Oroboros 's Techdirt Comments

Latest Comments (9) comment rss

  • On the post: Bill Gates Foundation Investing In Monsanto?

    Oroboros ( profile ), 30 Aug, 2010 @ 03:27pm

    Re:

    Agreed. It is sometimes a lot easier to change something offensive by taking ownership than by merely opposing it. I know a man who invests in corporations that he doesn't like so he can go to the shareholder meetings and vote for change.

  • On the post: Google, Facebook Sued Because Without Some Random Patent No One Would Ever Access A Social Network From A Mobile Phone

    Oroboros ( profile ), 13 Mar, 2010 @ 09:32am

    This is abread-and-butter business matter, so it hardly seems the big deal suggested by the original article.

    This is one reason why our economy is in the shitter. Rather than create something of value to consumers that earns profit, they leech off the value others create.

    As usual, it is the lawyers who win.

  • On the post: Don't Blame Your Community: Ad Blocking Is Not Killing Any Sites

    Oroboros ( profile ), 08 Mar, 2010 @ 02:45pm

    A quote and my appreciation

    A man may fail many times but he isn't a failure until he begins to blame somebody else.

    -John Burroughs

    This was one of the harder lessons for me to learn in life, and I still fall into the trap of blame from time to time.

    Of course, once I blame someone else for my failing, I've eliminated the one and only hope of actually learning from my mistakes and correcting them.

    On a slightly related note - I'm fighting a battle with the phone book companies that dump their garbage on our doorsteps every year. In theory, you can opt-out. In reality, if you live in an apartment building, you can't opt-out and they'll say as much if pressed on it. DEX deliveries to my 9 unit building weighed in at over 100 lbs, all of which were sent straight to the landfill as we have no recycling service and no one in my building sees a need for White or Yellow Pages in the era of cell phones and Google.

    We had a bill introduced in the CO legislature that would have required a switch to an opt-in model. I had to laugh at DEX sending a representative all the way from New Jersey to Denver to testify about how they have "no vested financial interest in delivering phone books to consumers who don't want them".

    If that had been true, there would have been no reason to oppose the bill (which they succeeded in killing).

    So I've moved on to targeting the advertisers. I want them to see the photos I have of these phone books in the trash so that they will realize just how much money they are wasting.

    I appreciate the TechDirt crew for learning from your mistakes and sharing them here :)

  • On the post: How UK Chiropractors' Attempt To Silence One Critic Created The Backlash That May Change Chiropractics In The UK

    Oroboros ( profile ), 04 Mar, 2010 @ 11:53am

    SBM

    There are many good articles about chiropractic at sciencebasedmedicine.org.

    I've seen three different chiropractors over the years for relief of back and shoulder pain that is likely the result of repetitive stress. I don't buy the subluxation theory because there's no scientific evidence of it. I equate it to the theory of "chi" in acupuncture. But I will say that being adjusted feels very good and I enjoy it as long as there is no pretense to be treating anything other than my back/shoulder problems.

  • On the post: Colbert Takes On Ridiculous Restrictions Over Talking About The Olympics

    Oroboros ( profile ), 23 Feb, 2010 @ 06:15pm

    Gay Olympics vs Special Olympics

    Fuck the <a HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_Games#Lawsuit_over_.27Gay_Olympics.27_name
    ">litigious and homophobic IOC.

    If I ever find out my home city is in the running to host the games, it will be my mission to derail it.

  • On the post: It Had To Happen: Blame Craigslist Gang Comes Out

    Oroboros ( profile ), 23 Apr, 2009 @ 10:24am

    Re: Oversight

    They found the killer without "oversight" anyway.

    And the proponents of my data mining application would argue that finding the killer before he meets his next victim, and saving just one life, will be worth the slight erosion to our privacy.

    Maybe it is, I honestly don't know.

  • On the post: It Had To Happen: Blame Craigslist Gang Comes Out

    Oroboros ( profile ), 23 Apr, 2009 @ 10:22am

    Re: Oversight

    Note: I'm not saying Craigslist SHOULD do this, and definitely not that they should even be obligated to do this. I'm just saying that there is a data mining application that could be used to track serial killers who target victims on a particular social networking site of any type. I don't know that the overall risks to our privacy from the probable abuses are worth implementing (my guess is probably not). But hypothetically Craigslist COULD do this if they wanted to and their ToS permitted it.

  • On the post: It Had To Happen: Blame Craigslist Gang Comes Out

    Oroboros ( profile ), 23 Apr, 2009 @ 10:19am

    a frequent user suddenly stops using the site for a while? The false positives would outnumber the actual incidents by a billion-to-one.

    I'm talkig about a serial killer. I'm talking about correlating multiple (as in, with a threshold of 4-6) and correlating it by region to murder reports.

  • On the post: It Had To Happen: Blame Craigslist Gang Comes Out

    Oroboros ( profile ), 23 Apr, 2009 @ 09:40am

    Re: Oversight

    Take a situation like this one: what exactly would oversight have done anyway? How exactly would the watchmen have known that this woman was about to meet a guy that was about to kill her? There is a potential software method to track killers. You have a user on a site who contacts others through the site, and shortly after contact those users stop visiting the site. At some level a pattern would emerge. User A causes other users to avoid us. Of course there's potential for false positives, but it would take little work to scan news headlines looking for a potential serial killer in a region to correlate with.