> If they don't like the copyright laws, > then get them changed to something more reasonable
Copyright doesn't matter to plagiarism. If someone published the Illiad (or even a fresh translation thereof) and claimed it as their own poem, they would be guilty of plagiarism even though the original work has always been out of copyright.
Bringing up copyright is just a red herring to obscure the real issues of her plagiarism. Any copyright infringement claims can be settled in court.
> Send him to Gitmo, then death penalty. No New York trials. He's a spy
But this is not a declared war. Soviet spies were not executed during the Cold War (except sometimes by the ordinary cons), they were given sentences of several decades, and sometimes traded for our agents that the Other Side had captured.
Anyway, if he is a spy, we should have turned him and fed disinformation to the Chinese, or chicken feed to set them up for a big whopper. The only reason to publicly arrest and imprison him is to prove the bona fides of some disinformation that he sent.
Oh, wait. Never mind. Ignore what I just said. We would never use a spy to send back the information that we wanted an adversary to believe. Everything that he stole and sent along is of the highest importance, and we will be reduced to slaves if the Chinese ever use it. Yeah, that's the ticket.
The problem with the House of Lords is that the vast majority of people have no idea as to the real work that they do.
Surely, that is the problem of "the vast majority of people" not the House Of Lords? That may have been the problem of the hereditary peers, in the sense that their poor PR job allowed Labor to do what it has wanted to since its founding.
Also, I doubt that Blair's actions increased the likelihood of bribery; the average income of Life peers was greater than that of hereditary peers, according to the reports that I read at the time. Increased the likelihood of Labor peers going along with their Common party's ideas, despite possible reservations, perhaps.
However because the chamber is unelected [...] people see it as undemocratic
It is undemocratic. That is not always a bad thing -- are people convicted by majority vote of representative samples, like they were in Socrates' Athens, or a unanimous vote of a small group? Counting warm bodies is not Vox Deii, pithy Latin sayings notwithstanding.
> The truth is that the duel at "high noon" is a myth perpetuated by spaghetti Westerns.
Odd, I remember seeing them in Hollywood Westerns from before the start of WWII, long before the first Spaghetti Western. They may even have occurred in the Silent Era, since many of the Hollywood tropes were invented then.
Spaghetti Westerns are those Westerns produced by European, usually Italian, film companies in the late 1950s and early 1960s (usually shooting in Central Spain, with a polyglot European cast and one or two American actors to make it easier to market in the USA). Blaming the duel on Spaghetti Westerns is like blaming Mel Brooks and Blazing Saddles for singing cowboys in fancy gear.
Also, I would be surprised if the duel at high noon wasn't actually invented by the dime novelists who were mythologizing the West even as it was occurring, or possibly by Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, which did the same thing.
> N00b. The seventies were the years of 8-bit computing. The eighties were the years of 16-bit: the holy PDP-11
Luser. The PDP-11, like the 10 and the DEC-20, were all from the 1970s. I used an *old* 11 running Unix V6 in 1979, and had spent the previous two years on 36 bit DEC-20s.
Now, OTOH, the 1980s (very early) was when anyone could afford their *own* PDP-11, as opposed to one owned by one's employer or college department. Well, anyone willing to buy a new computer rather than a new car.
> I wonder how trigger-happy the US Airforce might get if they stumbled across an SU-27 over US soil though
Not very. They might rent it for next year's Top Gun classes, or the Air Force equivalent, though. Assuming that they do not have their own, of course.
> The U.S. had no business interfering with a war that was basically an internal Euro matter.
Have you ever heard of the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zimmermann_Telegram/? Germany had no business interfering between Mexico and the USA, let alone picking the side that had just settled its own civil war (sort of) just a few years earlier to try to ally with.
BTW, look up a bit of Eighteenth and early Nineteenth Century history. We certainly "interfered" as much as we could, then.
> And since the French assisted your Revolutionary War against Britain, > you were right smack in the middle of one, used as a proxy.
Look at the terms under which it was settled. We used France as a proxy, screwed them by making a prior separate peace treaty with Great Britain, and congratulated ourselves very smugly for it. We may have been independent Americans, but our leaders were still part of the Eighteenth Century English culture.
Oh, and we were smack in the middle of the previous one (called the Seven Years War, in Europe), especially George Washington, who started it! OK, was one of the casus belli that got the French to attack despite losing one a bit over ten years previously. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Fort_Necessity/.
J. Michael Strasinsky (of Babylon 5 "fame") was supposedly working on something along this, with Ron Howard as executive producer (thus, enough money that it will not be *guaranteed* to be crap).
> Originally, robin Hood stole, but did it with style. > The whole protect the poor thing is probably a disney thing.
I have read several Robin Hood books from the early 19th Century and the "robs from the rich and gives to the poor" trope was firmly established then. Disney is not responsible for EVERY non-cynical idea in the world.
Personally, I just assumed that it was obvious, tactically, just as it was later obvious to Mao in the Little Red Book. If you pay back some of your take to help the "poor" or disenfranchised (aka peasantry, in Mao), they cover for you against those who only take (landlords or their agents)(even if you only pay a few pennies of the pounds that you take). This idea also occurred to the Medellin and Cali Cartels in Columbia.
> You must be new around here; my overlords will label you as low-risk, complacent, and obedient. job well done citizen
Well, wasn't that the WHOLE IDEA behind welcoming them in the first place? It would certainly be stupid to get them to label you as "potential troublemaker - not for promotion" whether you were or were not.
> Right in time for the Dubai economy to start tanking.
The Dubai economy already tanked (they are the "Arabs" without oil, just a good location between Arabia and India) months ago, and Abu Dhabi (Arabs WITH oil) bailed them out.
OTOH, the Empire State Building was finished in the depths of the Great Depression, and took decades to fill up. Again, the towers of the World Trade Center were finished after the US went into a recession, and took years to fill up (that is why Cantor Fitzgerald was able to get the top floors). This sort of thing happens in every downturn, since SOMEONE has to be last to start the biggest whatever and get caught when the economy tanks.
> Can someone please tell me the difference between "governments" > and "well-funded criminal organizations"?
In this context, the difference is that governments have never needed to decrypt GSM signals because they could compel the operators to do it for them (eg, CALEA in the USA) with just an order (sometimes with accompanying paperwork). Now, anyone can do it with a simple application of money, probably small enough that a single Hell's Angel chapter could afford it, if they start recruiting telecommunications professionals as they did lawyers.
A monopoly may have formed, but a monopoly was formed in 1934, it would have surely would have broken up before the 1980s had it been a truly natural monopoly. Changing technologies and the shortcomings of AT&T would have forced at least local competition in high-density metropolitan areas almost certainly.
AT&T was never a monopoly. Before it was broken up (and after) I was stuck on a little phone company that covered about a 20 mile diameter area, with equipment that was always about 20 years behind the state of the art. At 1200 baud, you could not read from a host in either of the local big cities (both on Bell PA) due to all the eighth note characters showing up due to line noise (IBM-PC as my machine, then). I often WISHED that AT&T *had* been a monopoly, as our service would have been much better. OTOH, when my scout troop visited the phone office, the obsolete electro-mechanical switches were much more interesting to watch than the modern digital one that handled the newest 20% of customers, just as a medieval tower clock is more interesting to look at than a quartz watch.
Also, you clearly don't understand the meaning of a natural monopoly. If it was a natural monopoly, then changing technologies would not have mattered much as the beneficial scaling effects would have swamped any company trying to compete, unless the state utility commission made rules that benefited the local competitors over AT&T (which is why my local company survived with its crappy equipment for so long).
NO GOD DAMNED GAME COMPANY SHOULD BE ABLE TO ACCESS YOUR FUCKING MEDICAL RECORDS TO FUCK WITH YOUR GAMING TO BEGIN WITH. (For ANY reason really.)
Even for a "game" created for your own exercise program, prescribed by a doctor to help you lose weight? Granted, I wouldn't want this added to my WoW avatar, but I can imagine sane reasons for the idea behind this patent. Imagine that this was built into a Nivenesque autodoc, for example, and it seems as reasonable as it accessing your medical profile to control the dosage of your anti-psychotics.
> Actually, only about 8% of Americans are of British Ancestry. They're far outnumbered by the Germans and Irish.
Only 8% describe themselves of British ancestry. Since most Americans didn't bother to limit their spouses to the same descent as they were, after a few generations it often stops mattering. For example, I am 3/4 German, and 1/4 Scotch-Irish (so called because none of them were Irish and almost none Scots, just Lowland Scottish, or English Borderers - in my case, Anglo-Welsh, mainly). If asked, I only bother listing German, even though, according to relatives into genealogy, I could also claim English royal and Roman Patrician descent.
> What exactly is the downside to forcing a company to give refunds for the broken merchandise that it sells?
Did Toyota give you a refund for the car when it had to recall its cars to fix something with the rug and the accelerator? No, it fixed (patched) the problem and sent you on your way.
Having a bug-fix patch available for free is like having a product recall. Requiring the consumer to pay an upgrade fee for XYZ 3.01 because XYZ 3.0 was totally crap would be quite different and deplorable, but it is also rare.
Slashdot Mirror
> If they don't like the copyright laws,
> then get them changed to something more reasonable
Copyright doesn't matter to plagiarism. If someone published the Illiad (or even a fresh translation thereof) and claimed it as their own poem, they would be guilty of plagiarism even though the original work has always been out of copyright.
Bringing up copyright is just a red herring to obscure the real issues of her plagiarism. Any copyright infringement claims can be settled in court.
> Send him to Gitmo, then death penalty. No New York trials. He's a spy
But this is not a declared war. Soviet spies were not executed during the Cold War (except sometimes by the ordinary cons), they were given sentences of several decades, and sometimes traded for our agents that the Other Side had captured.
Anyway, if he is a spy, we should have turned him and fed disinformation to the Chinese, or chicken feed to set them up for a big whopper. The only reason to publicly arrest and imprison him is to prove the bona fides of some disinformation that he sent.
Oh, wait. Never mind. Ignore what I just said. We would never use a spy to send back the information that we wanted an adversary to believe. Everything that he stole and sent along is of the highest importance, and we will be reduced to slaves if the Chinese ever use it. Yeah, that's the ticket.
Surely, that is the problem of "the vast majority of people" not the House Of Lords? That may have been the problem of the hereditary peers, in the sense that their poor PR job allowed Labor to do what it has wanted to since its founding.
Also, I doubt that Blair's actions increased the likelihood of bribery; the average income of Life peers was greater than that of hereditary peers, according to the reports that I read at the time. Increased the likelihood of Labor peers going along with their Common party's ideas, despite possible reservations, perhaps.
It is undemocratic. That is not always a bad thing -- are people convicted by majority vote of representative samples, like they were in Socrates' Athens, or a unanimous vote of a small group? Counting warm bodies is not Vox Deii, pithy Latin sayings notwithstanding.
> The truth is that the duel at "high noon" is a myth perpetuated by spaghetti Westerns.
Odd, I remember seeing them in Hollywood Westerns from before the start of WWII, long before the first Spaghetti Western. They may even have occurred in the Silent Era, since many of the Hollywood tropes were invented then.
Spaghetti Westerns are those Westerns produced by European, usually Italian, film companies in the late 1950s and early 1960s (usually shooting in Central Spain, with a polyglot European cast and one or two American actors to make it easier to market in the USA). Blaming the duel on Spaghetti Westerns is like blaming Mel Brooks and Blazing Saddles for singing cowboys in fancy gear.
Also, I would be surprised if the duel at high noon wasn't actually invented by the dime novelists who were mythologizing the West even as it was occurring, or possibly by Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, which did the same thing.
> N00b. The seventies were the years of 8-bit computing. The eighties were the years of 16-bit: the holy PDP-11
Luser. The PDP-11, like the 10 and the DEC-20, were all from the 1970s. I used an *old* 11 running Unix V6 in 1979, and had spent the previous two years on 36 bit DEC-20s.
Now, OTOH, the 1980s (very early) was when anyone could afford their *own* PDP-11, as opposed to one owned by one's employer or college department. Well, anyone willing to buy a new computer rather than a new car.
Why, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Rip/, of course.
> I wonder how trigger-happy the US Airforce might get if they stumbled across an SU-27 over US soil though
Not very. They might rent it for next year's Top Gun classes, or the Air Force equivalent, though. Assuming that they do not have their own, of course.
> The U.S. had no business interfering with a war that was basically an internal Euro matter.
Have you ever heard of the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zimmermann_Telegram/? Germany had no business interfering between Mexico and the USA, let alone picking the side that had just settled its own civil war (sort of) just a few years earlier to try to ally with.
BTW, look up a bit of Eighteenth and early Nineteenth Century history. We certainly "interfered" as much as we could, then.
> And since the French assisted your Revolutionary War against Britain,
> you were right smack in the middle of one, used as a proxy.
Look at the terms under which it was settled. We used France as a proxy, screwed them by making a prior separate peace treaty with Great Britain, and congratulated ourselves very smugly for it. We may have been independent Americans, but our leaders were still part of the Eighteenth Century English culture.
Oh, and we were smack in the middle of the previous one (called the Seven Years War, in Europe), especially George Washington, who started it! OK, was one of the casus belli that got the French to attack despite losing one a bit over ten years previously. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Fort_Necessity/.
>I'd like to see A Brave New World made into a serial.
It was. And unless you have no taste, you wouldn't "like to see" that. Same with The Martian Chronicles, before you ask.
> E.E. Smith's classic Lensman series?
J. Michael Strasinsky (of Babylon 5 "fame") was supposedly working on something along this, with Ron Howard as executive producer (thus, enough money that it will not be *guaranteed* to be crap).
> Originally, robin Hood stole, but did it with style.
> The whole protect the poor thing is probably a disney thing.
I have read several Robin Hood books from the early 19th Century and the "robs from the rich and gives to the poor" trope was firmly established then. Disney is not responsible for EVERY non-cynical idea in the world.
Personally, I just assumed that it was obvious, tactically, just as it was later obvious to Mao in the Little Red Book. If you pay back some of your take to help the "poor" or disenfranchised (aka peasantry, in Mao), they cover for you against those who only take (landlords or their agents)(even if you only pay a few pennies of the pounds that you take). This idea also occurred to the Medellin and Cali Cartels in Columbia.
> They say that every medium or larger sized company in China has a spy in it reporting to the government.
Only one?!? Someone clearly has been falling down on the job, over there.
A company for which I worked had four scientists from the PRC, and one of them was a narc.
> You must be new around here; my overlords will label you as low-risk, complacent, and obedient. job well done citizen
Well, wasn't that the WHOLE IDEA behind welcoming them in the first place? It would certainly be stupid to get them to label you as "potential troublemaker - not for promotion" whether you were or were not.
> So I say, build better deep buildings (holes), not tall towers of concrete (poles).
Thank you, Durin.
I keep telling the other players in my D&D group to build a delving, not a tower, but do they ever listen? NOOO!
(just keeping this News For Nerds, and not CNBC) (alas, that means no Erin Burnett, as well)
> Right in time for the Dubai economy to start tanking.
The Dubai economy already tanked (they are the "Arabs" without oil, just a good location between Arabia and India) months ago, and Abu Dhabi (Arabs WITH oil) bailed them out.
OTOH, the Empire State Building was finished in the depths of the Great Depression, and took decades to fill up. Again, the towers of the World Trade Center were finished after the US went into a recession, and took years to fill up (that is why Cantor Fitzgerald was able to get the top floors). This sort of thing happens in every downturn, since SOMEONE has to be last to start the biggest whatever and get caught when the economy tanks.
> There is no god, and Mohammed is his prophet.
Beware, for Odin will get you for that comment.
> Can someone please tell me the difference between "governments"
> and "well-funded criminal organizations"?
In this context, the difference is that governments have never needed to decrypt GSM signals because they could compel the operators to do it for them (eg, CALEA in the USA) with just an order (sometimes with accompanying paperwork). Now, anyone can do it with a simple application of money, probably small enough that a single Hell's Angel chapter could afford it, if they start recruiting telecommunications professionals as they did lawyers.
> "A wise (powerful?) man keeps his friends close and his enemies
> closer." I tried Machiavelli, and Sun Tzu but can't quite find it.
Try Mario Puzo. I am fairly sure that was in The Godfather (the book, I mean -- it was certainly in the movie).
AT&T was never a monopoly. Before it was broken up (and after) I was stuck on a little phone company that covered about a 20 mile diameter area, with equipment that was always about 20 years behind the state of the art. At 1200 baud, you could not read from a host in either of the local big cities (both on Bell PA) due to all the eighth note characters showing up due to line noise (IBM-PC as my machine, then). I often WISHED that AT&T *had* been a monopoly, as our service would have been much better. OTOH, when my scout troop visited the phone office, the obsolete electro-mechanical switches were much more interesting to watch than the modern digital one that handled the newest 20% of customers, just as a medieval tower clock is more interesting to look at than a quartz watch.
Also, you clearly don't understand the meaning of a natural monopoly. If it was a natural monopoly, then changing technologies would not have mattered much as the beneficial scaling effects would have swamped any company trying to compete, unless the state utility commission made rules that benefited the local competitors over AT&T (which is why my local company survived with its crappy equipment for so long).
Mod parent Insightful
(or plagiarist, since I read that in quite a number of reviews from the period, as well).
It was to the Chariot Race scene in Ben Hur, damn it. It's frigging OBVIOUS. (in the idiom of the review)
Even for a "game" created for your own exercise program, prescribed by a doctor to help you lose weight? Granted, I wouldn't want this added to my WoW avatar, but I can imagine sane reasons for the idea behind this patent. Imagine that this was built into a Nivenesque autodoc, for example, and it seems as reasonable as it accessing your medical profile to control the dosage of your anti-psychotics.
> Actually, only about 8% of Americans are of British Ancestry. They're far outnumbered by the Germans and Irish.
Only 8% describe themselves of British ancestry. Since most Americans didn't bother to limit their spouses to the same descent as they were, after a few generations it often stops mattering. For example, I am 3/4 German, and 1/4 Scotch-Irish (so called because none of them were Irish and almost none Scots, just Lowland Scottish, or English Borderers - in my case, Anglo-Welsh, mainly). If asked, I only bother listing German, even though, according to relatives into genealogy, I could also claim English royal and Roman Patrician descent.
> What exactly is the downside to forcing a company to give refunds for the broken merchandise that it sells?
Did Toyota give you a refund for the car when it had to recall its cars to fix something with the rug and the accelerator? No, it fixed (patched) the problem and sent you on your way.
Having a bug-fix patch available for free is like having a product recall. Requiring the consumer to pay an upgrade fee for XYZ 3.01 because XYZ 3.0 was totally crap would be quite different and deplorable, but it is also rare.