"The summary explicitly states that "the idea to harness a secondary radio channel that already existed" was the means for transmitting and receiving SMS text messages,"
You know, back in the days of analog voice with very low data-rate secondary digital channels, this actually did make sense - by making the price high, you could limit demand on the 56k or 96k data channel (it would be entirely possible for thousands of users sending texts all the time to completely flood a low-bandwidth digital channel).
But, seems like in a 2.5G and 3G world where everything is digital, and the available bandwidth is on the order of megabits per second, that the ridiculous fees for texting no longer has a good 'quality-of-service' argument. In fact, having people text more and talk less should *improve* quality of service now that it's *all* digital. Seems like it would, anyhow, since voice takes up a lot more digital bandwidth than text.
It's awfully confusing if everyone is using different names for the same thing. Direct translations, when translated back will (hopefully) give you back the correct name in your own language. It would be less than ideal to run some foreign language text through a computer translator (which might not be aware of the non-literal correlation), and have it give you a name which you have no idea means the same thing as Swine Flu.
"Excuse me for stating this, but ostracizing the sick is an excellent quarantine measure."
Well, yeah, but the problem might be that the affected people get better, but even after getting well again, are still ostracized. That their neighbors, business associates, etc. refuse to deal with them even after they have long gotten better from the sickness. It's a sad thing that peoples' religion sometimes is interpreted to assign blame, sinfulness, or sometimes 'lack of faith' on the (usually innocent) victims of sickness.
(Some might wonder why I even bother to qualify the above with 'usually innocent' - it's because, statistically speaking, it's almost guaranteed that sometimes someone who is engaging in what any particular religion views as 'sin' will *also* coincidentally get sick, and then people use that as 'proof' that the disease is a punishment from God/Allah/{$deity_of_choice}; or, in the case of STD's, the contact with the disease is often a direct result of engaging in said taboo behavior).
My company got rid of their old analog phone system, and all the physical plant that required, by switching to Cisco IP phones. The network uses power-over-ethernet tech to power the phones, and the cisco switches and routers they use provide Quality of Service that makes sure the phone audio quality is superb. You can do phones over WiFi, but, cell phones are a better solution most of the time, so why bother?
Plus, IP phones often offer a lot of features/services that aren't available (or are more expensive) with analog phone systems (like, for example, on our Cisco phones, I can lookup the phone number of anyone in the company by doing a name search in our Active Directory, right from the phone, then can have the phone dial the number automatically by selecting the name from the list on the LCD). Even if you have a separate digital network for phones, why bother having it separate (ok, well, if you already paid for it, it probably doesn't make sense to rip it out and buy IP phones, but I don't think it probably makes sense, nowadays, to have separate phone and data networks, if you are doing new installs)?
Thank you, for putting the lie to this oft-repeated non-sense. Every time there is a discussion about IPv6, someone (usually multiple someones) repeats this rubbish about "IPv6 is not a solution because it too is limited - just a larger limit). Yes, it is limited but it is so large that mankind will not run out of addresses until we either literally spread to many millions of planets throughout the galaxy, each populated by Billions of people, and/or start creating unfathomably large numbers of Nanoscopic electronic devices and individually addressing them with IPv6 addresses. I suppose when we reach the day when your body is filled with nanites that repair damaged cells, destroy cancer and virus infected cells, supplement the immune system, etc, so that you can have almost-immortality, at that point, we *might* start coming close to exhausting the IPv6 address space.
Because, even if everyone has TVs, cars, computers, cell phones, bicycles, refrigerators, stoves, microwaves, home security cameras and security control systems, etc, etc, individually IPv6 addressed, we wouldn't come anywhere near to running out of address space with IPv6.
"I remember about 6 months ago they also did a deal for the original Half Life on Steam for $1, I snapped that up too even though I've already got a legitimately bought copy of Half Life, albeit not on Steam."
I'm not positive this is still true, but at least when I first started using Steam, I was able to input the CD-Key for my boxed-copy of a half-life game (it wasn't even the original half-life, it was the Blue Shift box [never heard of Blue Shift? You're probably in good company]), and after I put in the CD-Key, ALL of the original half-life games became available for free to me in Steam.
Well, that's a little different than what I had in mind - the article there refers to starting with something like coal, and producing gasoline from the coal. That's potentially a short-term solution to at least help us reduce our dependence on foreign oil, here in the U.S. (because we have a lot of coal), but longer term, I'm thinking of something which is more environmentally friendly. The article does talk about synthesizing the fuel from biomass, and that is definitely something which sounds interesting, but I wonder if it's possible to even remove the biomass from the process?
That is, to essentially produce hydrocarbons from water and air, with energy as basically the only inputs (or maybe some very common/cheap elements or compounds)? Is that possible?
"Unless you cleared your cookies or changed to another browser that didn't have your login, your mod was dropped when you posted, even as an AC."
Which is why it's kind of stupid to ban moderators from posting - because they'll just clear their cookies and post as AC anyhow. I would moderate a lot more (I've probably lost 100 mod points over the years from expiration), but I'm too lazy to do the AC thing, and would rather have my posts in my name. I don't want to be gagged on an article just so that I can moderate, so I just don't bother moderating, most of the time.
I know the reasoning behind that was to try to prevent abuses, but honestly, I don't think it actually accomplishes anything positive.
Does fusion consume the lithium, or is it more of a catalyst (sort of) in the process? As long is it's not consumed, then it seems to me like using the Lithium in fusion reactors is a far better use for it than in car batteries.
It's kind of sad what people have done to the word "exploit". One of it's meanings (and I think the original meaning) of the word is simply to put something to use. In that sense of the word, it would be a good thing to 'exploit' Bolivian Lithium. Of course, the other meaning of the word is that when putting something to use, you do it in an way which is unfair to people, or bad for the environment.
Would it not be better for the people of Bolivia to be getting fair prices for that Lithium, under reasonable commercial exploitation, than for it to sit in the ground and the people of Bolivia not to make any money off it at all?
". ..who actually knows if it's practical in the end to have all cars run off lithium batteries?"
I do. The answer is "no". I suppose in the near-term, lithium batteries are not a bad idea, but cars that get 40 or 60 miles then need other energy sources (or swapped battery packs) to get you any farther are not going to get us away from using petroleum as an energy source. Yes, they can help reduce demand somewhat, and that's good, but if you reduce the demand, people will just drive more, and more people will drive (I heard just the other day on NPR about how China is having an automobile buying boom), and your demand will eventually end up right back where it started, despite vehicles like the Volt.
Is anyone doing (or has anyone in the past) done any research on creating synthetic fuels? That is to say, well, hydrogen is one example of a synthetic fuel - where you take energy (heat or electricity), and use it in a chemical process to synthesize fuels. I have seen a lot of people discussing the problems of using hydrogen gas or compressed liquid hydrogen as such a fuel, though (apparently, it's difficult to keep it contained, requiring heavy tanks with very hiqh-quality seals at every place the fuel hoses make connections, and if it loses containment, is highly explosive).
So, I've been wondering for awhile, instead of just synthesizing hydrogen, can you take that hydrogen, and somehow bond it with carbon which has been re-captured from the atmosphere (this would make such fuels carbon-neutral), to produce synthetic hydrocarbons (that is, something akin to gasolene or ethanol, which can easily be used in internal combustion engines)?
It's just really hard to beat liquid hydrocarbons for energy density, ease of containment/safety, etc. We already have infrastructure all over the world for delivering gas/ethanol to vehicles (fueling stations), and everyone is already driving cars and trucks that use those fuels.
If it's possible (I don't know enough about chemistry to know for sure if it's possible, but it seems like it *should* be possible to synthesize fuels), and possible to do it efficiently (I realize sometimes things are possible but you lose substantial percentages of energy in the process, so they aren't practical), it really seems to me that synthetic gas or ethanol is the route we should be pursuing in our R&D efforts.
I think I know what you're talking about. I remember when I was young, going to some sort of space museum (I think it was part of the NASA facility near Cleveland, OH), and they had a space capsule (well, it might have just been a replica - don't remember if it was real or now). But, the capsule was presented 'detached' from the rocket, and it had a very wide, slightly rounded 'bottom', which they said during re-entry orients itself towards the ground, so all the air is colliding with the large surface-area bottom, creating a lot of drag.
I suppose this proposed Russian design is at least somewhat similar.
Ok, so the design is based upon rockets, but does it mean that it uses *no* aerodynamic braking at all? I don't know a whole lot about aerodynamics, but I remember from physics class the discussion of drag and terminal velocity. Is it possible that the shape of their vehicle has a relatively slow terminal velocity, so that the rockets don't have to do *that much* braking at the end? Not that I'm saying that I think even requiring a small amount of retro-rocket braking is a good design, but it seems like maybe you are assuming an awful lot about what speed it will be at when they fire the rockets?
What's wrong with private companies investing to deploy those systems, and subscribers paying for their Internet access like anyone else? Again, I see no reason why the government is a superior option to private companies in providing Internet access.
Maybe for those remote places, we just have to face the fact that cables aren't going to be cost effective, and instead focus on wireless or satellite solutions for Internet access?
I don't know how it is in the UK, but here in the US, the issue of providing Internet access to the poor, so that they can try to improve their situation (e.g. through online educational materials, job training, reading up on technology, email access, etc) is largely resolved through libraries. If you are really so poor you cannot afford to get high-speed internet access, then go to the library.
The library approach limits costs (because you are only provisioning Internet access at a relatively small number of places throughout an area, instead of providing it to thouands, or even hundreds of thousands, of homes). It's inconvenient enough that people still have incentive to earn their own money and buy their own Internet access, instead of just using this 'free' access forever which other taxpayers have to pay for.
An article is posted about a government funded initiative to provide broadband to every home in a country, and I post a reply objecting to the wisdom of using taxpayer money that way, and it gets modded offtopic? WTF?
You know, instead of government spending taxpayer money on initiatives to make things like this free or artificially cheap, how about the government instead work on making sure that the economy is strong, and people have good jobs, then they can have the money to pay for their own broadband.
Seems like way too many people want to use government to attack problems from the wrong end. Don't try to make it so the poor can afford everything - try to make it so there a fewer poor people who can't afford things.
The person you were responding to is a Freedesktop.org, Gnome, or KDE developer (after all, I'm pretty sure on-screen keyboards probably wouldn't be part of the Linux kernel)? I didn't know from the post that they were a developer at all - how do you know? Anyhow, the great thing about open source is that even if the other developers don't care, all it really takes is 1 or 2 people who do care and it can potentially be added. Something which cannot be said about Microsoft - even if you want a feature, good luck getting MS to add it unless they think lots of people want it.
I for one appreciate the position you find yourself in, but I have to ask, do your wife, kids, and parents need Exchange connectivity? My experience of Exchange is that it's generally used in corporate settings, but most home users get their email through ISP's who generally don't use Exchange (of if they do, they turn on SMTP and POP3, so you can use any email client).
As for the Exchange thing, all I can say is, well, what do you expect? Exchange is a proprietary product from MS, who afaik haven't released any documentation for the Exchange protocol, so that Outlook is the one and only client in the world that can fully connect to it, and who would probably sue any open source developers who tried to reverse-engineer the protocol. Still, it would be cool if anyone had the guts to start a Samba-style project to reverse engineer the Exchange protocol and implement a client library for groupware projects to load to communicate with Exchange.
Wait, wait. . . did you just make an argument that because some random poster on/. downplayed a request for touchscreen support, that Linux developers don't care about requests for less-popular but potentially useful features? I agree that the GP's response of essentially 'who cares about touchscreen support' is kind of dumb, I fail to see how his post on/. has anything to do with developer attitudes?
Citizen journalism can only go so far. While I suppose it's possible for private citizens to do investigative journalism, I think that trained professionals may be far more effective at digging up information about government corruption, corporate abuses of employees/environment/customers, etc.
Sometimes (not always, but sometimes anyhow), investigative journalists can be the first ones to spot problems with investment companies, building projects where safety is being reduced by shady cost-cutting (bridges, skyscrapers, nuclear plants, etc), or other places where they fill a 'watch-dog' role. Where sources 'on the inside' who can't directly come out against the problems for fear of the safety of themselves or their families, can provide anonymous information to the journalists, so that the story can get out without being linked directly to them.
Could some of that stuff be done by citizen journalists? Sure, I suppose. Is it worth paying professionals to carry out those sorts of investigations? I believe it is.
What do you mean there's no fair use in trademarks? I agree that when it comes to naming your website, company, etc, there's no fair use. But there is fair use with respect to actual discussions about the trademarked company, organization, website, product, service, etc. Heck,/. article summaries all the time, by necessity, have to use trademarks like Microsoft, Apple, Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, etc in order to refer to the company or product which is being discussed in the article.
So, YES there is fair use in trademarks. That said, however, calling your website wikipediaart.org sure looks like trademark infringement to me, because they have actually named them site using the trademark.
IANAL, but from what I've read about trademark law, if you don't protect your trademark, you lose it (or at least, your ability to protect it gets significantly restricted). As the parent says, the domain name wikipediaart.org is confusing and implies to users that the site is in some way affiliated with or part of wikipedia. Even were that not the case, it's using the trademark right there in the domain name. I'm all for allowing people to have 'fair use' of a trademark when discussing a product, company, or other organization which is trademarked. However, using it in your domain name is different. In this particular case, since they are both in the same 'industry segment' (e.g. website), it's even a bigger problem. You can have McDonald's hamburgers, and McDonald's investments, because those are two different industries. I don't think you could probably have a McDonald's Kitchen restaurant, because you are in the same industry as McDonald's hamburgers, so you would be infringing on their trademark (I think).
So, in summary, it's one thing to use the trademarked name of a company, organization, website, product, or service, when you are actually discussing it (as I've done in this case when I use McDonald's or Wikipedia in the discussion). It's entirely a different thing to name your company, organization, website, product, or service with a name which incorporates someone else's trademark who is in the same industry. Fair use ends when you are naming yourself, if I understand correctly. From a fairness/ethical perspective, anyhow, seems like that would be a reasonable way to view trademarks.
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"The summary explicitly states that "the idea to harness a secondary radio channel that already existed" was the means for transmitting and receiving SMS text messages,"
You know, back in the days of analog voice with very low data-rate secondary digital channels, this actually did make sense - by making the price high, you could limit demand on the 56k or 96k data channel (it would be entirely possible for thousands of users sending texts all the time to completely flood a low-bandwidth digital channel).
But, seems like in a 2.5G and 3G world where everything is digital, and the available bandwidth is on the order of megabits per second, that the ridiculous fees for texting no longer has a good 'quality-of-service' argument. In fact, having people text more and talk less should *improve* quality of service now that it's *all* digital. Seems like it would, anyhow, since voice takes up a lot more digital bandwidth than text.
It's awfully confusing if everyone is using different names for the same thing. Direct translations, when translated back will (hopefully) give you back the correct name in your own language. It would be less than ideal to run some foreign language text through a computer translator (which might not be aware of the non-literal correlation), and have it give you a name which you have no idea means the same thing as Swine Flu.
"Excuse me for stating this, but ostracizing the sick is an excellent quarantine measure."
Well, yeah, but the problem might be that the affected people get better, but even after getting well again, are still ostracized. That their neighbors, business associates, etc. refuse to deal with them even after they have long gotten better from the sickness. It's a sad thing that peoples' religion sometimes is interpreted to assign blame, sinfulness, or sometimes 'lack of faith' on the (usually innocent) victims of sickness.
(Some might wonder why I even bother to qualify the above with 'usually innocent' - it's because, statistically speaking, it's almost guaranteed that sometimes someone who is engaging in what any particular religion views as 'sin' will *also* coincidentally get sick, and then people use that as 'proof' that the disease is a punishment from God/Allah/{$deity_of_choice}; or, in the case of STD's, the contact with the disease is often a direct result of engaging in said taboo behavior).
Not be named after 'unclean' animals after all. I only get kosher diseases, thank you very much!
My company got rid of their old analog phone system, and all the physical plant that required, by switching to Cisco IP phones. The network uses power-over-ethernet tech to power the phones, and the cisco switches and routers they use provide Quality of Service that makes sure the phone audio quality is superb. You can do phones over WiFi, but, cell phones are a better solution most of the time, so why bother?
Plus, IP phones often offer a lot of features/services that aren't available (or are more expensive) with analog phone systems (like, for example, on our Cisco phones, I can lookup the phone number of anyone in the company by doing a name search in our Active Directory, right from the phone, then can have the phone dial the number automatically by selecting the name from the list on the LCD). Even if you have a separate digital network for phones, why bother having it separate (ok, well, if you already paid for it, it probably doesn't make sense to rip it out and buy IP phones, but I don't think it probably makes sense, nowadays, to have separate phone and data networks, if you are doing new installs)?
Thank you, for putting the lie to this oft-repeated non-sense. Every time there is a discussion about IPv6, someone (usually multiple someones) repeats this rubbish about "IPv6 is not a solution because it too is limited - just a larger limit). Yes, it is limited but it is so large that mankind will not run out of addresses until we either literally spread to many millions of planets throughout the galaxy, each populated by Billions of people, and/or start creating unfathomably large numbers of Nanoscopic electronic devices and individually addressing them with IPv6 addresses. I suppose when we reach the day when your body is filled with nanites that repair damaged cells, destroy cancer and virus infected cells, supplement the immune system, etc, so that you can have almost-immortality, at that point, we *might* start coming close to exhausting the IPv6 address space.
Because, even if everyone has TVs, cars, computers, cell phones, bicycles, refrigerators, stoves, microwaves, home security cameras and security control systems, etc, etc, individually IPv6 addressed, we wouldn't come anywhere near to running out of address space with IPv6.
"I remember about 6 months ago they also did a deal for the original Half Life on Steam for $1, I snapped that up too even though I've already got a legitimately bought copy of Half Life, albeit not on Steam."
I'm not positive this is still true, but at least when I first started using Steam, I was able to input the CD-Key for my boxed-copy of a half-life game (it wasn't even the original half-life, it was the Blue Shift box [never heard of Blue Shift? You're probably in good company]), and after I put in the CD-Key, ALL of the original half-life games became available for free to me in Steam.
Well, that's a little different than what I had in mind - the article there refers to starting with something like coal, and producing gasoline from the coal. That's potentially a short-term solution to at least help us reduce our dependence on foreign oil, here in the U.S. (because we have a lot of coal), but longer term, I'm thinking of something which is more environmentally friendly. The article does talk about synthesizing the fuel from biomass, and that is definitely something which sounds interesting, but I wonder if it's possible to even remove the biomass from the process?
That is, to essentially produce hydrocarbons from water and air, with energy as basically the only inputs (or maybe some very common/cheap elements or compounds)? Is that possible?
"Unless you cleared your cookies or changed to another browser that didn't have your login, your mod was dropped when you posted, even as an AC."
Which is why it's kind of stupid to ban moderators from posting - because they'll just clear their cookies and post as AC anyhow. I would moderate a lot more (I've probably lost 100 mod points over the years from expiration), but I'm too lazy to do the AC thing, and would rather have my posts in my name. I don't want to be gagged on an article just so that I can moderate, so I just don't bother moderating, most of the time.
I know the reasoning behind that was to try to prevent abuses, but honestly, I don't think it actually accomplishes anything positive.
Does fusion consume the lithium, or is it more of a catalyst (sort of) in the process? As long is it's not consumed, then it seems to me like using the Lithium in fusion reactors is a far better use for it than in car batteries.
It's kind of sad what people have done to the word "exploit". One of it's meanings (and I think the original meaning) of the word is simply to put something to use. In that sense of the word, it would be a good thing to 'exploit' Bolivian Lithium. Of course, the other meaning of the word is that when putting something to use, you do it in an way which is unfair to people, or bad for the environment.
Would it not be better for the people of Bolivia to be getting fair prices for that Lithium, under reasonable commercial exploitation, than for it to sit in the ground and the people of Bolivia not to make any money off it at all?
". . .who actually knows if it's practical in the end to have all cars run off lithium batteries?"
I do. The answer is "no". I suppose in the near-term, lithium batteries are not a bad idea, but cars that get 40 or 60 miles then need other energy sources (or swapped battery packs) to get you any farther are not going to get us away from using petroleum as an energy source. Yes, they can help reduce demand somewhat, and that's good, but if you reduce the demand, people will just drive more, and more people will drive (I heard just the other day on NPR about how China is having an automobile buying boom), and your demand will eventually end up right back where it started, despite vehicles like the Volt.
Is anyone doing (or has anyone in the past) done any research on creating synthetic fuels? That is to say, well, hydrogen is one example of a synthetic fuel - where you take energy (heat or electricity), and use it in a chemical process to synthesize fuels. I have seen a lot of people discussing the problems of using hydrogen gas or compressed liquid hydrogen as such a fuel, though (apparently, it's difficult to keep it contained, requiring heavy tanks with very hiqh-quality seals at every place the fuel hoses make connections, and if it loses containment, is highly explosive).
So, I've been wondering for awhile, instead of just synthesizing hydrogen, can you take that hydrogen, and somehow bond it with carbon which has been re-captured from the atmosphere (this would make such fuels carbon-neutral), to produce synthetic hydrocarbons (that is, something akin to gasolene or ethanol, which can easily be used in internal combustion engines)?
It's just really hard to beat liquid hydrocarbons for energy density, ease of containment/safety, etc. We already have infrastructure all over the world for delivering gas/ethanol to vehicles (fueling stations), and everyone is already driving cars and trucks that use those fuels.
If it's possible (I don't know enough about chemistry to know for sure if it's possible, but it seems like it *should* be possible to synthesize fuels), and possible to do it efficiently (I realize sometimes things are possible but you lose substantial percentages of energy in the process, so they aren't practical), it really seems to me that synthetic gas or ethanol is the route we should be pursuing in our R&D efforts.
I think I know what you're talking about. I remember when I was young, going to some sort of space museum (I think it was part of the NASA facility near Cleveland, OH), and they had a space capsule (well, it might have just been a replica - don't remember if it was real or now). But, the capsule was presented 'detached' from the rocket, and it had a very wide, slightly rounded 'bottom', which they said during re-entry orients itself towards the ground, so all the air is colliding with the large surface-area bottom, creating a lot of drag.
I suppose this proposed Russian design is at least somewhat similar.
Ok, so the design is based upon rockets, but does it mean that it uses *no* aerodynamic braking at all? I don't know a whole lot about aerodynamics, but I remember from physics class the discussion of drag and terminal velocity. Is it possible that the shape of their vehicle has a relatively slow terminal velocity, so that the rockets don't have to do *that much* braking at the end? Not that I'm saying that I think even requiring a small amount of retro-rocket braking is a good design, but it seems like maybe you are assuming an awful lot about what speed it will be at when they fire the rockets?
What's wrong with private companies investing to deploy those systems, and subscribers paying for their Internet access like anyone else? Again, I see no reason why the government is a superior option to private companies in providing Internet access.
Maybe for those remote places, we just have to face the fact that cables aren't going to be cost effective, and instead focus on wireless or satellite solutions for Internet access?
I don't know how it is in the UK, but here in the US, the issue of providing Internet access to the poor, so that they can try to improve their situation (e.g. through online educational materials, job training, reading up on technology, email access, etc) is largely resolved through libraries. If you are really so poor you cannot afford to get high-speed internet access, then go to the library.
The library approach limits costs (because you are only provisioning Internet access at a relatively small number of places throughout an area, instead of providing it to thouands, or even hundreds of thousands, of homes). It's inconvenient enough that people still have incentive to earn their own money and buy their own Internet access, instead of just using this 'free' access forever which other taxpayers have to pay for.
An article is posted about a government funded initiative to provide broadband to every home in a country, and I post a reply objecting to the wisdom of using taxpayer money that way, and it gets modded offtopic? WTF?
You know, instead of government spending taxpayer money on initiatives to make things like this free or artificially cheap, how about the government instead work on making sure that the economy is strong, and people have good jobs, then they can have the money to pay for their own broadband.
Seems like way too many people want to use government to attack problems from the wrong end. Don't try to make it so the poor can afford everything - try to make it so there a fewer poor people who can't afford things.
The person you were responding to is a Freedesktop.org, Gnome, or KDE developer (after all, I'm pretty sure on-screen keyboards probably wouldn't be part of the Linux kernel)? I didn't know from the post that they were a developer at all - how do you know? Anyhow, the great thing about open source is that even if the other developers don't care, all it really takes is 1 or 2 people who do care and it can potentially be added. Something which cannot be said about Microsoft - even if you want a feature, good luck getting MS to add it unless they think lots of people want it.
I for one appreciate the position you find yourself in, but I have to ask, do your wife, kids, and parents need Exchange connectivity? My experience of Exchange is that it's generally used in corporate settings, but most home users get their email through ISP's who generally don't use Exchange (of if they do, they turn on SMTP and POP3, so you can use any email client).
As for the Exchange thing, all I can say is, well, what do you expect? Exchange is a proprietary product from MS, who afaik haven't released any documentation for the Exchange protocol, so that Outlook is the one and only client in the world that can fully connect to it, and who would probably sue any open source developers who tried to reverse-engineer the protocol. Still, it would be cool if anyone had the guts to start a Samba-style project to reverse engineer the Exchange protocol and implement a client library for groupware projects to load to communicate with Exchange.
Wait, wait. . . did you just make an argument that because some random poster on /. downplayed a request for touchscreen support, that Linux developers don't care about requests for less-popular but potentially useful features? I agree that the GP's response of essentially 'who cares about touchscreen support' is kind of dumb, I fail to see how his post on /. has anything to do with developer attitudes?
Citizen journalism can only go so far. While I suppose it's possible for private citizens to do investigative journalism, I think that trained professionals may be far more effective at digging up information about government corruption, corporate abuses of employees/environment/customers, etc.
Sometimes (not always, but sometimes anyhow), investigative journalists can be the first ones to spot problems with investment companies, building projects where safety is being reduced by shady cost-cutting (bridges, skyscrapers, nuclear plants, etc), or other places where they fill a 'watch-dog' role. Where sources 'on the inside' who can't directly come out against the problems for fear of the safety of themselves or their families, can provide anonymous information to the journalists, so that the story can get out without being linked directly to them.
Could some of that stuff be done by citizen journalists? Sure, I suppose. Is it worth paying professionals to carry out those sorts of investigations? I believe it is.
What do you mean there's no fair use in trademarks? I agree that when it comes to naming your website, company, etc, there's no fair use. But there is fair use with respect to actual discussions about the trademarked company, organization, website, product, service, etc. Heck, /. article summaries all the time, by necessity, have to use trademarks like Microsoft, Apple, Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, etc in order to refer to the company or product which is being discussed in the article.
So, YES there is fair use in trademarks. That said, however, calling your website wikipediaart.org sure looks like trademark infringement to me, because they have actually named them site using the trademark.
IANAL, but from what I've read about trademark law, if you don't protect your trademark, you lose it (or at least, your ability to protect it gets significantly restricted). As the parent says, the domain name wikipediaart.org is confusing and implies to users that the site is in some way affiliated with or part of wikipedia. Even were that not the case, it's using the trademark right there in the domain name. I'm all for allowing people to have 'fair use' of a trademark when discussing a product, company, or other organization which is trademarked. However, using it in your domain name is different. In this particular case, since they are both in the same 'industry segment' (e.g. website), it's even a bigger problem. You can have McDonald's hamburgers, and McDonald's investments, because those are two different industries. I don't think you could probably have a McDonald's Kitchen restaurant, because you are in the same industry as McDonald's hamburgers, so you would be infringing on their trademark (I think).
So, in summary, it's one thing to use the trademarked name of a company, organization, website, product, or service, when you are actually discussing it (as I've done in this case when I use McDonald's or Wikipedia in the discussion). It's entirely a different thing to name your company, organization, website, product, or service with a name which incorporates someone else's trademark who is in the same industry. Fair use ends when you are naming yourself, if I understand correctly. From a fairness/ethical perspective, anyhow, seems like that would be a reasonable way to view trademarks.