Lets get that amendment passed where no state can get more than 1.05 of the value they put in back (in money/grants or in investment).
Yeaaah... except that doesn't work with certain types of national-level projects (not that we've done any in a while). Or do you think the Interstate Highways shouldn't actually connect the coasts to each other?
That depends... are the showings over-saturated in those areas? All it takes for near-empty theaters for some showings is for there to be near-identical times at a good theater and a shitty theater in the same area, and enough showings that you can just wait for the next showing at the good theater.
It's interesting that Hollywood finally managed to translate a manga into a half decent live action movie. I can't think of a single one that wasn't terrible before.
1. Wakanda is not real (and for that matter, very different from the real Africa).
OMG! You mean there isn't really a country in the middle of Africa with cloaking technology and magical super-metal that can do almost anything you can imagine? I had no idea that it was all a lie! FAKE NEWS! FAKE NEWS!
2. Africa needs real help. Not from us, but from their own hard work.
... not sure if racist troll... in fact, not really sure WTF is meant here...
In America, neither the Democrat nor Republican parties are left-wing. Democrats are only considered such in comparison to Republicans; they're really much more centrist than anything else.
Because trademark law offers no "fair use" provisions, which means that a company has to aggressively hunt down anybody who uses their trademarked characters or risk losing the trademarks altogether.
Absolutely false, and people need to stop repeating this crap. First off, US law definitely has "fair use" protections on trademark usage, such as those related to 1st Amendment protections. Secondly, you cannot ever lose a trademark just because someone else uses it and you don't sue them. To be blunt, there are only two ways to lose a trademark: (1) Non-use; and (2) dilution (i.e. becoming generic).
Someone else using your mark without permission theoretically could be considered contributory evidence that you've abandoned your mark, but that's also going to require a lot more evidence (basically, extensive non-use, typically meaning your company doesn't do anything with the mark for 5+ years).
The other risk (dilution/becoming generic) is not a concern for something like "Harry Potter" - this applies to a term becoming used to describe everything in a category. Examples include Kleenex being used to describe all facial tissues, or Google being used as a verb to describe all web searches ("why don't you just google it?").
As for protecting their rights, it is not necessary for a trademark owner to take enforcement action against all infringement if it can be shown that the owner perceived the infringement to be minor and inconsequential. This is why it's actually suggested that trademark holders ignore small uses - because not only is it not worth paying a lawyer to send a C&D, nor the bad publicity, but that it sets a precedent that you are aware of their existence and considered events of that size to be of consequence (i.e. fighting small festivals makes you more likely to lose your trademark).
If they allow a festival of a certain size to use their trademarks, the another slightly bigger one will want to do the same, then a bigger one, and I think you are smart enough to know where this is going.
That more and more people are going to be buying Harry Potter merchandise, and getting more and more of a fan fervor worked up for their upcoming series of movies? Oh dear, how horrible for them!
This actually beings up one of the other fair use provisions that trademarks are bound by: positive identification usage. You cannot use trademark to sue someone for using your trademark to correctly identify your product. It's the same reason why McDonald's can use Burger King's trademark in commercials where they compare their burgers to the other company's. It's the same reason stores can advertise what they're selling without having to get permission from the manufacturers. So, if you want to advertise a "Harry Potter Festival" there is no legal standing to sue you if you are indeed having a festival centered around official Harry Potter products.
Executives fuck their secretaries all the time. You don't really think all those beauty queen secretaries are hired for their ability to perform the tasks outlined in their job description, do you?
Most of the time, yes they are. The secretaries/assistants for someone at the CEO level of a large company are paid very well, and people who are paid very well have the money to dress and groom themselves very well. There's a reason most CEOs also look amazing - it's because money brings confidence and the ability to dress well, and those are two of the biggest factors in other people's assessments of attractiveness.
Yes, there are scumbags who hire their secretaries based on their looks and/or to fuck them, but they are the exception and not the rule.
He is CEO of the company. He has oversight over every single employee. There is no way for there to be a “consensual” relationship in this case unless his sexual partner also founded the company with him.
This thinking is just plain naive. If the underling is the one who pursues the CEO, not the other way around, how is the CEO forcing him/herself on the other? If the underling instigates a sexual encounter of their own volition it may be considered bad judgment for the CEO to go along with it, but there's no way you can claim that the one instigating the encounter is not consenting.
Yes and no. There is a lot of weird politics that happens if there's an in-office relationship. You want to call the moron a moron, but you can't because he's dating your boss,
This one actually happened to me. Told someone he was fucking worthless at his job, to his face... the day before my manager quit and got replaced by the moron's wife. I went from having nothing in my discipline file at the company, to having an inch thick stack of paperwork for why I should be fired in under a month.
That being said, I think that any strict policy against dating in the workplace is a bad idea. Half the people I know met their S.O.'s at work, and as other posters have said, peoples' personal lives are personal and none of The Company's fucking business. Also, the idea that just because you have a policy against it in place that people will suddenly stop falling for their co-workers is ludicrous. People like who they like, and fall in love with who the fall in love with, and often consider their love life more important than their careers.
You just need to make sure there's safeguards in place to deal with the situation when (not if) co-workers start dating.
Waiters in restaurants aren't being automated, people working fast food or CVS aren't waiters
I am talking about actual waiters. Applebee's and Red Robin are two of the restaurants that come to mind - it used to be fully waitstaff that took your order/checked on you/brought your check/etc. Now it's a tablet at your table (complete with video games for only $2.99 per play!) that you use to do all that. Your waiter/waitress only shows up if you go too long without ordering (to explain how to use the tablet), if you summon them (through the tablet), and to bring your food. This lets management cut about 20-40% of the waitstaff requirements for the same number of customers.
there is no tax on those investments unless you have an income tax.
So, you've never heard of capital gains tax then?
Two problems here: (1) Capital gains tax is a type of income tax, so if there's no income tax, there's no capital gains tax. (2) Capital gains tax only applies when money is withdrawn from an investment, and even that has ways around it (such as in the US with the estate tax exemptions, which allows 100% capital gains tax avoidance in an estimated 99.8% of cases).
What type of magical "automation" is coming that is going to massively replace jobs? People keep talking about "automation", but is there some magic technology coming that is going to automate out waiters and lawyers and doctors and trash collectors?
Not paying attention, are you? Waiters and trash collectors are already losing jobs to automation. It's not a 100% replacement, but automation is cutting the numbers of workers in those (and many other) industries down.
Just look at checkout lines at stores - most of the ones around here have less manned lanes open because they're pushing the "self checkout" lanes - which are automated with video and weight sensors - which let a single employee run 4-12 "lanes" at a time. Even your examples of waiters and trash collectors suffer from this: Several national restaurant chains are moving to have a tablet-like device on the tables from which you can place orders and pay your bill. Doing this reduces the time waiters need to spend at your table, and results in more tables served with less employees. In the last 20 years, most garbage trucks have moved to a system where a driver uses a robotic arm to pick up and dump trash cans. Compare this to how it used to be, with 3-4 workers riding the truck with the driver to do the job that one robot arm does now.
If you can run something in a way that makes money, instead being a black-hole for tax revenue, and at the same time provide similar or adequate service why wouldn't you?
Except that's precisely what USPS is doing. Compare their service and pricing to FedEx or UPS - the USPS outdoes them 70%+ of the time, with 0% of their budget coming from tax revenue, and they're consistently turning a profit.
Your whole "capitalism is always good, socialism and communism is always bad" mentality is fucking toxic and leads to horrible markets. Simply put, some industries are best run by capitalism, but others are best run under socialist or communist policies. Others (such as mail and package delivery) are best run by a combination of the above (capitalism and socialism in this case).
Any push for everything to be run under a single one of those philosophies is a disaster - different industries work better or worse under different ideals, and the government should be flexible enough to consider which is best with what.
It would be nice if we could get some fundamental reform that would relieve us of income taxes (Sales or VAT instead) and put the brakes on debt issuance.
The reason there's both income tax and sales/VAT is because sales tax the poor more heavily than the rich. You only pay sales tax on what you buy - and the poor are spending nearly 100% of their paychecks each month. Compare that with the rich, who spend very little of their paychecks and invest the rest - there is no tax on those investments unless you have an income tax.
Wealth inequality is bad enough as it is. Switching to only sales/VAT will make that problem even worse. If you want to be more fair, switching it the other way is the better way to go: Higher income tax, and the removal of sales tax, will fight income inequality. Of course, there are other reasons for sales tax to exist (tourism spending, for example), but those would take a lot more evaluation to see if the costs/benefits make it worthwhile, or truly add anything to the system.
"Many graphic novels definitely contain long and complex storylines - often moreso than many mainstream novels on the bestseller lists"
Yeah, right, and oddly they manage to get it done in about 1/20th the amount of prose. I suppose you could be kind and called them abridged.
Once again, showing your ignorance of the medium. A very large amount of a prose novel is tied up in descriptions of visuals, or elements that are redundant to the pictures in the medium (such as the words "said", "shouting", etc.), as well as white space around shorter paragraphs. A more realistic estimate taking this into account is that comics are only getting about 1/4 the information across in the same space. Couple this with the average graphic novel page being twice the size, but with the same average font size, and you'll realistically only be talking about 1/2 the amount of information per page. If you want to make some kind of asinine argument about information contained in the work, it'd be more realistic to say it's more akin to a novella than a novel.
Of course, that ends up with you basically saying the longer a book is, the more important it is, and content be damned. (But, considering your "arguments" up to this point, I wouldn't be surprised if that was truly a criteria you believed mattered.)
No, they're not "graphic novels", a novel implies a substantial, long and complex storyline, not small amounts of simplistic text in speech bubbles in something 20 pages long about characters in silly custumes with their underpants on the outside.
If you think that's what they all are, you're pretty damn ignorant. Many graphic novels definitely contain long and complex storylines - often moreso than many mainstream novels on the bestseller lists. Compare V for Vendetta's depth to that of Twilight. Or Sandman to 50 Shades of Grey.
There are many, many very good, very complex and substantial works consisting of "text in speech bubbles". Some of them even are about "characters in silly costumes with their underpants on the outside" and still manage to say a lot (such as Watchmen or Kingdom Come).
I'll still take it over VLC any day. MPC has a good, clean interface and all the relevant features. It's simple to use and works great. VLC is a bit of a mess, and is not as fast or intuitive to use.
Slashdot Mirror
Lets get that amendment passed where no state can get more than 1.05 of the value they put in back (in money/grants or in investment).
Yeaaah... except that doesn't work with certain types of national-level projects (not that we've done any in a while). Or do you think the Interstate Highways shouldn't actually connect the coasts to each other?
So, i'll leave it to you... are you a fucking idiot, or a fucking liar?
Why pick only one?
Now picture Homer Simpson watching that soccer game: "A tie? Everyone's a loser".
You will be surprised when Trump declares complete victory then.
I don't think anyone will be surprised when he does.
The real question is why did our president just have a Twitter fight with a dead man?
Because he thought he'd finally be able to win an argument with him.
He was wrong.
That depends ... are the showings over-saturated in those areas? All it takes for near-empty theaters for some showings is for there to be near-identical times at a good theater and a shitty theater in the same area, and enough showings that you can just wait for the next showing at the good theater.
It's interesting that Hollywood finally managed to translate a manga into a half decent live action movie. I can't think of a single one that wasn't terrible before.
Edge of Tomorrow?
1. Wakanda is not real (and for that matter, very different from the real Africa).
OMG! You mean there isn't really a country in the middle of Africa with cloaking technology and magical super-metal that can do almost anything you can imagine? I had no idea that it was all a lie! FAKE NEWS! FAKE NEWS!
2. Africa needs real help. Not from us, but from their own hard work.
... not sure if racist troll ... in fact, not really sure WTF is meant here...
I hear that /. is going to remove user comments soon....
At which point, will it have any real reason to exist?
I thought Clinton was supposed to be left-wing.
In America, neither the Democrat nor Republican parties are left-wing. Democrats are only considered such in comparison to Republicans; they're really much more centrist than anything else.
Because trademark law offers no "fair use" provisions, which means that a company has to aggressively hunt down anybody who uses their trademarked characters or risk losing the trademarks altogether.
Absolutely false, and people need to stop repeating this crap. First off, US law definitely has "fair use" protections on trademark usage, such as those related to 1st Amendment protections. Secondly, you cannot ever lose a trademark just because someone else uses it and you don't sue them. To be blunt, there are only two ways to lose a trademark: (1) Non-use; and (2) dilution (i.e. becoming generic).
Someone else using your mark without permission theoretically could be considered contributory evidence that you've abandoned your mark, but that's also going to require a lot more evidence (basically, extensive non-use, typically meaning your company doesn't do anything with the mark for 5+ years).
The other risk (dilution/becoming generic) is not a concern for something like "Harry Potter" - this applies to a term becoming used to describe everything in a category. Examples include Kleenex being used to describe all facial tissues, or Google being used as a verb to describe all web searches ("why don't you just google it?").
As for protecting their rights, it is not necessary for a trademark owner to take enforcement action against all infringement if it can be shown that the owner perceived the infringement to be minor and inconsequential. This is why it's actually suggested that trademark holders ignore small uses - because not only is it not worth paying a lawyer to send a C&D, nor the bad publicity, but that it sets a precedent that you are aware of their existence and considered events of that size to be of consequence (i.e. fighting small festivals makes you more likely to lose your trademark).
If they allow a festival of a certain size to use their trademarks, the another slightly bigger one will want to do the same, then a bigger one, and I think you are smart enough to know where this is going.
That more and more people are going to be buying Harry Potter merchandise, and getting more and more of a fan fervor worked up for their upcoming series of movies? Oh dear, how horrible for them!
This actually beings up one of the other fair use provisions that trademarks are bound by: positive identification usage. You cannot use trademark to sue someone for using your trademark to correctly identify your product. It's the same reason why McDonald's can use Burger King's trademark in commercials where they compare their burgers to the other company's. It's the same reason stores can advertise what they're selling without having to get permission from the manufacturers. So, if you want to advertise a "Harry Potter Festival" there is no legal standing to sue you if you are indeed having a festival centered around official Harry Potter products.
Executives fuck their secretaries all the time. You don't really think all those beauty queen secretaries are hired for their ability to perform the tasks outlined in their job description, do you?
Most of the time, yes they are. The secretaries/assistants for someone at the CEO level of a large company are paid very well, and people who are paid very well have the money to dress and groom themselves very well. There's a reason most CEOs also look amazing - it's because money brings confidence and the ability to dress well, and those are two of the biggest factors in other people's assessments of attractiveness.
Yes, there are scumbags who hire their secretaries based on their looks and/or to fuck them, but they are the exception and not the rule.
He is CEO of the company. He has oversight over every single employee. There is no way for there to be a “consensual” relationship in this case unless his sexual partner also founded the company with him.
This thinking is just plain naive. If the underling is the one who pursues the CEO, not the other way around, how is the CEO forcing him/herself on the other? If the underling instigates a sexual encounter of their own volition it may be considered bad judgment for the CEO to go along with it, but there's no way you can claim that the one instigating the encounter is not consenting.
Yes and no. There is a lot of weird politics that happens if there's an in-office relationship. You want to call the moron a moron, but you can't because he's dating your boss,
This one actually happened to me. Told someone he was fucking worthless at his job, to his face ... the day before my manager quit and got replaced by the moron's wife. I went from having nothing in my discipline file at the company, to having an inch thick stack of paperwork for why I should be fired in under a month.
That being said, I think that any strict policy against dating in the workplace is a bad idea. Half the people I know met their S.O.'s at work, and as other posters have said, peoples' personal lives are personal and none of The Company's fucking business. Also, the idea that just because you have a policy against it in place that people will suddenly stop falling for their co-workers is ludicrous. People like who they like, and fall in love with who the fall in love with, and often consider their love life more important than their careers.
You just need to make sure there's safeguards in place to deal with the situation when (not if) co-workers start dating.
Waiters in restaurants aren't being automated, people working fast food or CVS aren't waiters
I am talking about actual waiters. Applebee's and Red Robin are two of the restaurants that come to mind - it used to be fully waitstaff that took your order/checked on you/brought your check/etc. Now it's a tablet at your table (complete with video games for only $2.99 per play!) that you use to do all that. Your waiter/waitress only shows up if you go too long without ordering (to explain how to use the tablet), if you summon them (through the tablet), and to bring your food. This lets management cut about 20-40% of the waitstaff requirements for the same number of customers.
there is no tax on those investments unless you have an income tax.
So, you've never heard of capital gains tax then?
Two problems here: (1) Capital gains tax is a type of income tax, so if there's no income tax, there's no capital gains tax. (2) Capital gains tax only applies when money is withdrawn from an investment, and even that has ways around it (such as in the US with the estate tax exemptions, which allows 100% capital gains tax avoidance in an estimated 99.8% of cases).
What type of magical "automation" is coming that is going to massively replace jobs? People keep talking about "automation", but is there some magic technology coming that is going to automate out waiters and lawyers and doctors and trash collectors?
Not paying attention, are you? Waiters and trash collectors are already losing jobs to automation. It's not a 100% replacement, but automation is cutting the numbers of workers in those (and many other) industries down.
Just look at checkout lines at stores - most of the ones around here have less manned lanes open because they're pushing the "self checkout" lanes - which are automated with video and weight sensors - which let a single employee run 4-12 "lanes" at a time. Even your examples of waiters and trash collectors suffer from this: Several national restaurant chains are moving to have a tablet-like device on the tables from which you can place orders and pay your bill. Doing this reduces the time waiters need to spend at your table, and results in more tables served with less employees. In the last 20 years, most garbage trucks have moved to a system where a driver uses a robotic arm to pick up and dump trash cans. Compare this to how it used to be, with 3-4 workers riding the truck with the driver to do the job that one robot arm does now.
If you can run something in a way that makes money, instead being a black-hole for tax revenue, and at the same time provide similar or adequate service why wouldn't you?
Except that's precisely what USPS is doing. Compare their service and pricing to FedEx or UPS - the USPS outdoes them 70%+ of the time, with 0% of their budget coming from tax revenue, and they're consistently turning a profit.
Your whole "capitalism is always good, socialism and communism is always bad" mentality is fucking toxic and leads to horrible markets. Simply put, some industries are best run by capitalism, but others are best run under socialist or communist policies. Others (such as mail and package delivery) are best run by a combination of the above (capitalism and socialism in this case).
Any push for everything to be run under a single one of those philosophies is a disaster - different industries work better or worse under different ideals, and the government should be flexible enough to consider which is best with what.
It would be nice if we could get some fundamental reform that would relieve us of income taxes (Sales or VAT instead) and put the brakes on debt issuance.
The reason there's both income tax and sales/VAT is because sales tax the poor more heavily than the rich. You only pay sales tax on what you buy - and the poor are spending nearly 100% of their paychecks each month. Compare that with the rich, who spend very little of their paychecks and invest the rest - there is no tax on those investments unless you have an income tax.
Wealth inequality is bad enough as it is. Switching to only sales/VAT will make that problem even worse. If you want to be more fair, switching it the other way is the better way to go: Higher income tax, and the removal of sales tax, will fight income inequality. Of course, there are other reasons for sales tax to exist (tourism spending, for example), but those would take a lot more evaluation to see if the costs/benefits make it worthwhile, or truly add anything to the system.
In japan manga comics almost always display borderline pre-teen girls in sexy outfits. Hardly the sign of a heathly hobby.
Just because those are the only ones you read, doesn't mean they're the only ones that exist.
"Many graphic novels definitely contain long and complex storylines - often moreso than many mainstream novels on the bestseller lists"
Yeah, right, and oddly they manage to get it done in about 1/20th the amount of prose. I suppose you could be kind and called them abridged.
Once again, showing your ignorance of the medium. A very large amount of a prose novel is tied up in descriptions of visuals, or elements that are redundant to the pictures in the medium (such as the words "said", "shouting", etc.), as well as white space around shorter paragraphs. A more realistic estimate taking this into account is that comics are only getting about 1/4 the information across in the same space. Couple this with the average graphic novel page being twice the size, but with the same average font size, and you'll realistically only be talking about 1/2 the amount of information per page. If you want to make some kind of asinine argument about information contained in the work, it'd be more realistic to say it's more akin to a novella than a novel.
Of course, that ends up with you basically saying the longer a book is, the more important it is, and content be damned. (But, considering your "arguments" up to this point, I wouldn't be surprised if that was truly a criteria you believed mattered.)
No, they're not "graphic novels", a novel implies a substantial, long and complex storyline, not small amounts of simplistic text in speech bubbles in something 20 pages long about characters in silly custumes with their underpants on the outside.
If you think that's what they all are, you're pretty damn ignorant. Many graphic novels definitely contain long and complex storylines - often moreso than many mainstream novels on the bestseller lists. Compare V for Vendetta's depth to that of Twilight. Or Sandman to 50 Shades of Grey.
There are many, many very good, very complex and substantial works consisting of "text in speech bubbles". Some of them even are about "characters in silly costumes with their underpants on the outside" and still manage to say a lot (such as Watchmen or Kingdom Come).
No, good ones used it, too. Typically, they used it with advanced AI that can tell real people from paper, though.
60's scifi writers?
Where do I sign up?
I'll still take it over VLC any day. MPC has a good, clean interface and all the relevant features. It's simple to use and works great. VLC is a bit of a mess, and is not as fast or intuitive to use.
MPC all the way.