We should have invaded that looney bin called Afganistan years ago. When they blew up those Buddhas we knew they weren't right in the head.
Of course, now we've managed to turn Iraq and Somalia (Everyone forgets about them) into Afganistans, too. And Afganistan is quickly turning back into Afganistan.
Possible if we'd finished Somalia, then invaded Afganistan after 9/11 and finished that.
Wait, that would have been a logical and doable plan, and couldn't have plunged us into a permanent war.
Which reasons might those be? Do you have specific cases where there are still CSS bugs? That doesn't include unimplemented features, since those will be ignored anyways. If you do, you should report them.
Um, MS knows full well how shoddy its box model is. There are tons of things MS hasn't fixed, and, no I don't need to report them.
Also, if you want to target stuff just at IE, rather than use the star hack, why not just use conditional comments? It's supported.
Yeah, they fixed like five CSS parsing bugs, and pretend that is somehow what web designers were complaining about. Those were just amazingly stupid errors, but if they were the only ones it would be trivial to write CSS that doesn't use what causes IE to barf.
The actual bugs are things like positioning and sizing boxes and cutting off content inside divs and all sorts of problems. Microsoft hasn't fixed any of these. The CSS parsing bugs were used to hide CSS that triggered other bugs, and now the parsing bugs are fixed, so the other bugs will now show up.
And, yes, now they've invented conditional statements in CSS that let you hide the CSS from IE7. So...um...the 'advancement' is that we now have to go back into our CSS and add these conditionals to the CSS we already had hidden. (And we have to leave it the same way, so IE6 won't choke on it.)
Some of us aren't really seeing the advantage of this 'bugfix'. How about IE actually rendering correctly so we don't have to feed it custom CSS?
And that doesn't even address the 'reverse hacks', aka '* html', where some CSS was written only for IE, and we still need it in IE7. How the hell are we supposed to conditional that?
They went and fixed their parser and not their renderer. We didn't give a damn about their parser. It would be trivial to write code that could be parsed the same in every browser. It's their broken rendering that's fucking us up, we were just using the broken parsing to hack the broken rendering.
Um, hello, web developer here. I have to write for IE's crap all the time.
I'm just pointing out, when your 3.5 million dollar website breaks, point out it is because Microsoft can't even standardize on incompatiblities. Don't accept this default position the computer industry has that nothing is ever anyone's fault. Point out that this is the second set of problems that IE support has created, the first being the work to use the incompatiblities.
It's not to get anyone to switch right there, or to make your website standards-only. There's no way that's going to happen. It's to stir up general dissatifation at the fact that everyone uses IE, with the result that more people don't like IE, on average, which will result in less people using it, on average, which means more people writing to standards, which means that there will be more resentment stirred up when these standards don't work, etc.
Which will eventually means that MS will have to FIX THE DAMN PROBLEMS or end up with no marketshare.
I'm not trying to get anything to happen in anyone's specific situation. I'm saying, (honestly and correctly) explain the problem, not just to the people who know it, web designers, but to the people in charge, to make the cycle of hate happen a little faster.
In short: If Microsoft causes you and your company extra work, be sure everyone knows this is Microsoft's fault, not some mysterious random computer problem that magically happens.
Except that Kinderstart and Google are not in the same market. Kinderstart is, despite them trying to confuse the issue, a directory, not a search engine. What's more, they are a very focused directory. There is no way in hell they can even vaguely compete with Google.
And here's a fun link. Search Google for 'kids'. What's the topmost result? Yahoo!'s Web Guide for kids.
Oh, yeah, Google's really trying to corner that market. They not only don't even have a directory for children, but point people looking for one of those at a very big competitor to their actual business, general search.
That's like, the exact opposite of abusing your monopoly position. Someone comes into a hamburger place (google) and wants some ice cream (Kid friendly stuff), and you don't have any, you direct them to a directly competing hamburger place (yahoo) that has ice cream (Their kid directory), instead of just an ice cream place (kinderstart), in the hopes they'll come back to you for the hamburgers.
But they aren't looking for 'a' search engine, they're looking for 'google'.
If someone types in 'kinderstart', this search engine is currently five in the ranking. The first one is a nursery in the UK called 'Kinderstart', the second is the California Department of Education program called 'Kinderstart', and the third and fourth are discussions about this case, so presumably wouldn't have been there before this case.
I.e, if you were looking for 'the kinderstart search engine', you could trivially find it before this case by typing 'kinderstart' into google and disregarding the two obvious incorrect results, and click on the one labeled 'Kinderstart - Your Kid Friendly Directory'. (Well, they aren't 'incorrect'. Google isn't psychic and can't possibly figure out which 'kinderstart' you mean.)
One thing should get this thrown out of court. Tada. Google UK is fourth, after frickin Altavista of all places, and real Google is fifth. Then MSN Search and Yahoo.
If Google were going to, nonsensically, manipulate the search rankings for itself, surely it would not have actual competitors, not little guys that no one has heard off, on its first result page. (In fact, putting little guys up there would be the best bet. Put up the crappiest engines no one's ever heard of when people people look for alternatives, and no one will leave.)
What sort of search engine relies on someone searching for it on Google? Am I missing something? Do people go to google, search for 'search engine', find one, and use that to search?
Or the other way around: You might choose to research something else because he's already researching it, and it turns out his theory was a good one, but all the research has to be redone when the lies are discovered.
Think of science as carefully searching an area. If someone starts lying about what they found, now you have to go back and search it again. While you can't assume what they said they found was there, you can't assume there's nothing there either. And people might have started to search somewhere else less promising, because they knew someone was already searching in the obvious place.
Especially with grants. Half the point of writing up a grant is to demonstrate you are researching something unique. While this guy was researching whatever he was researching, they would refused grants to people who wanted to look in the same place, so those people are now looking somewhere else.
Well, part of the problem is they've fixed like half the problems...including 'problems' that web developers used to hide CSS from broken-ass IE. Many of those reasons for hiding the CSS are still there, but now IE7 will see it and render brokenly. Yay.
Microsoft needs to fix all its problems with rendering. Rendering is the most important thing a web browser does, hell, it's the only thing it does. Everything else is just to let users make it do that.
As for XHTML, XHTML is gibberish at this point. Almost everyone uses it wrong by offering it up with an HTML mimetype. XHTML is simply not important.
No shit. Their great improvement are basically grabbing the UI of Firefox and Opera.
Well, that's all well and good, I don't have the slightest problem with that. But, um, if we wanted that we had IE frontends for the past five years that did that. I, as a web developer, want bug fixes and correct standards support, and as a Internet user I'd also like some security. Not stupid drag and drop tabs.
When people bitch that Microsoft-created workarounds for Microsoft-created bugs and Microsoft-created rendering brokenness no long work in Microsoft browsers, thus exposing the Microsoft-created bugs and Microsoft-created rendering brokenness to the world, be sure to explain the situation very very slowly, putting the word 'Microsoft' in there as much as possible.
And then offer them Firefox, which, amazingly, just does everything correctly.
Seriously, as a web designer, I'm glad they're complete fucking morons at Microsoft. It really shows the dangers of coding to pretend MS standards instead of actual ones. Don't work around their damn bugs, expecially not using other bugs. Make the page correctly. If people complain, tell them their browser must be broken, and they should contact whoever provided it. (Hey, it's true.)
I quote: The majority reasoned "even if 2 Live Crew's copying of the original's first line of lyrics and characteristic opening bass riff may be said to go to the original's 'heart,' that heart is what most readily conjures up the song for parody, and it is the heart at which parody takes aim."
They didn't copy the song and put new, unrelated lyrics to it, or put old lyrics to a new song. They copied parts of the song that invoked the original, and went off in a new direction, which may have, indeed, been illegal if it wasn't parody. (For a non-parody case of copying a single riff of music, see this song 'A Bittersweet Symphony', which 'The Verve' lost, and lost badly. Of course, that single riff was all the frickin music in the song, the courts said that just using it a few times might have been okay, but using it as the entire song was definately crossing a line.)
However, if you want another court case, try Huey Lewis and the News' "I Want A New Drug," and Ray
Parker Jr's "Ghostbusters". He sued because the music was merely similiar, but Ray Parker settled out of court, so we don't have a decision there.
I can't prove to you what parody is, and I'm rather baffled as to why you think 'new words to old music' is parody, because it's not. To quote that exact link, parody 'is the use of some elements of a prior author's composition to create a new one that, at least in part, comments on that author's works.'.
If it doesn't comment on the work, at least in part, it's not parody. 'Like a Surgeon' doesn't make any comments about 'Like a Virgin', it comments on the medical profession.
Now, the other way around, old words to new music, you might have an argument. If I were to make a parody of Star Wars, and in my parody Darth Vadar talked like Tiny Tim, that would, indeed, be an aspect of the parody, mocking his original voice. Likewise, you can argue that polka music is intended to poke fun at the original music, thus making the work itself a parody, and allowing use of the lyrics under fair use.
OTOH, I can see that going the other way, because it's really hard to see any relation between the original music and polka, or any corrolation at all. Polka is inheritly funny, but it's not funny because the original is polkaeque or anything, and the fact he does a lot of songs like this would present the argument he's just making normal covers of music, polka-style, instead of any sort of parody. A song cover is not a parody. Singing the chorus during the verses or switching to another song by the same artist (Implying all his music sounds is the same) might work as parody, but 'making a cover in a funny genre', not so much.
Now, like I said, he has done actual parodies, like "Smells Like Nirvana', taking both the original lyrics and music and altering them to mock themselves, like the kazoo noises and the fact he sings about not understanding the lyrics. That is actual parody, and he could get away with not paying any royalties on it.
This also ignores that there currently is no speech restrictions on college loans and other routine federal aid to college students.
Yet.
But I'd like some explaination how, if it's legal to tie an athletic scholarship to speech restrictions, it's not legal to tie the Federal Pell Grant to speech restrictions. And, like I've said, they've already decided to take loans from students with drug convictions.
And before anyone makes a comment about 'criminals'....we're talking about trivial uses of drugs. You're a rapist? Here's your student loan. You used pot in high school? Get out of here, druggie! Seriously, before anyone thinks the government does sane restrictions, that's the best example so far of an insane restriction that wouldn't even be constitutional if they tried to ban former drug users from college, but they can in essence do it by keeping the prices high and then not giving them loans. Of course, the great thing is, rich people can get in anyway.
People are like 'You don't have the right to get free money from the government.', but the supreme court itself said 'The power to tax is the power to destroy'. Taxes have to be fair and follow some sort of due process, but the government has discovered the loophole large enough to destroy anyone it wants to...anti-taxes don't have to be fair or follow any sort of due process. So they just tax everyone really high, and then anti-tax only the people they like.
I'm not a big believer in slippery slopes, but, honestly, this sort of crap has been going on forever. Not enough money to afford our strangely overpriced government service? Well, here's some free money to use towards that, as long as we 'like' you using criteria that we, as the government, would be barred from using anywhere else.
The idea started in welfare programs, where it made a little bit of sense, or at least seemed to. Then it started spreading. 10 dollars off your driver's license if you're an organ donor. Well, that's a noble cause, despite the fact the fee for a driver's license is just supposed to be paying for the cost of issuing it, it's not any sort of tax. (The tax is on your car.)
Etc, etc, till we reach this point where a free college education can get revoked if you post to a webpage.
It's not a delibrate conspiracy, it's just, instead of the government lowering prices of services or making taxes more progressives, they like to keep it the same, and give 'refunds', because then no one can bitch if those refunds go away, or, at least, they look stupid if they do, because they don't have the 'right' to free money. And then the government says 'Hey, we've got people we don't like using these refunds, let's make rules about that'. And the courts, like idiots, uphold them.
It's really astonishing that Republicans have been the biggest supporters of this sort of crap. They're basically saying 'Well, if we're going to be socialist, let's make sure the government gets absolute control over the recepients of handouts to prevent 'abuses', like some drug user making something of his life.', which is the worse possible kind of socialism, although, to be fair, at least it lets the rich do whatever they want, which is of course the purpose of the government and was the major objection to socialism before that idea.
They could just make the services available at below cost, but that would mean 'the wrong kind of people' would get them. This way, the wrong kind of poor people are kept out. (There are no 'wrong kind of rich people'. They've just made regretable mistakes when young.)
And that's not even touching on the recent 'Faith Based Initative' crap. Thing about that for a few minutes in the context of what I was just talking about. Some of that stuff might be reaching the point of 'delibrate conspiracy'.
Good grief. Okay, let's walk through this step by step:
Under copyright law, the lyrics and the music are two different things. You get that? If I want to make a cover of the song Yesterday, I must purchase both the lyrics and the music. Alternately, I can purchase the lyrics, and write new music, or purchase the music, and write new lyrics. There are different credits for each half, they have different royalties, even if you wrote both, it's still split up, and you can sell one and not the other.
In addition to that, the finished work is also under copyright, of the performers. (And if they got the lyrics or the music from someone else, they themselves have to pay royalties.) But that's completely moot, as Weird Al doesn't use any of the finished work, just the music or the lyrics. With me so far?
Okay, let's say he wants to make a song based on Madonna's 'Like a Virgin', called 'Like a Surgeon'. Well, the words are his, so he obviously don't have to pay for them. So what about the music?
Well, the music is exactly the same. It's not a 'parody'. It's new words, to the same music. There is no possible way to make exactly the same music out to be a parody of that music. Ergo, he has to pay for use of that music. If you check with him, he will freely admit this.
Likewise if he changes the music, like his 'Bohemia Polka'. The words are exactly the same, and not making fun of themselves, and thus can't possibly be parody. The music is his entirely, and thus he already doesn't have to pay any sort of licensing fee.
Just changing the music or lyrics doesn't get you off the copyright hook with the other half, and just because something is silly or funny doesn't make it 'parody'. Parody is when you use copyrighted stuff to poke fun at that stuff.
There is, a way, parody in some of his songs, but it's what he's singing about. George Lucas couldn't claim he stole a plotline from 'The Phantom Menance' in the song 'The Saga Begins', because that song is parodying the movie. (In addition, you can't generally win copyright suits against short summaries like that.) Don McLain could certainly sue his ass for using the music to 'American Pie' if he hadn't paid for it, though. That song isn't a parody of 'American Pie' in any way.
There are a very few songs, like 'Smell Like Nirvana', that are, in fact, parodying the song they are using the music of. If the lyrics in that song were sufficently close to the lyrics in the original, he'd have a parody defense. (But they aren't, really.)
But not in the songs that aren't making fun of their original, that is not parody. That's just a song with funny words. If I were rewrite Harry Potter in Pig Latin, I can't claim it's a parody because it's in a 'funny language'. Or if I put it in a funny cover and silly font, or do an audiobook version in a silly voice, and try to sell it, guess what? I'm getting sued, cause that ain't parody.
However, if I rewrite the story in a self-mocking matter, like Sluggy Freelance did with their 'Torg Potter' storylines, that is parody, and they can't sue based on the idea it's a derivative work. It is, but it's a parody. Parodies don't, and can't, just take part of a copyrighted work. Parodies are when you rewrite a copyrighted work, which would normally be illegal, but isn't because it's a parody. Just using a copyrighted work isn't a parody. I don't know how to make that clearer.
If you don't believe me, ask those people who dub over movies if what they do do is legal because it's a parody. The dialog is legal, even if the story they're making is reasonable close to the original, because it's parody. But they're also showing the video of the movie, and they do, indeed, have to pay for that. It's the same with the music and the lyrics.
My point was that the price of a soda is completely unrelated to the cost of providing that soda, and thus providing more soda or less soda has no effect on the price. The price of soda is exactly at the point that people are willing to pay for it.
There is absolutely no incentive to provide a cheaper product.
In fact, there already is a cheaper product. It's called a 'small'. You'll notice it's about 10 cents cheaper, despite the fact that it only has about one cent less drink, and of course it can be refilled just as much.
However, all this is moot, because the mere policing of 'no refills' would cost more than the few cents that is saved in costs. (That is, assuming you have both. If you just have just no refills, you'll piss a lot of people off.)
Those that drink a lot of soda are being subsidized by those that only drink one and leave.
Um, no. People who drink one soda and leave have spent 1.25 cents for 4 cents worth of product. Someone who sits there and drinks three full cups has spent 1.25 cents for 12 cents worth of product.
No one's 'subsidizing' anything. Anyone who goes 'I only buy soda at places where there aren't free refills, because I don't want to pay for other people's free refills' is delusional. The actual way to save money is to not buy insanely overprice soft drinks at food places.
To put it another way: When you buy just a drink and leave, they spent 4 cents on the drink, 2 cents on the cup, 2 cents on AC/heat/door repair/floor waxing/other building upkeep, and 10 cents on paying the person who gave you the drink.
As the other guy pointed out, anyone who drinks more soda than they paid at a fast food place for probably died halfway there.
If they did that, I'd demand a jury trial where they demonstrate that the car wasn't in my possession at the time.
What? If someone loans me their car, I can drive it somewhere, park it, and put money in the meter. If they loan it to me while it's already legally parked, I can put more money in the meter.
The burden of proof is on them to demonstrate that the owner didn't loan it to me during the thirty seconds I fed the meter. Remember, he could have agreed to my borrowing his car at any point in the past. The fact I wasn't in possession of the key could easily be an oversight on our parts.
Oh, and both me and the owner will be able to take the fifth, as the state is trying to fine both of us, me for feeding his meter and him for letting the meter expire. We don't have to lie, they have to prove that at no point in the past did he ever agree I could use his car during that time, without using either of our testimony. Have fun with that.
I think they go around chalking more often. Like every hour. So when they make the third mark they know you've been there too long. Although I guess it obviously would vary based on how many cops there are.
And while I rarely side with the police on stuff like this, honestly, that's about the easiest and least privacy-invading way to prevent mistakes. Yes, they could go around writing down all the plates, or just photographing the cars, or even have video cameras up, but I'd rather have chalk. They could stick notes on the car, but that's just pointless litter when most people will be gone after one of them. (If they mark the tires, they presumably mark a specific place on them, so if you move the car, the mark's not in the right place. Or they could just use different colors on different streets.)
Plus, now there's an opening for 'The Anti-Chalk', a superhero who goes around erasing the marks off cars so people don't get tickets.;) Which would be, like, the most trivial superhero job in the universe. Damp-Cloth Man. You could rig a wet-nap to the side of your shoe or something.
Slashdot Mirror
We should have invaded that looney bin called Afganistan years ago. When they blew up those Buddhas we knew they weren't right in the head.
Of course, now we've managed to turn Iraq and Somalia (Everyone forgets about them) into Afganistans, too. And Afganistan is quickly turning back into Afganistan.
Possible if we'd finished Somalia, then invaded Afganistan after 9/11 and finished that.
Wait, that would have been a logical and doable plan, and couldn't have plunged us into a permanent war.
Which reasons might those be? Do you have specific cases where there are still CSS bugs? That doesn't include unimplemented features, since those will be ignored anyways. If you do, you should report them.
Um, MS knows full well how shoddy its box model is. There are tons of things MS hasn't fixed, and, no I don't need to report them.
Also, if you want to target stuff just at IE, rather than use the star hack, why not just use conditional comments? It's supported.
Yeah, they fixed like five CSS parsing bugs, and pretend that is somehow what web designers were complaining about. Those were just amazingly stupid errors, but if they were the only ones it would be trivial to write CSS that doesn't use what causes IE to barf.
The actual bugs are things like positioning and sizing boxes and cutting off content inside divs and all sorts of problems. Microsoft hasn't fixed any of these. The CSS parsing bugs were used to hide CSS that triggered other bugs, and now the parsing bugs are fixed, so the other bugs will now show up.
And, yes, now they've invented conditional statements in CSS that let you hide the CSS from IE7. So...um...the 'advancement' is that we now have to go back into our CSS and add these conditionals to the CSS we already had hidden. (And we have to leave it the same way, so IE6 won't choke on it.)
Some of us aren't really seeing the advantage of this 'bugfix'. How about IE actually rendering correctly so we don't have to feed it custom CSS?
And that doesn't even address the 'reverse hacks', aka '* html', where some CSS was written only for IE, and we still need it in IE7. How the hell are we supposed to conditional that?
They went and fixed their parser and not their renderer. We didn't give a damn about their parser. It would be trivial to write code that could be parsed the same in every browser. It's their broken rendering that's fucking us up, we were just using the broken parsing to hack the broken rendering.
Um, hello, web developer here. I have to write for IE's crap all the time.
I'm just pointing out, when your 3.5 million dollar website breaks, point out it is because Microsoft can't even standardize on incompatiblities. Don't accept this default position the computer industry has that nothing is ever anyone's fault. Point out that this is the second set of problems that IE support has created, the first being the work to use the incompatiblities.
It's not to get anyone to switch right there, or to make your website standards-only. There's no way that's going to happen. It's to stir up general dissatifation at the fact that everyone uses IE, with the result that more people don't like IE, on average, which will result in less people using it, on average, which means more people writing to standards, which means that there will be more resentment stirred up when these standards don't work, etc.
Which will eventually means that MS will have to FIX THE DAMN PROBLEMS or end up with no marketshare.
I'm not trying to get anything to happen in anyone's specific situation. I'm saying, (honestly and correctly) explain the problem, not just to the people who know it, web designers, but to the people in charge, to make the cycle of hate happen a little faster.
In short: If Microsoft causes you and your company extra work, be sure everyone knows this is Microsoft's fault, not some mysterious random computer problem that magically happens.
Heh. I couldn't even find that using Google. ;)
Search google for 'kids'.
Hey, look, they do have competitor ads, right there. For free, no less! ;)
It's just this one guy's crappy directory they don't have.
Except that Kinderstart and Google are not in the same market. Kinderstart is, despite them trying to confuse the issue, a directory, not a search engine. What's more, they are a very focused directory. There is no way in hell they can even vaguely compete with Google.
And here's a fun link. Search Google for 'kids'. What's the topmost result? Yahoo!'s Web Guide for kids.
Oh, yeah, Google's really trying to corner that market. They not only don't even have a directory for children, but point people looking for one of those at a very big competitor to their actual business, general search.
That's like, the exact opposite of abusing your monopoly position. Someone comes into a hamburger place (google) and wants some ice cream (Kid friendly stuff), and you don't have any, you direct them to a directly competing hamburger place (yahoo) that has ice cream (Their kid directory), instead of just an ice cream place (kinderstart), in the hopes they'll come back to you for the hamburgers.
But they aren't looking for 'a' search engine, they're looking for 'google'.
If someone types in 'kinderstart', this search engine is currently five in the ranking. The first one is a nursery in the UK called 'Kinderstart', the second is the California Department of Education program called 'Kinderstart', and the third and fourth are discussions about this case, so presumably wouldn't have been there before this case.
I.e, if you were looking for 'the kinderstart search engine', you could trivially find it before this case by typing 'kinderstart' into google and disregarding the two obvious incorrect results, and click on the one labeled 'Kinderstart - Your Kid Friendly Directory'. (Well, they aren't 'incorrect'. Google isn't psychic and can't possibly figure out which 'kinderstart' you mean.)
One thing should get this thrown out of court. Tada. Google UK is fourth, after frickin Altavista of all places, and real Google is fifth. Then MSN Search and Yahoo.
If Google were going to, nonsensically, manipulate the search rankings for itself, surely it would not have actual competitors, not little guys that no one has heard off, on its first result page. (In fact, putting little guys up there would be the best bet. Put up the crappiest engines no one's ever heard of when people people look for alternatives, and no one will leave.)
What sort of search engine relies on someone searching for it on Google? Am I missing something? Do people go to google, search for 'search engine', find one, and use that to search?
Or the other way around: You might choose to research something else because he's already researching it, and it turns out his theory was a good one, but all the research has to be redone when the lies are discovered.
Think of science as carefully searching an area. If someone starts lying about what they found, now you have to go back and search it again. While you can't assume what they said they found was there, you can't assume there's nothing there either. And people might have started to search somewhere else less promising, because they knew someone was already searching in the obvious place.
Especially with grants. Half the point of writing up a grant is to demonstrate you are researching something unique. While this guy was researching whatever he was researching, they would refused grants to people who wanted to look in the same place, so those people are now looking somewhere else.
Well, part of the problem is they've fixed like half the problems...including 'problems' that web developers used to hide CSS from broken-ass IE. Many of those reasons for hiding the CSS are still there, but now IE7 will see it and render brokenly. Yay.
Microsoft needs to fix all its problems with rendering. Rendering is the most important thing a web browser does, hell, it's the only thing it does. Everything else is just to let users make it do that.
As for XHTML, XHTML is gibberish at this point. Almost everyone uses it wrong by offering it up with an HTML mimetype. XHTML is simply not important.
No shit. Their great improvement are basically grabbing the UI of Firefox and Opera.
Well, that's all well and good, I don't have the slightest problem with that. But, um, if we wanted that we had IE frontends for the past five years that did that. I, as a web developer, want bug fixes and correct standards support, and as a Internet user I'd also like some security. Not stupid drag and drop tabs.
You're looking at this the wrong way.
When people bitch that Microsoft-created workarounds for Microsoft-created bugs and Microsoft-created rendering brokenness no long work in Microsoft browsers, thus exposing the Microsoft-created bugs and Microsoft-created rendering brokenness to the world, be sure to explain the situation very very slowly, putting the word 'Microsoft' in there as much as possible.
And then offer them Firefox, which, amazingly, just does everything correctly.
Seriously, as a web designer, I'm glad they're complete fucking morons at Microsoft. It really shows the dangers of coding to pretend MS standards instead of actual ones. Don't work around their damn bugs, expecially not using other bugs. Make the page correctly. If people complain, tell them their browser must be broken, and they should contact whoever provided it. (Hey, it's true.)
I think I speak for everyone when I say 'Fuck every site in existence that was targeted to a fictional standard.'.
"it's no longer an object of ridicule either"
is what is technically known as 'damning with faint praise'.
It's not any good at all, but at least people aren't pointing and laughing at it?
Read the court case about music.
I quote: The majority reasoned "even if 2 Live Crew's copying of the original's first line of lyrics and characteristic opening bass riff may be said to go to the original's 'heart,' that heart is what most readily conjures up the song for parody, and it is the heart at which parody takes aim."
They didn't copy the song and put new, unrelated lyrics to it, or put old lyrics to a new song. They copied parts of the song that invoked the original, and went off in a new direction, which may have, indeed, been illegal if it wasn't parody. (For a non-parody case of copying a single riff of music, see this song 'A Bittersweet Symphony', which 'The Verve' lost, and lost badly. Of course, that single riff was all the frickin music in the song, the courts said that just using it a few times might have been okay, but using it as the entire song was definately crossing a line.)
However, if you want another court case, try Huey Lewis and the News' "I Want A New Drug," and Ray Parker Jr's "Ghostbusters". He sued because the music was merely similiar, but Ray Parker settled out of court, so we don't have a decision there.
I can't prove to you what parody is, and I'm rather baffled as to why you think 'new words to old music' is parody, because it's not. To quote that exact link, parody 'is the use of some elements of a prior author's composition to create a new one that, at least in part, comments on that author's works.'.
If it doesn't comment on the work, at least in part, it's not parody. 'Like a Surgeon' doesn't make any comments about 'Like a Virgin', it comments on the medical profession.
Now, the other way around, old words to new music, you might have an argument. If I were to make a parody of Star Wars, and in my parody Darth Vadar talked like Tiny Tim, that would, indeed, be an aspect of the parody, mocking his original voice. Likewise, you can argue that polka music is intended to poke fun at the original music, thus making the work itself a parody, and allowing use of the lyrics under fair use.
OTOH, I can see that going the other way, because it's really hard to see any relation between the original music and polka, or any corrolation at all. Polka is inheritly funny, but it's not funny because the original is polkaeque or anything, and the fact he does a lot of songs like this would present the argument he's just making normal covers of music, polka-style, instead of any sort of parody. A song cover is not a parody. Singing the chorus during the verses or switching to another song by the same artist (Implying all his music sounds is the same) might work as parody, but 'making a cover in a funny genre', not so much.
Now, like I said, he has done actual parodies, like "Smells Like Nirvana', taking both the original lyrics and music and altering them to mock themselves, like the kazoo noises and the fact he sings about not understanding the lyrics. That is actual parody, and he could get away with not paying any royalties on it.
This also ignores that there currently is no speech restrictions on college loans and other routine federal aid to college students.
Yet.
But I'd like some explaination how, if it's legal to tie an athletic scholarship to speech restrictions, it's not legal to tie the Federal Pell Grant to speech restrictions. And, like I've said, they've already decided to take loans from students with drug convictions.
And before anyone makes a comment about 'criminals'....we're talking about trivial uses of drugs. You're a rapist? Here's your student loan. You used pot in high school? Get out of here, druggie! Seriously, before anyone thinks the government does sane restrictions, that's the best example so far of an insane restriction that wouldn't even be constitutional if they tried to ban former drug users from college, but they can in essence do it by keeping the prices high and then not giving them loans. Of course, the great thing is, rich people can get in anyway.
People are like 'You don't have the right to get free money from the government.', but the supreme court itself said 'The power to tax is the power to destroy'. Taxes have to be fair and follow some sort of due process, but the government has discovered the loophole large enough to destroy anyone it wants to...anti-taxes don't have to be fair or follow any sort of due process. So they just tax everyone really high, and then anti-tax only the people they like.
I'm not a big believer in slippery slopes, but, honestly, this sort of crap has been going on forever. Not enough money to afford our strangely overpriced government service? Well, here's some free money to use towards that, as long as we 'like' you using criteria that we, as the government, would be barred from using anywhere else.
The idea started in welfare programs, where it made a little bit of sense, or at least seemed to. Then it started spreading. 10 dollars off your driver's license if you're an organ donor. Well, that's a noble cause, despite the fact the fee for a driver's license is just supposed to be paying for the cost of issuing it, it's not any sort of tax. (The tax is on your car.)
Etc, etc, till we reach this point where a free college education can get revoked if you post to a webpage.
It's not a delibrate conspiracy, it's just, instead of the government lowering prices of services or making taxes more progressives, they like to keep it the same, and give 'refunds', because then no one can bitch if those refunds go away, or, at least, they look stupid if they do, because they don't have the 'right' to free money. And then the government says 'Hey, we've got people we don't like using these refunds, let's make rules about that'. And the courts, like idiots, uphold them.
It's really astonishing that Republicans have been the biggest supporters of this sort of crap. They're basically saying 'Well, if we're going to be socialist, let's make sure the government gets absolute control over the recepients of handouts to prevent 'abuses', like some drug user making something of his life.', which is the worse possible kind of socialism, although, to be fair, at least it lets the rich do whatever they want, which is of course the purpose of the government and was the major objection to socialism before that idea.
They could just make the services available at below cost, but that would mean 'the wrong kind of people' would get them. This way, the wrong kind of poor people are kept out. (There are no 'wrong kind of rich people'. They've just made regretable mistakes when young.)
And that's not even touching on the recent 'Faith Based Initative' crap. Thing about that for a few minutes in the context of what I was just talking about. Some of that stuff might be reaching the point of 'delibrate conspiracy'.
Good grief. Okay, let's walk through this step by step:
Under copyright law, the lyrics and the music are two different things. You get that? If I want to make a cover of the song Yesterday, I must purchase both the lyrics and the music. Alternately, I can purchase the lyrics, and write new music, or purchase the music, and write new lyrics. There are different credits for each half, they have different royalties, even if you wrote both, it's still split up, and you can sell one and not the other.
In addition to that, the finished work is also under copyright, of the performers. (And if they got the lyrics or the music from someone else, they themselves have to pay royalties.) But that's completely moot, as Weird Al doesn't use any of the finished work, just the music or the lyrics. With me so far?
Okay, let's say he wants to make a song based on Madonna's 'Like a Virgin', called 'Like a Surgeon'. Well, the words are his, so he obviously don't have to pay for them. So what about the music?
Well, the music is exactly the same. It's not a 'parody'. It's new words, to the same music. There is no possible way to make exactly the same music out to be a parody of that music. Ergo, he has to pay for use of that music. If you check with him, he will freely admit this.
Likewise if he changes the music, like his 'Bohemia Polka'. The words are exactly the same, and not making fun of themselves, and thus can't possibly be parody. The music is his entirely, and thus he already doesn't have to pay any sort of licensing fee.
Just changing the music or lyrics doesn't get you off the copyright hook with the other half, and just because something is silly or funny doesn't make it 'parody'. Parody is when you use copyrighted stuff to poke fun at that stuff.
There is, a way, parody in some of his songs, but it's what he's singing about. George Lucas couldn't claim he stole a plotline from 'The Phantom Menance' in the song 'The Saga Begins', because that song is parodying the movie. (In addition, you can't generally win copyright suits against short summaries like that.) Don McLain could certainly sue his ass for using the music to 'American Pie' if he hadn't paid for it, though. That song isn't a parody of 'American Pie' in any way.
There are a very few songs, like 'Smell Like Nirvana', that are, in fact, parodying the song they are using the music of. If the lyrics in that song were sufficently close to the lyrics in the original, he'd have a parody defense. (But they aren't, really.)
But not in the songs that aren't making fun of their original, that is not parody. That's just a song with funny words. If I were rewrite Harry Potter in Pig Latin, I can't claim it's a parody because it's in a 'funny language'. Or if I put it in a funny cover and silly font, or do an audiobook version in a silly voice, and try to sell it, guess what? I'm getting sued, cause that ain't parody.
However, if I rewrite the story in a self-mocking matter, like Sluggy Freelance did with their 'Torg Potter' storylines, that is parody, and they can't sue based on the idea it's a derivative work. It is, but it's a parody. Parodies don't, and can't, just take part of a copyrighted work. Parodies are when you rewrite a copyrighted work, which would normally be illegal, but isn't because it's a parody. Just using a copyrighted work isn't a parody. I don't know how to make that clearer.
If you don't believe me, ask those people who dub over movies if what they do do is legal because it's a parody. The dialog is legal, even if the story they're making is reasonable close to the original, because it's parody. But they're also showing the video of the movie, and they do, indeed, have to pay for that. It's the same with the music and the lyrics.
However, you can distribute the original source, the patch, and any automated tools. You don't have to make everything up nice and fancy.
College students don't vote.
However, their parents do. And, what's more, their parents don't care about speech restrictions on the students.
My point was that the price of a soda is completely unrelated to the cost of providing that soda, and thus providing more soda or less soda has no effect on the price. The price of soda is exactly at the point that people are willing to pay for it.
There is absolutely no incentive to provide a cheaper product.
In fact, there already is a cheaper product. It's called a 'small'. You'll notice it's about 10 cents cheaper, despite the fact that it only has about one cent less drink, and of course it can be refilled just as much.
However, all this is moot, because the mere policing of 'no refills' would cost more than the few cents that is saved in costs. (That is, assuming you have both. If you just have just no refills, you'll piss a lot of people off.)
Any difference in price would be a gimmick.
Gah. When I said '1.25 cents', I meant '125 cents'.
Um, no. People who drink one soda and leave have spent 1.25 cents for 4 cents worth of product. Someone who sits there and drinks three full cups has spent 1.25 cents for 12 cents worth of product.
No one's 'subsidizing' anything. Anyone who goes 'I only buy soda at places where there aren't free refills, because I don't want to pay for other people's free refills' is delusional. The actual way to save money is to not buy insanely overprice soft drinks at food places.
To put it another way: When you buy just a drink and leave, they spent 4 cents on the drink, 2 cents on the cup, 2 cents on AC/heat/door repair/floor waxing/other building upkeep, and 10 cents on paying the person who gave you the drink.
As the other guy pointed out, anyone who drinks more soda than they paid at a fast food place for probably died halfway there.
If they did that, I'd demand a jury trial where they demonstrate that the car wasn't in my possession at the time.
What? If someone loans me their car, I can drive it somewhere, park it, and put money in the meter. If they loan it to me while it's already legally parked, I can put more money in the meter.
The burden of proof is on them to demonstrate that the owner didn't loan it to me during the thirty seconds I fed the meter. Remember, he could have agreed to my borrowing his car at any point in the past. The fact I wasn't in possession of the key could easily be an oversight on our parts.
Oh, and both me and the owner will be able to take the fifth, as the state is trying to fine both of us, me for feeding his meter and him for letting the meter expire. We don't have to lie, they have to prove that at no point in the past did he ever agree I could use his car during that time, without using either of our testimony. Have fun with that.
People need to stand up to this idiotic law.
I think they go around chalking more often. Like every hour. So when they make the third mark they know you've been there too long. Although I guess it obviously would vary based on how many cops there are.
And while I rarely side with the police on stuff like this, honestly, that's about the easiest and least privacy-invading way to prevent mistakes. Yes, they could go around writing down all the plates, or just photographing the cars, or even have video cameras up, but I'd rather have chalk. They could stick notes on the car, but that's just pointless litter when most people will be gone after one of them. (If they mark the tires, they presumably mark a specific place on them, so if you move the car, the mark's not in the right place. Or they could just use different colors on different streets.)
Plus, now there's an opening for 'The Anti-Chalk', a superhero who goes around erasing the marks off cars so people don't get tickets. ;) Which would be, like, the most trivial superhero job in the universe. Damp-Cloth Man. You could rig a wet-nap to the side of your shoe or something.