While SciFi claims the show as an original, it was created elsewhere.
That also goes for nearly everything that the SciFi channel claims as "SciFi Channel Originals." Most of those crappy monster movies they show on Saturdays are just bought by SciFi rather than made by them.
At least in the humanities, and I've no reason to expect that things are any different in the sciences, academic publishing is more screwed up than just the cost of the journals.
As academics, one of the things that most universities expect is for the professors to publish. So, in effect, we are getting paid to publish. In order to get published, we have to give our copyright to the publishers. The publishers then sell the articles to article aggregators like ebsco or any of a bunch of other companies. Then the university's library has to pay these companies to get access to these articles. So the university is paying us to publish and then turns around and pays someone else to get access to them!
Now, of course the university is paying to get access to a lot more than just the papers that are published by the members of its own faculty, but they are still paying twice for these articles that are only read by a handful of people.
However, the stupidity doesn't stop there. As I said, in order to get published, most journals require you to give them your copyright. Keep in mind, that they journals don't pay for this, and in many cases, before they will publish you they make you pay to join the organization they are supposed to represent. In the humanities it is a very common practice to publish a few articles and then rework them into a book. However, in order to publish that book, you have to get permission from the journal! Now it is a common thing and the journals routinely give permission, but the fact is that this is a professional courtesy. They are under no legal requirement to allow me to republish my own work. Call me crazy but I'd rather own my own work than rely on the generosity of the journals. (of course if everyone retained all the rights on their work, it would make it impossible for the journals to have the articles included in the article databases, but there is a middle ground where authors can maintain the ownership of their work and give the journals rights to reproduce the articles as well.)
To make things worse, nearly all the people in academia that I've talked to don't seem to see this as a problem. Unless people see it as a problem and start to push for change, the publishers are going to go right on taking out intellectual property.
because all energy has the same environmental cost
on
Hummer Greener Than Prius?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
While the part about the manufacture of the batteries is interesting, to say that a Hummer uses less energy than a Prius is misleading at best and propaganda at worst. The mistake that is makes is to assume that all energy usage is the same when of course it isn't. When the issue is the environment, there are types of energy that are better for the environment than others. The article is acting as if burning old tires and solar energy were exactly the same when they aren't. Without more details on the environmental impact of the manufacturing processes used in each vehicle, this article is only useful for raising questions and making people who own Hummers feel good about themselves.
OF the three PC-centric videogame mags in the USA computer Games has been thinner than PCWorld or CGW aka Games for Windows Magazine. For a few years now they've been trying to broaden the audience with crap like "Now Playing" which was an attempt to cover music and movies, which they tried to spin off into a magazine, and most recently with "Massive" which also spun off of CGM. Their reviews have often been a month behind the other mags too.
That being said, they were more thoughtful and had better coverage of things like videogame legislation and mainstream media's scare mongering around videogames (such as the Hot Coffee incident and such). They didn't get the fancy cover stories that the other mags did, but they had a lot to offer. I'll miss it.
Gaming mags may always be out of date compared to web sites, but like an old fashioned card catalog the nature of the format was that you might find something you wouldn't have ordinarily found if you weren't flipping through it. And I'm still reluctant to take my laptop into the bathroom with me or to lie in bed with it before I go to sleep.
It all depends on your definition of "important." I'm sure that there are lots of people who think that the Mona Lisa or Michelangelo's David are very important works of art even though there were portraits and lifelike statues before them. In this case important doesn't mean any kind of first. It means that, in their opinions, they thought it was very good and an achievement in the genre.
So is that the case for all of Great Britain? Because I've only heard about it being the case in London and surrounding areas, not in Scotland or other parts of Great Britain.
I've read that in many cities in England, especially London, you can't walk outside without being on a camera. Once you allow that kind of constant surveillance it is just a step away from having all your information monitored all the time anyway.
Living in the USA, when I first watched Torchwood I initially didn't beelive how easily they were able to track people on cameras so easily, then I remembered that such an ability real and not one of the scifi elements of the show.
I see a lot of people on here talking about two powerful the teachers unions are. I wish you people had been around when I was teaching high school because at the two schools I taught at the only thing the union did was take dues out of my paycheck.
As someone who was an English major and a math minor, let me say that I found teaching English was a lot harder than teaching math.
Having read the article, it seems more like its a case where a bunch of guys who happen to be in law school talking about who they think is hot or not than it is about free speech. I've not been to the site in question, so I don't know what other kinds of conversations go on there, but the article seems to mainly be about sexism and objectification of women than it does about first amendment issues.
I say it every time Star Trek comes up on slashdot but I still think that a lot of possibilities open up when you mash together the casts from TNG, DS9 and Voyager. You could have a lot more actors to pick from, as well as a lot more plot lines to pick from. You could also kill off a few of the characters without alienating a lot of the audience. I'd love to see a situation where Sisco comes back from the wormhole aliens and he faces off with Picard. Then we have Worf and O'Brien caught in the middle of who to side with. We have the hologram Doctor and the DS9 lounge singer who could bond. We have Odo and Data (or B4 or whatever the stupid Data-replacement was) compare notes on trying to be human. There's a lot more here than some revamp/prequel thing which would not attract any new fans and piss off all the current fans.
So someone finds out that another government has stollen actual secrets from the US, reports it, gets fired, then wins a lawsuit and this is obscure news. But an advertising company puts up some signs in Boston and it is all over the news. Let's see, stolen government secrets vs. publicity stunt gone bad. Damn that mainstream media and their liberal bias!
I"m not sure on the legal reasons on the ratings, however, i am a comic book nerd. DC still used the comics code authority for their manistream superhero comics like Superman and Batman when Marvel pulled out. DC does still put the seal on those books. They don't submit WIldstorm, Vertigo or many other comics to the comics code authority though.
Again in my original post I said that I pay for cable and Doctor WHo is shown on the SciFi channel. I am not a ratings household, so their ratings are not changed by whether or not I watch it on SciFi (and I usually end up watching it when it is on SciFi). I'm not going to buy the Doctor Who dvds, so what does it matter?
I suppose if you trade games in for store credit, there might be some reason to go there. However, I don't trade games. I only buy games that I'm pretty sure I will want, so I keep the games I buy.
I got a gift certificate from gamestop for my birthday in september and every time I go to the mall (admittedly only once every couple of months) I check out the gamestop looking to use the gift card. Everything there is so overpriced. Even with the $5 on the gift card any decent used games are still more than I would want to pay for them.
So the bank is who gives me my money and not my employer? It would be nice to get your comparisons right is you are going to make them.
If you take money from someone, you are taking something. they don't have the money. Who is being hurt by my not wanting to wait to watch Doctor Who? Or by my wanting to watch some other show that is not and probably never will be available in my country? Explain to me how I am hurting anyone and then maybe I'll think about stopping.
I know that as a Doctor Who fan in the states I'm not going to wait to see new episodes of Who. When I can download them and watch them less than 12 hours after they have been on in BBC, there really isn't any reason to wait until SciFi channel or whoever decides to air it. More and more it seems as if my favorite shows aren't aired on channels in the USA or if they are, they are shown months later.
Sure it may be copyright infringement to download them, but since there's no legal way for me to see a lot of these shows in the first place, I don't have a problem with it. I can't pay for them if I wanted to, I do pay for cable, and I'm not a Nielson Rating's house, so the arguments against downloading these shows seem pretty weak.
I thought a lot of it was fairly suspect. They were just listing multiple theories and not really giving as clear a picture as to the reputations of the people proposing the theories or the acceptance of those theories as I would have liked to have seen.
I think the theory that the same people who made all of these famous cave paintings in France came to the Americans and didn't make any cave paintings here seems especially hard to swallow. However the part where they showed that people in Asia had drastically different types stone tools than people in the Americas did at the same time period seemed fairly convincing evidence that however they developed the Clovis tools, it wasn't from northeast Asia.
The G, PG, PG-13, R, NC-17 ratings are trademarks of the MPAA. THey won't share with anyone or if they did I'm sure they would want to charge an arm and a leg. A few years ago Marvel comics pulled out of the Comics Code Authority and started rating their comics themselves. They originally used G, PG and R but the MPAA sued (or they threatened to sue, I can't remember) so Marvel had to make up their own ratings.
Incidentally the reason the MPAA got rid of X and tried to introduce NC-17 was partially because of the stigma of "X" but also because they didn't have a trademark on using X for a rating which is why we have porn claiming "XXX" ratings and the like (which really don't mean anything).
I really would be much easier if a game in the USA could be rated "R" but unless the MPAA suddenly becomes overcome with generosity, it isn't going to happen.
i would imagine that the price of getting a film rated, if there even is one, would be less than a movie company would expect to make from, say, a dozen theaters. So I would guess that it would be better to risk having the most squeeky clean family friendly movie actually get a rating than to have a few theaters not run it because they could just run a Disney or Dreamworks or whatever CGI talking animal movie one more week and not have to even think about whether or not this unrated movie was going to get some busybody worked up and protesting them.
I agree that to say "without language" is humorous. However, what is more humorous is that in rating movies R, the MPAA will frequently say that it is rated R for "pervasive use of language." I don't know about you, but I would be surprised if most Hollywood films didn't have a pervasive use of language.
The analogy is flawed. Videogames are a medium like film, music, or television. These laws seek to single out an entire medium for regulation. To do so there would need to be a mountain of evidence suggesting that this medium has negative side effects. There is no such mountain.
Beer which contains alcohol has been shown to have negative side effects if taken in large amounts. (I'm not sure the legal status of so-called non-alcohol beer)
In the USA no other medium has government enforced ratings. Laws against distributing pornography to minors are in regards to a genre not a medium and even in that situation there is no government enforced ratings for pornography (there are cases where things like comic books are said to be pornographic and often the case will revolve around whether or not the comic book actually is pornographic). To single out videogames would require an enormous amount of evidence that they were harmful to minors -- evidence which does not exist.
Slashdot Mirror
While SciFi claims the show as an original, it was created elsewhere.
That also goes for nearly everything that the SciFi channel claims as "SciFi Channel Originals." Most of those crappy monster movies they show on Saturdays are just bought by SciFi rather than made by them.
Just think what he could have accomplished if he had actually gotten his degree! ;-)
At least in the humanities, and I've no reason to expect that things are any different in the sciences, academic publishing is more screwed up than just the cost of the journals.
As academics, one of the things that most universities expect is for the professors to publish. So, in effect, we are getting paid to publish. In order to get published, we have to give our copyright to the publishers. The publishers then sell the articles to article aggregators like ebsco or any of a bunch of other companies. Then the university's library has to pay these companies to get access to these articles. So the university is paying us to publish and then turns around and pays someone else to get access to them!
Now, of course the university is paying to get access to a lot more than just the papers that are published by the members of its own faculty, but they are still paying twice for these articles that are only read by a handful of people.
However, the stupidity doesn't stop there. As I said, in order to get published, most journals require you to give them your copyright. Keep in mind, that they journals don't pay for this, and in many cases, before they will publish you they make you pay to join the organization they are supposed to represent. In the humanities it is a very common practice to publish a few articles and then rework them into a book. However, in order to publish that book, you have to get permission from the journal! Now it is a common thing and the journals routinely give permission, but the fact is that this is a professional courtesy. They are under no legal requirement to allow me to republish my own work. Call me crazy but I'd rather own my own work than rely on the generosity of the journals. (of course if everyone retained all the rights on their work, it would make it impossible for the journals to have the articles included in the article databases, but there is a middle ground where authors can maintain the ownership of their work and give the journals rights to reproduce the articles as well.)
To make things worse, nearly all the people in academia that I've talked to don't seem to see this as a problem. Unless people see it as a problem and start to push for change, the publishers are going to go right on taking out intellectual property.
While the part about the manufacture of the batteries is interesting, to say that a Hummer uses less energy than a Prius is misleading at best and propaganda at worst. The mistake that is makes is to assume that all energy usage is the same when of course it isn't. When the issue is the environment, there are types of energy that are better for the environment than others. The article is acting as if burning old tires and solar energy were exactly the same when they aren't. Without more details on the environmental impact of the manufacturing processes used in each vehicle, this article is only useful for raising questions and making people who own Hummers feel good about themselves.
OF the three PC-centric videogame mags in the USA computer Games has been thinner than PCWorld or CGW aka Games for Windows Magazine. For a few years now they've been trying to broaden the audience with crap like "Now Playing" which was an attempt to cover music and movies, which they tried to spin off into a magazine, and most recently with "Massive" which also spun off of CGM. Their reviews have often been a month behind the other mags too.
That being said, they were more thoughtful and had better coverage of things like videogame legislation and mainstream media's scare mongering around videogames (such as the Hot Coffee incident and such). They didn't get the fancy cover stories that the other mags did, but they had a lot to offer. I'll miss it.
Gaming mags may always be out of date compared to web sites, but like an old fashioned card catalog the nature of the format was that you might find something you wouldn't have ordinarily found if you weren't flipping through it. And I'm still reluctant to take my laptop into the bathroom with me or to lie in bed with it before I go to sleep.
It all depends on your definition of "important." I'm sure that there are lots of people who think that the Mona Lisa or Michelangelo's David are very important works of art even though there were portraits and lifelike statues before them.
In this case important doesn't mean any kind of first. It means that, in their opinions, they thought it was very good and an achievement in the genre.
So is that the case for all of Great Britain? Because I've only heard about it being the case in London and surrounding areas, not in Scotland or other parts of Great Britain.
I've read that in many cities in England, especially London, you can't walk outside without being on a camera. Once you allow that kind of constant surveillance it is just a step away from having all your information monitored all the time anyway.
Living in the USA, when I first watched Torchwood I initially didn't beelive how easily they were able to track people on cameras so easily, then I remembered that such an ability real and not one of the scifi elements of the show.
I see a lot of people on here talking about two powerful the teachers unions are. I wish you people had been around when I was teaching high school because at the two schools I taught at the only thing the union did was take dues out of my paycheck.
As someone who was an English major and a math minor, let me say that I found teaching English was a lot harder than teaching math.
Having read the article, it seems more like its a case where a bunch of guys who happen to be in law school talking about who they think is hot or not than it is about free speech. I've not been to the site in question, so I don't know what other kinds of conversations go on there, but the article seems to mainly be about sexism and objectification of women than it does about first amendment issues.
If you plan to keep running Vista, then you are going to need some 3d capabilities if you want to run the fancy Aero interface.
I say it every time Star Trek comes up on slashdot but I still think that a lot of possibilities open up when you mash together the casts from TNG, DS9 and Voyager. You could have a lot more actors to pick from, as well as a lot more plot lines to pick from. You could also kill off a few of the characters without alienating a lot of the audience. I'd love to see a situation where Sisco comes back from the wormhole aliens and he faces off with Picard. Then we have Worf and O'Brien caught in the middle of who to side with. We have the hologram Doctor and the DS9 lounge singer who could bond. We have Odo and Data (or B4 or whatever the stupid Data-replacement was) compare notes on trying to be human. There's a lot more here than some revamp/prequel thing which would not attract any new fans and piss off all the current fans.
So someone finds out that another government has stollen actual secrets from the US, reports it, gets fired, then wins a lawsuit and this is obscure news. But an advertising company puts up some signs in Boston and it is all over the news. Let's see, stolen government secrets vs. publicity stunt gone bad. Damn that mainstream media and their liberal bias!
I"m not sure on the legal reasons on the ratings, however, i am a comic book nerd. DC still used the comics code authority for their manistream superhero comics like Superman and Batman when Marvel pulled out. DC does still put the seal on those books. They don't submit WIldstorm, Vertigo or many other comics to the comics code authority though.
Again in my original post I said that I pay for cable and Doctor WHo is shown on the SciFi channel. I am not a ratings household, so their ratings are not changed by whether or not I watch it on SciFi (and I usually end up watching it when it is on SciFi). I'm not going to buy the Doctor Who dvds, so what does it matter?
I suppose if you trade games in for store credit, there might be some reason to go there. However, I don't trade games. I only buy games that I'm pretty sure I will want, so I keep the games I buy.
I got a gift certificate from gamestop for my birthday in september and every time I go to the mall (admittedly only once every couple of months) I check out the gamestop looking to use the gift card. Everything there is so overpriced. Even with the $5 on the gift card any decent used games are still more than I would want to pay for them.
So the bank is who gives me my money and not my employer? It would be nice to get your comparisons right is you are going to make them.
If you take money from someone, you are taking something. they don't have the money. Who is being hurt by my not wanting to wait to watch Doctor Who? Or by my wanting to watch some other show that is not and probably never will be available in my country? Explain to me how I am hurting anyone and then maybe I'll think about stopping.
I know that as a Doctor Who fan in the states I'm not going to wait to see new episodes of Who. When I can download them and watch them less than 12 hours after they have been on in BBC, there really isn't any reason to wait until SciFi channel or whoever decides to air it. More and more it seems as if my favorite shows aren't aired on channels in the USA or if they are, they are shown months later.
Sure it may be copyright infringement to download them, but since there's no legal way for me to see a lot of these shows in the first place, I don't have a problem with it. I can't pay for them if I wanted to, I do pay for cable, and I'm not a Nielson Rating's house, so the arguments against downloading these shows seem pretty weak.
I thought a lot of it was fairly suspect. They were just listing multiple theories and not really giving as clear a picture as to the reputations of the people proposing the theories or the acceptance of those theories as I would have liked to have seen.
I think the theory that the same people who made all of these famous cave paintings in France came to the Americans and didn't make any cave paintings here seems especially hard to swallow. However the part where they showed that people in Asia had drastically different types stone tools than people in the Americas did at the same time period seemed fairly convincing evidence that however they developed the Clovis tools, it wasn't from northeast Asia.
On PBS there was an episode of Nova all about this. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/stoneage/
The G, PG, PG-13, R, NC-17 ratings are trademarks of the MPAA. THey won't share with anyone or if they did I'm sure they would want to charge an arm and a leg. A few years ago Marvel comics pulled out of the Comics Code Authority and started rating their comics themselves. They originally used G, PG and R but the MPAA sued (or they threatened to sue, I can't remember) so Marvel had to make up their own ratings.
Incidentally the reason the MPAA got rid of X and tried to introduce NC-17 was partially because of the stigma of "X" but also because they didn't have a trademark on using X for a rating which is why we have porn claiming "XXX" ratings and the like (which really don't mean anything).
I really would be much easier if a game in the USA could be rated "R" but unless the MPAA suddenly becomes overcome with generosity, it isn't going to happen.
i would imagine that the price of getting a film rated, if there even is one, would be less than a movie company would expect to make from, say, a dozen theaters. So I would guess that it would be better to risk having the most squeeky clean family friendly movie actually get a rating than to have a few theaters not run it because they could just run a Disney or Dreamworks or whatever CGI talking animal movie one more week and not have to even think about whether or not this unrated movie was going to get some busybody worked up and protesting them.
I agree that to say "without language" is humorous. However, what is more humorous is that in rating movies R, the MPAA will frequently say that it is rated R for "pervasive use of language." I don't know about you, but I would be surprised if most Hollywood films didn't have a pervasive use of language.
The analogy is flawed. Videogames are a medium like film, music, or television. These laws seek to single out an entire medium for regulation. To do so there would need to be a mountain of evidence suggesting that this medium has negative side effects. There is no such mountain.
Beer which contains alcohol has been shown to have negative side effects if taken in large amounts. (I'm not sure the legal status of so-called non-alcohol beer)
In the USA no other medium has government enforced ratings. Laws against distributing pornography to minors are in regards to a genre not a medium and even in that situation there is no government enforced ratings for pornography (there are cases where things like comic books are said to be pornographic and often the case will revolve around whether or not the comic book actually is pornographic). To single out videogames would require an enormous amount of evidence that they were harmful to minors -- evidence which does not exist.