I’m also troubled by, not what Senator McCain says, but what members of the party say. And it is permitted to be said such things as, “Well, you know that Mr. Obama is a Muslim.” Well, the correct answer is, he is not a Muslim, he’s a Christian. He’s always been a Christian. But the really right answer is, what if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer’s no, that’s not America. Is there something wrong with some seven-year-old Muslim-American kid believing that he or she could be president? Yet, I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion, “He’s a Muslim and he might be associated terrorists.” This is not the way we should be doing it in America.

(Full transcript. Comments above on page 2 of the transcript.)
I can accept stupidity among the populace. There will always be angry, scared, bigoted people. I can even accept that some of those angry, scared, bigoted people are powerful enough to wind up in positions of authority in places like the National Review that allow them to spread their angry, scared, bigoted ideas on a national stage.
But what’s really demoralizing to me is that this is the first time I’ve heard a major public figure in American politics raise the appropriate response to the purely idiotic question of whether Barack Obama is a Muslim (or an Arab, since most of the angry, scared bigots don’t understand the difference). The right response is so what if he is?
Bravo, Powell. I wish more public figures had the courage to say that.

If you don’t get the reference, it’s from this, which as we learn here is derived from this. Thus ends this week’s lesson in old school Internet memes.
PAK CHOOIE UNF!

“the submitting user grants [company] the royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, perform, and display such Content (in whole or part) worldwide and/or to incorporate it in other works in any form, media, or technology now known or later developed, all subject to the terms of any applicable license.”

A good example is this comment on the Slashdot story last week about Adobe launching an online version of Photoshop Express. I’ve had to deal with these kind of complaints for the web properties I’m responsible for, but my annoyance is nothing new. The first time I remember coming across complaints about these kind of terms is almost a decade ago when Yahoo! took over Geocities. It annoyed me even back then when I was just a humble ed tech trainer, not a product manager responsible for honest-to-goodness web applications.
Although I am not a lawyer and you definitely shouldn’t take legal advice from me, let me explain to you what the heck is going on here: it’s called the Internet.

When you upload your content from your computer to [insert web-based application here] you are transferring that content from your computer to the centrally-hosted web application that, presumably, will reproduce that content when it serves it up for display to you or someone else on the web page. This is is commonly known as publishing in web parlance, a way to distribute content over the World Wide Web. Etc. etc. Terms starting to sound familiar?
The Web works by making copies of content and transmitting/distributing those copies all over hell and back anytime someone views a web page, not to mention all the caching of copies. Any company that’s going to get into the business of helping you put content of any sort on the web needs to get your permission to do fling that content all over the globe.
If the vendor didn’t explicitly make the license to do that part of the terms, then some other bozo is going to come along and say “I uploaded a photo to your photo sharing site, and you had the unmitigated gall to — horror or horrors — transmit my content to the web browser of someone, and in the process of doing so allowed them to cache a copy of that photo on their own computer! How dare you! I’m suing you for copyright infringement, Mr. Vendor!” The type of terms like those quoted above are about how the web works and making sure that some litigious jackass doesn’t sue the vendor over doing what’s necessary for a web app to exist. It’s not about “stealing copyright.”
So, you “stealing copyright” bozos, please stop getting your knickers in a twist. Put your tinfoil hat back on and wait by the front door for the black helicopters.
Oh, by the way, the quoted terms above? They’re quoted from the Slashdot Terms of Service. ;-)

In a fit of scientific skepticism, we decided to calculate how unlikely Joltin’ Joe’s [56-game hitting streak] really was. Using a comprehensive collection of baseball statistics from 1871 to 2005, we simulated the entire history of baseball 10,000 times in a computer. In essence, we programmed the computer to construct an enormous set of parallel baseball universes, all with the same players but subject to the vagaries of chance in each one.

Although it doesn’t quite set free my inner mathematician, it does bring out the writer in me, that little inner voice that says “What if . . .?”
What if one of those 10,000 alternate Joe DiMaggios — one who was less successful in baseball and didn’t marry Marilyn Monroe — slipped through the dimensional interface into the universe where Joe DiMaggio is the baseball legend that he is in ours? Or vice versa?
Crap. Now I’m gonna have to go read a DiMaggio biography.