Gary Coleman has been shilling for Cash Call lately, trying to sell people on loans with outrageous interest rates (99.25% APR for example). These are the kinds of loans that help keep poor people poor. And that brings up this question: by virtue of making a buck off of this kind of exploitation of the poor, is Gary Coleman evil?

The recording industry has long blamed piracy for diminishing record sales. But are pirates really to blame? People have long complained about having to pay for a whole CD to get the one or two songs they really wanted, and now they can buy just those songs. Is it really piracy, or is the death of the album killing music industry revenues?

In two different front page stories, one on May 23 and one on May 25, the headline proclaimed that one party sued another. In both cases, they were threatening potential lawsuits if their demands were not met, meaning no one was actually suing in either story.

I have to believe that the editors took a moment to RTFA before placing it on the front page of Slashdot (though some may say that's akin to believing in the Easter Bunny). So, if that's the case, one of two problems is evident:

• The Slashdot editors don't know the difference between a strong letter and a lawsuit, thus any time anyone sends them a threatening e-mail, they clap their hands to their heads and run around the office crying "we're being sued".
• The Slashdot editors need a little remedial English study so they can learn that you only use the word "sues" to describe an action when an actual lawsuit has been filed... not threatened or implied, but filed.

I know we're not supposed to have high expectations for Slashdot, but knowing what "sues" means is not a high expectation, is it?

One of the arguments that go back and forth in the fight over abolishing copyright is that if copyright is abolished, the financial incentive to create is removed and the supply of quality work is diminished. The abolishionists counter that this is not the case, but that new business models will evolve to work with the new system. But the only ones they point to as currently working are all based around software. I don't see it any currently working for other art forms on any sort of large scale.

So I say "prove it". I have posed a challenge to the open source activists who want to abolish copyright. Nothing legally prevents artists from licensing their *original* work under open source licenses and using open source business models. So let's see these evolved business models at work. Let's see them create the levels of fame and fortune that inspire people to "suffer for their art". Or, if the concepts of fame and fortune are so antithetical to the cause, let's see them produce a significant community of artists in varied mediums who are making a decent middle class living solely from open source business models and open source licensing their art.

I'm sick of hypothetical examples. If Open Source models work for all forms of copyrighted intellectual property and this warrants abolishing copyright, then show me the money. Prove this is a workable real-world idea, and not just some utopian ideal that will never stand up in real practice.

The open source art world is a cool niche and occasionally produces some interesting stuff, but it's not producing the kind of quantity or success that proves it can be a substitute for copyright. It's time for those who advocate open source art to step up to the plate and swing for the fences instead of chattering from the dugout. It's time for them to prove their ideas are real and workable, not just nice dreams that would work in a perfect world where we were all altruists and willing to create art for art's sake.

So I challenge you to prove your claims on a large scale, prove your ideas and ideals work, and show the world that open source art is a viable alternative to copyrighting your art. By July 4 of this year, establish a central web site where this experiment/initiative will be publicized.

On July 4 of next year, declare your independence from copyright by documenting at that web site the successful open source art initiatives that have either produced comparable levels of stardom and wealth to copyright-driven models or have produced large communities of artists who are deriving a solid middle-class income from open source licensing their art.

If you can provide this proof, the quantity and quality of artists moving to open source models will increase significantly. If not, then perhaps some of you will start applying some of that formidable brain power to thinking about how to fix copyright and make it work better instead of abolishing it.

In the end, regardless of the outcome, society benefits. Either they learn a new, workable way that makes things better, or they get a new cadre of copyright reformers who will work within the system to make things better. But either way, once these models are proved or disproved, all the energy spent on debating hypothetical points can be refocused into creating real and beneficial change.

Most stuff I see about stopping image thieves has to do with stopping hotlinking. But what about stopping people from merely copying the image or making it harder for them to find a URL to hotlink to?

This amazingly simple trick won't stop the dedicated thief, but makes it more work for those who know how to get around it and stymies those who don't. It's just HTML, no JavaScript, mod_rewrite, or plugins required.

PC World reported that Opera's mobile browser (Opera Mini) captured more market share than Apple's Safari browser for Mac last month. But when you look at the numbers and where they come from... It's not so impressive.

After posting in my Slashdot journal about how I'd been screwed out of $99 with an auto-renewing subscription and fine print, one commenter suggested I should dispute the charge with PayPal. Yeah, right.

Last year, after PayPal refused to refund the payment for a product that was falsely advertised and illegally sold, refusing to review evidence of my claim and ruling solely on whether or not I received the product, I realized PayPal is a thief's best Pal.

Seems that EULA's aren't the only places companies try to screw you. A big source of consumer losses are sites that autorenew subscriptions. They get you signed up and then a month or a year later, after you've forgotten about them, the charge shows up on your credit card or PayPal account. This isn't just porn sites, but sites that seem otherwise legitimate. Some understand that the fight over the refund and the angry ex-customer aren't worth the hassle and will process the cancellation of your subscription and a refund if you're quick enough about it. Others obstinately refuse and even lie about being unable to refund your money.

But even finding out a few vendors to avoid doesn't solve the problem. What's the best way to deal with autorenewing subscriptions so you remember to cancel in time?

Being none too enamored with Spotlight for OS X, I decided to give the newly released Google Desktop for Mac a try for searching through my hundreds of thousands of files (clipart, music, word processing, e-mails, etc.). I was none too impressed. While it does have some nice features, some bugs and idiosyncracies make it more of a toy than a tool, especially if you use Thunderbird for mail.

I got a MySpace friend request this morning. When I clicked over to the person's page, I found that clicking just about anywhere on it sent me to a porn site. Looking at the source, I found that this was accomplished through a simple piece of CSS. Wondering how effective it was, I tried it on my Akismet-protected blog and another and was able to hijack the pages. Seems that anywhere that you allow people to put HTML tags in a comment, unless you're filtering for this, they may be able to hijack the page where the comment is displayed.

Energy policy is a big thing for me in the 2008 election. So I went and looked at the web sites of four Democratic frontrunners and four Republican frontrunners to see what their issue statements were on the topic. Of the 8, only 3 laid out their plans in detail, 2 merely paid lip service with appropriate buzz words but no real details on how to get from here to there, and 3 had no energy issue statement at all.

After appearing in a Slashdot story, the word "Zonkdogfology" started getting picked up and used. Then someone submitted it to Wikipedia. But Wikipedia has slated its entry for deletion because it is made up, doesn't really have an authoritative definition, and "there are no reliable sources". So I'm pleading with the Slashdot community. Help authoritatively define "Zonkdogfology". Help this Pinnocchio of words become a real boy.

Fox's latest quiz show, "Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader?", brings back to the fore an old question. Is knowledge a measure of intelligence?

I don't believe it is. While knowledge may aid intelligence, what trivia you remember from grade school is not a measure of how smart you are.

Yahoo has picked up the page referenced in my last journal post (Googlebot and Document.write()). While the two HTML words are searchable, to probably no one's surprise, the four JavaScripted words are not.

On a fun side note, it looks like "zonkdogfology" may be trying to grow into a meme. Some people have found it entertaining enough to blog about the word itself. My fellow Seattle resident, Jerry Whiting, has a page about zonkdogfology, in which he equates it to a GooglePig. You'll have to visit his page to find out what a Google Pig is.

With JavaScript/AJAX being used to place dynamic content in pages, I was wondering how Google indexed web page content that was placed in a page using the JavaScript "document.write" method.

I created a page with six unique words in it. Two were in the plain HTML. Two were in a script within the page document. Two were in a script that was externally sourced from a different server. The page appeared in the Google index late last night and I just wrote up the results.