Why do we outlaw libel and slander? "Reputations are easily damaged but not easily fixed, and libel and slander can cause very real economic and emotional harm." Those are arguments that libel and slander are bad things, which I think is true. But "bad" does not imply "ought to be illegal," nor does the fact that someone else's actions may cause me substantive harm.
There are a number of anime with English titles that differ in mysterious ways from a literal translation of the original Japanese. To take liberties with the translation of dialogue is one thing, but the title? I suppose it's precisely because the title is so important that those bringing anime to our shores feel the need to ensure their titles sound "cool," but I think it's debatable at best whether many of these new titles sound better than their literal counterparts. In any case, I think faithfulness to the original is more important than is sounding cool.
I've been trying to switch over completely from AIM to Jabber, a difficult task since very few people I know use Jabber. Recently, though, GTalk started interoperating with Jabber; "Hallelujah!", I thought. Such optimism was premature, it seems.
Why is is that every single game website I visit has to be based on Flash? I don't want to wait while their bloated excuse for a website loads and then get assaulted by low-quality looped music while wrestling with 'cute' navigation schemes. That is, if I could even get Flash working consistently in FreeBSD. Most of the time, all I want is a blasted wallpaper! Couldn't they at least provide a bare-bones HTML version? Grr.
First, I apologize in advance for this rant. Second, since it's about the ending of the anime D.N.A², here's a nice big SPOILER WARNING. With that out of the way, I really didn't like the ending of D.N.A². I refer, of course, to the last three episodes released as a separate OVA to end the series.
Let me begin with a definition: by "intellectual property" or "IP" I mean things covered by copyrights and patents (I exclude trademarks for the sake of brevity). More generally, I mean ideas and information that are covered by laws that grant their creators certain exclusive rights, such as the right to produce or sell instances of the IP in question. The U.S. Constitution, for example, grants its Congress the power to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." In other words, the stated purpose of intellectual property in the United States is to benefit society as a whole by providing incentives for the creation of ideas.
Democracy doesn't scale. It works fairly well for governing things like cities and towns, but on a scale like that of the United States' federal government it just doesn't work. The evidence of this is all around us, from low voter turnout to the stranglehold the two-party system has on the federal government, even as both sides converge more and more. This problem is a form of the free rider problem, caused by a kind of prisoner's dilemma.
Why do all-way stop signs look identical to two-way stop signs? Those tiny rectangles below the sign don't count since they're so hard to see, and they're not even there most of the time. Why don't we make two-way stop signs visually distinct from all-way stop signs?
The Finder in versions of Mac OS prior to OS X, sometimes referred to as the "spatial Finder," was a direct, simple interface for managing files: the Finder represented each folder on the hard drive with exactly one window, and remembered that window's size and position on the screen. This was part of the illusion of direct manipulation of files and folders— users would feel as if they were manipulating the files themselves, not representations or abstractions thereof. In fact, many users didn't even think of the Finder as an application at all; to them, it was the computer.