Also, please include citations when you make accusations like that. I pulled up a bunch of articles on the Iranian twitspam with no problem but found it harder to dig up reports of US Agencies doing the same (though I wouldn't be shocked if they had, this seems to go both ways).
Actually, it was known as Phoenix from release 0.1 to around 0.5. Then it was initially renamed to Firebird for version 0.6 due to trademark issues with the Phoenix Technologies company (of Phoenix BIOS fame). Then when the Firebird Database Server people threw a hissy fit, a thorough trademark search was conducted, some minor issues settled, and it was renamed to Mozilla Firefox around release 0.8.
See the naming history on Wikipedia. It was quite a fiasco when they announced a second name change in a matter of months.
However, there is lots of complex emergent behavior from those "laws of physics" you mention. For example, all of chemistry and biology. Yes, it is true, that from a complete understanding of the laws of physics, all of those things should emerge - but that doesn't mean that you can write a *practical* simulation of biological phenomena by simply coding up the Standard Model, putting a bunch of particles in the right configuration, and clicking on "run".
For starters, the human body has something on the order of 10^27 atoms. The human brain is something on the order of 10^25 atoms. A perfect simulation from physics principles (i.e. quantum mechanics, electroweak forces, etc.) on that order of magnitude of all atomic and subatomic phenomena is breathtakingly beyond our current abilities. It is easy to say that it is in principle possible to simulate this, it is another thing to simulate even a single neuron in this manner. We could probably manage to simulate a few molecular interactions in this manner and get something reasonably close to results from them.
If we go up in scale several orders of magnitude, there are something on the order of 100 billion neurons. Now we are at least in the realm of conceivable simulation, if not so close to practical simulation. However, each neuron consists of hundreds of thousands or maybe millions of molecules interacting with each other, some simple molecules, some very complex proteins. While the raw code for this simulation may be composed of mostly just the DNA, the data it interacts with consist of lots of different materials brought into the body from air, water and food.
Now we are back to the point this author made about understanding all these interactions at the protein level. If we can't, in practice, with current systems, simply simulate the quantum mechanical behavior of all the particles in the brain, the only meaningful thing to do is some sort of structural/higher level simulation of components and interactions, and there are breathtaking numbers of complex interactions going on that we are nowhere near fully understanding.
So... to try to count how many years away we are from running such a simulation based on some very broken, reductive assumptions does seem like folly.
I do believe we'll get there (i.e. simulating the brain and understanding it well enough to create strong-AI level machines, but I don't think it will be in my lifetime (I'm 31 years old currently), and I don't think we'll be simulating any things of the scale and complexity of a human brain directly from first physics principles in my lifetime, or my great-grandchildren's lifetimes.
I am not a lawyer, but apparently his relates to the Lanham Act Section 45, 15 USC 1127 which defines abandonment of a trademark. But that law never explicitly states that failure to police constitutes abandonment. However, allowing a mark to become totally generic in usage is considered abandonment.
The requirement to police your mark has apparently been defined by appellate court decisions to meet standards of "reasonableness" and the like - so not cease-and-desisting every usage of your mark doesn't mean you lose the right to enforce it, but if you don't enforce it at all, you will probably have trouble winning a future case. The result of the vagueness of this requirement appears to be that many people err on the side of overzealous cease-and-desisting.
I know that legally companies have to enforce trademarks or risk losing them. However, for a case like this where there is no actual damage to their business and no real risk of confusion, the best solution from a PR perspective would be to offer a royalty-free license to the trademark and its variant to the person in question.
You know, instead of the traditional "cease-and-desist" letter, you could send a "we notice you borrowed from our logo - we are required to contact you by trademark law, and we will offer you a royalty-free license for this use, in a limited context, if you get in touch with us".
That would completely avoid the nasty press these companies for doing this, and keep the trademark lawyers happily occupied.
Why can't we live in the kind of more civil society where we look for positive solutions to problems in this way instead of simply defaulting to the negative?
Actually, the first public beta of Safari was January 7th 2003 according to Wikipedia. The first public point release of Firefox (or rather, Phoenix as it was called at the time before the great renaming controversy) was Phoenix 0.1 which was released in September 2002. So Firefox/Phoenix preceded Safari by about 3-4 months.
Firefox came out with many very usable, relatively stable point releases that I was using as my regular web browser long before it was at 1.0 (it is certainly true that Safari 1.0 preceded Firefox 1.0 by several years, but you know how open source projects are about labeling something "1.0"). In particular, by the 0.6/0.7 releases in late 2003, it was the default browser in some Linux distributions, and my regular web browser for daily use.
And arrow assignment is the syntax R uses currently. Which is all fine and well, except that I often find myself translating stuff from R to Python or R to C and looking at the two disparate assignment operators simultaneously gives me a headache.
Why anybody would buy a carrier-crippled handset in this day and age is beyond me. Just say no. Sack up, buy a real man's phone and stop your damned whining.
This is all nice, but Google has already done this with Android phones and the iPhone. The reason people expect it with the iPad is that there is a perfect platform out there already for an iPad clone, Android, which basically does everything iOS does roughly as well or at least within a stone's throw of iOS, and some things better.
The only reason it's not on any mainstream tablets yet is that Google hasn't yet certified a tablet specification (i.e. you need to have phone capabilities), and therefore any pure, non-cellular-voice-enabled Android tablets can't be released with Google apps and more importantly, with access to the Android Market.
So, yeah, I won't harp on about reality distortion fields and breathless Apple marketing because I don't need to. There are already crappy, off-brand Android tablet clones. The good ones will come out when Google says they can come out. This isn't vaporware, it's Google exerting some control over their platform, which is a good thing, seeing as they let things get a little too chaotic for a while with the Android OS versions.
You seem to have forgotten about the Digital Millenium Copyright Act and the concept of a "circumvention device". That was what they chased after everybody who distributed DeCSS for. Of course, it was totally futile then as it is now, but there is a legal stick to shake at people for this sort of thing, at least in the US.
You are the only slashtard around here. Android is completely open source. Google's proprietary apps such as Google Earth, Google Marketplace, etc. are not the same thing as Android, the operating system. Certain hardware handsets are not the same as Android either, and not all handsets are open, for business reasons.
If you want a completely open handset, get the Nexus One, and you get the full benefit of the open source operating system that is Android. Or get any rootable, unlocked handset, just don't expect the carriers to subsidize a truly open handset for you.
The whining about this drives me nuts - you can have open handsets, or you can have carrier-subsidized handsets, but you aren't likely to get both in the same device. The market has spoken - 95% of people in the US at least want the cheap, carrier-subsidized handsets. The other 5% of people buy the Nexus One at full freight. This topic has been hashed and rehashed, and everybody should know all of this already. Whining about how Android isn't truly open source just makes you look like a fucking retard.
Knowledge of the existence of the documents doesn't endanger lives, nor really does general tactical information about past engagements despite what the military might suggest - it's not like the Taliban haven't already figured out all of that stuff themselves after 9+ years of fighting Americans.
The things that endanger lives are specific persons, villages, and sources that have cooperated with US military personnel. Some of those people have probably already been killed or will be very soon, since the Taliban has already said they have people reviewing all the documents for names.
Eh? Android does support ActiveSync. It just that prior to 2.2, it didn't enforce all the corporate security policies of ActiveSync. See Feature Enhancement Request 4475 and see this article for a summary of related changes in 2.2.
2.2 seems to address most of the password/security policy issues with ActiveSync. I have 2.2 running on my Nexus One, but don't use Exchange server, so can't comment here.
For Droid owners, the update to 2.2 is supposed to come out officially this week, though I'm pretty sure there are unofficial 2.2 ROMs out there already. So basically, what you are talking about is no longer an issue, or at least not a particularly significant one.
Umm, you are aware that this guy is closely involved with Julian Assange in running Wikileaks, which leaked tons of US classified information, right? The summary is utterly misleading. This isn't a random dude getting harassed by the US government just because he works on Tor technology. In fact, that fact appears to be completely unrelated to his detention.
I'm not going to judge whether the wikileaks leaks are legal or not, moral or not, the fact is when you get involved in that line of work directly opposed to the US government AND you are a US citizen, a few hours questioning is par for the course. If they said he'd been detained for 3 *weeks* without being charged, I'd say okay, there's something to make a big deal about here.
SwiftKey comes close, and has really good predictive text guesses that are usually right and will let me pick the exact thing I typed from the displayed list if I am typing a formerly unknown proper noun, for example, but it has some minor problems on my Nexus One that are really frustrating.
First, it tends to recognize keypresses near the lower right corner as backspace or enter and on the bottom row as space keys. It's very smart about character keys, but doesn't apply the same analysis to punctuation keys - it should be obvious that I wouldn't type three characters then space then a garbled half of the word - it's like it stops processing when it thinks I meant to hit a space bar. Duh. Blindtype seems to be smarter about that.
And second, it occasionally seems to fail to register or filters out the first 1-2 characters of a word I am typing if I type too fast. It's almost like it thinks they were so quick that they were mistakes. This is very frustrating and needs to be a configurable option for fast thumb typists like myself.
These are the reasons I'm looking forward to BlindType, or at least a fixed version of SwiftKey. It seems from the BlindType demo videos to at least address the first problem because it processes a set of keypresses as a batch. Whether I'm faster in practice with BlindType, SwiftKey or something else will remain to be seen.
And yes, I've tried Swype too and have it installed but don't use it everyday. It's nice and quite fast if I'm sitting there and looking at my screen, but I can't use it at all when I'm walking around or otherwise multitasking, which is why I'm so eager for BlindType.
I think you misunderstood the study. From the source, it appears that they assessed personality characteristics based on answers to questions in a survey, and compared to self-reported iPad ownership status.
So in fact it *is* the case that iPad owners are more selfish, less altruistic, etc., or at least that they admitted to less altrustic, less kind behaviors in the study (whether admitted behavior and self-perception is somehow influenced by the fact that you just got them to admit to being an iPad owner is a fair question).
Clearly, you should hire an MBA to write your software, a developer to design your web page, and a designer to run your company. Then all will be right in the world.
I am not a designer, but I agree, most of what I see on that site is somewhere between uninspired and terrible.
Here's a question - if I have a graphic design project that I want to get done for a modest sum of money (somewhere in the several hundred to several thousand dollar range, depending on complexity and quantity of work), but don't expect 100 people to do a design for free, where can I find lots of portfolios of design work online to find somebody who's actually good and reasonably priced to work with?
It is. You can download and compile the source as much as you want. It's all right there. Google has made it 100% open.
Of course, if you want a truly open phone, that you can have root access to and that you can unlock the bootloader on (i.e. to flash your own ROMs) you'll either need to use a procedure that's not authorized by the manufacturer, or you'll need to get a Google Developer Phone (i.e. Nexus One). Or find a manufacturer that supports truly open hardware (good luck with that).
Unless you use something like the GPL-v3, forcing manufacturers to be open isn't possibly. And if you tried the GPL-v3 approach, not a single manufacturer would have adopted Android. It's completely incompatible with their business model of carrier-subsidized handsets and carrier-lock-in.
Unfortunately, nobody in the market other than a few hundred thousand geeks really wanted the openness of the Nexus One, as a result it's been removed from public sales in the US effective yesterday, and will only be offered for sale to registered Android developers in the future (it's still on the market through retail outlets and phone company partnerships in Europe, Korea and possibly other places though).
People voted with their dollars - they *like* the crapware because it subsidizes their el-cheapo subsidized handsets. If they were willing to pay the actual cost of the hardware, they wouldn't have to see bloatware/crapware flooding the damn phones and wouldn't be beholden to the shitty carriers. But no, they are a bunch of whiny bitches who won't pay and they killed the market for open hardware.
Luckily, registering as an Android developer just means paying an extra $25 bucks, which shouldn't stop most of the Slashdot geek crowd. And rooting and bootloader-unlocking most of the Samsung, Motorola and HTC Android phones is pretty easy for anybody who's tech-saavy enough to be flashing their own ROMs in the first place.
What I don't get is why would they even *think* of letting this get to court. Seriously. Even if the guy's chance of prevailing is only 10%, the downside risk is absolutely gigantic for Zuckerberg, AND for the venture capital guys that have put up a lot of money for Facebook.
Knowing as they do that the signature is legitimate, they should have offered this guy 10 or 20 million bucks to just go away rather than taking the risk that this guy will end up seizing a big chunk of equity.
Also shows you how absolutely useless the "due diligence" is that VCs perform. Zuckerberg probably never disclosed this old contract from the early days to any of his investors or they would have forced a settlement with this guy before things got this far. I've gotta think they are squirming just a bit right now.
There used to be some interesting interviews and the like in Playboy magazing, in addition to the skin.
The problem is these articles on thesmokingjacket.com are written for morons. "Get Kinky in Your Backwards Robe" about having sex in a Snuggie. "Larger than Life" - does some chick with 38KKK fake boobs have the world's biggest fake boobs? "Can he survive without hairspray" about Jimmy Johnson's hairdo. "How to get laid at work". That sort of speaks for itself.
I mean, I was thinking a bit like Esquire, but this looks like CollegeHumor.com without the humor, mixed with one of those magazines your wife or girlfriend secretly likes to read in the checkout line but is too embarrassed to buy.
The word Onion is *not* there. There is a -SPAN emblem in the lower right corner. If you don't already know the video is from the Onion, that logo being the Onion logo is not immediately obvious, even if you've heard of the Onion before and know that it's a humor publication. Especially when it's covered by advertising.
Of course, the satirical nature of the content is obvious to anybody with a brain though.
A) That rather looked like the letter "D" in a script font to me, so I would have thought it said "D-Span". It certainly doesn't say "Onion-Span", and the association with the Onion logo is only obvious if you already know or suspect it's from the Onion.
B) That part of the video was partially obscured for much of the video by Google ads over the lower bar of the screen.
Obviously none of this changes the fact that it was obviously a spoof to anybody with a brain, but the fortuitous combination of YouTube's Google ad placement with an small, not-completely obvious logo means that the sourcing, while clear if you already know it's from the Onion, isn't necessarily obvious at a glance.
Slashdot Mirror
As opposed to the laughably juvenile attempts by Iranian intelligence agencies to spam twitter with pro-Iranian-government messages?
Also, please include citations when you make accusations like that. I pulled up a bunch of articles on the Iranian twitspam with no problem but found it harder to dig up reports of US Agencies doing the same (though I wouldn't be shocked if they had, this seems to go both ways).
Actually, it was known as Phoenix from release 0.1 to around 0.5. Then it was initially renamed to Firebird for version 0.6 due to trademark issues with the Phoenix Technologies company (of Phoenix BIOS fame). Then when the Firebird Database Server people threw a hissy fit, a thorough trademark search was conducted, some minor issues settled, and it was renamed to Mozilla Firefox around release 0.8.
See the naming history on Wikipedia. It was quite a fiasco when they announced a second name change in a matter of months.
However, there is lots of complex emergent behavior from those "laws of physics" you mention. For example, all of chemistry and biology. Yes, it is true, that from a complete understanding of the laws of physics, all of those things should emerge - but that doesn't mean that you can write a *practical* simulation of biological phenomena by simply coding up the Standard Model, putting a bunch of particles in the right configuration, and clicking on "run".
For starters, the human body has something on the order of 10^27 atoms. The human brain is something on the order of 10^25 atoms. A perfect simulation from physics principles (i.e. quantum mechanics, electroweak forces, etc.) on that order of magnitude of all atomic and subatomic phenomena is breathtakingly beyond our current abilities. It is easy to say that it is in principle possible to simulate this, it is another thing to simulate even a single neuron in this manner. We could probably manage to simulate a few molecular interactions in this manner and get something reasonably close to results from them.
If we go up in scale several orders of magnitude, there are something on the order of 100 billion neurons. Now we are at least in the realm of conceivable simulation, if not so close to practical simulation. However, each neuron consists of hundreds of thousands or maybe millions of molecules interacting with each other, some simple molecules, some very complex proteins. While the raw code for this simulation may be composed of mostly just the DNA, the data it interacts with consist of lots of different materials brought into the body from air, water and food.
Now we are back to the point this author made about understanding all these interactions at the protein level. If we can't, in practice, with current systems, simply simulate the quantum mechanical behavior of all the particles in the brain, the only meaningful thing to do is some sort of structural/higher level simulation of components and interactions, and there are breathtaking numbers of complex interactions going on that we are nowhere near fully understanding.
So... to try to count how many years away we are from running such a simulation based on some very broken, reductive assumptions does seem like folly.
I do believe we'll get there (i.e. simulating the brain and understanding it well enough to create strong-AI level machines, but I don't think it will be in my lifetime (I'm 31 years old currently), and I don't think we'll be simulating any things of the scale and complexity of a human brain directly from first physics principles in my lifetime, or my great-grandchildren's lifetimes.
I am not a lawyer, but apparently his relates to the Lanham Act Section 45, 15 USC 1127 which defines abandonment of a trademark. But that law never explicitly states that failure to police constitutes abandonment. However, allowing a mark to become totally generic in usage is considered abandonment.
The requirement to police your mark has apparently been defined by appellate court decisions to meet standards of "reasonableness" and the like - so not cease-and-desisting every usage of your mark doesn't mean you lose the right to enforce it, but if you don't enforce it at all, you will probably have trouble winning a future case. The result of the vagueness of this requirement appears to be that many people err on the side of overzealous cease-and-desisting.
My source for much of this information.
I know that legally companies have to enforce trademarks or risk losing them. However, for a case like this where there is no actual damage to their business and no real risk of confusion, the best solution from a PR perspective would be to offer a royalty-free license to the trademark and its variant to the person in question.
You know, instead of the traditional "cease-and-desist" letter, you could send a "we notice you borrowed from our logo - we are required to contact you by trademark law, and we will offer you a royalty-free license for this use, in a limited context, if you get in touch with us".
That would completely avoid the nasty press these companies for doing this, and keep the trademark lawyers happily occupied.
Why can't we live in the kind of more civil society where we look for positive solutions to problems in this way instead of simply defaulting to the negative?
Actually, the first public beta of Safari was January 7th 2003 according to Wikipedia. The first public point release of Firefox (or rather, Phoenix as it was called at the time before the great renaming controversy) was Phoenix 0.1 which was released in September 2002. So Firefox/Phoenix preceded Safari by about 3-4 months.
Firefox came out with many very usable, relatively stable point releases that I was using as my regular web browser long before it was at 1.0 (it is certainly true that Safari 1.0 preceded Firefox 1.0 by several years, but you know how open source projects are about labeling something "1.0"). In particular, by the 0.6/0.7 releases in late 2003, it was the default browser in some Linux distributions, and my regular web browser for daily use.
And arrow assignment is the syntax R uses currently. Which is all fine and well, except that I often find myself translating stuff from R to Python or R to C and looking at the two disparate assignment operators simultaneously gives me a headache.
Why anybody would buy a carrier-crippled handset in this day and age is beyond me. Just say no. Sack up, buy a real man's phone and stop your damned whining.
This is all nice, but Google has already done this with Android phones and the iPhone. The reason people expect it with the iPad is that there is a perfect platform out there already for an iPad clone, Android, which basically does everything iOS does roughly as well or at least within a stone's throw of iOS, and some things better.
The only reason it's not on any mainstream tablets yet is that Google hasn't yet certified a tablet specification (i.e. you need to have phone capabilities), and therefore any pure, non-cellular-voice-enabled Android tablets can't be released with Google apps and more importantly, with access to the Android Market.
So, yeah, I won't harp on about reality distortion fields and breathless Apple marketing because I don't need to. There are already crappy, off-brand Android tablet clones. The good ones will come out when Google says they can come out. This isn't vaporware, it's Google exerting some control over their platform, which is a good thing, seeing as they let things get a little too chaotic for a while with the Android OS versions.
You seem to have forgotten about the Digital Millenium Copyright Act and the concept of a "circumvention device". That was what they chased after everybody who distributed DeCSS for. Of course, it was totally futile then as it is now, but there is a legal stick to shake at people for this sort of thing, at least in the US.
You are the only slashtard around here. Android is completely open source. Google's proprietary apps such as Google Earth, Google Marketplace, etc. are not the same thing as Android, the operating system. Certain hardware handsets are not the same as Android either, and not all handsets are open, for business reasons.
If you want a completely open handset, get the Nexus One, and you get the full benefit of the open source operating system that is Android. Or get any rootable, unlocked handset, just don't expect the carriers to subsidize a truly open handset for you.
The whining about this drives me nuts - you can have open handsets, or you can have carrier-subsidized handsets, but you aren't likely to get both in the same device. The market has spoken - 95% of people in the US at least want the cheap, carrier-subsidized handsets. The other 5% of people buy the Nexus One at full freight. This topic has been hashed and rehashed, and everybody should know all of this already. Whining about how Android isn't truly open source just makes you look like a fucking retard.
Knowledge of the existence of the documents doesn't endanger lives, nor really does general tactical information about past engagements despite what the military might suggest - it's not like the Taliban haven't already figured out all of that stuff themselves after 9+ years of fighting Americans.
The things that endanger lives are specific persons, villages, and sources that have cooperated with US military personnel. Some of those people have probably already been killed or will be very soon, since the Taliban has already said they have people reviewing all the documents for names.
Eh? Android does support ActiveSync. It just that prior to 2.2, it didn't enforce all the corporate security policies of ActiveSync. See Feature Enhancement Request 4475 and see this article for a summary of related changes in 2.2.
2.2 seems to address most of the password/security policy issues with ActiveSync. I have 2.2 running on my Nexus One, but don't use Exchange server, so can't comment here.
For Droid owners, the update to 2.2 is supposed to come out officially this week, though I'm pretty sure there are unofficial 2.2 ROMs out there already. So basically, what you are talking about is no longer an issue, or at least not a particularly significant one.
Umm, you are aware that this guy is closely involved with Julian Assange in running Wikileaks, which leaked tons of US classified information, right? The summary is utterly misleading. This isn't a random dude getting harassed by the US government just because he works on Tor technology. In fact, that fact appears to be completely unrelated to his detention.
I'm not going to judge whether the wikileaks leaks are legal or not, moral or not, the fact is when you get involved in that line of work directly opposed to the US government AND you are a US citizen, a few hours questioning is par for the course. If they said he'd been detained for 3 *weeks* without being charged, I'd say okay, there's something to make a big deal about here.
SwiftKey comes close, and has really good predictive text guesses that are usually right and will let me pick the exact thing I typed from the displayed list if I am typing a formerly unknown proper noun, for example, but it has some minor problems on my Nexus One that are really frustrating.
First, it tends to recognize keypresses near the lower right corner as backspace or enter and on the bottom row as space keys. It's very smart about character keys, but doesn't apply the same analysis to punctuation keys - it should be obvious that I wouldn't type three characters then space then a garbled half of the word - it's like it stops processing when it thinks I meant to hit a space bar. Duh. Blindtype seems to be smarter about that.
And second, it occasionally seems to fail to register or filters out the first 1-2 characters of a word I am typing if I type too fast. It's almost like it thinks they were so quick that they were mistakes. This is very frustrating and needs to be a configurable option for fast thumb typists like myself.
These are the reasons I'm looking forward to BlindType, or at least a fixed version of SwiftKey. It seems from the BlindType demo videos to at least address the first problem because it processes a set of keypresses as a batch. Whether I'm faster in practice with BlindType, SwiftKey or something else will remain to be seen.
And yes, I've tried Swype too and have it installed but don't use it everyday. It's nice and quite fast if I'm sitting there and looking at my screen, but I can't use it at all when I'm walking around or otherwise multitasking, which is why I'm so eager for BlindType.
I think you misunderstood the study. From the source, it appears that they assessed personality characteristics based on answers to questions in a survey, and compared to self-reported iPad ownership status.
So in fact it *is* the case that iPad owners are more selfish, less altruistic, etc., or at least that they admitted to less altrustic, less kind behaviors in the study (whether admitted behavior and self-perception is somehow influenced by the fact that you just got them to admit to being an iPad owner is a fair question).
Clearly, you should hire an MBA to write your software, a developer to design your web page, and a designer to run your company. Then all will be right in the world.
Thanks for showing what a moron you are. You think the bits know where they came from? You and the RIAA lawyers can go stew in you own suck.
I am not a designer, but I agree, most of what I see on that site is somewhere between uninspired and terrible.
Here's a question - if I have a graphic design project that I want to get done for a modest sum of money (somewhere in the several hundred to several thousand dollar range, depending on complexity and quantity of work), but don't expect 100 people to do a design for free, where can I find lots of portfolios of design work online to find somebody who's actually good and reasonably priced to work with?
It is. You can download and compile the source as much as you want. It's all right there. Google has made it 100% open.
Of course, if you want a truly open phone, that you can have root access to and that you can unlock the bootloader on (i.e. to flash your own ROMs) you'll either need to use a procedure that's not authorized by the manufacturer, or you'll need to get a Google Developer Phone (i.e. Nexus One). Or find a manufacturer that supports truly open hardware (good luck with that).
Unless you use something like the GPL-v3, forcing manufacturers to be open isn't possibly. And if you tried the GPL-v3 approach, not a single manufacturer would have adopted Android. It's completely incompatible with their business model of carrier-subsidized handsets and carrier-lock-in.
Unfortunately, nobody in the market other than a few hundred thousand geeks really wanted the openness of the Nexus One, as a result it's been removed from public sales in the US effective yesterday, and will only be offered for sale to registered Android developers in the future (it's still on the market through retail outlets and phone company partnerships in Europe, Korea and possibly other places though).
People voted with their dollars - they *like* the crapware because it subsidizes their el-cheapo subsidized handsets. If they were willing to pay the actual cost of the hardware, they wouldn't have to see bloatware/crapware flooding the damn phones and wouldn't be beholden to the shitty carriers. But no, they are a bunch of whiny bitches who won't pay and they killed the market for open hardware.
Luckily, registering as an Android developer just means paying an extra $25 bucks, which shouldn't stop most of the Slashdot geek crowd. And rooting and bootloader-unlocking most of the Samsung, Motorola and HTC Android phones is pretty easy for anybody who's tech-saavy enough to be flashing their own ROMs in the first place.
What I don't get is why would they even *think* of letting this get to court. Seriously. Even if the guy's chance of prevailing is only 10%, the downside risk is absolutely gigantic for Zuckerberg, AND for the venture capital guys that have put up a lot of money for Facebook.
Knowing as they do that the signature is legitimate, they should have offered this guy 10 or 20 million bucks to just go away rather than taking the risk that this guy will end up seizing a big chunk of equity.
Also shows you how absolutely useless the "due diligence" is that VCs perform. Zuckerberg probably never disclosed this old contract from the early days to any of his investors or they would have forced a settlement with this guy before things got this far. I've gotta think they are squirming just a bit right now.
There used to be some interesting interviews and the like in Playboy magazing, in addition to the skin.
The problem is these articles on thesmokingjacket.com are written for morons. "Get Kinky in Your Backwards Robe" about having sex in a Snuggie. "Larger than Life" - does some chick with 38KKK fake boobs have the world's biggest fake boobs? "Can he survive without hairspray" about Jimmy Johnson's hairdo. "How to get laid at work". That sort of speaks for itself.
I mean, I was thinking a bit like Esquire, but this looks like CollegeHumor.com without the humor, mixed with one of those magazines your wife or girlfriend secretly likes to read in the checkout line but is too embarrassed to buy.
The word Onion is *not* there. There is a -SPAN emblem in the lower right corner. If you don't already know the video is from the Onion, that logo being the Onion logo is not immediately obvious, even if you've heard of the Onion before and know that it's a humor publication. Especially when it's covered by advertising.
Of course, the satirical nature of the content is obvious to anybody with a brain though.
Yes, I believe I said that if they didn't realize it was satirical simply based on the content, they are idiots.
A) That rather looked like the letter "D" in a script font to me, so I would have thought it said "D-Span". It certainly doesn't say "Onion-Span", and the association with the Onion logo is only obvious if you already know or suspect it's from the Onion.
B) That part of the video was partially obscured for much of the video by Google ads over the lower bar of the screen.
Obviously none of this changes the fact that it was obviously a spoof to anybody with a brain, but the fortuitous combination of YouTube's Google ad placement with an small, not-completely obvious logo means that the sourcing, while clear if you already know it's from the Onion, isn't necessarily obvious at a glance.