Gee, I hope Germany follows with plates commemorating gas chambers and crematoriums. Or what about a plate depicting people burning in the Dresden and Tokyo fire bombings? People with limbs shot off by guns or blown off by landmines? People dying of secondary nuclear effects? Maybe some black slaves whipped bloody.
I think that's the stuff we should remember, the innocent people who suffered and died horrible deaths so we could have minivans, wall to wall carpeting, and a corporate-run government to build roads for us to drive around with cartoon pictures of nuclear blasts. Kaboom!
You're right! A license plate commemorating trolls would be a great idea!
No he wouldn't. Its trademarks that you have to defend or lose. All Lucas has to do is not sue the film makers in question, but that doesn't mean that Star Wars goes into the public domain.
Yes - you're right. What I meant, and should have said, is that Lucas would be granting an implied license to all fans to use his copyrighted materials in any way they wished. And this would make things very blurry for him legally, down the road.
When Weird Al is making a parody of a song (like "Amish Paradise"), he doesn't have to pay royalties.
When Weird Al is using a tune to write a song about something else entirely (like "The Saga Begins"), he has to pay royalties and get permissions.
"The Saga Begins" for example isn't a parody of "American Pie", it's a song about Star Wars using the melody from "American Pie". Consequently, he has to pay royalties. Make sense?
Parodies are legally protected speech (subject to a few tweaks, etc.). That's why Spaceballs or Weird Al's "Amish Paradise" don't require the payment of royalties, and don't require the original creator's permission. So all Lucas is doing with regard to parodies is acknowledging that there's nothing he can do about them, and saying that he enjoys watching them and so will assist in their circulation.
Documentaries don't really use copyrighted materials - the story they're telling is not about Luke Skywalker, it's about Lucasfilm (or whomever is the subject of the documentary).
New non-parody works, though (like fanfiction), which utilize the characters to create original fiction, are legally problematic. If Lucas acquiesced in the creation of these, then he would be yielding his copyright into the public domain. This would be a hugely bad idea for him. (Every movie production company would set to work making cheap-ass Star Wars flicks, to start with.) It would mean he was relinquishing his right to royalties from the use of the characters, etc. He would be insane to do this.
Unfortunately, there's not much in the way of middle ground, where he could say "well, fans can make little fanfiction movies, but commercial movie producers can't". IIRC, Mercedes Lackey got into a lot of trouble this way once, trying to turn over a portion of one of her fantasy worlds into the public domain for fans to write fanfiction in -- ended up as a mess.
The best Lucas can do is what he has done here - applaud the parodies and apologetically forbid "Star Wars" fanfiction.
Rome was a republic, and bore little resemblance to what we might consider a democracy.
The city magistrates were elected (until Imperial times), but by (what would seem to us) a really screwy procedure. The popular assemblies, which qualify as direct democracy, only really became powerful at the time of the Gracchi, in the 2nd century BC. The Senate was a plutocracy (given that the primary qualification was a specific level of personal wealth).
Why however is Rome the canonical "really ancient civilization", and not, say, Sumeria? 753 BC, nothing.
Well... Osama bin Laden is responsible, but so are the people (or entities) which provoked him and his cronies to do it. I don't know why they did it -- nor does it really matter -- but they had to have a good reason (to them) to put in the high amount of time and effort.
Yes, and someone put *them* up to what they did, and someone put *them* up to that, and so on.
But that's doesn't change the fact that Al Qaeda actually did it.
Not until you start looking at the larger context does it make sense that we still burn coal. Companies with money can support blatant lies if they spend enough to media brainwash them into the general public. And we all just accept it.
Yes, and disreputable and dishonest organizations can support blatant lies which kneecapped nuclear power in America. The electrical power utilities don't have any vested interest in coal, or they'd never have bothered to build what nuclear plants they could!
Face it, it's goofy, NON-PROFIT environmental organizations which are "brainwashing the general public", not "companies with money".
There is a good chance that he is acting out because he has realised that he is screwed. He has probably talked to his lawyers and realised that no one is really going to be able to help him. People have posted "he'll get his day in court", but he probably already realises that on that day they will just go through the motions of convicting him.
Being held in contempt of court is not a good way to help your case, under any circumstances. The judge is the one who's going to hand down the sentence, and he's just screwed himself into a higher prison term.
If he really thought he was screwed, he should have plea-bargained.
Since George W Bush has repeatedly shown his contempt for the rest of the world
...by saving it from Islamic fundamentalism and nuclear terrorism, right...
international law
There is no such thing as "international law". There are such things as treaty obligations, and GWB has broken no treaties. (Before you start whining about the ABM treaty, that treaty provided that the signatories could withdraw with six months notice. We gave our six months notice.)
the environment
By refusing to ratify the daffy Kyoto treaty, which would result in mass starvation and which other nations are now realizing they don't want to implement?
the future of the planet
As if this somehow were a meaningful statement.
why aren't other governments justified in nuking Washington to get that nut who's threatening the rest of the world with nukes?
... and, if you read the article, you'd see that the United States is not "threatening the rest of the world with nukes", it is assembling contingency plans for what happens if somebody attacks us.
Ok, let's say you're an elected member of congress. How would your constituents like you to prioritize the following: A. Fight Terrorists B. Fix Economy C. Teach Our Children D. Fight Crime E. Cut Taxes F. Reduce deficit/Debt Reduction G. Explore Mars
I would note that we know how to do E, G, and likely A. To paraphrase Buzz Aldrin, that means that we should attempt A, E, and G.
Given that there were *any* battles over land implies that the land was stolen, since it clearly did not first belong to the Europeans who ended up owning it.
*shrug* Not like it wouldn't have happened the other way round. Here is a timeline of the Winnebagos, for example; check out the long and bloody litany of Indian wars which didn't involve Europeans at all.
Sure, it's not politically correct to point out that that American Indians had huge and bloody land wars amongst themselves, or that Indian tribes held enormous numbers of slaves before the Civil War, etc., but that doesn't make it any less true.
History's just one thing after another. The Europeans' ancestors got kicked around by the Mongols, or the Arsacids, or the Magyars. The present Indians' ancestors got kicked around by the Welsh, or the Spanish, or the Swedes. C'est la vie.
The island labeled Taprobane is the wrong size and completely the wrong shape for Sri Lanka, which is teardrop-shaped. Except for the label, it more closely resembles the size and shape of Australia than Sri Lanka.
Admittedly, it's a bit of a stretch. Taprobane is the classical Greek pronounciation of Tambapanni, the local name for Sri Lanka. Presumably, it was important enough for trade that Eratosthenes would have included it in his map.
The ancients had a considerable trade with Taprobane, which is why Eratosthenes would have heard of it. Australia is another matter entirely.
As for the shape - you realize this is a modern reconstruction, because no ancient copies of his map survive. They might as well have drawn Taprobane in the shape of Pikachu.
... and the most modern theory is that the Americas were populated originally by a group of Europeans, who were wiped out by later immigrants from Asia.
And these were then largely wiped out by a subsequent group of immigrants from Europe.
So the 15th-19th century near-genocide of the Indians is merely the latest iteration, not a slaughter without parallel.
Ive been online for around 8 years now. And now there are many many new people coming online all the time. Many of whom have prolly never heard of usenet/gopher/telnet/IRC etc... makes me feel kinda old, in the online sence. anyone else feel this way?
I read the first piece of Spam on USENET (the Green Card Lawyers' advertisement), thinking "what is this and why did they crosspost it?"
I used WAIS. I remember the Gopher server at wustl. Once, just to show a friend I could do it, I went in and browsed the card catalog at the Widener Library. He didn't believe me, figuring that it had to be an offline program or something.
I thought that Mosaic was a neat trick. I used Yahoo back before they had their own domain name.
If I was one of these individuals, I would do everything in my power to either destroy or neuter the liberating effects(or as they see it, perverting) of such a worldview.
You mean like trying to destroy its proponents by flying planes into their buildings?
Bush's war on terrorism is defending Western civilization, and the Internet is a product and a symbol of Western civilization, no matter who else has ultimately ended up using it.
The reason we call them faceless is because nobody is actually held responsible for the actions of said company. The company may be fined or sued, but the individuals within it are protected for all but the most blatant of federal offences - and not even all of those.
It's called strict liability for criminal offenses. Corporate officers can be and are held liable, and sent to jail, for crimes they commit, or for crimes which they should have prevented.
Suing someone over a troll-like post on a messageboard is childlike, and shows a company to be immature.
How can a company be immature? It's a legally recognized organization of (generally) three kinds, a partnership, a corporation, and a subchapter-S corporation. None of these has feelings, or "matures".
It is peculiar how people anthropomorphize companies as "evil", "greedy", etc. Companies are run by officers. These themselves may be evil, greedy, charitable, etc. Corporations, for their part, "are" a club of investors, one of whom might be you, who "want" to make money as a result of their investment. They hire officers to run their corporation and to carry out their wishes. These make decisions corresponding to what they think the owners would want.
Slashdot Mirror
Gee, I hope Germany follows with plates commemorating gas chambers and crematoriums. Or what about a plate depicting people burning in the Dresden and Tokyo fire bombings? People with limbs shot off by guns or blown off by landmines? People dying of secondary nuclear effects? Maybe some black slaves whipped bloody.
I think that's the stuff we should remember, the innocent people who suffered and died horrible deaths so we could have minivans, wall to wall carpeting, and a corporate-run government to build roads for us to drive around with cartoon pictures of nuclear blasts. Kaboom!
You're right! A license plate commemorating trolls would be a great idea!
No he wouldn't. Its trademarks that you have to defend or lose. All Lucas has to do is not sue the film makers in question, but that doesn't mean that Star Wars goes into the public domain.
Yes - you're right. What I meant, and should have said, is that Lucas would be granting an implied license to all fans to use his copyrighted materials in any way they wished. And this would make things very blurry for him legally, down the road.
Rod Serling: For beyond reason and discourse, there is the raw emotion of the uninformed.
pan to night sky
And from this, a fallacy so ridiculous, it could exist only... in the Slippery Slope Zone.
cue music
There's a distinction:
When Weird Al is making a parody of a song (like "Amish Paradise"), he doesn't have to pay royalties.
When Weird Al is using a tune to write a song about something else entirely (like "The Saga Begins"), he has to pay royalties and get permissions.
"The Saga Begins" for example isn't a parody of "American Pie", it's a song about Star Wars using the melody from "American Pie". Consequently, he has to pay royalties. Make sense?
Lucas' attitude is the proper one.
Parodies are legally protected speech (subject to a few tweaks, etc.). That's why Spaceballs or Weird Al's "Amish Paradise" don't require the payment of royalties, and don't require the original creator's permission. So all Lucas is doing with regard to parodies is acknowledging that there's nothing he can do about them, and saying that he enjoys watching them and so will assist in their circulation.
Documentaries don't really use copyrighted materials - the story they're telling is not about Luke Skywalker, it's about Lucasfilm (or whomever is the subject of the documentary).
New non-parody works, though (like fanfiction), which utilize the characters to create original fiction, are legally problematic. If Lucas acquiesced in the creation of these, then he would be yielding his copyright into the public domain. This would be a hugely bad idea for him. (Every movie production company would set to work making cheap-ass Star Wars flicks, to start with.) It would mean he was relinquishing his right to royalties from the use of the characters, etc. He would be insane to do this.
Unfortunately, there's not much in the way of middle ground, where he could say "well, fans can make little fanfiction movies, but commercial movie producers can't". IIRC, Mercedes Lackey got into a lot of trouble this way once, trying to turn over a portion of one of her fantasy worlds into the public domain for fans to write fanfiction in -- ended up as a mess.
The best Lucas can do is what he has done here - applaud the parodies and apologetically forbid "Star Wars" fanfiction.
Rome was a republic, and bore little resemblance to what we might consider a democracy.
The city magistrates were elected (until Imperial times), but by (what would seem to us) a really screwy procedure. The popular assemblies, which qualify as direct democracy, only really became powerful at the time of the Gracchi, in the 2nd century BC. The Senate was a plutocracy (given that the primary qualification was a specific level of personal wealth).
Why however is Rome the canonical "really ancient civilization", and not, say, Sumeria? 753 BC, nothing.
Here in Columbus, somebody has methodically gone to every one of these signs and cut away the 'W' in 'WORK FROM HOME'.
I figure maybe Saruman's hiring, or they have some vacancies in those endless Warhammer armies.
For those who don't get subtil things (or just happened to miss this one)
Subtle.
When you perdict something people tend to act on the perdiction. Thus God sent a profit to warn Niniva of coming doom,
Predict. Prediction. Prophet. Nineveh.
2000 is a perfect example. There were big comptuer problems related to the roll over from 1999 to 2000, but because there
Computer. Rollover.
was warning the problems were fixed, so there were no problems, so the warnings must have been uneeded right?
Unneeded.
However I'm willing to perdict the next terrorist bombing will be in Iseral/Palistine. You are now warned.
Predict. Israel. Palestine.
Your score is 11. Your rating is JeffK. Thank you for playing!
Well... Osama bin Laden is responsible, but so are the people (or entities) which provoked him and his cronies to do it.
I don't know why they did it -- nor does it really matter -- but they had to have a good reason (to them) to put in the high amount of time and effort.
Yes, and someone put *them* up to what they did, and someone put *them* up to that, and so on.
But that's doesn't change the fact that Al Qaeda actually did it.
Not until you start looking at the larger
context does it make sense that we still burn
coal. Companies with money can support
blatant lies if they spend enough to media
brainwash them into the general public. And we all just accept it.
Yes, and disreputable and dishonest organizations can support blatant lies which kneecapped nuclear power in America. The electrical power utilities don't have any vested interest in coal, or they'd never have bothered to build what nuclear plants they could!
Face it, it's goofy, NON-PROFIT environmental organizations which are "brainwashing the general public", not "companies with money".
ASA
What then is the correct Latinized plural for "typo", eh? "typis" maybe?
Typoes, if you think of it as a theoretical third-declension noun, as English generally does.
Not that "typo" is actually a word, being merely an abbreviation for "typographical error".
Incidentally, the "genera" poster was making fun of you for confusing "genus" and "genius" in your original post.
There is a good chance that he is acting out because he has realised that he is screwed. He has probably talked to his lawyers and realised that no one is really going to be able to help him.
People have posted "he'll get his day in court", but he probably already realises that on that day they will just go through the motions of convicting him.
Being held in contempt of court is not a good way to help your case, under any circumstances. The judge is the one who's going to hand down the sentence, and he's just screwed himself into a higher prison term.
If he really thought he was screwed, he should have plea-bargained.
Basically, his publishing company was either a) gonna reprint the book (at Michael's expense) with more PC language
Wow. An argument that Michael Moore isn't PC enough? I *have* seen everything.
Brutalization like this could lead to substandard literature.
Heh. Too late now.
Since George W Bush has repeatedly shown his contempt for the rest of the world
...by saving it from Islamic fundamentalism and nuclear terrorism, right...
international law
There is no such thing as "international law". There are such things as treaty obligations, and GWB has broken no treaties. (Before you start whining about the ABM treaty, that treaty provided that the signatories could withdraw with six months notice. We gave our six months notice.)
the environment
By refusing to ratify the daffy Kyoto treaty, which would result in mass starvation and which other nations are now realizing they don't want to implement?
the future of the planet
As if this somehow were a meaningful statement.
why aren't other governments justified in nuking Washington to get that nut who's threatening the rest of the world with nukes?
... and, if you read the article, you'd see that the United States is not "threatening the rest of the world with nukes", it is assembling contingency plans for what happens if somebody attacks us.
Congratulations. You've won the troll pentathlon.
I value Space Exploration, but not enough to commit any resources to it.
You have some other definition of "value"?
Ok, let's say you're an elected member of congress. How would your constituents like you to prioritize the following:
A. Fight Terrorists
B. Fix Economy
C. Teach Our Children
D. Fight Crime
E. Cut Taxes
F. Reduce deficit/Debt Reduction
G. Explore Mars
I would note that we know how to do E, G, and likely A. To paraphrase Buzz Aldrin, that means that we should attempt A, E, and G.
Given that there were *any* battles over land implies that the land was stolen, since it clearly did not first belong to the Europeans who ended up owning it.
*shrug* Not like it wouldn't have happened the other way round. Here is a timeline of the Winnebagos, for example; check out the long and bloody litany of Indian wars which didn't involve Europeans at all.
Sure, it's not politically correct to point out that that American Indians had huge and bloody land wars amongst themselves, or that Indian tribes held enormous numbers of slaves before the Civil War, etc., but that doesn't make it any less true.
History's just one thing after another. The Europeans' ancestors got kicked around by the Mongols, or the Arsacids, or the Magyars. The present Indians' ancestors got kicked around by the Welsh, or the Spanish, or the Swedes. C'est la vie.
The island labeled Taprobane is the wrong size and completely the wrong shape for Sri Lanka, which is teardrop-shaped. Except for the label, it more closely resembles the size and shape of Australia than Sri Lanka.
Admittedly, it's a bit of a stretch. Taprobane is the classical Greek pronounciation of Tambapanni, the local name for Sri Lanka. Presumably, it was important enough for trade that Eratosthenes would have included it in his map.
The ancients had a considerable trade with Taprobane, which is why Eratosthenes would have heard of it. Australia is another matter entirely.
As for the shape - you realize this is a modern reconstruction, because no ancient copies of his map survive. They might as well have drawn Taprobane in the shape of Pikachu.
Where does Australia appear on that map of Eratosthenes? All I see is Taprobane, and that is the ancient name for Sri Lanka.
... and the most modern theory is that the Americas were populated originally by a group of Europeans, who were wiped out by later immigrants from Asia.
And these were then largely wiped out by a subsequent group of immigrants from Europe.
So the 15th-19th century near-genocide of the Indians is merely the latest iteration, not a slaughter without parallel.
Ive been online for around 8 years now. And now there are many many new people coming online all the time. Many of whom have prolly never heard of usenet/gopher/telnet/IRC etc... makes me feel kinda old, in the online sence. anyone else feel this way?
I read the first piece of Spam on USENET (the Green Card Lawyers' advertisement), thinking "what is this and why did they crosspost it?"
I used WAIS. I remember the Gopher server at wustl. Once, just to show a friend I could do it, I went in and browsed the card catalog at the Widener Library. He didn't believe me, figuring that it had to be an offline program or something.
I thought that Mosaic was a neat trick. I used Yahoo back before they had their own domain name.
An eternity ago, now.
And I'm not even particularly old!
If I was one of these individuals, I would do everything in my power to either destroy or neuter the liberating effects(or as they see it, perverting) of such a worldview.
You mean like trying to destroy its proponents by flying planes into their buildings?
Bush's war on terrorism is defending Western civilization, and the Internet is a product and a symbol of Western civilization, no matter who else has ultimately ended up using it.
The reason we call them faceless is because nobody is actually held responsible for the actions of said company. The company may be fined or sued, but the individuals within it are protected for all but the most blatant of federal offences - and not even all of those.
It's called strict liability for criminal offenses. Corporate officers can be and are held liable, and sent to jail, for crimes they commit, or for crimes which they should have prevented.
Suing someone over a troll-like post on a messageboard is childlike, and shows a company to be immature.
How can a company be immature? It's a legally recognized organization of (generally) three kinds, a partnership, a corporation, and a subchapter-S corporation. None of these has feelings, or "matures".
It is peculiar how people anthropomorphize companies as "evil", "greedy", etc. Companies are run by officers. These themselves may be evil, greedy, charitable, etc. Corporations, for their part, "are" a club of investors, one of whom might be you, who "want" to make money as a result of their investment. They hire officers to run their corporation and to carry out their wishes. These make decisions corresponding to what they think the owners would want.
Faceless companies are a myth, folks.