uctpjac - Slashdot User

Submission + - Are engineers natural libertarians or technocrats? (opendemocracy.net)

Submitted by

uctpjac

on Tuesday January 03, 2012 @12:01PM

uctpjac writes: "This openDemocracy article uses Scott Adams' presidential bid to argue that however much engineers — especially Silicon Valley types — like to think that they're libertarians, they are in fact much more likely to be control-freak technocrats. Is this a fair account? Has the author wrongly read Dilbert, or wrongly interpreted the relationship between the engineering mindset and Adams' representation of it in the cartoon strip?"

Submission + - UK libel law is a global threat to web free speech (opendemocracy.net)

Submitted by uctpjac on Sunday March 29, 2009 @08:39AM

uctpjac writes: London media lawyer Emily MacManus argues that UK libel law has three features which make it the "defamation tourism" capital of the world and a serious threat to web free speech. First, there is no free speech presumption in the UK as there is, for example, in the US. Second, every access of a web page is considered to be a separate act of publication in the UK (unlike the US, where "original publication" holds). Third, "no-win-no-fee" libel litigation is now allowed in the UK. If any blog, anywhere, publishes something you'd like taken down, threaten libel action in the UK: no one except the super-rich can afford to even take these cases to court, so media lawyers advise publishers to "take it down, take it down quickly, take it down again". There's not much chance that the judges will move the law any time soon because they are just not seeing the cases to make precedent over.

Comment chart shows mollom killing spam (Score 1) 183

by uctpjac on Sunday December 28, 2008 @06:19PM (#26252901) Attached to: Smart Spam Filtering For Forums and Blogs?

you might be interested in this chart:
http://www.opendemocracy.net/blog/economics/admin/2008/11/18/mollom-beats-spam
that shows what Mollom did to our forum spam after just 2 months. The interesting thing is that the spammers actually seem to have stopped trying to attack this url.
Tony

Comment FDR = politics. SDR = tehchnology (Score 1) 113

by uctpjac on Saturday February 04, 2006 @07:02AM (#14641096) Attached to: Software-Defined Radio Could Unify Wireless World

I find it sad that the first post rated "Informative" is almost all political... "This is one place where the advantage of FDR appears." ... So let's discuss FDR in a more sane manner (if that is possible on the flamefest that Slashdot has bcome).

FDR = Franklyn Delano Roosevelt = Liberal = one of the most politcally charged sets of initials in American politics.

SDR = software defined radio = not really a question of politics

a revealing lapsus??

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