I have nothing against Ogg Vorbis--except maybe its silly name--but it's not going to have any impact at all outside the geek community. Why? Everyone who's ever used music on his PC knows what an mp3 is. Most people know about the new Windows format, and when the new Windows XP hits the streets with built-in Windows Media creation at high quality, it will gain even more penetration--already some digital players support it. But no one outside of the people who read Slashdot or other geek sites has ever heard of Ogg Vorbis. And they probably never will.
First of all, the name is just dumb and totally non-descriptive. MP3 could get away with being non-descriptive because it was the first, and for a long while the only popular choice. But every new format has the words "Audio" or at least "Media" in it. Because people need to know what a product is quickly and easily, not scratch their heads wondering what it does. Plus, the name can't be taken seriously. No mainstream news site will cover Ogg Vorbis much based on that fact alone. If the name sounds like a joke, the product will be treated like a joke. I know there's a long tradition of interesting naming in the Linux community, but average non-Linux-geeks don't like products with stupid names. It may be shallow, but it is a fact. If Ogg had just been called something like "Free Audio Format" or "Open Sound System" or some such, it would have actually had a chance at the mainstream. As it is, I don't picture Kurt Loder saying "Ogg Vorbis" any time soon, although he's said "mp3" and even "Windows Media" before.
Good luck, but between MP3 files--which will still remain common, since 3rd party software always finds a way around MS incompatibilities--, the newer Windows format, and RealAudio (which I hate, hate, hate, hate), Ogg Vorbis stands littel chance of making it outside of geekdom.
No, it's McDonalds' fault. Ever since they switched to soy milkshakes instead of the real thing, the world has gone steadily downhill.:-) But seriously, we live in a society which values material things over relationships. When your job is more important than your husband or wife, don't expect your marriage to last long. The fact that almost all contemporary married couples both work means that they spend very little time with each other, much less the children. To almost everyone these days, job and money come before all else, all in the name of having a bigger TV or a newer car or going on vacations further away from home. Or, worse, all in the name of a promotion and "status."
None of which has to do with sex in any way whatsoever. Sex is a non-issue here. Whether married, divorced, single, a teenager, or elderly, sex is and always has been available. No more people are having sex today, whether inside or outside marriage, than had sex fifty years ago. How can we know? Well, for one thing, teenage pregnancy rates were astronomical in the 1950s. The big difference between then and now is that back then anyone who even vaguely looked pregnant prior to marriage was immediately sent out of town and hidden away until the baby was born and then they were almost always coerced and forced into giving it up. Today, sex is slightly more public, and the teen pregnancy rate is down thanks to better education and improved sexual health. Teens are still having sex, they just know more about how to be careful about it. You may want to believe that more teens are engaging in abstinence, and that's why teen pregnancy is down, but studies do not support that conclusion. In addition, many people who speak out and profess abstinence are just putting on a facade--do you remember the abstinence campaigns of the 80s, with Brooke Shields doing public sevice announcements about how she's not going to have sex until marriage? Funny thing is, she'd already been having sex, as she later confessed as an adult. Why pressure kids into hiding their sex lives and making it into something below-the-board that they have to sneak around about, instead of recognizing that most of them are going to choose to enjoy sex and supporting that natural and healthy decision? Well, because people like you are hell-bent on trying to instill their own religious views into everyone else, which is why "sex education" in this country is a joke. The healthiest, happiest people in the world, with lower divorce rates than ours, come from countries such as France and the Netherlands and Japan, where sex is viewed as natural and healthy and to be enjoyed at all ages from adolescence on up. Americans have a lot of *things*, but that doesn't make quality of life; studies show that most Europeans are more content with their lives.
> Let's say a 16-year-old male decides to have an active sex life. Let's say he experiments, and has all kinds of
> fun with different partners.
Good for him. I didn't get started til I was 18, and when I did years of stress and sexual frustration just melted away into contentment. Actually, to be honest I did have one experience with a neighbor girl when I was about 11, but that hardly counts. But, I digress. Shower me with your wisdom.
> What do you suppose his experiences teach him about loving relationships? That they're supposed to last?
No, it'll teach him--once he finds a girl he loves, not just fucks, and he will sooner or later--that love feels more wonderful than any of the other gifts God has given us, and that there's very little which feels worse than losing someone you love in that way. He'll learn what the best and worse life has to offer is. And even the pain of losing a first love will be good for him--it's an exquisite pain, and very instructive too. You can never realize how good love is until you lose it at least once. I learned more about humanity and feelings and love and life in my first relationship than I'd learned in the 18 years which came before. And to think, that relationship lasted a matter of months rather than years... So, it will teach him a lot about loving relationships, like how important they really are and how he never wants to lose one again once he finds another.
> (And don't try to tell me sex isn't about love. Don't separate the two.)
But they *are* separate. They certainly overlap, but you can surly have one without the other. For example, did you love your wife before you married her, even though you say you waited for marriage before having sex? You can definitely have love without sex, although sexual passion is definitely a part of it even if no sex is ocurring. Likewise, you can have sex with someone you don't love. Why else would the "world's oldest profession" be so successful? Prostitution is the epitome of sex without love, and as someone who lives near Washington, D.C. and has a friend who is an "escort," I can tell you that it's a very lucrative business engaged in by people of all walks of life, ages, levels of wealth and status, etc. So, there is a great demand for sex without love. But we don't have to be so extreme and literal to get that point: what do you think clubs and pick-up bars are for? To find soulmates and life-partners? Nope, they're there because people like to hook up for a good thorough fuck, with love not a part of the equation. In the process of said fucking you'll eventually find someone you do love. Now, that's not to say that sx without love is as good as sex in a loving relationship. Of course it isn't, because love is so much better than plain old sex. But that doesn't mean we can't or shouldn't enjoy some good old fashioned sex while waiting for someone to love to come along.
> No, they'll likely imbue in him the idea that relationships are disposable.
Umm, no, because like I said sex doesn't feel as good as love. Even an idiot can feel the difference once love comes along. So, why shouldn't sex be enjoyed in the meantime? Teenagers have "disposable relationships" all the time, whether sex is involved or not. You don't advocate that teenagers shouldn't date until marriage, do you? Dating relationships are important and intimate relationships whether sex occurs or not. So your statement about sex teaching him that relationships are disposable just falls apart.
> Let's say he ends up getting married. How faithful is this man to his wife?
Just as good as anyone else's, if not better. After all, if you've already taken a bite out of every kind of fish in the se, and found the one you like above all others, and know that if you stop to grab another fish the one you like most will leave and never come back, well, you're not likely to get curious enough to do that. But if you've never had any other fish...well, you're going to be a lot more curious.
> He's had no practice at self-control in at least this one area, and his chances are very diminished.
Bollocks. His chances are increased, because he needn't be curious about sex with diffeent partners. He already knows what it's like. He's also probably lost a love when he was a teenager if he's gotten around so much, so he'll know better than to ruin real love for a momentary piece of patch. Compare that to some sissy little inexperienced sexually repressed guy who's far more likely to let curiosity get the best of him if some attractive woman makes an overture, since he'll be wondering what it's like whereas the experienced gentleman already knows.
> Since I was young, I was taught about the sanctity of marriage and its contract between the couple, the community, and God.
Good for you. This is what needs to be taught. But it has nothing to do with sex, because sex and marriage are not synonymous. Heck, read your Bible--people had sex outside of marriage all the time back then, too; here's a trivia question: name the woman who dressed as a prostitute to seduce her father-in-law, and was praised by the elders for it. Funny how he was never chastised for visiting someone whom he thought was a street prostitute. Sex can be enjoyed before marriage, with no diminishing to the institution of marriage itself. Again, sex and marriage are not synonyms, and even in the Bible people could have sex outside of marriage and not be condemned for it.
You confuse the issues rather than reasoning carefully. All religious conservatives such as yourself do. Personally, I'm going to teach my son that marriage is the most important thing he can ever do, and that once he does he's made an obligation to stay with and be faithful to his family no matter what. And I'll also teach him that, until he finds that spcial person he loves darly, he should enjoy the body God gave him and have sex as long as he's responsible and careful and always mindful of the girl's feelings. Teenagers are biologically meant to have sex, and to use sex play as part of emotional growth and maturation. The day my son turns 13 is the dy he gets a subscription to Playboy, as a symbol that he on't have to hide his sexuality like so many of us did. What he does in his bedroom is his business, not mine.
> Actually, the single biggest cause of failed marriages is money.
No, the biggest cause of failed marriages is the fact that people don't take marriage seriously anymore. It is no longer a necessity, it's a luxury in this fast-paced go-go-faster success-driven cesspool of a country. People put more effort into work than into marriage, so naturally marriages fail.
> Also, divorce rates are higher among people who live together before they marry. What does this mean?
It means exactly what I said. Marriage is not taken seriously by the young'uns these days. Marriages are as disposable as everything else in this country. People don't want permanent relationships, they want disposable ones that fit neatly between their work schedules. This has absolutely nothing to do with sex before marriage. It has to do with the disposable culture that the rest of the world rightly associates with--and blames on--America. Naturally, divorce rates will be higher among those who live together before they marry, because those people are the least likely to consider marriage very important in the first place. That's why they didn't bother to get married before moving in together. Duh. Tell me how that has anything to do with not having sex before marriage supposedly being such a wonderful thing? Plenty of people have sex before marriage, whether they live together or not. Maybe they marry, maybe they don't. They still enjoy a healthy and wonderful sex life. Likewise, plenty of people don't have sex before marriage. Maybe they marry, maybe they don't. They lack a healthy and wonderful sex life, and miss out on some of the most amazing sex of their lives, which they're supposed to be enjoying in their teens and early twenties. Because, I tell you, having sex at 16 or 18 has so many fun dimensions to it that are lacking when you're older, plus the stamina of an 18 year old male has no equal. Good luck trying to have sex that amazing when you're 26 or 30 or whatever. Man was made to mate starting in his teens. It is a biological fact, and hormone concentrations prove that it's even a biological imperative. Why fight nature? Why not enjoy sex when you're young, and then enjoy marriage when you're older? For everything there is a season.
It's annoying how religious and/or conservative zealots constantly confuse the issues. The devaluation of marriage is a function of disposable society, and too much focus on work rather than family, and has absolutely nothing to do with sex and sexual freedom. There is one and only one reason that people who abstain from sex before marriage have lower divorce rates: the only people who abstain from sex before marriage are very religiously conservative people who place a strong religious and moral valuation on the institution of marriage, and thus consider it a permanent bond. Sex or not before marriage has zero to do with it; it's the religious convictions pertaining to marriage which do. So, all this emphasis on abstinence in the U.S. is useless. In fact, all it does is deny teens knowledge about how to enjoy their bodies and sexuality naturally and safely and productively. It doesn't bolster marriage, because only a strong belief in the institution and its import does that. Denying yourself sex doesn't. Teach how important marriage is, and what it does for society, and how a good marriage is better than just a good job. Don't try to hold out sex as a carrot in some backwards attempt to promote marriage in an outdated manner which harms sexual health more than it could possibly help marriage.
> I would like to know how you explain much of the sex displayed in XXX videos as being perfectly natural.
Looks perfectly natural to me. Girl meets boy, girl does boy, five guys walk by and girl manages to cram two of them "between her cheeks," one of them underneath, two of them between her other cheeks, and one of them between her toes. German Shepherd walks by, and well... See, just like a normal day in the college dorms.:-)
American society is roughly the least progressive and most backwards in the Western world when it comes to sexuality. I think the Islamic theocracies are the only nations with a less healthy and progressive sexual outlook.
And yes, it is unhealthy and backwards. It's not meant as a value judgement, but as an objective fact, given that the more progressive and sexually enlightened nations in Europe and in Japan and even in some South American countries have far lower rates of teenage pregnancy, sex crimes, divorce, and other such related problems. Just think about it; America still clings to this Puritanical system of sexual mores whose ultimate embodiment is "no sex until marriage." Not that very many people actually practise this, but it's ludicrous to think that it's a healthy idea in the first place. Sex is a very important part of life, and to make a lifelong committment to someone without even having shared that experience with them is just asking for trouble, sexual dysfunction and divorce, or a joyless marriage.
And yet, this is what we teach our teenagers in the U.S. We teach them that they should be asexual during some of the most sexually exciting and powerful years of their lives, rather than teaching them how to enjoy their natural sexuality in safe and healthy ways, as a learning process. America had a real sexual revolution, just like the rest of the Western world, and at just about the same time in the late sixties through the seventies. The problem is that we had a fairly successful sexual counterrevolution in the 80s, when the Meese Commission wrongly accused pornography of causing sex crimes (funny how in many countries porn is shown on TV, and yet they have fewer sex crimes) and when fear of AIDS was used as a means to sexually repress young people by instilling irrational fear which far outweighs the true risks (look at the real NIH statistics; most HIV is passed through anal intercourse, since the walls of the anus are likely to be abraded and bleed--so avoiding anal intercourse and partners who engage in it means your chances of getting it are slim to none). Almost all men who get HIV get it from other men, and almost all women who get HIV get it from men who have gotten it from men. This isn't to say that homosexuality is the problem, I'll admit I experimented a bit in college myself. It's just to say that unprotected anal sex (including accidental condom breakage) and sex with someone who has had unprotected anal sex are the only significant risk factors for HIV, excepting IV drug use. So, AIDS is not the huge problem people are made to believe it is in this country. But fear of AIDS has been used to repress sexuality further, particularly among teenagers.
So, what does this have to do with Yahoo! selling porn? Well, the sexual rvolutions in all Western countries, including the U.S., were fueled by the decriminalization of pornography. Easy availability of sexually explicit material made people more comfortable in exploring their sexuality and trying new things, and made it okay to talk about sex publicly. Two of the overlooked historical events in this country were the release of the movie *Deep Throat* and the later release of *Behind the Green Door*. The former was a very stupid movie, but was the first porn film to seep into the mainstream--couples, and husbands and wives actually went to see that movie together, and the mainstream media even took notice of its popularity. It spawned countless discussions aboutsomething that was still considered a no-no in many circles--oral sex. The latter gained notoriety because its star happened to be the Ivory Soap girl, so the nation and the press took notice and it was shown in theaters to average people in almost every major city. Porn was a symbol of sexual freedom in many countries during the 70s, including the U.S. There was a period of time in the late 70s when certain high-quality porn films were reviewed in mainstream magazines, and by about 1980 many people thought that porn and mainstream movies were beginning to merge a bit--it was not uncommon for a "crossover" porn film to be shot on 35mm film and have a budget of hundreds of thousands of dollars back then. But then, as I mentioned, the 80s brought a counterrevolution against pornography, which was blamed by Ed Meese's hand-picked commission for just about all of society's ills, even though rates of sex crimes actually declined once porn became decriminalized and gained acceptance. It's a release valve for sexual tensions. So, porn was pushed back into the background, as was sexuality in general. Even though porn generates more revenue than mainstream movies, it's still considered something shady in this country, though in much of Europe porn is given a far more legitimate status, at the front of the bus instead of the back.
This is why porn needs to be moved more into the mainstream again in this country. If Yahoo! carries porn, that gives it added legitimacy and status. Porn was an integral part of sexual liberation and the sexual revolution, though today that fact is overlooked by many American scholars, particularly in light of extreme feminist objections to porn by the likes of Catherine McKinnon. Legitimizing it more adds more to the idea that sex is good, normal, healthy, and people should enjoy it openly and not hide their sexuality but revel in it.
That doesn't make me a bad person. It makes me a person who doesn't adhere to bad laws. As an example, I possess and distribute circumvention devices as defined by the DMCA. That makes me a criminal. Am I likely to get busted for it? A while back I would have said "Of course not." These days, I cover my ass just in case. Likewise, I've participated in discussions that are routinely monitored by the federal piggies, and I distrust them enough to believe that they'd take innocent political discussions to be "threats" against them. For example, the author of a treatise called *Assassination Politics* has been hounded by the IRS, FBI, and ATF for years now, and is currently on trial for "stalking" agents by posting publically available information about them, like names and addresses, and going across the street from their houses to record license plate numbers. Since when is posting public record information, or walking across the street from a house once or twice, stalking? I certainly don't agree with all his political views, but I do not believe someone should be harassed by the authorities for exercising his free speech rights in a political treatise, and then arrested for compiling and posting information about the agents who've been harassing him. If you've followed the Jim Bell case, you know that today he went a little nuts in Court and admitted tampering with mail--even though he isn't charged yet with it--but I'd expect that most people would have a mental breakdown after years of official abuse and harassment.
So, yes, I cover my ass with encrytion as thick as any. I do so because I don't want any of my own free speech to be held against me one day by a government which has proven itself crufty and bloated and untrustworthy. I do so because I help to violate copyrights which are artificially extended far beyond their useful lifetimes and which now interfere with the right of fair use. And between PGP 2.6.3ckt, Scramdisk, Scorch, a batch process for overwriting and restoring settings on startup and shutdown, a ramdisk for swap, two firewalls, enough open land around me to make even TEMPEST unviable, and a physical access control to my computer room, I have one of the most secure systems you could imagine. I not only feel secure, I am secure, from any sort of government aggression or abuse of my rights. Is it overkill? Yes, it is. But better safe than sorry. If every hacker took the precautions I do, the government would be hard pressed to prove a case at all.
As someone who's studied the issues obsessively, you cannot be compelled to provide evidence against yourself according to the 5th Amendment, with 2 minor exceptions. You can be compelled to submit to fingerprinting and DNA tests. This is because these are not considered evidence against yourself as much as they are considered generally identifying characteristics, like your physical appearance. Just as you cannot show up to Court or a police lineup wearing a black hood to avoid being identified, you cannot fail to give a fingerprint or DNA sample. This makes sense if you think about it, because the fingerprint or DNA sample is in and of itself not evidence either way, it's just like an "identifying mark."
Can you be compelled to produce physical evidence against yourself, like the key to a lock? Of course not, if you are the defendant and you haven't been dumb enough to tell your lawyer about it. Your attorney has an ethical obligation to the Court, and may have to turn something like that over. You as a defendant do not. The confusion arises because parties to a case other than the defendant or his spouse can be compelled to produce physical evidence. But not a defendant or his spouse.
This doesn't mean that the police can't lie to you and manipulate you to try to extract evidence from you. They can and do all the time. For example, I was once told by the coppers "cooperate [i.e., turn over the stuff we're looking for] and we'll let you go with no bail. Don't cooperate and we'll talk to the judge and make sure you don't go home tonight." So, unsurprisingly, I got a $10,000 bail, since I didn't "cooperate" with the bacon. No wonder I hate pork.
Sorry to be so blunt, but going to Amazon you'll see that both *The Bachman Books*, in which *The Rage* was later reprinted, and the novel *The Rage* itself, are both OUT OF PRINT. Which is what I clearly said above. They are out of print because King asked the publisher to pull them when a copy of *The Rage* was found in the locker of a high school student who engaged in a school shooting.
As I said, they can be found second-hand, but are no longer being sold new and will probably never be sold new in King's lifetime. Therefore, I was hoping to find an OCR's copy of *The Rage* on the Net, but no one has posted one. As I said, I might buy a used copy and OCR and upload it myself, since doing so won't be taking money out of any author's or publisher's pockets.
http://rintintin.colorado.edu/~grayd/McCheese.html has lots of images.
http://page.auctions.yahoo.com/auction/23451661 brings up 2 pics of a 1973 glass featuring the Mayor.
You, sir, obviously have not used Google recently.:-) Or you were joking, in which case...
But anyway, I miss those old playgrounds full of the McDonalds characters that they used to have in some locations. The lame see-them-everywhere plastic tunnel crap they have at McDonalds now just sucks in comparison. I remember clibing all over those huge metal characters, with "forts" and see-saws and all sorts of fun stuff. But these days I guess it's too much of a legal liability to give kids a playground that's actually fun, instead of a bunch of plastic tubes and nylon webbing. Blech.
I've searched for online texts of books that have been pulled by their publishers, and scored 1 for 2. I easily found the book *Hitman*, pulled by its publisher after a lawsuit was filed against them because the book was found in the possession of someone who had killed someone else in a manner similar to that described in the book. It was a small survivalist publisher, who didn't have the money to defend themselves even though it's obvious that they'd win in court--First Amendment, ey. I guess you only have rights if you can afford to pay for the upkeep. Anyway, the book was worthless tripe about how to become a contrct killer, and nothing mentioned in it isn't intuitively obvious to anyone with more then three neurons. Hardly worth the time, but I wanted a copy of this "banned" book on principle.
The "banned" book I could not find online was *The Rage*, written by Stephen King under the pseudonym "Bachman" back when the market was too saturated with King novels and he didn't want to put out that many more for a while, but kept writing voluminously anyway. It was later published under King's own name in a collection of all the books written under that pseudonym, called *The Bachman Books*. But the novel was found in the locker of a high school kid who was involved in a school shooting, and King decided to have the publisher yank the book. I went looking for a scanned-in text of it online, figuring I wouldn't be taking money out of anyone's pocket since the book is permanently out of stock and out of print. Nada. Of course, a quick search of eBay yields a ton of second-hand copies, so if I really wanted to I could buy one and OCR it onto the Net myself. But, I was surprised that no one has done so, considering that it is no longer available except second-hand anyway.
Many cafes still serve "French sodas" which are essentially milk, carbonated water, and a flavoring syrup. Great stuff. My favorite is a Hazelnut French soda. In fact, the Borders bookstore near me serves them, although they have the annoying habit of using Sprite instead of keeping plain carbonated water on tap.
For a truly strange twist on milk, try making Koumiss (aka kumis, kumiss, or koumis). The Mongols used to make it by filling an animal stomach or bladder with mare's milk, hanging it outside the tent, and allowing it to ferment for up to a month or so. You can make a safer approximation by taking a gallon of 1% pasteurized cow milk, adding a few drops of Lactaid to break down the lactose into something standard brewing yeast can actually convert to alcohol, and a pinch of brewing yeast, and letting it ferment for 2 days. It's not only alcoholic by that point, but also quite fizzy thanks to all the CO2 that's a by-product of the yeast's activities. The alcohol inhibits the milk from souring. It tastes...interesting. Just picture mixing one part Coors Original with two parts milk, and then dropping in an Alka Seltzer. Interesting taste, indeed.;-) From what I hear, it's popular with some of the SCA type people. But personally, I prefer to brew mead instead. Yummy.
You're right about that, and I should have been more specific. There is a different consideration given to names which are not real words; they are often trademarked before being put into actual use, and I haven't heard of any such trademarks being ruled invalid. That doesn't mean they couldn't be, mind you, just that I don't recall any cases. This is why companies these days use so many "made-up" names, like Itanium and Lucent, for product and company names: they can easily assert broad trademark and dilution claims if anyone tries to muscle in on the name. If I recall correctly, there was an article on Slashdot a long time back which mentioned that Intel bought the name Itanium from a company which had trademarked severak such made-up names for sale.
So, that's where one big distinction lies: between names which are not common words, and names which are. It gets extremely complicated, though, with quite a few other factors. But one of the cases I always remember is Robert Mondavi versus Arturo Fuente. The Fuente cigar company is an established cigar maker, which produced (at the height of the cigar boom, when they were chic all of a sudden) a special top brand they called the Opus X. They called it Opus X because all the wrapper leaf came from a special field of experimental Cuban seed tobacco, which they all jokingly called "Project X." So when the product neared market, they came up with the name Opus X.
Unbeknownst to them, Robert Mondavi's famous winery had trademarked Opus One not only for wine, but for a cigar brand. Mondavi took Fuente to Court on trademark claims, because of the similarity between Opus One and Opus X.
To cut to the chase, Mondavi lost. Fuente was first to market with a cigar product using "Opus" in the name, and what's more although Opus is not a common word in English it is a plain Latin word often used universally to denote, for example, a composer's works in the order in which they were composed. Mondavi further had argued that there is a similarity between fine cigars and fine wines, since they are often sold in the same shops and are advertised together in related cigar and wine publications. But the Court ruled that, despite any perceptions on Mondavi's part that wines and fine cigars are similar and related products, an average consumer is not going to confuse a wine with "Opus" in the title with a cigar with "Opus" in the title.
I don't feel like looking the case up to refresh my memory about specifics, but these names should be enough for anyone to find the decision online if anyone is interested in such trademark disputes. I'd wager the judge in this case is going to rule in a similar manner, saying that New Line was first to market with a film called *Diablo* and that, both entertainment companies or not, no reasonable consumer is going to confuse a computer game about demons with a film about a drug lord.
Of course, I feel very, very dirty. Yuck; I just defended an AOL/TimeWarner subsidiary. I love New Line films, and now every time I buy one I'm going to be supporting...AOL. Every time I turn on CNN, I'm not only supporting leftist looney Ted Turner, which was bad enough, but now...AOL. I think I'm gonna hurl...;-)
You cannot just go out and trademark words willy-nilly. For a trademark claim to be upheld, a company must have a legitimate place in the industry for which a word is being trademarked, or have imminent prospects of doing so. Blizzard trademarked Diablo as it relates to film titles, yet they had and have no legitimate place in the film industry. They only have their vague assurance that, yes, sometime in the future they want to make a movie called Diablo.
Well, guess what: that's not good enough. The trademark will be invalidated, even if the judge is a total head-in-arse moron, he will still see from out his arse that Blizzard filed an invalid trademark request since they had no legitimate prospects of making a Diablo movie any time this century. Heck, it *is* a new century, and Blizzard doesn't even have a script, five years after filing the trademark request.
Guess what: if trademark law worked the way you think it does, then no one could ever name a product or business anything. Every piece of shit lawyer and bloodsucking IP leech with brains enough to file a trademark application could just think up every good word for every good use, and trademark them all, waiting around for someone to want to name something and then extorting money from them. Fortunately, it does not work that way.
Students even have Constitutional rights when on school grounds, even though this case is about something done off grounds in the student's free time. But let me beat you with a cluestick about on-grounds rights, anyway.
The Court has held repeatedly that, even on school grounds during school hours, students have Constitutional rights including the right to free speech and free press as guaranteed by the First Amendment. A student's First Amendment rights while on school grounds are slightly limited, but not to the extent people like you--and even a lot of misguided teachers and admins--seem to think. For instance, students have the right to distribute printed materials ("free student newspapers," pamphlets, etc.) on school grounds between, before, and after classes, in accordance with prescribed guidelines set by the district as to location and time. One would think that the administration could therefore limit such free press entirely, but the Court has set limits to the rights of schools in setting up such guidelines, so that any overbroad school regulations restricting speech and press are considered unconstitutional. This makes perfect sense, since the public school system is in fact an arm of the government and therefore cannot violate the Constitution. And, despite the fact that most students are under-18, the Court has ruled that minors have Constitutional protections in schools, though slightly limited ones. In private schools, though, students don't have such explicit rights, since the schools are not an arm of the government and therefore free to disallow exercise of some rights.
I know this not because I'm a lawyer (IANAL), but because in 11th grade I was suspended for 3 days for distributing an alternative student newspaper written and published by me and several friends. I liked to call it my school's "free student newspaper" since it wasn't subject to the censorious editorial control of a certain idiot vice principal. See, in 10th grade I had submitted an article against race-based scholarships and my school's Minority Parent Association, which I viewed as providing minority students with more opportunities and help seeking scholarships than the white students had. Funny thing is, in my school whites were a 70-30 minority, and when the article was published I had to receive a security detail for a few days to escort me to and from classes and then after that I still had to contend with mistaken people who thought I was a racist for wanting *equal* opportunities--I even had a desk thrown at me, and a national newspaper local to me did an article about the controversy. Well, after that the newspaper rejected most of my articles, and the one they did finally publish was so horribly censored abnd mutilated that my idiot vice principal even changed the common phrase "liberal education" to the nonsensical "conservative education," thinking it had something to do with politics. Bah. So, I got several friends, including the Homecoming Queen, to write articles with a conservative slant, and published them as *The Federalist* which I had printed at a local shop (today, one could print the same quality on any home laser printer). Funny thing is, except for my articles, every one of my writers was a woman or black, so our conservative newspaper was very diverse. I submitted it to the principal for approval of a time and place for distribution, as per school regs, but the administration nailed me when they found out I'd given advance copies to students who'd written articles for me. I researched the whole legal area, and appealed, and the suspension was expunged when I brought the area superintendant a pile of photocopied, highlighted legal decisions by the Supreme Court and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, affirming that the school's regs were constitutionally vague and overbroad. All it took was the threat of a lawsuit, and me handing him a pile of decisions affirming my rights to free press even in public school.
He could have been a jackass and not acknowledged my rights, but he folded before I did (it was a bluff--my family was too poor to sue). He recognized my rights once they were shown to him clearly, in the form of Court deisions with the good bits highlighted.
Since then the First Amendment has been a pet subject of mine, and I can tell you that since public schools are an arm of the Government, they are not allowed to completely take away any rights of students. They are only legally allowed to put reasonable limits on those rights, ones which are necessary for maintaining order. Trying to eliminate First Amendment protections does not instill order, it breeds contempt in students for the hypocrites who teach us one thing about rights and then demonstrate another through abuse of discretion and authority. This is why things like Columbine happen, because students with half a brain or more realize that their rights are systematically abusd, and then they strike out violently against such oppression. The sad part is, this makes misguided school admins clamp down further, which only alienates students more and will lead to more rebellious outbursts. And the thing that makes me most upset is the realization that, in today's climate, that same administrator who reversed my suspension and affirmed my rights, would probably have gone the other way even when presented with all the evidence I gave him. It's sad and unfortunate, and it teaches our kids (most of the smart ones, anyway) that government is there to oppress them, not ensure their rights. When the government, and parents even, start treating 16 year olds as having no more rights than 6 year olds, that breeds so much unnecessary enmity...
Far too often people blame poor production values, when the projectionist just failed to frame the film to the proper aspect ratio. Many people don't realize that 35mm film stock is actually exposed at closer to 4:3 than 16:9, and then matted to fit the widescreen format. In fact, sometimes (but not usually) the 4:3 side of a DVD actually shows more surface area than the widescreen side, when it's done by removing the matte. If I recall correctly, this is the case with the DVD (or was it the laserdisc--not sure) of *Looking for Mr. Goodbar*, where the 4:3 gives some unintentional full frontal nudity of Diane Keaton where the original presentation in widescreen gives only a topless view at that point.
This is also done, sometimes with very detrimental effect, on TV presentations of movies. I recall seeing *Manhunter* (the first in the series of films with Hannibal Lector) several years back on broadcast TV, with the matte removed to give a full frame presentation. The microphone was in damn near every scene, and it was pissing me off mightily because much of the film was set against white walls where the black mike was a grating eyesore.
This brings up a sore spot with me--the whole 4:3 versus 16:9 format war going on now.It's insane and insipid. Originally, most silver screen era films were done in 4:3 or near there, which is why you don't see them presented in widescreen often--they weren't filmed that way. Widescreen formats only became the norm after television became big, so that Hollywood competed by giving us bigger and wider screens. That's when aspect ratios of around 16:9 took hold. Funny thing is, to get the 16:9 image, you have to matte the normal 4:3 aspect ratio of 35mm film stock, so you end up with fewer lines of resolution and less screen area than you could have with the original 4:3. You also end up with many directors matting their view in camera, so that microphones and other detritus encroach into the frame when unmatted, whereas in the old days of the 4:3 standard directors obviously made sure there were no stage equipment anywhere in the frame. Some directors compose their films to this day with the 4:3 unmatted aspect ratio in mind, which is why people who complain that Kubrick's films aren't available in widescreen are just being foolish since it's mostly unmatted full frame so that you get to see *more* of the image than you got in the theater, not less.
So it's ironic that the new television formats are 16:9 and people think that that's good. Televisions are finally abandoning the classic 4:3 format of most things, to adopt the 16:9 format movies switched to fifty years ago just to try to outdo televisions. The worst part is that our useful range of focus is at about a 4:3 aspect, which explains why both films and TVs were originally cast in that aspect ratio; 16:9 sacrifices part of our useful vertical range of focus to add to areas outside our useful horizontal range of focus. To understand what I'm trying to say in case it sounds odd, the next time you go to a theater walk towards the screen and look at the center of it, until you get to the point at which the screen takes up all of the range of your focus from about your hairline to your chin. You'll notice that the screen stretches out horizontally far past the points on either side which are clearly in focus when staring at the center of the screen. The result is that most people will have to sit further back away from a screen than necessary in order to have these edges of the screen easily in focus, which renders a lot of unused blank space above and below the screen which could have been and would have been taken up by the picture in the classic 4:3 aspect ratio. In contrast, the 4:3 ratio leaves all the blank unused space to your unfocused peripheral vision, filling up all the most useful space. Actually, you don't even need to go to the theater--do a related version of this test now, with your 4:3 monitor, and then visualize how you'd have to sit further away to get the same clearly focused screen space if you had a 16:9 aspect ratio.
So, 16:9 gives us the illusion of added screen real estate, while taking away from the most useful in-focus area to add to the less useful peripheries. Sure, 16:9 has its purported advantages, like in displaying 2 pages of text side by side in the case of monitors. Think about it, though: this has to do with size more than aspect ratio. For instance, my 20 inch 4:3 monitor is big enough to display pages of text side by side, ironically the 4:3 ratio means that I get to see more of the pages from top to bottom than I would with a 16:9 monitor. "More" or "less" is just a semantics game with aspet ratios; you need to measure usable screen area for any meaningful and realistic comparison, not "my screen is wider" or "my creen is taller." But it's not an accident that both classic Hollywood films and TV shows chose a 4:3 ratio--it corresponds to a real and measurable useful range of focus for the human eye, not counting unfocusable peripherals.
The problem is that there's quite a difference between having fairly primitive firearms and having none at all. I think we in the U.S. are dangerously close to having none at all, except for old-fashioned shotguns for sport hunting--I doubt a militia equipped with shotguns, even when sawed off, would be very effective against an army equipped with automatic weapons--the reload time alone, well...
The reason I think it's dangerously close to being that way is that there are so many creeping measures to close down every loophole so that the government knows where each and every legally owned firearm is. Once you know what guns are whee, it becomes awfully easy to come and collect them en masse the moment a ban comes into effect. Thee's quite a bit of support for banning certain firearms, so that if it suddenly became illegal to own semi automatics, the FBI and ATF could come round quickly and seize any such firearm not voluntarily turned in--recall that they know where they are thanks to gun registration. Then on o the next type, after a while. Not to mention ammunition--they've already outlawed certain types of armor-piercing bullets; outlawing certain types of ammunition could be somewhat efectively used to render some kinds of firearms largely useless. I wouldn't assume that these things couldn't happen, simply because a majority of the American people seem to be currently in a safety-at-all-costs mode, giving up freedom after freedom largely voluntarily. At this point, very little would surprise me about what a passive, complacent, sheepish public would surrender to the government.
> The bottom line is, society is not going to be run by the low-life of this world.
No, the bottom line is that people like you will either be the downfall of liberty, or (hopefully, but doubtfully) be stamped out by the more reasonable and tolerant.
I need not quote the two similar Jefferson and Franklin quotes usually brought up in situations like these, but needless to say, you don't deserve to be an American. That's not a flame, it's just what our Founding Fathers would have said. People such as yourself kill freedom, for silly mistaken reasons. In another thread on this discussion you said that neighborhoods with a high rate of criminal activity should be bulldozed. Instead, people like you should be bulldozed. You advocate mass censorship of media which have legitimate uses in discourse, calling them a "public menace." Sir, places and media are not a public menace; people with your censorious attitude are.
As for how you say things should be handled in terms of jurisdiction: bollocks. The Federal government has authority to regulate interstate commerce; however, it has not the authority under the Constitution to regulate interstate morality. That is the whole reason we have state governments--so that they can legislate based on the customs and temperaments of the people living therein. The Federal government has no more right to hold an ISP in New York City accountable for being a conduit for something which is illegal in Oklahoma City, than the government of Singapore has to hold the U.S. responsible for something it allows to be put online. Unfortunately, we've been in a Federalist mode in the Court for the past several decades, but the tone is changing and with a Bush appointee or two in the next few years the Court should once again begin respeting Amendment X of the U.S. Constitution.
The same holds true for International accords--the EU notwithstanding, what an ISP in The Hague or Madrid or Berlin or Osaka or San Diego can and cannot be held accountable for, will still remain as different as can be. Fortunately, some countries are blessed with a citizenry which relishes freedom more than that of the U.S. now does.
As for your understanding of USENET, it cannot be as extensive as you seem to believe if you think newsgroups are ever, as you put it, "shut down." It is a well-known fact that there will always be another server which carries any given group if one's ISP stops carrying it. Almost all people serious about USENET use a "premium" news server in addition to their ISP, and despite your wishing it so, this case is not a precedent and the Court will definitely hold that government attempts to stamp out a newsgroup based on some of its content is unlawful prior restraint of speech. You conveniently neglected to address such points as that when I made them in the post above.
Unionizing and strikes are fine, but they aren't inherently good any more than all corporations are bad. In recent decades unions have done as much to harm some workers as they've done to help others. As an example, the closed shop concept, in which you aren't allowed to get a job at a given employer unless you join the union. Well, what if I am opposed, diametrically, to many of the things the union supports? Well, if I want to work at that job, I still have to join the union. Are you telling me there are *no* Republican middle-class workers? As one myself, I'd be outraged to have my dues going to fund a party I don't usually vote for. Fortunately, I live in a state where closed shops are outlawed--but my state is, if I recall correctly, in the minority. Often, non-union workers are just people trying to make a living in their chosen field without having extra money siphoined from their paychecks, and used for political purposes. Unions often try to squash anyone who isn't a member, and act as bad as any strongarming corporation.
So, don't whine and boo-hoo about someone making a joke at a union strike. Non-union writers have every bit as much right to work as union members, and probably deserve more respect since they don't try to bully people into unionizing just to work and paying a union-tax that gets used for PAC money whether the worker forced to pay union dues agrees with it or not. Now, legally, union members don't have to pay the portion of dues used for political bribery--err, lobbying--but Big Unions managed to successfully defeat a bill that would have required union shops to post this information, so few union members even know this. Kind of reminds me how slimey megacorps buy legislation, eh...
I mean, have you *seen* the band Kittie? They be some HOT bitches in that band. Even their songs are...well...go look up some of the lyrics, because it's hard to understand what they're saying when they yell at the top of their lungs phrases like "YOU CAN EAT A DICK!!!!" But, I digres...
USENET newsgroups aen't web sites, which exist on a single server cluster and which are responsible if they fail to pull down a site containing illicit stuff (kiddie porn, warez, whatever) once they know it's there. Newsgroups aren't even chatrooms, hosted on a particular chat server. USENET newsgroups are decentralized, kind of like mailing lists in that someone posts a message at one server and it propagates to all other servers that carry that newsgroup. There are roughly 70,000 newsgroups, so if an ISP fails to carry one, material will just be posted to another in its place. It's absolutely impossible to stamp out illicit material on USENET, whether a news provider censors groups based on name or not. For example, guess what the group alt.binaries.aoi carries? Pictures which are mostly by recognized artists and hence probably legal in much of the U.S., but which are probably illegal in some U.S. jurisdictions and elsewhere because, by artists or not, the pictures are of nude underage females. Now, how is your average news admin going to a) know what's posted to this group, and b) know whether the images are legal in his locale or not--as I said, they're of nude minors, so are illegal in some places, yet in others they're sold in Barnes and Noble. Personally my local B&N has books like this,David Hamilton's *Age of Innocence* and Jock Sturges' *Radiant Identities*, and Amazon.com sells them--yet, Jock Sturges had his prints confiscated at one point and there was an attempt to charge him with production of child porn, and Hamilton's work has been characterized as child porn in some Sun Belt states (much as the great German film "The Tin Drum" was declared child pornography in Oklahoma). So, how is a news admin supposed to know whether to censor the group? What if the server is located in a place where such images are legal, but has customers in places where the images are illicit?
The answer of course is that news admins shouldn't have to worry about it and should just censor nothing, being common carriers as they are. They aren't responsible for censoring illicit material, any more than the phone company is responsible for censoring people plotting crimes or seducing young boys/girls. It's just not their job, or their fault. If presented with a court order to trace a user who's posting illicit crap, fine. But to eliminate a newsgroup based on its name or part of its traffic--bullshit. This one case isn't telling. if the news provider had fought, I'm sure the Court would have recognized it as a common carrier not responsible for content.
Even in groups where more questionable, sometimes downright heinous, material is posted, there is still often a wonderful flow of constructive discussion. As an example, the group mentioned in this articleisn't actually called "Pedo University"--if you know anything about USENET, you know this isn't a proper name--is alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.pre-teen , and it's full of text discussions as well as binaries which I wouldn't ever risk downloading. But I have downloaded the text, as there's nothing illegal about that, and I've found the discussions to be amusing, entertaining, and sometimes even educational.
See, when you connect to a newsgroup, assuming your news server carries it, you retrive the header data for each article--subject line, line count, etc. Then you can choose which articles to download, based on that information. Now, I started writing a novel some time ago in which one of the characters frequents the electronic underground, and one of the places I went for research was the newsgroup alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.pre-teen, because it was well-publicized when the then-Attorney General of NY Dennis Vacco led a bust which included some of the people who posted binaries to that group. Some of those people were members of a fictional, cyberspace-only "club" called "Pedo University," which in reality is a bunch of people who post mostly text to one another in that newsgroup, interacting as the fictional faculty members of an imaginary girls' school. They have nicknames like "Dean Groucho" (who started the imaginary institution, and "hired" the other "faculty" members from among people who consistently post interesting text commentary for a substantial length of time), "Wildman, Professor of Genealogy," "Herod, Professor of Classical Studies," "Frank McCoy, Director, Family Counseling Office," "Dr. Stein, Dan of Anatomical Studies and Pre-Admission Physicals," "Godfather, U.S. Customs Liason," and "Pall Mall, Director of Psychotropic Plant Research." Ony 1 member of this P.U. group has ever been arrested for child pornography, as far as I know; I believe his handle was Pancho. Some members openly use their own names and such, as they aren't into illicit pictures at all--Frank McCoy, for example, writes stories about sex with young girls, which he's free to do under the First Amendment, and possesses/posts nothing ilegal, so uses his own name and says the police are welcome to drop by and look at his PC.
Now, I went to the newsgroup after the original Vacco bust--the guilty plea by this ISP is a result of this bust 2 years ago--to read text posts to try to learn how to write the character I had planned. Well, what I found was a vibrant group of very funny people with a running joke about being faculty members at an imaginary girls' school. From what I read, there's a lot of illegal binary material posted to the group, though I haven't seen any of it--text only, since I have no desire to be arrested and since I'm not sexually attracted to anyone under about 16 or so, like most heterosexual males. Some of the material posted even offends many members of PU--like a series of an 8 year old being raped by her father, who thankfully was arrested recently after censored pics of the girl were shown on *America's Most Wanted*. The members of PU all cheered when that guy was arrested, and rightfully so. It's just a bunch of people with an unfortunate sexual orientation and a damn fine sense of humor, not a bunch of child molesters, who post text on the group, not molest children. Though I came with the intention of reading text for a few weeks for character research, I liked the people and their humour so much that I still read the group and occasionally talk with the group's regulars.
So, how is the group, in and of itself, illegal? It isn't. Only some of the binaries are illegal; the text isn't. If you want to advocate that ISPs and news servers block binaries in these groups once the authorities give them the message IDs, fine. That puts the burden on law enforcement, where it belongs--and it's easy enough for a news admin to cancel/delete a message by mesage ID. But for law enforcement to try to block entire groups based on name and a portion of content puts an undue burden on both the ISP and free speech. For one thing, it's clearly prior restraint. Niow, an ISP has every right to voluntarily choose not to carry certain groups, and many do. Many others carry all groups, advocating free speech. To strong-arm them into erasing certain groups from their group files is unconstitutional prior restraint on speech, period. As I said, LEA should give news providers lists of illicit message IDs, if they want to censor USENET. That would be constitutional. But what they have done now, in this case, isn't, and I wish the ISP had had more backbone. We need to start fighting for our rights, not buckling under because it's the expediant thing to do. While the right to make-believe about an imaginary Pedo University may not be a right you like, it's still free speech, and shouldn't be put under prior restraint. The police are trammeling rights all over the place, unfairly jailing people like the now-cleared suspect in the Gallaudet murder case, publicly pointing the finger at innocent people like Richard Jewell, trying 10 year olds as adults to appease a lynch-mob-like public witchhunt spurred on by the ratings-whoring media, and murdering innocent civilians like at Ruby Ridge. We need to draw a line, and hold them accountable. We need to start saying, I may not like that, but it's a right and should not be abridged. I hope we all start dropping your own type of attitude, and cring about principles over shortsighted rhetoric.
Nothing personal, but that is roughly the worst reasoning I have ever heard. Just because one person decides to use the money he has gained through constitutionally shady means for a good purpose, does not make it right that he got that money in the first place. That's like saying, "Well, when that theif stole my car and sold it, he gave the money to the homeless, so it's okay." Umm, duh, it's not okay. It was *your* property, stolen, and just because the proceeds were given to a good cause doesn't make it right.
How does this relate directly to copyright law? People--big corporations and wealthy IP brokers--are *stealing* our property--our IP. Once copyright expires, the work becomes public domain--meaning it belongs to all of us, to the society and culture which inspired and nurtured it in the first place. So, people who extend copyright beyond constitutionally intended terms are *stealing* from our entire culture, from all of us. As a specific example, about six years ago the RIAA started demanding royalties from the Boy Scouts of America for singing popular campfire songs. These are songs which have been sung around the campfire for decades, some which my grandfather probably sung when he was a boy, which would have obviously been public domain and freely used if copyright had not been stretched and beaten into submission by organizations like the RIAA--and here, they were trying to extract royalty payments from the Boy Scouts! How much more evil and greedy can you get? Denying kids the opportunity to sing songs which had become part of our cultural heritage, unless they pay up. That is fucking disgusting, and attitudes like yours allow it to happen. You're well-meaning, but you lack understanding of the scope of this IP mess. Do you want everything ever written, sung, painted, or filmed to be copyrighted and forbidden to use and forbidden to become part of the public culture, until it's so old that it's too late for anyone to bother? Because, that's what we're in the process of doing. People are afraid to create things that are too closely inspired by works which may have been created fifty years ago, for fear of being sued for copyright infringement. Studios won't touch many things, and keep releasing tired retreads of movies they made forty years ago--and why not, it's still their IP, why innovate when you can just reach into the vault and mindlessly vomit something back up? The Boy Scouts and other ouh groups have to keep kids from singing copyrighted songs around the fire, or worry about paying royalties. That's sick. Our whole goddamned society is fucked up because of corporate greed like that.
> But even in the latter case, their sole purpose is to provide that sleazy sense of tactless
> production one comes to expect from all forms of adult entertainment.
I'm not going to defend animated GIFs here--they're annoying as hell, and on a dialup 56k like most people still are using, they're absolutely evil time-wasters. I recall once being SO annoyed that a page was taking so long to load, because the animated GIF banner at the top must have had thirty friggin frames...
But I just had to ask: what do you expect *other* than sleazy, tactless production in adult entertainment? Proper, tactful production? I can see it now, on PBS's Masterporn Theatre: "Oh, Madam Deepthroat, bring forth thy heaving bosoms of delight, that I might feel them up whilst thou tastest of my knightly schlong, bedewed with premature trickles of nectar as sweet as morning dew. Oh, how I have yearned to taste thy tuna steak of love, whilst you get it on with my handmaiden in some hot girl-girl action..."
Personally, I prefer the straightforward smut of a Dark Bros. or Max Hardcore production to the polished coldness of some silly Skinemax-wannabe soft stuff. But, I digress...;-)
Don't be a fucking condescending idiot. Historically speaking, many of the greatest and most respectable coders have inserted backdoors for themselves in sensitive places, hidden "signatures" of some sort in their source code, and yes, kept copies of sensitive software for themselves. Hell, it doesn't even take a coder to ignore security--recall recent press over former FBI directors, Los Alamos nuclear lab techs, and other, bringing classified work home with them on unsecured media? So in conclusion, fuck you, condescending assmaster. Use common sense.
The studio told the director to change the line "I wanna have your abortion" after seeing the scene on dailies. Annoyed, they purposefully tried to come up with a line even more offensive to replace it. Needless to say, when hearing the replacement line I'm currently using as my sig, the studio stopped interfering.:-)
On a related note, word is the release of the Dogma: Special Edition DVD is being delayed indefinitely, even though it's been completed for months, because of assholio Disney execs. The film was produced by a Disney subsidiary company, but because of protests by Xtian Xtremists, Disney sold the film off to an unrelated studio. Well, Disney apparently still owns the rights to deleted scenes and some extra material produced during filming, and isn't allowing their use. Columbia Tristar is trying to negotiate with Disney to get the rights to the extra materials, but Disney is being a monumental bitch. Score another one for corporate oppresion and censorship. I'd like to drop that fucking Mickey Mouse into a cuisinart...
I had about 140something in karma when the kap went into place, so it gradually crept down since I speak my mind and make occasional jokes and sometimes people mod i down. But shortly after I was down to about 120, I submitted a story and it was accepted. I think you get a +3 for getting a story accepted. But since I was above 50, it reset my karma to the kapped level.
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I have nothing against Ogg Vorbis--except maybe its silly name--but it's not going to have any impact at all outside the geek community. Why? Everyone who's ever used music on his PC knows what an mp3 is. Most people know about the new Windows format, and when the new Windows XP hits the streets with built-in Windows Media creation at high quality, it will gain even more penetration--already some digital players support it. But no one outside of the people who read Slashdot or other geek sites has ever heard of Ogg Vorbis. And they probably never will.
First of all, the name is just dumb and totally non-descriptive. MP3 could get away with being non-descriptive because it was the first, and for a long while the only popular choice. But every new format has the words "Audio" or at least "Media" in it. Because people need to know what a product is quickly and easily, not scratch their heads wondering what it does. Plus, the name can't be taken seriously. No mainstream news site will cover Ogg Vorbis much based on that fact alone. If the name sounds like a joke, the product will be treated like a joke. I know there's a long tradition of interesting naming in the Linux community, but average non-Linux-geeks don't like products with stupid names. It may be shallow, but it is a fact. If Ogg had just been called something like "Free Audio Format" or "Open Sound System" or some such, it would have actually had a chance at the mainstream. As it is, I don't picture Kurt Loder saying "Ogg Vorbis" any time soon, although he's said "mp3" and even "Windows Media" before.
Good luck, but between MP3 files--which will still remain common, since 3rd party software always finds a way around MS incompatibilities--, the newer Windows format, and RealAudio (which I hate, hate, hate, hate), Ogg Vorbis stands littel chance of making it outside of geekdom.
> Oh, I see. It's all Burger King's fault.
:-) But seriously, we live in a society which values material things over relationships. When your job is more important than your husband or wife, don't expect your marriage to last long. The fact that almost all contemporary married couples both work means that they spend very little time with each other, much less the children. To almost everyone these days, job and money come before all else, all in the name of having a bigger TV or a newer car or going on vacations further away from home. Or, worse, all in the name of a promotion and "status."
No, it's McDonalds' fault. Ever since they switched to soy milkshakes instead of the real thing, the world has gone steadily downhill.
None of which has to do with sex in any way whatsoever. Sex is a non-issue here. Whether married, divorced, single, a teenager, or elderly, sex is and always has been available. No more people are having sex today, whether inside or outside marriage, than had sex fifty years ago. How can we know? Well, for one thing, teenage pregnancy rates were astronomical in the 1950s. The big difference between then and now is that back then anyone who even vaguely looked pregnant prior to marriage was immediately sent out of town and hidden away until the baby was born and then they were almost always coerced and forced into giving it up. Today, sex is slightly more public, and the teen pregnancy rate is down thanks to better education and improved sexual health. Teens are still having sex, they just know more about how to be careful about it. You may want to believe that more teens are engaging in abstinence, and that's why teen pregnancy is down, but studies do not support that conclusion. In addition, many people who speak out and profess abstinence are just putting on a facade--do you remember the abstinence campaigns of the 80s, with Brooke Shields doing public sevice announcements about how she's not going to have sex until marriage? Funny thing is, she'd already been having sex, as she later confessed as an adult. Why pressure kids into hiding their sex lives and making it into something below-the-board that they have to sneak around about, instead of recognizing that most of them are going to choose to enjoy sex and supporting that natural and healthy decision? Well, because people like you are hell-bent on trying to instill their own religious views into everyone else, which is why "sex education" in this country is a joke. The healthiest, happiest people in the world, with lower divorce rates than ours, come from countries such as France and the Netherlands and Japan, where sex is viewed as natural and healthy and to be enjoyed at all ages from adolescence on up. Americans have a lot of *things*, but that doesn't make quality of life; studies show that most Europeans are more content with their lives.
> Let's say a 16-year-old male decides to have an active sex life. Let's say he experiments, and has all kinds of
> fun with different partners.
Good for him. I didn't get started til I was 18, and when I did years of stress and sexual frustration just melted away into contentment. Actually, to be honest I did have one experience with a neighbor girl when I was about 11, but that hardly counts. But, I digress. Shower me with your wisdom.
> What do you suppose his experiences teach him about loving relationships? That they're supposed to last?
No, it'll teach him--once he finds a girl he loves, not just fucks, and he will sooner or later--that love feels more wonderful than any of the other gifts God has given us, and that there's very little which feels worse than losing someone you love in that way. He'll learn what the best and worse life has to offer is. And even the pain of losing a first love will be good for him--it's an exquisite pain, and very instructive too. You can never realize how good love is until you lose it at least once. I learned more about humanity and feelings and love and life in my first relationship than I'd learned in the 18 years which came before. And to think, that relationship lasted a matter of months rather than years... So, it will teach him a lot about loving relationships, like how important they really are and how he never wants to lose one again once he finds another.
> (And don't try to tell me sex isn't about love. Don't separate the two.)
But they *are* separate. They certainly overlap, but you can surly have one without the other. For example, did you love your wife before you married her, even though you say you waited for marriage before having sex? You can definitely have love without sex, although sexual passion is definitely a part of it even if no sex is ocurring. Likewise, you can have sex with someone you don't love. Why else would the "world's oldest profession" be so successful? Prostitution is the epitome of sex without love, and as someone who lives near Washington, D.C. and has a friend who is an "escort," I can tell you that it's a very lucrative business engaged in by people of all walks of life, ages, levels of wealth and status, etc. So, there is a great demand for sex without love. But we don't have to be so extreme and literal to get that point: what do you think clubs and pick-up bars are for? To find soulmates and life-partners? Nope, they're there because people like to hook up for a good thorough fuck, with love not a part of the equation. In the process of said fucking you'll eventually find someone you do love. Now, that's not to say that sx without love is as good as sex in a loving relationship. Of course it isn't, because love is so much better than plain old sex. But that doesn't mean we can't or shouldn't enjoy some good old fashioned sex while waiting for someone to love to come along.
> No, they'll likely imbue in him the idea that relationships are disposable.
Umm, no, because like I said sex doesn't feel as good as love. Even an idiot can feel the difference once love comes along. So, why shouldn't sex be enjoyed in the meantime? Teenagers have "disposable relationships" all the time, whether sex is involved or not. You don't advocate that teenagers shouldn't date until marriage, do you? Dating relationships are important and intimate relationships whether sex occurs or not. So your statement about sex teaching him that relationships are disposable just falls apart.
> Let's say he ends up getting married. How faithful is this man to his wife?
Just as good as anyone else's, if not better. After all, if you've already taken a bite out of every kind of fish in the se, and found the one you like above all others, and know that if you stop to grab another fish the one you like most will leave and never come back, well, you're not likely to get curious enough to do that. But if you've never had any other fish...well, you're going to be a lot more curious.
> He's had no practice at self-control in at least this one area, and his chances are very diminished.
Bollocks. His chances are increased, because he needn't be curious about sex with diffeent partners. He already knows what it's like. He's also probably lost a love when he was a teenager if he's gotten around so much, so he'll know better than to ruin real love for a momentary piece of patch. Compare that to some sissy little inexperienced sexually repressed guy who's far more likely to let curiosity get the best of him if some attractive woman makes an overture, since he'll be wondering what it's like whereas the experienced gentleman already knows.
> Since I was young, I was taught about the sanctity of marriage and its contract between the couple, the community, and God.
Good for you. This is what needs to be taught. But it has nothing to do with sex, because sex and marriage are not synonymous. Heck, read your Bible--people had sex outside of marriage all the time back then, too; here's a trivia question: name the woman who dressed as a prostitute to seduce her father-in-law, and was praised by the elders for it. Funny how he was never chastised for visiting someone whom he thought was a street prostitute. Sex can be enjoyed before marriage, with no diminishing to the institution of marriage itself. Again, sex and marriage are not synonyms, and even in the Bible people could have sex outside of marriage and not be condemned for it.
You confuse the issues rather than reasoning carefully. All religious conservatives such as yourself do. Personally, I'm going to teach my son that marriage is the most important thing he can ever do, and that once he does he's made an obligation to stay with and be faithful to his family no matter what. And I'll also teach him that, until he finds that spcial person he loves darly, he should enjoy the body God gave him and have sex as long as he's responsible and careful and always mindful of the girl's feelings. Teenagers are biologically meant to have sex, and to use sex play as part of emotional growth and maturation. The day my son turns 13 is the dy he gets a subscription to Playboy, as a symbol that he on't have to hide his sexuality like so many of us did. What he does in his bedroom is his business, not mine.
> Actually, the single biggest cause of failed marriages is money.
No, the biggest cause of failed marriages is the fact that people don't take marriage seriously anymore. It is no longer a necessity, it's a luxury in this fast-paced go-go-faster success-driven cesspool of a country. People put more effort into work than into marriage, so naturally marriages fail.
> Also, divorce rates are higher among people who live together before they marry. What does this mean?
It means exactly what I said. Marriage is not taken seriously by the young'uns these days. Marriages are as disposable as everything else in this country. People don't want permanent relationships, they want disposable ones that fit neatly between their work schedules. This has absolutely nothing to do with sex before marriage. It has to do with the disposable culture that the rest of the world rightly associates with--and blames on--America. Naturally, divorce rates will be higher among those who live together before they marry, because those people are the least likely to consider marriage very important in the first place. That's why they didn't bother to get married before moving in together. Duh. Tell me how that has anything to do with not having sex before marriage supposedly being such a wonderful thing? Plenty of people have sex before marriage, whether they live together or not. Maybe they marry, maybe they don't. They still enjoy a healthy and wonderful sex life. Likewise, plenty of people don't have sex before marriage. Maybe they marry, maybe they don't. They lack a healthy and wonderful sex life, and miss out on some of the most amazing sex of their lives, which they're supposed to be enjoying in their teens and early twenties. Because, I tell you, having sex at 16 or 18 has so many fun dimensions to it that are lacking when you're older, plus the stamina of an 18 year old male has no equal. Good luck trying to have sex that amazing when you're 26 or 30 or whatever. Man was made to mate starting in his teens. It is a biological fact, and hormone concentrations prove that it's even a biological imperative. Why fight nature? Why not enjoy sex when you're young, and then enjoy marriage when you're older? For everything there is a season.
It's annoying how religious and/or conservative zealots constantly confuse the issues. The devaluation of marriage is a function of disposable society, and too much focus on work rather than family, and has absolutely nothing to do with sex and sexual freedom. There is one and only one reason that people who abstain from sex before marriage have lower divorce rates: the only people who abstain from sex before marriage are very religiously conservative people who place a strong religious and moral valuation on the institution of marriage, and thus consider it a permanent bond. Sex or not before marriage has zero to do with it; it's the religious convictions pertaining to marriage which do. So, all this emphasis on abstinence in the U.S. is useless. In fact, all it does is deny teens knowledge about how to enjoy their bodies and sexuality naturally and safely and productively. It doesn't bolster marriage, because only a strong belief in the institution and its import does that. Denying yourself sex doesn't. Teach how important marriage is, and what it does for society, and how a good marriage is better than just a good job. Don't try to hold out sex as a carrot in some backwards attempt to promote marriage in an outdated manner which harms sexual health more than it could possibly help marriage.
> I would like to know how you explain much of the sex displayed in XXX videos as being perfectly natural.
:-)
Looks perfectly natural to me. Girl meets boy, girl does boy, five guys walk by and girl manages to cram two of them "between her cheeks," one of them underneath, two of them between her other cheeks, and one of them between her toes. German Shepherd walks by, and well... See, just like a normal day in the college dorms.
American society is roughly the least progressive and most backwards in the Western world when it comes to sexuality. I think the Islamic theocracies are the only nations with a less healthy and progressive sexual outlook.
And yes, it is unhealthy and backwards. It's not meant as a value judgement, but as an objective fact, given that the more progressive and sexually enlightened nations in Europe and in Japan and even in some South American countries have far lower rates of teenage pregnancy, sex crimes, divorce, and other such related problems. Just think about it; America still clings to this Puritanical system of sexual mores whose ultimate embodiment is "no sex until marriage." Not that very many people actually practise this, but it's ludicrous to think that it's a healthy idea in the first place. Sex is a very important part of life, and to make a lifelong committment to someone without even having shared that experience with them is just asking for trouble, sexual dysfunction and divorce, or a joyless marriage.
And yet, this is what we teach our teenagers in the U.S. We teach them that they should be asexual during some of the most sexually exciting and powerful years of their lives, rather than teaching them how to enjoy their natural sexuality in safe and healthy ways, as a learning process. America had a real sexual revolution, just like the rest of the Western world, and at just about the same time in the late sixties through the seventies. The problem is that we had a fairly successful sexual counterrevolution in the 80s, when the Meese Commission wrongly accused pornography of causing sex crimes (funny how in many countries porn is shown on TV, and yet they have fewer sex crimes) and when fear of AIDS was used as a means to sexually repress young people by instilling irrational fear which far outweighs the true risks (look at the real NIH statistics; most HIV is passed through anal intercourse, since the walls of the anus are likely to be abraded and bleed--so avoiding anal intercourse and partners who engage in it means your chances of getting it are slim to none). Almost all men who get HIV get it from other men, and almost all women who get HIV get it from men who have gotten it from men. This isn't to say that homosexuality is the problem, I'll admit I experimented a bit in college myself. It's just to say that unprotected anal sex (including accidental condom breakage) and sex with someone who has had unprotected anal sex are the only significant risk factors for HIV, excepting IV drug use. So, AIDS is not the huge problem people are made to believe it is in this country. But fear of AIDS has been used to repress sexuality further, particularly among teenagers.
So, what does this have to do with Yahoo! selling porn? Well, the sexual rvolutions in all Western countries, including the U.S., were fueled by the decriminalization of pornography. Easy availability of sexually explicit material made people more comfortable in exploring their sexuality and trying new things, and made it okay to talk about sex publicly. Two of the overlooked historical events in this country were the release of the movie *Deep Throat* and the later release of *Behind the Green Door*. The former was a very stupid movie, but was the first porn film to seep into the mainstream--couples, and husbands and wives actually went to see that movie together, and the mainstream media even took notice of its popularity. It spawned countless discussions aboutsomething that was still considered a no-no in many circles--oral sex. The latter gained notoriety because its star happened to be the Ivory Soap girl, so the nation and the press took notice and it was shown in theaters to average people in almost every major city. Porn was a symbol of sexual freedom in many countries during the 70s, including the U.S. There was a period of time in the late 70s when certain high-quality porn films were reviewed in mainstream magazines, and by about 1980 many people thought that porn and mainstream movies were beginning to merge a bit--it was not uncommon for a "crossover" porn film to be shot on 35mm film and have a budget of hundreds of thousands of dollars back then. But then, as I mentioned, the 80s brought a counterrevolution against pornography, which was blamed by Ed Meese's hand-picked commission for just about all of society's ills, even though rates of sex crimes actually declined once porn became decriminalized and gained acceptance. It's a release valve for sexual tensions. So, porn was pushed back into the background, as was sexuality in general. Even though porn generates more revenue than mainstream movies, it's still considered something shady in this country, though in much of Europe porn is given a far more legitimate status, at the front of the bus instead of the back.
This is why porn needs to be moved more into the mainstream again in this country. If Yahoo! carries porn, that gives it added legitimacy and status. Porn was an integral part of sexual liberation and the sexual revolution, though today that fact is overlooked by many American scholars, particularly in light of extreme feminist objections to porn by the likes of Catherine McKinnon. Legitimizing it more adds more to the idea that sex is good, normal, healthy, and people should enjoy it openly and not hide their sexuality but revel in it.
That doesn't make me a bad person. It makes me a person who doesn't adhere to bad laws. As an example, I possess and distribute circumvention devices as defined by the DMCA. That makes me a criminal. Am I likely to get busted for it? A while back I would have said "Of course not." These days, I cover my ass just in case. Likewise, I've participated in discussions that are routinely monitored by the federal piggies, and I distrust them enough to believe that they'd take innocent political discussions to be "threats" against them. For example, the author of a treatise called *Assassination Politics* has been hounded by the IRS, FBI, and ATF for years now, and is currently on trial for "stalking" agents by posting publically available information about them, like names and addresses, and going across the street from their houses to record license plate numbers. Since when is posting public record information, or walking across the street from a house once or twice, stalking? I certainly don't agree with all his political views, but I do not believe someone should be harassed by the authorities for exercising his free speech rights in a political treatise, and then arrested for compiling and posting information about the agents who've been harassing him. If you've followed the Jim Bell case, you know that today he went a little nuts in Court and admitted tampering with mail--even though he isn't charged yet with it--but I'd expect that most people would have a mental breakdown after years of official abuse and harassment.
So, yes, I cover my ass with encrytion as thick as any. I do so because I don't want any of my own free speech to be held against me one day by a government which has proven itself crufty and bloated and untrustworthy. I do so because I help to violate copyrights which are artificially extended far beyond their useful lifetimes and which now interfere with the right of fair use. And between PGP 2.6.3ckt, Scramdisk, Scorch, a batch process for overwriting and restoring settings on startup and shutdown, a ramdisk for swap, two firewalls, enough open land around me to make even TEMPEST unviable, and a physical access control to my computer room, I have one of the most secure systems you could imagine. I not only feel secure, I am secure, from any sort of government aggression or abuse of my rights. Is it overkill? Yes, it is. But better safe than sorry. If every hacker took the precautions I do, the government would be hard pressed to prove a case at all.
As someone who's studied the issues obsessively, you cannot be compelled to provide evidence against yourself according to the 5th Amendment, with 2 minor exceptions. You can be compelled to submit to fingerprinting and DNA tests. This is because these are not considered evidence against yourself as much as they are considered generally identifying characteristics, like your physical appearance. Just as you cannot show up to Court or a police lineup wearing a black hood to avoid being identified, you cannot fail to give a fingerprint or DNA sample. This makes sense if you think about it, because the fingerprint or DNA sample is in and of itself not evidence either way, it's just like an "identifying mark."
Can you be compelled to produce physical evidence against yourself, like the key to a lock? Of course not, if you are the defendant and you haven't been dumb enough to tell your lawyer about it. Your attorney has an ethical obligation to the Court, and may have to turn something like that over. You as a defendant do not. The confusion arises because parties to a case other than the defendant or his spouse can be compelled to produce physical evidence. But not a defendant or his spouse.
This doesn't mean that the police can't lie to you and manipulate you to try to extract evidence from you. They can and do all the time. For example, I was once told by the coppers "cooperate [i.e., turn over the stuff we're looking for] and we'll let you go with no bail. Don't cooperate and we'll talk to the judge and make sure you don't go home tonight." So, unsurprisingly, I got a $10,000 bail, since I didn't "cooperate" with the bacon. No wonder I hate pork.
Sorry to be so blunt, but going to Amazon you'll see that both *The Bachman Books*, in which *The Rage* was later reprinted, and the novel *The Rage* itself, are both OUT OF PRINT. Which is what I clearly said above. They are out of print because King asked the publisher to pull them when a copy of *The Rage* was found in the locker of a high school student who engaged in a school shooting.
As I said, they can be found second-hand, but are no longer being sold new and will probably never be sold new in King's lifetime. Therefore, I was hoping to find an OCR's copy of *The Rage* on the Net, but no one has posted one. As I said, I might buy a used copy and OCR and upload it myself, since doing so won't be taking money out of any author's or publisher's pockets.
http://rintintin.colorado.edu/~grayd/McCheese.html has lots of images.
:-) Or you were joking, in which case...
http://page.auctions.yahoo.com/auction/23451661 brings up 2 pics of a 1973 glass featuring the Mayor.
You, sir, obviously have not used Google recently.
But anyway, I miss those old playgrounds full of the McDonalds characters that they used to have in some locations. The lame see-them-everywhere plastic tunnel crap they have at McDonalds now just sucks in comparison. I remember clibing all over those huge metal characters, with "forts" and see-saws and all sorts of fun stuff. But these days I guess it's too much of a legal liability to give kids a playground that's actually fun, instead of a bunch of plastic tubes and nylon webbing. Blech.
I've searched for online texts of books that have been pulled by their publishers, and scored 1 for 2. I easily found the book *Hitman*, pulled by its publisher after a lawsuit was filed against them because the book was found in the possession of someone who had killed someone else in a manner similar to that described in the book. It was a small survivalist publisher, who didn't have the money to defend themselves even though it's obvious that they'd win in court--First Amendment, ey. I guess you only have rights if you can afford to pay for the upkeep. Anyway, the book was worthless tripe about how to become a contrct killer, and nothing mentioned in it isn't intuitively obvious to anyone with more then three neurons. Hardly worth the time, but I wanted a copy of this "banned" book on principle.
The "banned" book I could not find online was *The Rage*, written by Stephen King under the pseudonym "Bachman" back when the market was too saturated with King novels and he didn't want to put out that many more for a while, but kept writing voluminously anyway. It was later published under King's own name in a collection of all the books written under that pseudonym, called *The Bachman Books*. But the novel was found in the locker of a high school kid who was involved in a school shooting, and King decided to have the publisher yank the book. I went looking for a scanned-in text of it online, figuring I wouldn't be taking money out of anyone's pocket since the book is permanently out of stock and out of print. Nada. Of course, a quick search of eBay yields a ton of second-hand copies, so if I really wanted to I could buy one and OCR it onto the Net myself. But, I was surprised that no one has done so, considering that it is no longer available except second-hand anyway.
Many cafes still serve "French sodas" which are essentially milk, carbonated water, and a flavoring syrup. Great stuff. My favorite is a Hazelnut French soda. In fact, the Borders bookstore near me serves them, although they have the annoying habit of using Sprite instead of keeping plain carbonated water on tap.
;-) From what I hear, it's popular with some of the SCA type people. But personally, I prefer to brew mead instead. Yummy.
For a truly strange twist on milk, try making Koumiss (aka kumis, kumiss, or koumis). The Mongols used to make it by filling an animal stomach or bladder with mare's milk, hanging it outside the tent, and allowing it to ferment for up to a month or so. You can make a safer approximation by taking a gallon of 1% pasteurized cow milk, adding a few drops of Lactaid to break down the lactose into something standard brewing yeast can actually convert to alcohol, and a pinch of brewing yeast, and letting it ferment for 2 days. It's not only alcoholic by that point, but also quite fizzy thanks to all the CO2 that's a by-product of the yeast's activities. The alcohol inhibits the milk from souring. It tastes...interesting. Just picture mixing one part Coors Original with two parts milk, and then dropping in an Alka Seltzer. Interesting taste, indeed.
You're right about that, and I should have been more specific. There is a different consideration given to names which are not real words; they are often trademarked before being put into actual use, and I haven't heard of any such trademarks being ruled invalid. That doesn't mean they couldn't be, mind you, just that I don't recall any cases. This is why companies these days use so many "made-up" names, like Itanium and Lucent, for product and company names: they can easily assert broad trademark and dilution claims if anyone tries to muscle in on the name. If I recall correctly, there was an article on Slashdot a long time back which mentioned that Intel bought the name Itanium from a company which had trademarked severak such made-up names for sale.
;-)
So, that's where one big distinction lies: between names which are not common words, and names which are. It gets extremely complicated, though, with quite a few other factors. But one of the cases I always remember is Robert Mondavi versus Arturo Fuente. The Fuente cigar company is an established cigar maker, which produced (at the height of the cigar boom, when they were chic all of a sudden) a special top brand they called the Opus X. They called it Opus X because all the wrapper leaf came from a special field of experimental Cuban seed tobacco, which they all jokingly called "Project X." So when the product neared market, they came up with the name Opus X.
Unbeknownst to them, Robert Mondavi's famous winery had trademarked Opus One not only for wine, but for a cigar brand. Mondavi took Fuente to Court on trademark claims, because of the similarity between Opus One and Opus X.
To cut to the chase, Mondavi lost. Fuente was first to market with a cigar product using "Opus" in the name, and what's more although Opus is not a common word in English it is a plain Latin word often used universally to denote, for example, a composer's works in the order in which they were composed. Mondavi further had argued that there is a similarity between fine cigars and fine wines, since they are often sold in the same shops and are advertised together in related cigar and wine publications. But the Court ruled that, despite any perceptions on Mondavi's part that wines and fine cigars are similar and related products, an average consumer is not going to confuse a wine with "Opus" in the title with a cigar with "Opus" in the title.
I don't feel like looking the case up to refresh my memory about specifics, but these names should be enough for anyone to find the decision online if anyone is interested in such trademark disputes. I'd wager the judge in this case is going to rule in a similar manner, saying that New Line was first to market with a film called *Diablo* and that, both entertainment companies or not, no reasonable consumer is going to confuse a computer game about demons with a film about a drug lord.
Of course, I feel very, very dirty. Yuck; I just defended an AOL/TimeWarner subsidiary. I love New Line films, and now every time I buy one I'm going to be supporting...AOL. Every time I turn on CNN, I'm not only supporting leftist looney Ted Turner, which was bad enough, but now...AOL. I think I'm gonna hurl...
You cannot just go out and trademark words willy-nilly. For a trademark claim to be upheld, a company must have a legitimate place in the industry for which a word is being trademarked, or have imminent prospects of doing so. Blizzard trademarked Diablo as it relates to film titles, yet they had and have no legitimate place in the film industry. They only have their vague assurance that, yes, sometime in the future they want to make a movie called Diablo.
Well, guess what: that's not good enough. The trademark will be invalidated, even if the judge is a total head-in-arse moron, he will still see from out his arse that Blizzard filed an invalid trademark request since they had no legitimate prospects of making a Diablo movie any time this century. Heck, it *is* a new century, and Blizzard doesn't even have a script, five years after filing the trademark request.
Guess what: if trademark law worked the way you think it does, then no one could ever name a product or business anything. Every piece of shit lawyer and bloodsucking IP leech with brains enough to file a trademark application could just think up every good word for every good use, and trademark them all, waiting around for someone to want to name something and then extorting money from them. Fortunately, it does not work that way.
Students even have Constitutional rights when on school grounds, even though this case is about something done off grounds in the student's free time. But let me beat you with a cluestick about on-grounds rights, anyway.
The Court has held repeatedly that, even on school grounds during school hours, students have Constitutional rights including the right to free speech and free press as guaranteed by the First Amendment. A student's First Amendment rights while on school grounds are slightly limited, but not to the extent people like you--and even a lot of misguided teachers and admins--seem to think. For instance, students have the right to distribute printed materials ("free student newspapers," pamphlets, etc.) on school grounds between, before, and after classes, in accordance with prescribed guidelines set by the district as to location and time. One would think that the administration could therefore limit such free press entirely, but the Court has set limits to the rights of schools in setting up such guidelines, so that any overbroad school regulations restricting speech and press are considered unconstitutional. This makes perfect sense, since the public school system is in fact an arm of the government and therefore cannot violate the Constitution. And, despite the fact that most students are under-18, the Court has ruled that minors have Constitutional protections in schools, though slightly limited ones. In private schools, though, students don't have such explicit rights, since the schools are not an arm of the government and therefore free to disallow exercise of some rights.
I know this not because I'm a lawyer (IANAL), but because in 11th grade I was suspended for 3 days for distributing an alternative student newspaper written and published by me and several friends. I liked to call it my school's "free student newspaper" since it wasn't subject to the censorious editorial control of a certain idiot vice principal. See, in 10th grade I had submitted an article against race-based scholarships and my school's Minority Parent Association, which I viewed as providing minority students with more opportunities and help seeking scholarships than the white students had. Funny thing is, in my school whites were a 70-30 minority, and when the article was published I had to receive a security detail for a few days to escort me to and from classes and then after that I still had to contend with mistaken people who thought I was a racist for wanting *equal* opportunities--I even had a desk thrown at me, and a national newspaper local to me did an article about the controversy. Well, after that the newspaper rejected most of my articles, and the one they did finally publish was so horribly censored abnd mutilated that my idiot vice principal even changed the common phrase "liberal education" to the nonsensical "conservative education," thinking it had something to do with politics. Bah. So, I got several friends, including the Homecoming Queen, to write articles with a conservative slant, and published them as *The Federalist* which I had printed at a local shop (today, one could print the same quality on any home laser printer). Funny thing is, except for my articles, every one of my writers was a woman or black, so our conservative newspaper was very diverse. I submitted it to the principal for approval of a time and place for distribution, as per school regs, but the administration nailed me when they found out I'd given advance copies to students who'd written articles for me. I researched the whole legal area, and appealed, and the suspension was expunged when I brought the area superintendant a pile of photocopied, highlighted legal decisions by the Supreme Court and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, affirming that the school's regs were constitutionally vague and overbroad. All it took was the threat of a lawsuit, and me handing him a pile of decisions affirming my rights to free press even in public school.
He could have been a jackass and not acknowledged my rights, but he folded before I did (it was a bluff--my family was too poor to sue). He recognized my rights once they were shown to him clearly, in the form of Court deisions with the good bits highlighted.
Since then the First Amendment has been a pet subject of mine, and I can tell you that since public schools are an arm of the Government, they are not allowed to completely take away any rights of students. They are only legally allowed to put reasonable limits on those rights, ones which are necessary for maintaining order. Trying to eliminate First Amendment protections does not instill order, it breeds contempt in students for the hypocrites who teach us one thing about rights and then demonstrate another through abuse of discretion and authority. This is why things like Columbine happen, because students with half a brain or more realize that their rights are systematically abusd, and then they strike out violently against such oppression. The sad part is, this makes misguided school admins clamp down further, which only alienates students more and will lead to more rebellious outbursts. And the thing that makes me most upset is the realization that, in today's climate, that same administrator who reversed my suspension and affirmed my rights, would probably have gone the other way even when presented with all the evidence I gave him. It's sad and unfortunate, and it teaches our kids (most of the smart ones, anyway) that government is there to oppress them, not ensure their rights. When the government, and parents even, start treating 16 year olds as having no more rights than 6 year olds, that breeds so much unnecessary enmity...
Far too often people blame poor production values, when the projectionist just failed to frame the film to the proper aspect ratio. Many people don't realize that 35mm film stock is actually exposed at closer to 4:3 than 16:9, and then matted to fit the widescreen format. In fact, sometimes (but not usually) the 4:3 side of a DVD actually shows more surface area than the widescreen side, when it's done by removing the matte. If I recall correctly, this is the case with the DVD (or was it the laserdisc--not sure) of *Looking for Mr. Goodbar*, where the 4:3 gives some unintentional full frontal nudity of Diane Keaton where the original presentation in widescreen gives only a topless view at that point.
This is also done, sometimes with very detrimental effect, on TV presentations of movies. I recall seeing *Manhunter* (the first in the series of films with Hannibal Lector) several years back on broadcast TV, with the matte removed to give a full frame presentation. The microphone was in damn near every scene, and it was pissing me off mightily because much of the film was set against white walls where the black mike was a grating eyesore.
This brings up a sore spot with me--the whole 4:3 versus 16:9 format war going on now.It's insane and insipid. Originally, most silver screen era films were done in 4:3 or near there, which is why you don't see them presented in widescreen often--they weren't filmed that way. Widescreen formats only became the norm after television became big, so that Hollywood competed by giving us bigger and wider screens. That's when aspect ratios of around 16:9 took hold. Funny thing is, to get the 16:9 image, you have to matte the normal 4:3 aspect ratio of 35mm film stock, so you end up with fewer lines of resolution and less screen area than you could have with the original 4:3. You also end up with many directors matting their view in camera, so that microphones and other detritus encroach into the frame when unmatted, whereas in the old days of the 4:3 standard directors obviously made sure there were no stage equipment anywhere in the frame. Some directors compose their films to this day with the 4:3 unmatted aspect ratio in mind, which is why people who complain that Kubrick's films aren't available in widescreen are just being foolish since it's mostly unmatted full frame so that you get to see *more* of the image than you got in the theater, not less.
So it's ironic that the new television formats are 16:9 and people think that that's good. Televisions are finally abandoning the classic 4:3 format of most things, to adopt the 16:9 format movies switched to fifty years ago just to try to outdo televisions. The worst part is that our useful range of focus is at about a 4:3 aspect, which explains why both films and TVs were originally cast in that aspect ratio; 16:9 sacrifices part of our useful vertical range of focus to add to areas outside our useful horizontal range of focus. To understand what I'm trying to say in case it sounds odd, the next time you go to a theater walk towards the screen and look at the center of it, until you get to the point at which the screen takes up all of the range of your focus from about your hairline to your chin. You'll notice that the screen stretches out horizontally far past the points on either side which are clearly in focus when staring at the center of the screen. The result is that most people will have to sit further back away from a screen than necessary in order to have these edges of the screen easily in focus, which renders a lot of unused blank space above and below the screen which could have been and would have been taken up by the picture in the classic 4:3 aspect ratio. In contrast, the 4:3 ratio leaves all the blank unused space to your unfocused peripheral vision, filling up all the most useful space. Actually, you don't even need to go to the theater--do a related version of this test now, with your 4:3 monitor, and then visualize how you'd have to sit further away to get the same clearly focused screen space if you had a 16:9 aspect ratio.
So, 16:9 gives us the illusion of added screen real estate, while taking away from the most useful in-focus area to add to the less useful peripheries. Sure, 16:9 has its purported advantages, like in displaying 2 pages of text side by side in the case of monitors. Think about it, though: this has to do with size more than aspect ratio. For instance, my 20 inch 4:3 monitor is big enough to display pages of text side by side, ironically the 4:3 ratio means that I get to see more of the pages from top to bottom than I would with a 16:9 monitor. "More" or "less" is just a semantics game with aspet ratios; you need to measure usable screen area for any meaningful and realistic comparison, not "my screen is wider" or "my creen is taller." But it's not an accident that both classic Hollywood films and TV shows chose a 4:3 ratio--it corresponds to a real and measurable useful range of focus for the human eye, not counting unfocusable peripherals.
The problem is that there's quite a difference between having fairly primitive firearms and having none at all. I think we in the U.S. are dangerously close to having none at all, except for old-fashioned shotguns for sport hunting--I doubt a militia equipped with shotguns, even when sawed off, would be very effective against an army equipped with automatic weapons--the reload time alone, well...
The reason I think it's dangerously close to being that way is that there are so many creeping measures to close down every loophole so that the government knows where each and every legally owned firearm is. Once you know what guns are whee, it becomes awfully easy to come and collect them en masse the moment a ban comes into effect. Thee's quite a bit of support for banning certain firearms, so that if it suddenly became illegal to own semi automatics, the FBI and ATF could come round quickly and seize any such firearm not voluntarily turned in--recall that they know where they are thanks to gun registration. Then on o the next type, after a while. Not to mention ammunition--they've already outlawed certain types of armor-piercing bullets; outlawing certain types of ammunition could be somewhat efectively used to render some kinds of firearms largely useless. I wouldn't assume that these things couldn't happen, simply because a majority of the American people seem to be currently in a safety-at-all-costs mode, giving up freedom after freedom largely voluntarily. At this point, very little would surprise me about what a passive, complacent, sheepish public would surrender to the government.
> The bottom line is, society is not going to be run by the low-life of this world.
No, the bottom line is that people like you will either be the downfall of liberty, or (hopefully, but doubtfully) be stamped out by the more reasonable and tolerant.
I need not quote the two similar Jefferson and Franklin quotes usually brought up in situations like these, but needless to say, you don't deserve to be an American. That's not a flame, it's just what our Founding Fathers would have said. People such as yourself kill freedom, for silly mistaken reasons. In another thread on this discussion you said that neighborhoods with a high rate of criminal activity should be bulldozed. Instead, people like you should be bulldozed. You advocate mass censorship of media which have legitimate uses in discourse, calling them a "public menace." Sir, places and media are not a public menace; people with your censorious attitude are.
As for how you say things should be handled in terms of jurisdiction: bollocks. The Federal government has authority to regulate interstate commerce; however, it has not the authority under the Constitution to regulate interstate morality. That is the whole reason we have state governments--so that they can legislate based on the customs and temperaments of the people living therein. The Federal government has no more right to hold an ISP in New York City accountable for being a conduit for something which is illegal in Oklahoma City, than the government of Singapore has to hold the U.S. responsible for something it allows to be put online. Unfortunately, we've been in a Federalist mode in the Court for the past several decades, but the tone is changing and with a Bush appointee or two in the next few years the Court should once again begin respeting Amendment X of the U.S. Constitution.
The same holds true for International accords--the EU notwithstanding, what an ISP in The Hague or Madrid or Berlin or Osaka or San Diego can and cannot be held accountable for, will still remain as different as can be. Fortunately, some countries are blessed with a citizenry which relishes freedom more than that of the U.S. now does.
As for your understanding of USENET, it cannot be as extensive as you seem to believe if you think newsgroups are ever, as you put it, "shut down." It is a well-known fact that there will always be another server which carries any given group if one's ISP stops carrying it. Almost all people serious about USENET use a "premium" news server in addition to their ISP, and despite your wishing it so, this case is not a precedent and the Court will definitely hold that government attempts to stamp out a newsgroup based on some of its content is unlawful prior restraint of speech. You conveniently neglected to address such points as that when I made them in the post above.
Unionizing and strikes are fine, but they aren't inherently good any more than all corporations are bad. In recent decades unions have done as much to harm some workers as they've done to help others. As an example, the closed shop concept, in which you aren't allowed to get a job at a given employer unless you join the union. Well, what if I am opposed, diametrically, to many of the things the union supports? Well, if I want to work at that job, I still have to join the union. Are you telling me there are *no* Republican middle-class workers? As one myself, I'd be outraged to have my dues going to fund a party I don't usually vote for. Fortunately, I live in a state where closed shops are outlawed--but my state is, if I recall correctly, in the minority. Often, non-union workers are just people trying to make a living in their chosen field without having extra money siphoined from their paychecks, and used for political purposes. Unions often try to squash anyone who isn't a member, and act as bad as any strongarming corporation.
So, don't whine and boo-hoo about someone making a joke at a union strike. Non-union writers have every bit as much right to work as union members, and probably deserve more respect since they don't try to bully people into unionizing just to work and paying a union-tax that gets used for PAC money whether the worker forced to pay union dues agrees with it or not. Now, legally, union members don't have to pay the portion of dues used for political bribery--err, lobbying--but Big Unions managed to successfully defeat a bill that would have required union shops to post this information, so few union members even know this. Kind of reminds me how slimey megacorps buy legislation, eh...
I mean, have you *seen* the band Kittie? They be some HOT bitches in that band. Even their songs are...well...go look up some of the lyrics, because it's hard to understand what they're saying when they yell at the top of their lungs phrases like "YOU CAN EAT A DICK!!!!" But, I digres...
USENET newsgroups aen't web sites, which exist on a single server cluster and which are responsible if they fail to pull down a site containing illicit stuff (kiddie porn, warez, whatever) once they know it's there. Newsgroups aren't even chatrooms, hosted on a particular chat server. USENET newsgroups are decentralized, kind of like mailing lists in that someone posts a message at one server and it propagates to all other servers that carry that newsgroup. There are roughly 70,000 newsgroups, so if an ISP fails to carry one, material will just be posted to another in its place. It's absolutely impossible to stamp out illicit material on USENET, whether a news provider censors groups based on name or not. For example, guess what the group alt.binaries.aoi carries? Pictures which are mostly by recognized artists and hence probably legal in much of the U.S., but which are probably illegal in some U.S. jurisdictions and elsewhere because, by artists or not, the pictures are of nude underage females. Now, how is your average news admin going to a) know what's posted to this group, and b) know whether the images are legal in his locale or not--as I said, they're of nude minors, so are illegal in some places, yet in others they're sold in Barnes and Noble. Personally my local B&N has books like this,David Hamilton's *Age of Innocence* and Jock Sturges' *Radiant Identities*, and Amazon.com sells them--yet, Jock Sturges had his prints confiscated at one point and there was an attempt to charge him with production of child porn, and Hamilton's work has been characterized as child porn in some Sun Belt states (much as the great German film "The Tin Drum" was declared child pornography in Oklahoma). So, how is a news admin supposed to know whether to censor the group? What if the server is located in a place where such images are legal, but has customers in places where the images are illicit?
The answer of course is that news admins shouldn't have to worry about it and should just censor nothing, being common carriers as they are. They aren't responsible for censoring illicit material, any more than the phone company is responsible for censoring people plotting crimes or seducing young boys/girls. It's just not their job, or their fault. If presented with a court order to trace a user who's posting illicit crap, fine. But to eliminate a newsgroup based on its name or part of its traffic--bullshit. This one case isn't telling. if the news provider had fought, I'm sure the Court would have recognized it as a common carrier not responsible for content.
Even in groups where more questionable, sometimes downright heinous, material is posted, there is still often a wonderful flow of constructive discussion. As an example, the group mentioned in this articleisn't actually called "Pedo University"--if you know anything about USENET, you know this isn't a proper name--is alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.pre-teen , and it's full of text discussions as well as binaries which I wouldn't ever risk downloading. But I have downloaded the text, as there's nothing illegal about that, and I've found the discussions to be amusing, entertaining, and sometimes even educational.
See, when you connect to a newsgroup, assuming your news server carries it, you retrive the header data for each article--subject line, line count, etc. Then you can choose which articles to download, based on that information. Now, I started writing a novel some time ago in which one of the characters frequents the electronic underground, and one of the places I went for research was the newsgroup alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.pre-teen, because it was well-publicized when the then-Attorney General of NY Dennis Vacco led a bust which included some of the people who posted binaries to that group. Some of those people were members of a fictional, cyberspace-only "club" called "Pedo University," which in reality is a bunch of people who post mostly text to one another in that newsgroup, interacting as the fictional faculty members of an imaginary girls' school. They have nicknames like "Dean Groucho" (who started the imaginary institution, and "hired" the other "faculty" members from among people who consistently post interesting text commentary for a substantial length of time), "Wildman, Professor of Genealogy," "Herod, Professor of Classical Studies," "Frank McCoy, Director, Family Counseling Office," "Dr. Stein, Dan of Anatomical Studies and Pre-Admission Physicals," "Godfather, U.S. Customs Liason," and "Pall Mall, Director of Psychotropic Plant Research." Ony 1 member of this P.U. group has ever been arrested for child pornography, as far as I know; I believe his handle was Pancho. Some members openly use their own names and such, as they aren't into illicit pictures at all--Frank McCoy, for example, writes stories about sex with young girls, which he's free to do under the First Amendment, and possesses/posts nothing ilegal, so uses his own name and says the police are welcome to drop by and look at his PC.
Now, I went to the newsgroup after the original Vacco bust--the guilty plea by this ISP is a result of this bust 2 years ago--to read text posts to try to learn how to write the character I had planned. Well, what I found was a vibrant group of very funny people with a running joke about being faculty members at an imaginary girls' school. From what I read, there's a lot of illegal binary material posted to the group, though I haven't seen any of it--text only, since I have no desire to be arrested and since I'm not sexually attracted to anyone under about 16 or so, like most heterosexual males. Some of the material posted even offends many members of PU--like a series of an 8 year old being raped by her father, who thankfully was arrested recently after censored pics of the girl were shown on *America's Most Wanted*. The members of PU all cheered when that guy was arrested, and rightfully so. It's just a bunch of people with an unfortunate sexual orientation and a damn fine sense of humor, not a bunch of child molesters, who post text on the group, not molest children. Though I came with the intention of reading text for a few weeks for character research, I liked the people and their humour so much that I still read the group and occasionally talk with the group's regulars.
So, how is the group, in and of itself, illegal? It isn't. Only some of the binaries are illegal; the text isn't. If you want to advocate that ISPs and news servers block binaries in these groups once the authorities give them the message IDs, fine. That puts the burden on law enforcement, where it belongs--and it's easy enough for a news admin to cancel/delete a message by mesage ID. But for law enforcement to try to block entire groups based on name and a portion of content puts an undue burden on both the ISP and free speech. For one thing, it's clearly prior restraint. Niow, an ISP has every right to voluntarily choose not to carry certain groups, and many do. Many others carry all groups, advocating free speech. To strong-arm them into erasing certain groups from their group files is unconstitutional prior restraint on speech, period. As I said, LEA should give news providers lists of illicit message IDs, if they want to censor USENET. That would be constitutional. But what they have done now, in this case, isn't, and I wish the ISP had had more backbone. We need to start fighting for our rights, not buckling under because it's the expediant thing to do. While the right to make-believe about an imaginary Pedo University may not be a right you like, it's still free speech, and shouldn't be put under prior restraint. The police are trammeling rights all over the place, unfairly jailing people like the now-cleared suspect in the Gallaudet murder case, publicly pointing the finger at innocent people like Richard Jewell, trying 10 year olds as adults to appease a lynch-mob-like public witchhunt spurred on by the ratings-whoring media, and murdering innocent civilians like at Ruby Ridge. We need to draw a line, and hold them accountable. We need to start saying, I may not like that, but it's a right and should not be abridged. I hope we all start dropping your own type of attitude, and cring about principles over shortsighted rhetoric.
Nothing personal, but that is roughly the worst reasoning I have ever heard. Just because one person decides to use the money he has gained through constitutionally shady means for a good purpose, does not make it right that he got that money in the first place. That's like saying, "Well, when that theif stole my car and sold it, he gave the money to the homeless, so it's okay." Umm, duh, it's not okay. It was *your* property, stolen, and just because the proceeds were given to a good cause doesn't make it right.
How does this relate directly to copyright law? People--big corporations and wealthy IP brokers--are *stealing* our property--our IP. Once copyright expires, the work becomes public domain--meaning it belongs to all of us, to the society and culture which inspired and nurtured it in the first place. So, people who extend copyright beyond constitutionally intended terms are *stealing* from our entire culture, from all of us. As a specific example, about six years ago the RIAA started demanding royalties from the Boy Scouts of America for singing popular campfire songs. These are songs which have been sung around the campfire for decades, some which my grandfather probably sung when he was a boy, which would have obviously been public domain and freely used if copyright had not been stretched and beaten into submission by organizations like the RIAA--and here, they were trying to extract royalty payments from the Boy Scouts! How much more evil and greedy can you get? Denying kids the opportunity to sing songs which had become part of our cultural heritage, unless they pay up. That is fucking disgusting, and attitudes like yours allow it to happen. You're well-meaning, but you lack understanding of the scope of this IP mess. Do you want everything ever written, sung, painted, or filmed to be copyrighted and forbidden to use and forbidden to become part of the public culture, until it's so old that it's too late for anyone to bother? Because, that's what we're in the process of doing. People are afraid to create things that are too closely inspired by works which may have been created fifty years ago, for fear of being sued for copyright infringement. Studios won't touch many things, and keep releasing tired retreads of movies they made forty years ago--and why not, it's still their IP, why innovate when you can just reach into the vault and mindlessly vomit something back up? The Boy Scouts and other ouh groups have to keep kids from singing copyrighted songs around the fire, or worry about paying royalties. That's sick. Our whole goddamned society is fucked up because of corporate greed like that.
> But even in the latter case, their sole purpose is to provide that sleazy sense of tactless
;-)
> production one comes to expect from all forms of adult entertainment.
I'm not going to defend animated GIFs here--they're annoying as hell, and on a dialup 56k like most people still are using, they're absolutely evil time-wasters. I recall once being SO annoyed that a page was taking so long to load, because the animated GIF banner at the top must have had thirty friggin frames...
But I just had to ask: what do you expect *other* than sleazy, tactless production in adult entertainment? Proper, tactful production? I can see it now, on PBS's Masterporn Theatre: "Oh, Madam Deepthroat, bring forth thy heaving bosoms of delight, that I might feel them up whilst thou tastest of my knightly schlong, bedewed with premature trickles of nectar as sweet as morning dew. Oh, how I have yearned to taste thy tuna steak of love, whilst you get it on with my handmaiden in some hot girl-girl action..."
Personally, I prefer the straightforward smut of a Dark Bros. or Max Hardcore production to the polished coldness of some silly Skinemax-wannabe soft stuff. But, I digress...
Don't be a fucking condescending idiot. Historically speaking, many of the greatest and most respectable coders have inserted backdoors for themselves in sensitive places, hidden "signatures" of some sort in their source code, and yes, kept copies of sensitive software for themselves. Hell, it doesn't even take a coder to ignore security--recall recent press over former FBI directors, Los Alamos nuclear lab techs, and other, bringing classified work home with them on unsecured media? So in conclusion, fuck you, condescending assmaster. Use common sense.
The studio told the director to change the line "I wanna have your abortion" after seeing the scene on dailies. Annoyed, they purposefully tried to come up with a line even more offensive to replace it. Needless to say, when hearing the replacement line I'm currently using as my sig, the studio stopped interfering. :-)
On a related note, word is the release of the Dogma: Special Edition DVD is being delayed indefinitely, even though it's been completed for months, because of assholio Disney execs. The film was produced by a Disney subsidiary company, but because of protests by Xtian Xtremists, Disney sold the film off to an unrelated studio. Well, Disney apparently still owns the rights to deleted scenes and some extra material produced during filming, and isn't allowing their use. Columbia Tristar is trying to negotiate with Disney to get the rights to the extra materials, but Disney is being a monumental bitch. Score another one for corporate oppresion and censorship. I'd like to drop that fucking Mickey Mouse into a cuisinart...
I had about 140something in karma when the kap went into place, so it gradually crept down since I speak my mind and make occasional jokes and sometimes people mod i down. But shortly after I was down to about 120, I submitted a story and it was accepted. I think you get a +3 for getting a story accepted. But since I was above 50, it reset my karma to the kapped level.