Exactly, that's precisely what the majority of stoned people at Burning Man will say. Of course, that's because they aren't so good at arithmetic and even worse at history. Since 1967, when the census bureau began tracking it, there has been exactly one instance of real median income falling over any five year period. That's the last five years. Every other period in American history has seen median incomes are increase. It's just these last five years that Damon republican in the Whitehouse has fucked it all up.

Your parents and grandparents actually worked, hard, in the heat, to afford an 800 square foot home. Today's young leftist mooches live in their parent's 800 square foot basement, working part time and complaining about how tough it is.

    Get off my lawn - or mow it. The Mexican who came to my door unable to speak English couple of years ago pushing a broken down mower now arrives in a $30,000 dually. Because he worked for it.

It's not just programmers that think in terms of effincident please processes, in fact I'd say that's more the domain of the business person. You can get a degree in how to most effectively and efficiently run an operation to deliver goods to customers, that's called a mba. MBAs, and MBA style thinking about efficient process, is not popular with the burning man crowd.

The pdf linked in the article mentions a few points. The following is my understanding of what they said. It doesn't represent my opinion.

    The commenters generally agreed that patent trolling isn't currently a big problem in Canada. Canadian companies are affected more by US trolls, because the Canadian system already handles it pretty well. Therefore "don't fix it if it ain't broke". Any change will have good and bad consequences, and Canada doesn't need much good consequences.

Universities were given as an example of institutions which do real, valuable research and development, but don't manufacture products. They license their technology, so they are non-practicing entities. How do you legally distinguish a research institution and a company who licenses the results of that work vs a troll?

I happen to know that the vast majority of trolling is done by four companies. Hundreds of thousands of people have patents. The challenge is to target those four needles in a very large haystack. When you're targeting a needle in a haystack, and want to destroy the needle (troll) without harming the hay (inventors etc) you want to use precision tools.

Good (or pedantic?) point. Since I come from a country where the head of state, head of government, and head crook are the same office, I tend to think of all national heads as "head of state".

Yeah the same thing bugs me when watching football (handegg ). I get excited for half second when the announcer says Manning just set a record, then goes on to say it's the record for most completed passes in the first quarter of a home game in Denver against a team with a winning record on the road. Wtf.

For many decades now we've had female heads of state (ie Thatcher), female Supreme Court justices, female CEOs of top companies (ie Whitman). At this point, women have done pretty much everything men have done. It's not 1940 anymore. Isn't it time we stop the sexist talk about "female astronauts", "lady lawyers", etc and just talk about astronauts and lawyers? Do we really need to call one of our national leaders a "black woman senator"? She's senator, period. She's neither less than or better than another senator based on her genitalia or her complexion.

The other day I was watching TV and they were talking about the "first black female Puerto Rican pole vault champion" or some such horseshit. She's not the first pole vault champion, nor the first woman, or even th first woman pole vault champion, so give it a rest already. Will you leftists never see beyond anybody's genitalia and complexion?

Censorship:
The review of books, movies, etc., to prohibit publication and distribution, usually for reasons of morality or state security.
--Oran's Dictionary of Law

The key difference between censorship and laws related to libel, national security, conspiracy and harassment (including the law being discussed on this page) is that censorship prevents the words from being published. These other laws say that you might get in trouble AFTER publishing certain things. The common phrase used to distinguish the two is "prior restraint". You might ask why the distinction matters. If this law is abused, you might see a news headline like "Journalist arrested for criticizing prime minister". Under a censorship regime, you'd not see any headline at all - the newspaper is censored.

If information is REMOVED after it is published, that might qualify as censorship - it's preventing people from reading it. The fact that it's removed before it's read could mean that the public can't judge whether or not the removal is proper. On the other hand, if someone just gets in trouble afterward for something they published, the government's actions are visible to the public, so it's not technically censorship. Of course just because it's not censorship doesn't mean it's okay. A lot of things are bad , censorship is just one of many bad things.

GP is correct. Censorship means proactively preventing publication. This law may well be BAD. It is not censorship, by the definition of the word censorship. Again that doesn't mean it's a good law, it's just not murder, censorship, or jaywalking.

> What a load of cock you're writing here. Google doesn't discriminate between what is relevant and what isn't.

The topic we're discussing is that a European court ordered Google to hide information which is "inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant". Note two of the three things Google is ordered to decide are relevance - Google must decide if the information is irrelevant or no longer relevant, the court ordered.

The case was a guy who didn't pay his bills and eventually his property was auctioned off to pay the bills. If you're considering hiring the guy to drive an ice cream truck, that information may be irrelevant. If you're considering partnering with him to open a restaurant which will require a $200,000 investment, that information may be very relevant indeed. Google can't possibly decide if the information is relevant since it doesn't know the reader's purpose for seeking information about the guy, but the court ordered them to make that determination.

> and then the classic : you get drunk and do something stupid somebody get a photo. Pre-2000 a good memory to share between friend. Past 2000 google+facebook : a friend which unwittingly may cost you a good job.

Photos of a person getting drunk and acting stupid would be completely irrelevant for some things, very relevant for others. If I'mhiring someone yo replace my roof, I don't care what you do on the weekend. I can decide that's not relevant to my decision. If you're applying for a job on the next Jackass movie, those pictures may help you get the job. If you're applying for a job as an airline pilot, a habit of heavy drinking will negatively affect your prospects. If you've asked me out on a date and I'm a partier, I may see that and think you look like a fun person to hang out with. If you've asked my 16 year old daughter on a date and you like posting "get drunk and stupid" pictures ...

The reader of the information is in a position to consider the totality of the circumstances and decide what's relevant and not. This court ordered Google to decide what's relevant to a given situation without any way to know what the situation is. I think the court may need to look up the word "relevant". No fact is irrelevant itself, it's only relevant or irrelevant in a particular use case.

Funny you should say that, because these are all requests to remove existing links that already appear on Google.

I always thought the biggest iPad, should be called something like the iPad Max, or if that's too cliche, the Maxipad.

Micro payments would need to GENERATE few dollars per day for site owners. That doesn't say anything about what they COST. If I fill out a payment form to pay 10 cents for a howto, that generates 10 cents for the bank and site to split, but it costs a few minutes. The typical Slashdot reader probably sells their time at over $1/minute, so it costs ten times as much as the site owner gets.

Sure there is no law of physics that says it must cost a lot, but if spammers send millions of emails hoping for an average profit of $0.000001 per email, how many millions of fraudulent micropayments would they submit to be paid two cents apiece? The system has to be robust against sophisticated fraud in order to survive, and that will cost users time and the security will cost a lot of money.

On the other hand, if we can come up with a system that keeps the transactional, security, and convenience costs below 50%, we can become billionaires. A company that could do that would be a thousand times larger than PayPal. I did know one guy who ran a successful system like that years ago, and it made him quite wealthy. The key in his case was that he had client web sites that were part of a group that customers would purchase as a package deal. Suppose that for $25 / year, you got no ads and special perks on :
Slashdot
Cnet
SourceForge
Github
Stackexchange
Lots of Maker sites
And 800 other tech / nerd sites.

That might be worth taking a couple of minutes to sign up (and the transaction fee the merchant pays for credit card processing). All the sites could sell subscriptions and receive a cut of the revenue. If 10% of nerds paid each paid $25, that would be a lot of money to split between the participating sites. That's generally how the successful one worked, covering a certain niche.

Just curious, do you watch commentary on Comedy Central and MSNBC?

Would you believe when I moved to that area, there were cattle grazing at the intersection of 183 & 620, which was a stop sign as I recall. :)