When (if) the copyright on the old Mickey films runs out, anyone will be able to print new copies to sell. No one will be able to create new "Mickey Mouse" movies except Disney, because he is a trademark of the company. Of course, we will also see the Diz try to stop people from selling ex-copyrighted works on the basis of these trademarks as well.
There are three real reasons Disney doesn't make a "Mickey Film":
Firstly, they never have. Mickey evolved as a character in comedic shorts. He never made the jump to features for the same reason the early living short film comics never really did, there's just not that much character to work with. The first Disney features were all to serious to support the light characters from their short films. Now it is a tradition for Disney to create their features along the same lines, telling cinematic stories using characters that don't already have "baggage."
Secondly, ol' Mickey is now an important mascot for Disney, sort of a figurehead. If he starts playing in the mud and showing up in new films, there is the risk of failure or tarnish on that image.
Finally, Mickey represents the continued presence of Walt's ghost in Disney. Aside from a brief attempt to dress him "hip" in the eighties, Disney chooses to keep Mickey relatively timeless for this reason. (Have you seen that a lot of the new paraphenilia has gone back to the old "pac-man" eyes?) We are far more likley to see Goofy and Donald Duck in features than we are to see Mickey Mouse.
If a kid thinks they don't like sports, assign them a programming assignment to track scores or statistics. Choose a real sport like hockey or soccer, instead of a "stand around and scratch" fest like football (american) or baseball. Though really, a lot of geeky kids can dig baseball because of the obsessive focus on stats in that sport.
If a kid will only read science fiction, give them a genre-crossing book like a Sci-Fi Mystery or something. Somebody needs to write a new set of Danny Dunn-esque books for kids, because a lot of the science in those is out of date, but something along those lines is good for preteen smarties, especially since they hit all different scientific fields. (Why are there 3 different editions of the "Hardy Boys" at the local B&N, but you have to pay $30 online for used "Danny Dunn" books? Someone fix this please! Thank goodness I saved my paperbacks, though they're looking a little sad.) For heaven's sake, don't let them obsessively read each and every Star Trek pulp "novel."
It's "usually" the smart kid's fault when he (or she) gets picked on? It was my fault that my high school French teacher couldn't control the class well enough to keep people from blatantly copying my tests, and the kids gave me trouble because I told them not to? It's my FAULT that I think academic dishonesty is inappropriate?! I think this is a good thing.
I thought you said you were smart. Smart kids don't whine, they innovate. If you're real lucky, the teach will say "whoever finishes the test early can just jet on out" then you write all wrong answers, the imbeciles copy them and flee, then you go back and put in the right answers.
If you're unfortunate enough that everyone has to stay anyway, you have to get a little more creative, like leaving the test in plain sight with the wrong answers then hunching over it to correct them or something. A good ploy is to walk up to the teachers desk and then go "oh wait" and change half the answers before turning it in, nobody can just come up and watch what you're changing.
Your number one weapon is essay questions. Encourage your teacher to put as many essay questions as possible on the tests and write really longwinded answers that can't be copied or easily paraphrased by your dopey peers. Then there's the retest... Get a life and join some clubs or something and get excuses to be out of class on test day. If your school has them, take prefirst classes, there's usually a better subset of people in those anyway.
In general, you can use your intelligence to minimize your risks anyway. If you take off your blinders you'll notice that there are one or two kids on the football team that are a cut above the rest when it comes to academics or morals. Befriend these and you may be scorned, but you wont get beaten at least.
I'm homeschooling my daughter, but if she was in school, I would definitely pressure the school board to establish some sort of grade privacy. When I got into college and had to take general ed classes, it was great not to have to play the "smart kid" role since no one knew I was getting an A+ in the class.
Good. I really don't think we need the rate of "advancement" we're getting in 3d. Not when it's being used to make up for poor performance by software and to make Ms. Croft's boobs more detailed.
If this does lengthen the "ultimate card->crap worthless card" video cycle, it will be somewhat better for consumers, in my view. For too long, game companies have been babied by these 6 month card releases, and never have to compete in the gameplay arena, or on price. They just try to be first out the door on the new cards so they can put out hotter screenshots and bigger polygon counts in the game fan 'zines. Slower graphics chip cycles will also lead to better, more mature drivers before the driver team moves on to the newest chip.
The best thing that could happen for regular, non-bleeding-edge consumers like myself is for the few remaining companies to raise prices on the newest cards by $50 or so, and have them reign for a year, getting down to current new release prices at around 4-6 months.
2/3 the people think that the restaurants make the portions too big, 1/8 think that they're too small. Who do you think complains?
My favorite is how they keep shoving all this food in your face, (bread and beverage while you wait, a big salad, a potato, 1 1/2 cups of vegetables, and a 10oz steak, say) then the waitress acts like her day is ruined when you don't order dessert (my quota!).
And more to the point, where could anybody get the idea that making a game mod based on a cartoon somehow was "fair use". The inadequacy of mass education rears its head again.
I interviewed former Popular Science conceptual artist Marcus Downforflame about his SQRT(-1) Manifesto, which he wrote a while back, but he's not doing much else these days except diddling around with other washed-up people on inconsequential projects such as his new "really cool Lincoln Logs Star Wars base."
"Cars today really suck. I mean, they're basically the same as they were 50 years ago, with four wheels and an engine. They even still have headlights!"
Marcus is famous for his drawings and paintings of various flying cars and personal jetpacks, which he was convinced would be here by now.
"Look at it this way," he says, shifting his massive belly and accidentally knocking over his "King Cobra" bottle into the gutter, "Car factories are so much more advanced now. They have robots and just-in-time parts supplies. The paints they use on cars are more durable and shinier, but with all these resources, no one has managed to build a flying car!"
"I used to draw cars in the 50s with turbofans and micro-atomic generators, but it was hard to do that with 'pencils' and 'paper'. I recently visited the PS Art Department, and you know what I saw them using? Pencils and paper!"
"Here it is, 50 years later and I still haven't got to make it in the back seat of a flying car," Marcus' eyes get a little watery as he turns and looks at the scarlet sunset. I can almost see the swarms of flying atomic cars that he imagines, their fins glistening in the last light of the day.
If you had to choose between having one Operating System running flawlessly under Plex86, versus having a lot of OSs running less perfectly, which would you pick? Which of these two states do you think would be closer to the perfect virtualization of all OSs? If you did have to choose one OS to run perfectly in Plex86 virtualization, which would it be?
It took me while to get KDE2 compiled correctly. (Mostly because I first did the./configure;make deal without reading ahead that I would have to specifically enable certain options like SSL, RPM, GIF rather than having them be autoconfigured. I still haven't gotten RPM support working in kpackage, for reasons that I don't entirely understand.) But I love browsing the web with Konqueror! Now that I installed Lesstif and got Flash running, I can go basically everywhere, without all the crashing I would get from Netscape. (And Konqueror hasn't bombed out my X server once, Mr. Andreeeesen!)
Why not create a program to scan your pages for a bit like that and output them with GIFs or PNGs of the expressions with appropriate alt text? Will work on all browsers today.
It's amazing, when the topic of HTML and its evils/replacements/wishlists appears on/., how many people pop up that NEED native browser support for arbitrary mathematical notation.
I think you didn't get the part about Keynes and the glass of water. He swirls it while talking about the Fremen practices regarding the dead, after the other characters were speaking in high-school gross-out story fashion about it. He does this bring the water into their attention, increasing their discomfort at his casual acceptance of the Fremen culture, which is alien to their decadent, water-spoiled lifestyle. I thought it was an appropriate and decent piece of stage business.
The IOC is only thinking about their duty to present the Olympics for the betterment of mankind, through the example of peaceful competition.
Riiiiiight.... $kching$
The one disturbing thing I found about the letter was the paragraph where he talks about not competing with GNOME. I don't know if its just me, but it seemed like he was saying that they weren't trying to compete with GNOME only because there weren't many GNOME users, and that if there were more, they'd do everything possible to steal them away. As I said, its probably just me, but that paragraph still sounds somewhat odd.
I don't know what's disturbing about that. Given the paradigm of open source software, it is a moral imperitive to "steal" users/developers from a whatever parallel projects may exist.
As far as I can tell, the only TLDs that seem to be consistently valid are.gov and.edu. New TLDs don't solve the namespace problem, because companies and squatters will just buy the new versions of the same old names. They don't solve the organizational problem because there's no way to fully, fairly, and consistently enforce something like.kids.
A nail. Not the nail. But removing the power of the Several States to elect the President is one more step down the path of letting the more populous States take control of the US Government.
Slashdot Mirror
When (if) the copyright on the old Mickey films runs out, anyone will be able to print new copies to sell. No one will be able to create new "Mickey Mouse" movies except Disney, because he is a trademark of the company. Of course, we will also see the Diz try to stop people from selling ex-copyrighted works on the basis of these trademarks as well.
There are three real reasons Disney doesn't make a "Mickey Film":
Firstly, they never have. Mickey evolved as a character in comedic shorts. He never made the jump to features for the same reason the early living short film comics never really did, there's just not that much character to work with. The first Disney features were all to serious to support the light characters from their short films. Now it is a tradition for Disney to create their features along the same lines, telling cinematic stories using characters that don't already have "baggage."
Secondly, ol' Mickey is now an important mascot for Disney, sort of a figurehead. If he starts playing in the mud and showing up in new films, there is the risk of failure or tarnish on that image.
Finally, Mickey represents the continued presence of Walt's ghost in Disney. Aside from a brief attempt to dress him "hip" in the eighties, Disney chooses to keep Mickey relatively timeless for this reason. (Have you seen that a lot of the new paraphenilia has gone back to the old "pac-man" eyes?) We are far more likley to see Goofy and Donald Duck in features than we are to see Mickey Mouse.
If a kid will only read science fiction, give them a genre-crossing book like a Sci-Fi Mystery or something. Somebody needs to write a new set of Danny Dunn-esque books for kids, because a lot of the science in those is out of date, but something along those lines is good for preteen smarties, especially since they hit all different scientific fields. (Why are there 3 different editions of the "Hardy Boys" at the local B&N, but you have to pay $30 online for used "Danny Dunn" books? Someone fix this please! Thank goodness I saved my paperbacks, though they're looking a little sad.) For heaven's sake, don't let them obsessively read each and every Star Trek pulp "novel."
I thought you said you were smart. Smart kids don't whine, they innovate. If you're real lucky, the teach will say "whoever finishes the test early can just jet on out" then you write all wrong answers, the imbeciles copy them and flee, then you go back and put in the right answers.
If you're unfortunate enough that everyone has to stay anyway, you have to get a little more creative, like leaving the test in plain sight with the wrong answers then hunching over it to correct them or something. A good ploy is to walk up to the teachers desk and then go "oh wait" and change half the answers before turning it in, nobody can just come up and watch what you're changing.
Your number one weapon is essay questions. Encourage your teacher to put as many essay questions as possible on the tests and write really longwinded answers that can't be copied or easily paraphrased by your dopey peers. Then there's the retest... Get a life and join some clubs or something and get excuses to be out of class on test day. If your school has them, take prefirst classes, there's usually a better subset of people in those anyway.
In general, you can use your intelligence to minimize your risks anyway. If you take off your blinders you'll notice that there are one or two kids on the football team that are a cut above the rest when it comes to academics or morals. Befriend these and you may be scorned, but you wont get beaten at least.
I'm homeschooling my daughter, but if she was in school, I would definitely pressure the school board to establish some sort of grade privacy. When I got into college and had to take general ed classes, it was great not to have to play the "smart kid" role since no one knew I was getting an A+ in the class.
Just because it's Barbie or Wallace and Gromit doesn't make it obviously parady. And likewise, it would be possible to make a "DBZ" parody mod.
Good. I really don't think we need the rate of "advancement" we're getting in 3d. Not when it's being used to make up for poor performance by software and to make Ms. Croft's boobs more detailed.
The best thing that could happen for regular, non-bleeding-edge consumers like myself is for the few remaining companies to raise prices on the newest cards by $50 or so, and have them reign for a year, getting down to current new release prices at around 4-6 months.
2/3 the people think that the restaurants make the portions too big, 1/8 think that they're too small. Who do you think complains?
My favorite is how they keep shoving all this food in your face, (bread and beverage while you wait, a big salad, a potato, 1 1/2 cups of vegetables, and a 10oz steak, say) then the waitress acts like her day is ruined when you don't order dessert (my quota!).
Can you change your government with two phone calls and 50 bucks?
It's not the same thing.
And more to the point, where could anybody get the idea that making a game mod based on a cartoon somehow was "fair use". The inadequacy of mass education rears its head again.
You can use AOL on our broadband sytem, or you can pay more to use another provider.
"Cars today really suck. I mean, they're basically the same as they were 50 years ago, with four wheels and an engine. They even still have headlights!"
Marcus is famous for his drawings and paintings of various flying cars and personal jetpacks, which he was convinced would be here by now.
"Look at it this way," he says, shifting his massive belly and accidentally knocking over his "King Cobra" bottle into the gutter, "Car factories are so much more advanced now. They have robots and just-in-time parts supplies. The paints they use on cars are more durable and shinier, but with all these resources, no one has managed to build a flying car!"
"I used to draw cars in the 50s with turbofans and micro-atomic generators, but it was hard to do that with 'pencils' and 'paper'. I recently visited the PS Art Department, and you know what I saw them using? Pencils and paper!"
"Here it is, 50 years later and I still haven't got to make it in the back seat of a flying car," Marcus' eyes get a little watery as he turns and looks at the scarlet sunset. I can almost see the swarms of flying atomic cars that he imagines, their fins glistening in the last light of the day.
Look before you leap.
If you had to choose between having one Operating System running flawlessly under Plex86, versus having a lot of OSs running less perfectly, which would you pick? Which of these two states do you think would be closer to the perfect virtualization of all OSs? If you did have to choose one OS to run perfectly in Plex86 virtualization, which would it be?
I'd much rather my daughter see mutilated dead bodies on the web than listen to Chumbawumba.
It took me while to get KDE2 compiled correctly. (Mostly because I first did the ./configure;make deal without reading ahead that I would have to specifically enable certain options like SSL, RPM, GIF rather than having them be autoconfigured. I still haven't gotten RPM support working in kpackage, for reasons that I don't entirely understand.) But I love browsing the web with Konqueror! Now that I installed Lesstif and got Flash running, I can go basically everywhere, without all the crashing I would get from Netscape. (And Konqueror hasn't bombed out my X server once, Mr. Andreeeesen!)
Somebody should have built replacement Enigma rotors out of AOL CDs.
It's amazing, when the topic of HTML and its evils/replacements/wishlists appears on /., how many people pop up that NEED native browser support for arbitrary mathematical notation.
Good guys don't wear black.
I think you didn't get the part about Keynes and the glass of water. He swirls it while talking about the Fremen practices regarding the dead, after the other characters were speaking in high-school gross-out story fashion about it. He does this bring the water into their attention, increasing their discomfort at his casual acceptance of the Fremen culture, which is alien to their decadent, water-spoiled lifestyle. I thought it was an appropriate and decent piece of stage business.
The IOC is only thinking about their duty to present the Olympics for the betterment of mankind, through the example of peaceful competition. Riiiiiight.... $kching$
I don't know what's disturbing about that. Given the paradigm of open source software, it is a moral imperitive to "steal" users/developers from a whatever parallel projects may exist.
freshmeat.NET
As far as I can tell, the only TLDs that seem to be consistently valid are .gov and .edu. New TLDs don't solve the namespace problem, because companies and squatters will just buy the new versions of the same old names. They don't solve the organizational problem because there's no way to fully, fairly, and consistently enforce something like .kids.
A nail. Not the nail. But removing the power of the Several States to elect the President is one more step down the path of letting the more populous States take control of the US Government.
Here they come.