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Apple is very cautious about what they allow in the store because they are a VERY big target. The stories about difficulty getting apps approved are not exaggerated. I tried to release a Bobble Head Obama app before the election last year and it was rejected because it "ridiculed a public figure" - I responded that caricature was not the same thing as ridicule and never heard back from anyone. My most recent game took over a month to make it through their hoops - apparently it's ok to show massive amounts of cleavage like the infamous "Asian Boobs" app but if you have cartoon bikini chicks in the icon you've gone too far. I finally got my game in the store but was told that it would not be sold in China. I guess the Chinese hate girls in bikinis too! http://bit.ly/8Q0vyA

I think a lot of the criticism in the review you linked is based on the characters being portrayed too simply polarized into good people/ bad people. In a way I agree that the colonel could have been a more dynamic character with a moment of doubt about his agenda or at least not continuing on fighting when the battle had already been lost, apparently just because he was evil. Or maybe the aliens could have been portrayed as having more flaws, for instance if the different tribes had violent battles against one another. Or maybe even it could have gone into more detail about the unobtanium, that possibly what it was capable of bringing the humans could have a chance at outweighing the cost of destroying the tribes homeland, or at least that more of a reason for obtaining it was given other than it was worth a lot of money (possibly it holds the secret to anti-gravity? I thought maybe that explains the mountains floating in mid-air)
But overall I think those are storytelling and artistic decisions that still fall within the scope of a good film and not moral caricature, I'm reminded of the statue of David by Michelangelo, it's not usually criticized for making David 8 feet tall and at the peak of physical perfection, it's probably not an accurate reflection on what the biblical David actually looked like, and it's not subtle in portraying him in a positive light, but it falls within a credible artists ability to convey how he feels about the subject rather than being uttermost realistic.

Are you going to honestly suggest that those specific phrases in the script, coupled with the overall plot and theme of the movie are not intentionally designed to parallel a certain view of Iraq?

I am. I watched the whole thing without once thinking of Iraq. You seem to be gleefully ignoring the fact that there are many more direct parallels in the history of Colonialism.

The overall plot and theme were settled long before the US invasion of Iraq. It's easy to find web reviews of Cameron's pre-2000 versions of the script.

"Shock and awe", etc are there because they are the sorts of things audiences expect to hear from ridiculously over-the-top caricatures of ruthless military villains.

I don't have a Slashdot account because I almost never feel the need to comment. Congratulations on producing a thread of comments this unbelievably ridiculous.

'Avatar' is all kinds of stupid, but an ideologically-motivated attack on GWB or the Iraq war it is not.

Storyline of the Smurfs:

These blue creatures live in a perfect Volksgemeinschaft under a wise and ominpotent Fuh^hather and respect Earth and Nature. An evil, greedy wizard looking like the caricature of a stereotypical Jew is trying to catch, eat or turn them into gold, but is too dumb to breathe and fails spectacularly on everything. The only attractive female of their species was initially created by the Jewish caricature with the intent to subvert and catch them but is turned good (and blonde of course!) by the righteous smurfs and aids them instead.

Fuh^h^hather knows best, people with dominant long noses want to turn you into gold, females are sent by the Jewish devil and one woman is enough for the entire squad.

Very nice.

His evil but equally inept sidekick cat is called Azrael (=USrael) for crying out loud.

Now what about Avatar:

Nature knows best, blue characters live in perfect harmony. Suspiciously White Anglo Saxon Protestant from a Greedy Corporation people come to kill them and turn their homeland into gold, but are too dumb to breathe and produce epic fails in the process. An attractive WASP male is sent by them to subvert and catch them, but he is turned good by the righteous Blue People and aids them instead.

The bad guys:
Stephen Lang http://www.imdb.com/media/rm3726346240/nm0002332 - symbolizing White Anglo Saxon Protestant male
Giovanni Ribisi http://www.imdb.com/media/rm3037960960/nm0000610 - symbolizing a "Southern European" complexion similar to people from Italy and, well, Israel. Compare him to Michel Friedman, vice president of the Jewish conference in Germany from 2000-2003 and decide: http://2005.euroforum.cc/2005/pix/main/Michel_Friedmann.jpg

In short: greedy Jews/USrael/AmeriKKKans are trying to kill the perfect Volk to get their money/oil/resources.

The Smurfs give this "conflict" in full length and Avatar concentrates on the story of Smurfette. The special effects are better.

Global Warming threatens (fill in favorite vice/past time/ethnic group/international cause here), women and children hit hardest.

Global Warming is now a caricature of itself.

If she's so proactive why did she call for the no confidence vote so quickly, and then rush back to the planet with no plan 10 minutes later?

Stupid and quick on the draw. A hotter version of George W. Bush??

A lot of these characters are STUPID, but I don't think that's a good enough description for a redeeming movie.

This isn't stupid, it's a combination of inexperience as a politician and the desire to fix what's wrong. It turned out to be right based on a lot of luck and good diplomacy on her part, but it's not unlike what happens in real life to the young politico who thinks he can change the way things work with pluck and personal effort. She called for the vote of no confidence because she was tricked into it, and she left ten minutes later because the very act of having to call for that vote made her think that there was no help for her people forthcoming from the Senate so she had to go fix it herself.

I actually found her to be refreshingly real-life in a movie stuffed with caricatures.

Virg

You are entitled to your free speech, but you have no right to use it to trod upon the rights of others. That's where it stops. If he's tired of hearing your opinion, for example, you need to give it a rest. You'd no longer be expressing yourself and instead will have switched over to simply shouting him down.

That's an absurd caricature of what I said. I'm not a Neanderthal to sit around "shouting" (or whatever euphemism you wish to use or situation you wish to imply) people down over their choice in software license. I was responding to a very specific comment made in the GGP's post:

Your opinion need not be submitted.

The answer is, yes, my opinion can and will be submitted. The obvious implication being as long as I'm not violating anyone's rights in doing so. A big part of that is called social skills. Most people, including myself, have them.

Thank you for allowing me to clarify that for anyone else that didn't get it the first time though, as my girlfriend is oft to say...
Really?
Seriously?

> And the problem with all "pro-choice" organizations and individuals is that they only care about the adults.

Are you f*cking kidding?

Anti-Choice theocrats never care about the consequences of their short sightedness.

They leave that as a mess for someone else to clean up once they have done their meddling.

Even your caricature of the pregnant woman is pathetically out of touch with reality.

In all comments I've read so far on this article, the complaints steam from the fact that the commenters don't know the difference between "copyright laws" and "creators rights laws". Usually they are as stupid as claiming [bad anlogy warning] that you have the right to shoot someone in the street from the window of your house, because you own your house and the gun.

Anglosaxian copyright laws is about "ownership rigths".

European "creators rights" (a literal translation of what it is called in European languages) is made to protect creators of art from their creations being used for a different purpose than originally intended. It do however give some protection from being screwed over financially for the artist.

The "creators rights" in Europe has been hollowed out by international treaties with the Anglosaxian world. Almost nothing is left, instead it has been replaced by extended copyright laws, the same kind as in US, those that that Slashdotters like to complain about.

European creators rights for instance protect an artist whos painting has been sold or given as a piece to put on the wall in a private home and is later used as a book cover and remade into millions of copies without the artists approval. With the European "creators rigths" laws an artist need not to let every buyer sign a contract that he/she will only use the piece of art for its original purpose, the artist is protected by his "creators rights". The owner of the painting must explicitly buy a license to put it on a book cover (or a license that explicitly nullifies the creators rights) and the artist has the right to refuse.

Another example. Swedish press has written a lot about how Pippi Longstocking and other characters and books created by Astrid Lindgren is used by Neo-Nazi groups in Sweden as propaganda tools. The Neo-Nazis buy books, toys and other licensed products, so they are protected by ownership laws to do wathever they please with them. Sixty years ago the grandchildren of Astrid Lindgren could have taken these groups to court and claimed that they used Astrid Lindgrens creations in a manner that was not originally intended (there was an exception for artistic use, like pastiches or caricatures). But as the "creators rights" have weakened, this is not possible anymore. Notice that this has nothing to do with the rights to royalties from books and products, sixty years ago that right only lasted for 50 years after the creation of the pieace of art and was only held by the artist(s) and his/her/their direct heirs.

Nah, deification of elected officials is dangerous and now I bet any picture which distorts Obama or members of his families appearance is automatically sacrilegious.

The article writer, I think, was even-handed; mentioning a specific instance about Michelle Obama, and contrasting it with different handling of images of the 'opposing' political spectrum. That's reasonable. Now, the way Google and others reacted to the actual pictures isn't reasonable... how Michelle Obama's caricature was handled is a sad indication of a twisted form of racism; but it's a culturally approved racism, so they probably didn't have much choice. It'll be embarrassing a few decades from now, though.

It seems to me like it would be in Google's interest to remain neutral regarding search results

No, because if they did that, no one would ever use Google. When you search for "foo" you want a page about foo, not the page that says the word "foo" the greatest number of times. They have to analyze for true relevance and utility.

But that can't be done objectively. When programmers create heuristics, they're really (in a roundabout way) stating personal opinions, about what works "best." And "look it up in the human-maintained blacklist" is actually a pretty damn useful heuristic sometimes.

When you search for Michelle Obama images, is a caricature relevant? How relevant? There is no "neutral" answer to that; it comes down to whether you're looking for the most referenced image, or the image that happens to look the most like her, or some other criteria.

When you use Google, you don't know what that criteria is. But it's not "neutral" and it never will be, because 0% of users want neutral. They want "best" but can't even formally describe what "best" is, because if they could do that, then they would be Google.

"Making important decisions on the basis of "Eh, our enemies are just ignorant mud farmers anyway, no problem", on the other hand, is colossally arrogant and extremely dangerous."

I'm not sure that's a fair caricaturization of their reasoning.

As many Slashdot readers are in a position to know, upgrades can be complicated and encryption always adds overhead. Which is exactly what the Air Force explains in the article:

The difficulty, officials said, is that adding encryption to a network that is more than a decade old involves more than placing a new piece of equipment on individual drones. Instead, many components of the network linking the drones to their operators in the U.S., Afghanistan or Pakistan have to be upgraded to handle the changes. Additional concerns remain about the vulnerability of the communications signals to electronic jamming, though there's no evidence that has occurred, said people familiar with reports on the matter....Some officials worried that adding encryption would make it harder to quickly share time-sensitive data within the U.S. military, and with allies. "There's a balance between pragmatics and sophistication," said Mike Wynne, Air Force Secretary from 2005 to 2008.

It's easy to look at vulnerabilities in isolation, but there are always tradeoffs. Up-armoring Humvees, for example, made them slower, less manuverable, and increased fuel consumption. If there was not a need for additional armor it would be a net disadvantage to add it. Similarly, upgrading hardware and software in a critical military system designed in the 1990's and actively deployed around the world is not trivial, and not something you're likely to do without a good reason. Now they have a good reason, so they're going to do it. That makes sense to me.

This is definitely a very impressive achievement in its own right, and the technology that has made this possible is pretty amazing, but it's a bit premature to say "we've cracked the genetic code of cancer" full stop.

But how then would they manage to catch the attention of enough reader/viewer in order to accumulate enough eyeball-time to sell at an interesting rate to advertiser ?~

More seriously :

If they can find mutations that are more common than others or genes that are mutated more often than others, then they can perhaps discover new genes which, when mutated drive the development and progression of the tumor. If you can discover which genes are important you can perhaps design treatments for that.

Yup. There's some interesting potential in data-mining if this experiment is repeated enough. You could also achieve some interesting result to pin down possible suspect by sequencing *several* tumoral cells and trying to see which mutation are common to most cells of 1 patient's cancer. But it needs to be also repeated over a population of several cancerous patients to obtain a list of "usual suspect" (beyond those we already know about. Like p53, BCR-ABL, ABC-transporters, etc.)

By having a bigger amount of "gene usually over- / under- expressed in tumor", scientist may find expression pattern which don't- or seldom- occur in healthy cells and thus design drugs which are more cancer-specific.

In an over-simplified caricature :
- Lots of current cancer drugs target fast-replicating cells, because that's typical for cancer cell. Sadly, other important healthy cells also do replicate quickly - such as the immune system. Thus people treated with these drugs are immunodeficient
- Such series of study might reveal a complex network of 30 genes all working together in tumours. Activity of the same genes might occur in other cells, but never more than 3 at a time. One could design a treatment which contain a mixture of two dozens of drugs, targeting these 30 genes and slightly lowering the efficiency of the produced proteins. Healthy cells won't be that much affected : they slightly lose some activity in only 3 crucial proteins. Cancer cells would be much more affected : they have decreased activity in all 30 proteins - this adds up and they might be significantly less good at surviving.

I'm always fascinated by the "I didn't use the code, just the ideas" attitude (This may be a caricature of your true attitude, but I don't mean to accuse or quibble, just to focus the discussion), I haven't studied it much, but I'm not sure it would be a very useful legal defense (and I've seen people porting drivers from Linux to BSD use it, not just people speaking of things that are so small they might not even be copyrightable (I can't imagine a sane court applying copyright to a fix for an off by one error or whatever)).

There was no similar discussion of Yoda's accent that I recall. This is because Jar-Jar's accent was seen by many to be patterned after racist caricatures; Yoda's had no such similarities.

True, I remember the only discussion about Yoda's voice being its similarity to Grover's.

So unless you think Lucas is an anti-monsterite, it's hard to make a case for racism on that basis...

Here's yet another spin. Something bad happens and corrective action is urged. In fact it's so bad, that corrective action must be mandated because of the scale involved. The powers of the wealthy status quo don't want corrective action because they perceive it as cutting into their whiskey and Thai sex tour money. So they spend their money to create front groups to stall and question the there really is anything bad happening at all. They spend their money on politicians and talking heads to create "controversy," and spreading hokum about how that the bad thing is actually good, and how the people that want to stop the bad thing actually just want to steal all your money, piss on your Bible, round your family up into the UN mandated concentration camps, make you dig your own grave, and then machine gun you to death. Predictably the bad thing gets worse, and because of the unwarranted delay will take more effort now to not to prevent (since at this point we've passed well beyond the tipping point) but rather to just mitigate compared to the amount of effort required at the very beginning. So now the status quo proclaims that the bad thing must not have been so bad, because now the opposition doesn't want to stop it, just slow it, and anyway now they want more money, so obviously it must have been a fraud in the first place. Meanwhile the status quo forces continue to rake in the cash.

But no. This doesn't make sense because right-wing motivations are always pure as the driven snow, and only when those who I politically oppose argue for something that I already believe, are their motivations pure and conclusions correct, because I'm Right(tm). I know I'm right, because it's in my name, and I'm right. I'm a winner, and winners aren't wrong, so I'm right. If I was wrong, I'd have to change, but change is for losers, and I'm a winner, so I don't have to change, and because I don't have to change I'm right.

You can bet that if a left-winger says that global warming is so bad that he wants nuclear power, he's sincere about it. If he says that global warming is so bad that he wants taxes and regulation, he could be sincere, but might be using the global warming as an excuse, since he wants those things anyway.

Clearly you have never heard of James Lovelock and have no knowledge of the modern environmental and anti-climate change movement beyond what Glenn Beck tells you, since your "insight" is little more than a simplistic maligned caricature. But I'm sure you sleep well at night because it never enters your mind that you're premisses, let alone your conclusions, just might be wrong.

It was a Chevy. Who knows what impact that name had above and beyond that (but I love that people have this stupid, ridiculous caricature of Mexicans in their heads).

You made a good point in the first paragraph, but...

While men at large would default to settle disputes through violent means, women would do it peacefully by default.

Using sexual stereotypes and sweeping generalizations to prove the point is asinine. Please, instead of falling back on these tired myths try thinking for yourself. How many people do you know who actually fit these poorly-drawn caricatures?

Remember when O'Reilly was watchable

No. When was that?

I've always felt O'Reilly was actually a caricature of a conservative commentator, put there mostly to discredit real conservatives by virtue of being an obnoxious, often ignorant, blowhard. A feeling that was reinforced when he tried to go up against Limbaugh on the radio. There's a reason that didn't work out so well, even with Limbaugh's handicap of being unable to resist opening his mouth on the environment.

But then I talk to family members who watch the 'Factor all the time and somehow can not only stand him, but do so repeatedly, almost as if they like what they're hearing and can't get enough of it. I really don't understand.

there were burning monks and prague students, there was the little man bulldozing a whole fucking town and some other guy smacking two skyscrapers and all it takes for a dane is to confess for a petty crime. outrage!! that's twice as badass as is drawing a caricature.