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Comment What?! It's all Google's fault? (Score 1) 290

"while Google's search engine 'prevents them from making decent money online — by massively fragmenting traffic, by undermining brand power, and by turning news stories into fungible commodities.'"

- How about offering accidental readers incentive to visit your main page more often?
- How about leveraging Google's search results to boost your own brand power?

If you wait on Google to boost your own brand then you're doing it wrong.
And it's the newspapers that treat news as commodities, not Google.

Let's not lay the blame for mainstream newspapers' failure to grasp the 21st century.

Comment Re:Um.. Can someone tag this "phishing"? (Score 5, Insightful) 156

Welcome to the rest of the world.
It's often that us non US-people only get a sparse page with a few fields to enter your data in, only to find out that the service you thought you were registering for doesn't work yet in your country.

Call it phishing if you like, but it's par for the course. It's just that you US-ians don't notice it as often.

The Almighty Buck

Jack Thompson Sues Facebook For $40M 421

angry tapir writes "Jack Thompson has sued Facebook for US$40 million, saying that the social networking site harmed him by not removing angry postings made by Facebook gamers. The lawsuit was filed in the US District Court for the Southern District of Florida. Thompson is best known for bringing suit against Grand Theft Auto's Take Two Interactive, Sony Computer Entertainment America, and Wal-Mart, arguing that the game caused violent behavior."
GNU is Not Unix

Microsoft Makes Second GPLv2 Release 218

angry tapir writes "Microsoft has made its second release under the General Public License in two days with software for Moodle, an 'open-source course management system that teachers use to create online learning Web sites for their classes[, which] has about 30 million users in 207 countries.' It comes on the heels of Redmond contributing drivers to the Linux community. No reports as yet on dropping temperatures in hell."
Programming

The "Doctor Who" Model of Open Source 116

Glyn Moody writes "Open source projects are generally fine when there's a long-term leader like Linus; but what happens when nobody is able or willing to run things for extended periods? Peter Murray-Rust explains how the open chemistry group known as the Blue Obelisk has evolved what he calls the 'Doctor Who Model of Open Source': 'You'll recall that every few years something fatal happens to the Doctor and you think he is going to die and there will never be another series. Then he regenerates. The new Doctor has a different personality, a different philosophy (though always on the side of good). It is never clear how long any Doctor will remain unregenerated or who will come after him. And this is a common theme in the Blue Obelisk.' Could other open source projects learn from this experience as long-term leaders start to move on?"

Comment How to destroy the meaning of a word. (Score 4, Insightful) 524

fact (plural facts)

      1. An honest observation.
      2. Something actual as opposed to invented.
                    In this story, the Gettysburg Address is a fact, but the rest is fiction.
      3. Something which has become real.
                    The promise of television became a fact in the 1920s.
      4. Something concrete used as a basis for further interpretation.
                    Let's look at the facts of the case before deciding.
      5. An objective consensus on a fundamental reality that has been agreed upon by a substantial number of people.
                    There is no doubting the fact that the Earth orbits the Sun.
      6. Information about a particular subject.
                    The facts about space travel.

Microsoft adds this to the list:
      7. Something Microsoft pulls out of their asses.
                    "Get the facts".

They have given bogus 'facts' about their software offerings with regards to Linux, and now to Firefox. Do they think we're idiots? Are they really that scared about competition? That they need to resort to outright lying? How can you build a trust-relationship with them, if you can't trust them when they come out with 'facts'? What happened to ethics?

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