I looked a bit closer at r-blo's other submission that was accepted. It's the MS-vs-TIVO article on Engadget. The curious thing is that it's written by a Thomas Hawk. That name sounded familiar to me.... So I looked at his user record on Slashdot.
Turns out Thomas Hawk submitted two stories last Thursday. Both accepted. One is a review of the Windows Media Player and the other is the article that originally got me suspicious about Advertorial Content on Slashdot. It's the Mark Cuban fluff piece that looks like paid placement to boost Cuban's image as a tech guru. Thomas Hawk writes in his introduction to that slashdot posting--
Mark Cuban, owner of the Mavericks, HDNET, blogger extraordinaire and all around tech visionary really, really gets it.
The submitter of this story, r-blo, has never posted any messages, but has submitted two stories-- both of which were accepted. My guess is that the sidekick PR dept. bought this story placement from Slashdot and this account has been created for the supposed submission of the placed advertorial...
The other story r-blo submitted was probably paid for by Tivo's pr department.
Granted you aren't very familiar with Star Trek, nor am I. But, your post reminded me of something that will pose a unique challenge to this game---
Obviously, as you make more cash, you should be able to get better ships
In ST:Next Generation, there are a few episodes where they talk about how human society has developed in tandem with technology to the point that resources are no longer a problem. As a result, there isn't a place for money or wealth as a motivation for human characters in the series. I wonder if the game could be similarly inspired such that players aren't trying to simply horde dubloons or whatever.
the reason they give that definition of overclocking is because the PR people who made this press release...
Just curious, but did you notice that the description of overclocking was part of the submitter's description of the story? Supposedly this isn't a press release. But looking back at the history for the submitter, keeleysam, it looks like the account is less than 2 weeks old. Perhaps created simply as a dummy by slashdot in order to post this paid-placement advertorial.
On the topic of Alienware, I think they are selling a worthy product. There is a niche of gamers / users who want a tweaked machine, but don't have the time or technical prowess to do it themselves. Alienware is targetting that demand quite well.
Look at the moderation of my critique of Mark Cuban. I'm modded as 'flamebait'. How in the F?!? I had noticed the recurring Mark Cuban articles, and thought perhaps they are paid placements. But the moderation is very suspicious.
I think he is trying to boost his tech-guru image with these media placements.
This is modded flamebait? Who am I flaming? Mark Cuban? Are there a lot of Mark Cuban fanboys I'm offending with my criticism here? This is ridiculous.
I agree, my original post was a bit terse. I was trying to get out of the office and not go on a complete, in-depth rant about Mark Cuban.
Mark Cuban is one of those dangerous business people that gets it enough to make other people who don't get it think he's REALLY got it. The latter are people like the goofs at Circuit City's corporate office who thought they would be able to launch the DiVX format. The people that conceived of the DiVX scheme were of the Mark Cuban variety. These are people who can draw up a concept that looks great on paper and in boardroom presentations, but it's got no legs on the street.
Hard drives as a medium are not an elegant solution for the distribution of digital content. In addition to asking people to pony-up the deposit for the hard drive they'll ferry back and forth to the video store, you're also going to ask people to purchase a special player that provides playback, and perhaps some storage capability. He's trying to address the current pinch he (and the people in his tax bracket with 62" HD plasma tv sets) feel for storing HD content. So this concept won't really be addressing a pinch felt widely by consumers until HDTV sets are more widespread. When will that be? I'd say we're still five or more years off from HDTV becoming commonplace.
And here's where the hard drive medium idea becomes a deer in the headlights. If you have to wait five years to get this thing off the ground, you're looking at competing with FTTH (fiber to the home). A much more elegant solution for transferring huge amounts of digital content.
So please don't tell me that Mark Cuban's a few steps ahead of me. He's stuck in the 'trip to the video store' world which really won't exist after FTTH becomes commonplace.
There isn't much difference between Mark Cuban and the folks that started CueCat and the eYeOpener. The big difference is that he cashed out before the market proved his idea (broadcast.com) was weak while those other guys just sank with their ships.
He's getting a lot of attention because he was able to persuade a bunch of dumb investors that broadcast.com was going to make oodles of cash. That doesn't seem to have panned out, but he got out from under that failure before it was recognized as such.
He's full of crap. In this article he's talking about how Hard Drives are a better content distribution medium than optical discs. Uhhh... I guess when you're a billionaire you forget to check into the per-unit costs of things after a while.
Hard drives are far more efficient and more capable of storing future content than HD-DVD or Blu-ray
..in china they dont have much choice in what the government determines for them.
I think there comes a point in resource management when things can get to a state of emergency. Under such a scenario, it might just be in the peoples' best interest for the government to step in and take charge of things. Democracy is a luxury the people of China just can't afford.
With our addiction to oil and inability to convince people not to sprawl their communities and drive SUV's, I'm not sure how long into the future we'll be able to afford democracy, either.
...you can look at the logs on your SMTP server, figure out the infected customer, and take appropriate action.
It seems like ISPs are incredibly hesitant to behave this way. Maybe spam is different than other abusive network traffic, but I still haven't seen any ISPs do anything about their users' worm-infected machines attempting to propogate the infection to every other machine on the network. When I say, 'maybe spam is different,' I mean that maybe it is more of a pinch point for them and they'll take action on their users' compromised boxes.
As for detection, they can see the traffic at the router, so they can already easily identify which customers have sick computers.
I read the article. The article never mentions parody. The posting on Slashdot misleadingly refers to parody. The article provides a quote from the Best Brains guy saying it's about the name. Most of the discussion here is on the parody issue, and that's what I was responding to.
The original post is flawed. No where in the article does there mention a defense of parody. It's assumed by the/. submitter.
I agree with you. The Top Gun sendup is hilarious. Also love their Terminator show and Britney Spears' Crossroads.
I am pretty certain this case will focus on the name issue and consumer confusion. That will be difficult. As for their act being damn near identical, I don't think you're being accurate here. They have different jokes, different characters, and different movies. They admit inspiration from the tv show, but that's not a trademark or copyright violation any more than Carrot Top can sue other prop comics who produce weird objects from a trunk and have people laugh.
Think about how many instances in the video game world where there are 'rip-offs' of successful concepts. There are countless imitations of the Space Invaders and Pac Man concepts. How about Phoenix and then later Pliedes? To violate intellectual property laws, you have to do more than lift a concept. A judge wants to see letter-for-letter, note-for-note copying of content. That's not present in the Mr. Sinus performance.
Thanks for the highlighting. I skimmed that page too quickly and only noted the aspects that mentioned public use of recorded music.
In any event, I do not expect the Best Brains folks to win this on the grounds that the Mr. Sinus performance is stealing material from Mystery Science Theater 3000. The jokes are 100% original and the characters are different (humans, not robots). They admit an inspiration from the TV show, but any audience member would agree that it's a completely original work seperate from the TV show. For this, I think they are safe.
The name unquestionably could cause consumer confusion. They will have a hard time defending this and will likely have to change their name again.
Ok, so I'm at a concert and a bunch of fools are shouting "Freebird!" The band on stage laughs and indulges the drunks with a few chords from freebird. Does Skynard get paid for this?
Check ASCAP's website. Their licensing only applies to the playing of actual recordings in public.
By your rationale, Tony Hawk can sue any skateboarder who performs a trick that is identical to his.
Live performances are free from copyrights / trademarks. You have no further to look than all the schlocky tribute bands that perform Beatles, Judas Priest, and Black Sabbath covers. No licensing / royaltees are required for live performances.
Michael Jackson is in serious debt right now. If there were a possibility that he could sue anyone who did the moonwalk, he'd have whole different set of lawyers aimed on this front.
You are correct. It is a difficult issue. In the case you're referring to, the lower court ruled against the freedom to publish the doctors' addresses because the publication had a correlation to the deaths of three doctors who had been listed. If it turns out that RNC delegates are injured or killed, I would agree that their private contact info seems to have been misused.
But that's the trick with the first ammendment. Prior restraint of speech has continually been ruled down by the courts. We have to let things take their course, then hold someone responsible after a bit of speech has been connected to some kind of crime.
If the public interest is served by the publication of these names and addresses, then they should be published.The first ammendment does not mention that for speech to be protected it must serve the public interest. Look no further than the rantings of the KKK to see that protected speech can include collections of words that do not serve the public interest.
Just to be fair here, it doesn't look like Sen. Kennedy is the only senator who wasn't too keen on this bill. It failed to pass with 8 yeas and 90 nays. Point fingers at Kerry and Kennedy all you want, but please don't stop pointing them at the other 88 senators who voted this bill down.
Additionally, the bill you are referencing, Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, is described by Thomas as
"A bill to prohibit civil liability actions from being brought or continued against manufacturers, distributors, dealers, or importers of firearms or ammunition for damages resulting from the misuse of their products by others. "
I'm not sure what bill you are referring to when you say This bill would have essentially given the Attorney General the power to ban any ammunition that was capable of penetrating police soft body armor. It doesn't seem to be this one that you've attributed the Kennedy quote to and that a near unanimous number of senators opposed.
You didn't misunderstand as much as I was vague in my condemnation of the strong pro-gun lobby.
I do think guns are fine. I don't think the legislative threat to private gun ownership is as great as the NRA and the GOP would have you believe, however. The NRA has a vested interest in promoting the concern that the liberals are trying to take our guns away. It's job security for them. The GOP leverages this misconception because polls show that for a large group of people, their votes are based on this issue alone. Just like abortion defines so many other peoples' voting patterns.
Because so many people in America feel so strongly about gun ownership, we will have guns available in plentiful quantities for many generations to come. Here's how you can tell this: The main proponents of anti-gun legislation are cops and victims of gun crimes. Both these groups together are far outnumbered by gun enthusiasts. Count how many people you see at pro-2nd ammendment demonstrations and then count how many people are at anti-gun protests. The former dwarfs the latter by a lot.
Now and again you'll see gun-limiting legislation proposed. In most cases, this is an effort to capitalize politically on some tragedy that occurred somewhere or the politicians floating it are trying to get the endorsement of the police unions. That endorsement allows them to claim they're 'tough on crime.'
I do have to disagree with your recommendation that citizens own fully automatic rifles. In the rare instances where we have people go berzerk and shoot up an elementary school, or their workplaces, or just random strangers, one of the things that limits the amount of violence is the rate at which bullets can be fired. I do think it would be very fun to shoot a fully automatic weapon, but if it means that a nut shooting into a crowd can kill 30 people rather than 17, I think it's worth it to not enjoy the experience as a private citizen. In all the well-publicized shooting cases I can think of, the killers were law-abiding citizens prior to the killings, btw.
The government and media in America has its citizens whipped up into a frothful and delirious state of constant fear. Fear of terrorists. Fear of different ethnicities. Fear of liberals.
A gun is an equalizer for those who feel powerless. A gun makes them feel as though they have power in an environment where they are frightened.
The NRA manipulates their fears for political and financial gain by promoting the notion that there is a campaign afoot to take their guns away. The NRA is the great protector of Americans' only safety blanket.
There are many lessons for Americans to learn from Afghanistan and Iraq. Among these is this: Allowing each household to own a fully automatic AK-47 does not seem to have created an orderly or peaceful society.
Slashdot Mirror
I looked a bit closer at r-blo's other submission that was accepted. It's the MS-vs-TIVO article on Engadget. The curious thing is that it's written by a Thomas Hawk. That name sounded familiar to me.... So I looked at his user record on Slashdot.
Turns out Thomas Hawk submitted two stories last Thursday. Both accepted. One is a review of the Windows Media Player and the other is the article that originally got me suspicious about Advertorial Content on Slashdot. It's the Mark Cuban fluff piece that looks like paid placement to boost Cuban's image as a tech guru. Thomas Hawk writes in his introduction to that slashdot posting--
Mark Cuban, owner of the Mavericks, HDNET, blogger extraordinaire and all around tech visionary really, really gets it.
And when I wrote this post questioning Mark Cuban's predictions, it was modded down as 'flamebait'... oh, well. I guess slashdot has to pay the bills somehow.
The submitter of this story, r-blo, has never posted any messages, but has submitted two stories-- both of which were accepted. My guess is that the sidekick PR dept. bought this story placement from Slashdot and this account has been created for the supposed submission of the placed advertorial...
The other story r-blo submitted was probably paid for by Tivo's pr department.
They _should_ be lauded for not being scumbags.
I take care of my children!
I haven't ever been to jail!
What do you want? A cookie?!? That's what you're supposed to do!
Granted you aren't very familiar with Star Trek, nor am I. But, your post reminded me of something that will pose a unique challenge to this game---
Obviously, as you make more cash, you should be able to get better ships
In ST:Next Generation, there are a few episodes where they talk about how human society has developed in tandem with technology to the point that resources are no longer a problem. As a result, there isn't a place for money or wealth as a motivation for human characters in the series. I wonder if the game could be similarly inspired such that players aren't trying to simply horde dubloons or whatever.
the reason they give that definition of overclocking is because the PR people who made this press release...
Just curious, but did you notice that the description of overclocking was part of the submitter's description of the story? Supposedly this isn't a press release. But looking back at the history for the submitter, keeleysam, it looks like the account is less than 2 weeks old. Perhaps created simply as a dummy by slashdot in order to post this paid-placement advertorial.
On the topic of Alienware, I think they are selling a worthy product. There is a niche of gamers / users who want a tweaked machine, but don't have the time or technical prowess to do it themselves. Alienware is targetting that demand quite well.
Look at the moderation of my critique of Mark Cuban. I'm modded as 'flamebait'. How in the F?!? I had noticed the recurring Mark Cuban articles, and thought perhaps they are paid placements. But the moderation is very suspicious.
I think he is trying to boost his tech-guru image with these media placements.
FPS is technical jargon for 'First Posts Sent'.
Would you accept 'luggable'?
This is modded flamebait? Who am I flaming? Mark Cuban? Are there a lot of Mark Cuban fanboys I'm offending with my criticism here? This is ridiculous.
I agree, my original post was a bit terse. I was trying to get out of the office and not go on a complete, in-depth rant about Mark Cuban.
Mark Cuban is one of those dangerous business people that gets it enough to make other people who don't get it think he's REALLY got it. The latter are people like the goofs at Circuit City's corporate office who thought they would be able to launch the DiVX format. The people that conceived of the DiVX scheme were of the Mark Cuban variety. These are people who can draw up a concept that looks great on paper and in boardroom presentations, but it's got no legs on the street.
Hard drives as a medium are not an elegant solution for the distribution of digital content. In addition to asking people to pony-up the deposit for the hard drive they'll ferry back and forth to the video store, you're also going to ask people to purchase a special player that provides playback, and perhaps some storage capability. He's trying to address the current pinch he (and the people in his tax bracket with 62" HD plasma tv sets) feel for storing HD content. So this concept won't really be addressing a pinch felt widely by consumers until HDTV sets are more widespread. When will that be? I'd say we're still five or more years off from HDTV becoming commonplace.
And here's where the hard drive medium idea becomes a deer in the headlights. If you have to wait five years to get this thing off the ground, you're looking at competing with FTTH (fiber to the home). A much more elegant solution for transferring huge amounts of digital content.
So please don't tell me that Mark Cuban's a few steps ahead of me. He's stuck in the 'trip to the video store' world which really won't exist after FTTH becomes commonplace.
There isn't much difference between Mark Cuban and the folks that started CueCat and the eYeOpener. The big difference is that he cashed out before the market proved his idea (broadcast.com) was weak while those other guys just sank with their ships.
He's getting a lot of attention because he was able to persuade a bunch of dumb investors that broadcast.com was going to make oodles of cash. That doesn't seem to have panned out, but he got out from under that failure before it was recognized as such.
He's full of crap. In this article he's talking about how Hard Drives are a better content distribution medium than optical discs. Uhhh... I guess when you're a billionaire you forget to check into the per-unit costs of things after a while.
Hard drives are far more efficient and more capable of storing future content than HD-DVD or Blu-ray
I think there comes a point in resource management when things can get to a state of emergency. Under such a scenario, it might just be in the peoples' best interest for the government to step in and take charge of things. Democracy is a luxury the people of China just can't afford.
With our addiction to oil and inability to convince people not to sprawl their communities and drive SUV's, I'm not sure how long into the future we'll be able to afford democracy, either.
It seems like ISPs are incredibly hesitant to behave this way. Maybe spam is different than other abusive network traffic, but I still haven't seen any ISPs do anything about their users' worm-infected machines attempting to propogate the infection to every other machine on the network. When I say, 'maybe spam is different,' I mean that maybe it is more of a pinch point for them and they'll take action on their users' compromised boxes.
As for detection, they can see the traffic at the router, so they can already easily identify which customers have sick computers.
seth{a}mk120.mine.nu
thanks!
I read the article. The article never mentions parody. The posting on Slashdot misleadingly refers to parody. The article provides a quote from the Best Brains guy saying it's about the name. Most of the discussion here is on the parody issue, and that's what I was responding to.
The original post is flawed. No where in the article does there mention a defense of parody. It's assumed by the
I agree with you. The Top Gun sendup is hilarious. Also love their Terminator show and Britney Spears' Crossroads.
I am pretty certain this case will focus on the name issue and consumer confusion. That will be difficult. As for their act being damn near identical, I don't think you're being accurate here. They have different jokes, different characters, and different movies. They admit inspiration from the tv show, but that's not a trademark or copyright violation any more than Carrot Top can sue other prop comics who produce weird objects from a trunk and have people laugh.
Think about how many instances in the video game world where there are 'rip-offs' of successful concepts. There are countless imitations of the Space Invaders and Pac Man concepts. How about Phoenix and then later Pliedes? To violate intellectual property laws, you have to do more than lift a concept. A judge wants to see letter-for-letter, note-for-note copying of content. That's not present in the Mr. Sinus performance.
Thanks for the highlighting. I skimmed that page too quickly and only noted the aspects that mentioned public use of recorded music.
In any event, I do not expect the Best Brains folks to win this on the grounds that the Mr. Sinus performance is stealing material from Mystery Science Theater 3000. The jokes are 100% original and the characters are different (humans, not robots). They admit an inspiration from the TV show, but any audience member would agree that it's a completely original work seperate from the TV show. For this, I think they are safe.
The name unquestionably could cause consumer confusion. They will have a hard time defending this and will likely have to change their name again.
Ok, so I'm at a concert and a bunch of fools are shouting "Freebird!" The band on stage laughs and indulges the drunks with a few chords from freebird. Does Skynard get paid for this?
Check ASCAP's website. Their licensing only applies to the playing of actual recordings in public.
By your rationale, Tony Hawk can sue any skateboarder who performs a trick that is identical to his.
Live performances are free from copyrights / trademarks. You have no further to look than all the schlocky tribute bands that perform Beatles, Judas Priest, and Black Sabbath covers. No licensing / royaltees are required for live performances.
Michael Jackson is in serious debt right now. If there were a possibility that he could sue anyone who did the moonwalk, he'd have whole different set of lawyers aimed on this front.
It seems that slashdotter bryanp advocates private ownership of fully automatic weapons. This discussion has become totally non-linear, so please understand I was responding to that sentiment.
That is hilarious. I've never heard of a case where someone is sued for plagarizing themselves. Thanks for posting this text.
You are correct. It is a difficult issue. In the case you're referring to, the lower court ruled against the freedom to publish the doctors' addresses because the publication had a correlation to the deaths of three doctors who had been listed. If it turns out that RNC delegates are injured or killed, I would agree that their private contact info seems to have been misused.
But that's the trick with the first ammendment. Prior restraint of speech has continually been ruled down by the courts. We have to let things take their course, then hold someone responsible after a bit of speech has been connected to some kind of crime.
If the public interest is served by the publication of these names and addresses, then they should be published.The first ammendment does not mention that for speech to be protected it must serve the public interest. Look no further than the rantings of the KKK to see that protected speech can include collections of words that do not serve the public interest.
Just to be fair here, it doesn't look like Sen. Kennedy is the only senator who wasn't too keen on this bill. It failed to pass with 8 yeas and 90 nays. Point fingers at Kerry and Kennedy all you want, but please don't stop pointing them at the other 88 senators who voted this bill down.
Additionally, the bill you are referencing, Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, is described by Thomas as I'm not sure what bill you are referring to when you say This bill would have essentially given the Attorney General the power to ban any ammunition that was capable of penetrating police soft body armor. It doesn't seem to be this one that you've attributed the Kennedy quote to and that a near unanimous number of senators opposed.
You didn't misunderstand as much as I was vague in my condemnation of the strong pro-gun lobby.
I do think guns are fine. I don't think the legislative threat to private gun ownership is as great as the NRA and the GOP would have you believe, however. The NRA has a vested interest in promoting the concern that the liberals are trying to take our guns away. It's job security for them. The GOP leverages this misconception because polls show that for a large group of people, their votes are based on this issue alone. Just like abortion defines so many other peoples' voting patterns.
Because so many people in America feel so strongly about gun ownership, we will have guns available in plentiful quantities for many generations to come. Here's how you can tell this: The main proponents of anti-gun legislation are cops and victims of gun crimes. Both these groups together are far outnumbered by gun enthusiasts. Count how many people you see at pro-2nd ammendment demonstrations and then count how many people are at anti-gun protests. The former dwarfs the latter by a lot.
Now and again you'll see gun-limiting legislation proposed. In most cases, this is an effort to capitalize politically on some tragedy that occurred somewhere or the politicians floating it are trying to get the endorsement of the police unions. That endorsement allows them to claim they're 'tough on crime.'
I do have to disagree with your recommendation that citizens own fully automatic rifles. In the rare instances where we have people go berzerk and shoot up an elementary school, or their workplaces, or just random strangers, one of the things that limits the amount of violence is the rate at which bullets can be fired. I do think it would be very fun to shoot a fully automatic weapon, but if it means that a nut shooting into a crowd can kill 30 people rather than 17, I think it's worth it to not enjoy the experience as a private citizen. In all the well-publicized shooting cases I can think of, the killers were law-abiding citizens prior to the killings, btw.
And that word is: FEAR.
The government and media in America has its citizens whipped up into a frothful and delirious state of constant fear. Fear of terrorists. Fear of different ethnicities. Fear of liberals.
A gun is an equalizer for those who feel powerless. A gun makes them feel as though they have power in an environment where they are frightened.
The NRA manipulates their fears for political and financial gain by promoting the notion that there is a campaign afoot to take their guns away. The NRA is the great protector of Americans' only safety blanket.
There are many lessons for Americans to learn from Afghanistan and Iraq. Among these is this: Allowing each household to own a fully automatic AK-47 does not seem to have created an orderly or peaceful society.