their impact on the flow of traffic off the freeway. Like the people who decide that it's time to go 40mph when they see their exit ahead. Just one of them can turn the right lane into one big clusterfuck real fast. Of course, people who wait until the last second to change lanes or merge can be just as bad, since their maneuvers often force people to hit their brakes.
He Says He Owns the Word 'Stealth' (Actually, He Claims 'Chutzpah,' Too)
By COLIN MOYNIHAN
Can a man own a word? And can he sue to keep other people from using it?
Over the last few years, Leo Stoller has written dozens of letters to companies and organizations and individuals stating that he owns the trademark to "stealth." He has threatened to sue people who have used the word without his permission. In some cases, he has offered to drop objections in exchange for thousands of dollars. And in a few of those instances, people or companies have paid up.
"If a trademark owner doesn't go up to the plate each day and police his mark, he will be overrun by third-party infringers," Mr. Stoller, a 59-year-old entrepreneur, said in a telephone interview from his office in Chicago. "We sue a lot of companies."
Mr. Stoller owns and runs a company called Rentamark.com, which offers, among other things, advice on sending cease-and-desist letters and Mr. Stoller's services as an expert witness in trademark trials. Through Rentamark, Mr. Stoller offers licensing agreements for other words he says he owns and controls, such as bootlegger, hoax and chutzpah, and sells t-shirts and other merchandise through what the Web site calls its "stealth mall."
He is currently in a legal dispute with Sony's Columbia Pictures unit over a film that opens late this month. It is about elite Navy pilots and titled - what else? - "Stealth."
Mr. Stoller said he first registered "stealth" as a trademark in 1985 to cover an array of sporting goods. But in recent years, "stealth" has become widely used in marketing and branding circles to bestow a sense of the subliminal or the subversive or to convey an aura of lurking power.
Companies including the retailer Kmart and the consumer electronics maker JVC have stumbled into Mr. Stoller's territory and have removed "stealth" from their Web sites after hearing from him. Another electronics maker, Panasonic, omitted the word from a product called the "stealth wired remote zoom/pause control" after receiving one of Mr. Stoller's letters.
"If you can solve problems without going to court you're better off," said Russell J. Rotter, a lawyer for Panasonic, a division of Matsushita.
The best-known stealth brand may be the military's B2 stealth bomber, whose main contractor, Northrop Grumman, has fought Mr. Stoller to something of standoff. In 2001, the company paid Mr. Stoller $10 and agreed to abandon its trademark applications to use "stealth bomber" in spinoff products like model airplanes and video games. In return, Mr. Stoller agreed not to oppose Northrop's use of "stealth" in aircraft or defense equipment.
"We resolved it in a way that achieved our business purposes without in any way agreeing that Mr. Stoller's assertions were correct," said Tom Henson, a Northrop Grumman spokesman.
Trademark owners can obtain the right to use a word for commercial purposes and then to prevent others from seeking to use the same word for similar commercial purposes. For instance, the Delta Faucet Company, which has trademarked "Delta," could prevent another faucet company from adopting the name. But it cannot object to Delta Airlines because the two companies' products are not likely to be confused with one another.
A search of United States Patent and Trademark Office records found that Mr. Stoller and companies that share a Chicago post office box with him - Central Mfg., Stealth Industries, and S. Industries - hold at least two dozen registered trademarks for "stealth," covering such diverse products and services as crossbows, pool cues and insurance consultations.
Mr. Stoller said that he also held and administered as many as two dozen other "stealth" trademarks, and insisted that his close association with the word gave him special rights.
"We're entitled to own it with all goods and services," he said. "We were there first."
Some companies do recognize his rights to some uses of the word. Easton Spo
There is no known accurate measure of perceptual audio fidelity.
;)
Of course there is! It's the amount of money you spend on power cables and RCA interconnects!
The mp3s are CBR 128kbps. Ugh. When will people learn to use ABR instead of CBR? You wind up with fractionally larger files that sound MUCH better!
it turned your show-mom into a complete horndog who lived to unf the ghost.
Pak, chooie, unf.
Pak, chooie, unf.
Pak, chooie, unf-unf-unf-unf!
*ahem*
Y'know, I've always assumed that it was watching Gillian Anderson in the X-Files that made me partial to redheads, but I guess I'd kinda forgotten that Gates McFadden is a redhead. My orginal assumption could be wrong, since I used to watch ST:TNG every night when I was a kid. Gates is 36 years older than me, but if that time travel stuff ever works out.... *grin*
Is that you, Merton?
Assuming I'm right, just keep the laptop (and cat) out of your lap while you're trying to knock your wife up, and you'll be fine.
Good advice. Most women probably would not appreciate attempts to use a laptop while impregnating them, and those cats have sharp claws.
DVD's in drugstores ?
Please read this.
Get your's today!
Please read this.
Want to help me? Write an app that catalogs every CD as soon as I insert it and then stores the results in a database and make it part of the OS package.
You forgot the option to rip it while you listen and compress it later using spare cpu cycles. Now *that* would kick ass.
There seems to be quite a vogue for drama-portrayed-as-fact in the UK at the moment. One decent one I saw recently was Supervolcano, a cheery tale in which millions of Americans get buried in a giant volcanic eruption. Others are a bit weirder (there was a bizarre 'documentary' about dragons on Channel 4; I switched off when it started hypothesising about dragon mating rituals) - but sadly I do think a modernised War of the Worlds would be considered a bit 'done-already'. :-/
It's here in the US, too. In fact, it's the reason I stopped watching the Discovery channel. The formula for producing these docudramas seems be:
1) Take an improbable topic we don't know much about
2) Make a lot of assumptions about the topic and present them all as fact
3) Have Patrick Stewart narrate the finished film
5) ???
6) Profit!
It's all part of the "reality tv" crapflood television has been experiencing for the past four or five years. It makes me want to put on my ninja suit, take my katana down off the wall, and go hunting for TV execs.
The basic idea here was probably workable, and could have started a new era of "letters to the editor" that actually stood a chance of changing things.
I disagree. The idea was a bad one. Wikis are not for discussion. Imagine what Slashdot would be like if every news post and every comment could be edited by anyone.
Anyone who spends any amount of time participating in newsgroups/messageboards/wikis could tell you that this was a bad idea. Some corner office twit at the Times probably "discovered" wikis and decided that it would be a great idea to let readers play at being columnists.
Their reaction to the vandalism (blaming Slashdot) further demonstrates their technical ignorance. What would happen in the real world if the LA Times erected an "art wall" and invited everyone in town to draw on it? Would they be surprised to find it covered in obscene language and drawings of giant penises the next day? I'm not sure, but you can bet they'd blame it on the citizens of LA, not their own short-sightedness.
Yeah, you can do whatever you want with digital, but make sure your printer is up to the task. Epson and HP both have good photo printers that make use of gray and light gray ink in addition to black. It makes a HUGE difference in the quality of B&W prints, and a noticeable difference in color prints.
Actually, astronomy is an absolutely brilliant idea. But get a pair of astrobinoculars, not a telescope. Oberwerk makes amazing binoculars for ~$140, and kids will see ten times what they would through a "good" $500 telescope. In fact, I would recommend getting a pair of astrobinoculars long before I would a gaming console. The stars are far more likely to spark their imagination and make playing video games all the more engaging.
Don't forget a tripod. It doesn't matter how your binoculars are if the view is shaking all over the place.
"Learn to do it without a GUI. Only stupid people need GUIs"
Now, like I say, that's not what you mean to say, but that's how "Learn to do things without pretty GUIs. That's the best way to learn." will be interpreted by a fair percentage of non tech people.
No, the non-technical people be asking, "WTF is a GUI?"
The Founding Fathers would cringe in pain if they knew that Americans were partaking in such censorship and tyranny.
Censorship? Tyranny? Where's your sense of proportion? They're just message boards. You may be getting a poor reception because of hyperbole like that.
Indeed, most of the forums I listed are moderated by people who have basically failed in the real world, and therefore feel the need to moderate others to make themselves feel worthwhile.
And saying something like that will definitely put you at a disadvantage. If the mods are groupthink-perpetuating idiots, find another forum. However, you cannot deny the need for moderation, because some people just want to cause trouble.
The real trolls are the moderators. They are the true enemies of freedom and liberty.
Yes, because everyone should be free to post whatever they want, including links to goatse. [/sarcasm]
That's the trick, isn't it? Convincing people that they know better than some Beltway boob is easy. Getting them to actually act on it is very, very hard.
That's rather ignorant. On most message boards, moderation is only used to keep discussion polite and on-topic. (Slashdot needs a bit more than that, since we have so many active posters.) Have you ever heard of trolltalk? The kind of shit you see there would be in every thread on slashdot if we didn't have moderators.
Also, keep in mind that you are free to say whatever you want, here and anywhere else on the web. However, other people are free to ignore you. Moderators are free to mod down you down, delete your message, or ban you. You don't have a right to be heard. Claiming you have one just makes you sound like an attention whore.
If you really want an unmoderated discussion forum, feel free to start one. I'm quite interested to see how you deal with trolls.
But add a editorial wiki to a bible belt newspaper, and there will surely be dialogue going on indeed.
But is it the right kind of dialogue? With an impersonal medium such as the internet, misunderstandings are easily created. It's also easier to be an asshole. And a wiki is wrong in the first place, since it's endlessly editable. A proper discussion board, moderated with an iron fist (to keep out people who can't be polite), would work better.
Even then, I don't think that the textual medium is entirely adequate. You can learn so much more about someone in face-to-face discussion.
Worst. Story. Ever.
MS is nowhere on the list.