It should also be noted that this also includes all the music already licensed through the RIAA, because GEMA is the sole licensor for Germany. So "random boy band"'s own "protectors" have already agreed to a price which Google was willing to pay; only this sublicensor wants more than the RIAA gets. And insists on a per click, which is of course very cheatable. Not that I don't completely trust giant copyright associations on these things.
I had to seal my (unsigned) absentee ballot in a cover envelope and sign the cover envelope along the seal. Which prevents this particular fraud, but probably not all possible frauds This was in Republican-leaning Texas, by the way.
I have also not seen anything in this category. Certainly there are some articles that many parents might not like their children to see, but education and supervision is probably a better solution than any filter Wikipedia could manage to install. Of course, boys of a certain age are going to find it regardless of what the parents do.
Many think that it's the origin of the cyclops myth. The skulls of these mammoths (once thought elephants) have very small eye sockets and a giant trunk socket. One could easily imagine that it is the skull of a giant with one big eye.
They actually are blocking an awfully huge number of videos. Even home videos with low-quality background music are blocked. But sometimes something gets through -- especially if the user makes a real effort. GEMA wants Google to either (1) come up with a perfect filter or (2) pay far more to show the videos in Germany than they do in the U.S.
It should be made clear that GEMA represents basically all music labels in Germany. The money that the RIAA has already received for these videos is insufficient according to them. Google is being asked to essentially pay a second time for the songs, and pay more for Germany than they did for the U.S. At least as I understand it.
Cool. It doesn't seem to like the firewall here, though (or the firewall doesn't like it). But if gives me hope of being able to get the stupid thing to work, at least.
They've actually been doing this for a while, and it is hurting my search experience. I prefer to read content in English, but I live in Germany, which means that if I want to buy something online, I want to buy it from a German (or at least European) company to avoid having to go in to the customs office to pay taxes on everything I buy (and so as to receive the products in 1-3 days instead of 2-4 weeks).
I used to be able to achieve this very easily by using the German name for what I needed, and if that name was the same as the English term, adding "kaufen" (buy) to the search. But with the translation technology, that means that I get all the first results in English, wanting to sell me products out of the U.S.A. I haven't found a really good way around this. Admittedly, I could change the settings for what language I want every time I do such a search, but that is a lot of trouble for me. If there were an option to turn this behavior off, I would do so.
The problem is that there is a pot of all the money that they collect, and it is divided according to the popularity of the artist. If you buy a CD from a relatively obscure artist who is covered by GEMA, he is going to get a smaller fraction of the money, and some of the money from the CD you just bought will be going to the popular artists (whom you probably weren't intending to support).
The youtube thing is really frustrating, I keep hoping that Google will manage to come up with a deal, but apparently GEMA wants more money than the RIAA demanded to make it "legal" to stream those videos in Germany. I must admit, though, that GEMA does have its (rather small) upside: since they "represent" practically all the musicians in the world, you only have one place you need to go to pay royalties. I don't think that very much of the GEMA money gets to the artists, of course, probably less than with the RIAA.
I think that the horrors of autoraise can only be understood by someone who has used focus follows mouse (click to raise) for a while. At least on an X-based system, it is really heaven. I am constantly running things in multiple windows and overlapping, and it makes me very happy and productive. But I have had time to learn to work with it. I now have the problem that I am almost paralyzed when I have to use Windows on a small monitor (especially the versions with application grouping in the status bar). However, I do know that my feelings on this are not universal.
More and more, though, we have developers deciding that their opinions are universal. OpenOffice is the big offender in this in the Linux world. They decided at some point to override the window manager, forcing raising on focus, which makes it pretty much impossible to work with severe OOo windows open. I have not yet come up with a good alternative, though. So I am forced to minimize all the OOo windows to prevent them from blocking out what I'm actually trying to do. To be more on topic, I managed to use Gnome 3 for about a day and a half before I gave up and went to XFCE.
I was trying to avoid explaining the whole German system. In any case, almost the whole country has switched to a 12-year Gymnasium, so completing the same number of years in a German school does qualify for the university (assuming you pass the leaving exams).
The lists are interesting in that this year's list includes an item of required reading for my English classes (Brave New World), and last years includes a book that I required for English, even though it wasn't formally required by the government (To Kill a Mockingbird). [I'm teaching in Germany, where there are centralized exams to graduate from High School, so that everybody has to read at least some of the same books.]
I suppose that it is censorship in a certain way, since the libraries typically receive government monies; on the other hand, the publication and purchase of the books was in no way suppressed, so in that sense, censorship isn't exactly the right word here, as it would be, say, in Iran when the controversy over The Satanic Verses came out.
Yep. I had shell access, usenet and FTP from io.com once upon a time. I only had a 386 so didn't try to set up SLIP with them. They literally required you to buy an O'Reilly (or similar) book on SLIP from them in order to sign up for the service. If you could prove that you already owned the book, they would refund a certain portion of the sign-up fee.
I really think that a lot of the problem is that both sides are missing the distinction between science and philosophy. The "evolutionist" side for acting like they can scientifically prove the non-existence of God (this is actually just a hypothesis that exists under their scientific activities) and the "creationist" people for wanting to teach their philosophy (that there is a creative intelligence behind the universe) as science.
As scientists, both sides should really be doing the same thing -- the "evolutionist" side is looking for the mechanisms that drive evolution and for the intermediate types in the fossil record, while the "creationists" should be looking for the mechanism by which the Creator did his work. There's no reason that they have to be at each other's throats, really.
That said, it might be useful to have a couple of days at the beginning of the chapter on evolution where both philosophies are presented, thus calming fears of both sides that their views are not being taught. The actual scientific content should try to avoid (as is generally done in textbooks) any bias toward either of the philosophies.
This argument only works for "intelligent design" type creationists. The "Young Earthers" and the like might be mentioned in the introduction, but then no further attention should be paid to them in science class, because they are simply not doing science.
I could even see allowing additional extensions beyond the first, but the cost of these should increase exponentially. If Disney is convinced that derivatives of Steamboat Willie are going to drive them into the ground, they can pay an ever-increasing fee to protect it. Something like first renewal costs $10,000 (or more), second is $20,000, third is $40,000 and so on. At a certain point, even Disney would be moved to let things slip into the public domain... The reason for the high renewal fee is that if the work isn't generating serious income, there is no point in renewing the copyright, and if the work is that valuable, the public has a vested interest in getting it into the public domain
I just used some Babylon 5 for my English class (I have all boys, so showing soap operas, as the German government would have me do, was really out of the question). From the first season, there are really only one or two episodes that really add to the plot, and one of those would be more noticed in retrospect, once things start happening. Seasons 3-4 are the best part of the series, where the story takes place, and the actors have more or less gelled into their roles. (Season 5 was a bounce back from being cancelled, so that they had crammed most of the story into Season 4, and as a result seems to drag a lot.)
Well, if she ends up not being found innocent, then she doesn't have a criminal record. If the police have to be "beyond a shadow of a doubt" before they can arrest somebody, the justice system might as well not exist. And a reasonable suspicion exists here -- the woman just received a hugely expensive ring from a man who wasn't exactly rich. It is reasonable for the police to think that she might have known that the ring was stolen.
Around here we've had the German police threaten to bodily carry American HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATES to a German high school because they had had the temerity to get a high school degree before the legal age of being able to stop going to school in Germany. (They were 16, IIRC.)
On the other hand, I'm pretty O.K. with this. It is in society's interest that the kids go to school (whether they learn anything or not), and if they refuse to do this (breaking the laws for mandatory education), they can be sent to alternative education or carry the device. If they choose alternative education and fail to attend, they go to juvenile hall. Nowhere are the kid's rights being infringed that I can see.
Hmm... In 1989 I got to Graduate School, where I had email, telnet, gopher and news. After leaving school, around 1993 or so, I had a dialup account with Steve Jackson games with the same sort of all-text access (presumably I could have used lynx, but I didn't really know about the WWW at that point). Would that I had kept an email address at io.com! They were offering home SLIP connections, but they cost more than I was willing to pay (and needed a more able computer than I had at the moment). If you ordered a SLIP connection, you were required to buy a reference book from them, as you were expected to troubleshoot yourself.
This is almost exactly the idea that I had had a couple of years ago on Slashdot (not copyrighted). I think I suggested doubling the rate at each step, but the principle is the same. If Disney is really convinced that the entire conglomerate is going to go under if somebody samples "Steamboat Willie" in a commercial, then they can pay to prevent it. Most stuff would arrive in the public domain pretty rapidly, and the things that stayed in private hands would be available to the public, as someone would be actively promoting it.
The periods should probably be scaled according to the medium somewhat -- protection for a computer program could actually be much shorter than for a book or movie. As it is, PacMan has another 65 years of protection or so
By the logic of most of the people posting here, if I publish a book and anyone chooses not to stock it in their store, I can claim censorship and take them to court. What if my book isn't any good? What if I'm trying to get my commentary on the Gospels into the Atheist book store? What if...
The right of the stores to sell the material that they deem appropriate is sacrosanct. Otherwise, all the bookstores are going to go down by being forced to keep lots of books in stock that they may sell once every 10 years. Is it "censorship" that WalMart refuses to carry graduate-level Mathematics texts? No, it's simple business. For better or worse, WalMart has determined that it is in their interests to provide only products that meet with a certain set of moral norms. This is primarily a business decision -- they presume that if they are selling CDs that parents will not approve of, the parents will not allow children to shop there, thus cutting their revenue.
Apple has to have the ability to decide what they sell, otherwise, by the Slashdot "all censorship is wrong" mentality, they would be forced to carry child pornography - Nazi - Holocaust denial - Terrorism howto software, and then be shut down by the government. And the decision of what they choose to sell or not sell must rest with the company, otherwise we can't hold the company responsible for what they sell.
It is another thing if the government steps in and says that a particular piece of software cannot be sold anywhere. That's why we have a special name for this practice. The common usage of "censorship" to apply to anyone who chooses not to distribute material for any reason, cited in the parent post, essentially makes the term useless. We need to expand our vocabulary. WalMart doesn't "censor" artists, but rather "bowdlerizes" them.
The Wizard of Oz: contrast between the sepia tones in Kansas with the Technicolor of Oz. A major plot point.
Schindler's List: by coloring only the little girl's coat in the scene of Jews being rounded up, the filmmakers sought to increase the emotional attachment to the people being killed.
But as an adjective, meaning #2 of "moot" in the link you so kindly provided is "deprived of practical significance: made abstract or purely academic". One could argue that your parent was using this meaning.
Strictly speaking, the Vatican didn't claim Copyright or Trademark, but ownership of the names and images.
I think that the point of this is connected with Catholic schools and churches taking names like "Pope John Paul the Great", before Pope John Paul II is even declared a saint, much less having stood the test of time to earn the title "Great". Or organizations that oppose the Catholic Church, but claim the patronage of a pope, like the hypothetical "Blessed John XXIII Society for the Abolition of Liturgy". They are just instructing the bishops to be careful what permissions they give. I doubt this declaration will have any effect at all outside of the Catholic Church.
Slashdot Mirror
It should also be noted that this also includes all the music already licensed through the RIAA, because GEMA is the sole licensor for Germany. So "random boy band"'s own "protectors" have already agreed to a price which Google was willing to pay; only this sublicensor wants more than the RIAA gets. And insists on a per click, which is of course very cheatable. Not that I don't completely trust giant copyright associations on these things.
I had to seal my (unsigned) absentee ballot in a cover envelope and sign the cover envelope along the seal. Which prevents this particular fraud, but probably not all possible frauds This was in Republican-leaning Texas, by the way.
I have also not seen anything in this category. Certainly there are some articles that many parents might not like their children to see, but education and supervision is probably a better solution than any filter Wikipedia could manage to install. Of course, boys of a certain age are going to find it regardless of what the parents do.
Many think that it's the origin of the cyclops myth. The skulls of these mammoths (once thought elephants) have very small eye sockets and a giant trunk socket. One could easily imagine that it is the skull of a giant with one big eye.
They actually are blocking an awfully huge number of videos. Even home videos with low-quality background music are blocked. But sometimes something gets through -- especially if the user makes a real effort. GEMA wants Google to either (1) come up with a perfect filter or (2) pay far more to show the videos in Germany than they do in the U.S. It should be made clear that GEMA represents basically all music labels in Germany. The money that the RIAA has already received for these videos is insufficient according to them. Google is being asked to essentially pay a second time for the songs, and pay more for Germany than they did for the U.S. At least as I understand it.
Cool. It doesn't seem to like the firewall here, though (or the firewall doesn't like it). But if gives me hope of being able to get the stupid thing to work, at least.
They've actually been doing this for a while, and it is hurting my search experience. I prefer to read content in English, but I live in Germany, which means that if I want to buy something online, I want to buy it from a German (or at least European) company to avoid having to go in to the customs office to pay taxes on everything I buy (and so as to receive the products in 1-3 days instead of 2-4 weeks).
I used to be able to achieve this very easily by using the German name for what I needed, and if that name was the same as the English term, adding "kaufen" (buy) to the search. But with the translation technology, that means that I get all the first results in English, wanting to sell me products out of the U.S.A. I haven't found a really good way around this. Admittedly, I could change the settings for what language I want every time I do such a search, but that is a lot of trouble for me. If there were an option to turn this behavior off, I would do so.
The problem is that there is a pot of all the money that they collect, and it is divided according to the popularity of the artist. If you buy a CD from a relatively obscure artist who is covered by GEMA, he is going to get a smaller fraction of the money, and some of the money from the CD you just bought will be going to the popular artists (whom you probably weren't intending to support).
The youtube thing is really frustrating, I keep hoping that Google will manage to come up with a deal, but apparently GEMA wants more money than the RIAA demanded to make it "legal" to stream those videos in Germany. I must admit, though, that GEMA does have its (rather small) upside: since they "represent" practically all the musicians in the world, you only have one place you need to go to pay royalties. I don't think that very much of the GEMA money gets to the artists, of course, probably less than with the RIAA.
I think that the horrors of autoraise can only be understood by someone who has used focus follows mouse (click to raise) for a while. At least on an X-based system, it is really heaven. I am constantly running things in multiple windows and overlapping, and it makes me very happy and productive. But I have had time to learn to work with it. I now have the problem that I am almost paralyzed when I have to use Windows on a small monitor (especially the versions with application grouping in the status bar). However, I do know that my feelings on this are not universal.
More and more, though, we have developers deciding that their opinions are universal. OpenOffice is the big offender in this in the Linux world. They decided at some point to override the window manager, forcing raising on focus, which makes it pretty much impossible to work with severe OOo windows open. I have not yet come up with a good alternative, though. So I am forced to minimize all the OOo windows to prevent them from blocking out what I'm actually trying to do. To be more on topic, I managed to use Gnome 3 for about a day and a half before I gave up and went to XFCE.
I was trying to avoid explaining the whole German system. In any case, almost the whole country has switched to a 12-year Gymnasium, so completing the same number of years in a German school does qualify for the university (assuming you pass the leaving exams).
The lists are interesting in that this year's list includes an item of required reading for my English classes (Brave New World), and last years includes a book that I required for English, even though it wasn't formally required by the government (To Kill a Mockingbird). [I'm teaching in Germany, where there are centralized exams to graduate from High School, so that everybody has to read at least some of the same books.]
I suppose that it is censorship in a certain way, since the libraries typically receive government monies; on the other hand, the publication and purchase of the books was in no way suppressed, so in that sense, censorship isn't exactly the right word here, as it would be, say, in Iran when the controversy over The Satanic Verses came out.
Yep. I had shell access, usenet and FTP from io.com once upon a time. I only had a 386 so didn't try to set up SLIP with them. They literally required you to buy an O'Reilly (or similar) book on SLIP from them in order to sign up for the service. If you could prove that you already owned the book, they would refund a certain portion of the sign-up fee.
I really think that a lot of the problem is that both sides are missing the distinction between science and philosophy. The "evolutionist" side for acting like they can scientifically prove the non-existence of God (this is actually just a hypothesis that exists under their scientific activities) and the "creationist" people for wanting to teach their philosophy (that there is a creative intelligence behind the universe) as science.
As scientists, both sides should really be doing the same thing -- the "evolutionist" side is looking for the mechanisms that drive evolution and for the intermediate types in the fossil record, while the "creationists" should be looking for the mechanism by which the Creator did his work. There's no reason that they have to be at each other's throats, really.
That said, it might be useful to have a couple of days at the beginning of the chapter on evolution where both philosophies are presented, thus calming fears of both sides that their views are not being taught. The actual scientific content should try to avoid (as is generally done in textbooks) any bias toward either of the philosophies.
This argument only works for "intelligent design" type creationists. The "Young Earthers" and the like might be mentioned in the introduction, but then no further attention should be paid to them in science class, because they are simply not doing science.
I could even see allowing additional extensions beyond the first, but the cost of these should increase exponentially. If Disney is convinced that derivatives of Steamboat Willie are going to drive them into the ground, they can pay an ever-increasing fee to protect it. Something like first renewal costs $10,000 (or more), second is $20,000, third is $40,000 and so on. At a certain point, even Disney would be moved to let things slip into the public domain... The reason for the high renewal fee is that if the work isn't generating serious income, there is no point in renewing the copyright, and if the work is that valuable, the public has a vested interest in getting it into the public domain
I just used some Babylon 5 for my English class (I have all boys, so showing soap operas, as the German government would have me do, was really out of the question). From the first season, there are really only one or two episodes that really add to the plot, and one of those would be more noticed in retrospect, once things start happening. Seasons 3-4 are the best part of the series, where the story takes place, and the actors have more or less gelled into their roles. (Season 5 was a bounce back from being cancelled, so that they had crammed most of the story into Season 4, and as a result seems to drag a lot.)
Despite the preview, I messed that one up: s/innocent/guilty/ .
Well, if she ends up not being found innocent, then she doesn't have a criminal record. If the police have to be "beyond a shadow of a doubt" before they can arrest somebody, the justice system might as well not exist. And a reasonable suspicion exists here -- the woman just received a hugely expensive ring from a man who wasn't exactly rich. It is reasonable for the police to think that she might have known that the ring was stolen.
Around here we've had the German police threaten to bodily carry American HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATES to a German high school because they had had the temerity to get a high school degree before the legal age of being able to stop going to school in Germany. (They were 16, IIRC.)
On the other hand, I'm pretty O.K. with this. It is in society's interest that the kids go to school (whether they learn anything or not), and if they refuse to do this (breaking the laws for mandatory education), they can be sent to alternative education or carry the device. If they choose alternative education and fail to attend, they go to juvenile hall. Nowhere are the kid's rights being infringed that I can see.
Hmm... In 1989 I got to Graduate School, where I had email, telnet, gopher and news. After leaving school, around 1993 or so, I had a dialup account with Steve Jackson games with the same sort of all-text access (presumably I could have used lynx, but I didn't really know about the WWW at that point). Would that I had kept an email address at io.com! They were offering home SLIP connections, but they cost more than I was willing to pay (and needed a more able computer than I had at the moment). If you ordered a SLIP connection, you were required to buy a reference book from them, as you were expected to troubleshoot yourself.
This is almost exactly the idea that I had had a couple of years ago on Slashdot (not copyrighted). I think I suggested doubling the rate at each step, but the principle is the same. If Disney is really convinced that the entire conglomerate is going to go under if somebody samples "Steamboat Willie" in a commercial, then they can pay to prevent it. Most stuff would arrive in the public domain pretty rapidly, and the things that stayed in private hands would be available to the public, as someone would be actively promoting it.
The periods should probably be scaled according to the medium somewhat -- protection for a computer program could actually be much shorter than for a book or movie. As it is, PacMan has another 65 years of protection or so
By the logic of most of the people posting here, if I publish a book and anyone chooses not to stock it in their store, I can claim censorship and take them to court. What if my book isn't any good? What if I'm trying to get my commentary on the Gospels into the Atheist book store? What if...
The right of the stores to sell the material that they deem appropriate is sacrosanct. Otherwise, all the bookstores are going to go down by being forced to keep lots of books in stock that they may sell once every 10 years. Is it "censorship" that WalMart refuses to carry graduate-level Mathematics texts? No, it's simple business. For better or worse, WalMart has determined that it is in their interests to provide only products that meet with a certain set of moral norms. This is primarily a business decision -- they presume that if they are selling CDs that parents will not approve of, the parents will not allow children to shop there, thus cutting their revenue.
Apple has to have the ability to decide what they sell, otherwise, by the Slashdot "all censorship is wrong" mentality, they would be forced to carry child pornography - Nazi - Holocaust denial - Terrorism howto software, and then be shut down by the government. And the decision of what they choose to sell or not sell must rest with the company, otherwise we can't hold the company responsible for what they sell.
It is another thing if the government steps in and says that a particular piece of software cannot be sold anywhere. That's why we have a special name for this practice. The common usage of "censorship" to apply to anyone who chooses not to distribute material for any reason, cited in the parent post, essentially makes the term useless. We need to expand our vocabulary. WalMart doesn't "censor" artists, but rather "bowdlerizes" them.
The Wizard of Oz: contrast between the sepia tones in Kansas with the Technicolor of Oz. A major plot point.
Schindler's List: by coloring only the little girl's coat in the scene of Jews being rounded up, the filmmakers sought to increase the emotional attachment to the people being killed.
But as an adjective, meaning #2 of "moot" in the link you so kindly provided is "deprived of practical significance: made abstract or purely academic". One could argue that your parent was using this meaning.
Strictly speaking, the Vatican didn't claim Copyright or Trademark, but ownership of the names and images.
I think that the point of this is connected with Catholic schools and churches taking names like "Pope John Paul the Great", before Pope John Paul II is even declared a saint, much less having stood the test of time to earn the title "Great". Or organizations that oppose the Catholic Church, but claim the patronage of a pope, like the hypothetical "Blessed John XXIII Society for the Abolition of Liturgy". They are just instructing the bishops to be careful what permissions they give. I doubt this declaration will have any effect at all outside of the Catholic Church.