That's where I got the quote, but making it a link goes over the 120 char limit:-(.
Oh, I'm not doubting the general point of the sig. ("Those who rely on the withdrawl method are often parents"), I'm just nitpicking the terminology.
It'd be like the doctor saying "being shot in the foot can kill you." It can't, really--not the way that being shot in the head can. But you can die of shock, bleeding to death, etc...
As far as limiting to one launch system, that's pretty much what we have now with the shuttle, isn't it? Something goes wrong, you don't launch again for a few years?
We're discussing rockets, not the shuttle. Essentially the same system can be used for most of our rockets, with only the absolutely necessary changes being made. (And the shuttle crawler, FWIW, could hypothetically be retrofited to launch heavy-carrier rockets, multi-launch small craft, or just hauling stuff around.)
The main barriers to laser/microwave systems are: 1) People wouldn't want to be near the launch site
People don't want to live near the SHUTTLE launch sight--well, not that near, anyway. (Maybe you meant "has a larger restricted zone on the ground", which would be an annoying problem.)
2) No military spinoff (except lower satellite launch costs).
I disagree with this one. I have great confidence in the ability of my military to take any technological advancement and find a way to make it reassure the USA's superpower status. (Think ICBMs, but on a much smaller, convential scale--we could launch cruise missiles from Florida and hit N. Korea!)
3) Most of the design would be on the ground system; the vehicle would be fairly simple. The big aerospace companies would pay their senators good money for a rocket replacement for the shuttle.
The big aerospace companies can dance almost as well as Microsoft--if a viable tech were invented, they'd lap it up and put it to use to beat their competition to the ground.
The first creationist who takes this opportunity to reply and infer that Einstein's "god does not play dice" comment is tacit proof of god is going to get beat with a dusty 1200 baud modem.
Aw, c'mon. That'd only be proof of Einstein's belief in God.
Einstein's hair--now, THAT's proof of the divine sense of humor.:)
Withdrawal before climax is very ineffective and those who try this are usually called "parents."
Actually, it's a very, very effective anti-conception technique--beats the pants off the rythym method, no chemical inbalancing, and when it fails, you know immediatly. (Failure, of course, doesn't always result in a pregnancy.)
The problem isn't effectivenses--it's that, by relying on people to go against what their instinct are screaming at them to do, it has a god-awful high error rate. Especially given that those who aren't in a position to use a better form of birth control, or have the necessary operations, are of the segments of the population not known for their willpower or their ability to go against their instincts.
Save rockets for the last resort. Yes they are good at a quick effective solution... but multiple space launches a day (manned or unmanned but something IMHO, necessary for more than the minor interest we have in space now)... rockets no longer become the best option.
Rockets aren't just a "good" solution. They're the ONLY solution we have for getting into space. (And, FWIW, they don't even have to make that much pollution--if the shuttle didn't have to be a heavy-lifter it could ditch the boosters, and run purely on a relatively clean peroxide or H20 combination.)
Most other proposed projects are about as feasible as bullets. Among other problems with "power on the ground" systems (pollution, overly expensive precision) you set yourself to one launch system--and with the costs needed to get that much energy into a transferrable form (ignoring the probably inefficiencies), it just doesn't make sense.
Now, two-stage jet-and-rocket designs make sense--they just haven't quite gotten there yet.
Oh, and about the Soyuz--it's great, but only if you can limit yourself to its three-person crew, and don't have to haul anything.
I challenge your claim that this is not a fraud. Who isolated the HIV virus?
That doesn't make it a fraud. Even if the first scientist was too shady with his results, HIV is still the leading explination for AIDS.
It is certainly not a different topic. AIDS is about money, and no one is making more money than the drug companies right now.
Yes--right now, in dealing with AIDS. Correct me if I'm wrong, but weren't there ten years of "AIDS" before we had a treatment--and a good five years or so of "HIDS" before that?
I hate to break this horrible fact to you, but all AIDS "therapies" are extremely toxic to the body
And amputation is a shock to the body. And cataurization causes burns. And CPR breaks ribs.
As long as the treatment is less damaging than the condition treated, it's fair medical practice.
I'll add here that no one admits any more that AZT is effective at prolonging life.
There you go with the bad grammar again. (Are you a native speaker?) If anyone "admited" AZT was effective, then it would be. You probably meant "...no one claims any more..."
And you know as well as I do that "the darn disease" is a really sloppy way of describing AIDS. Are you referring to immune deficiency, or one of the diseases on the (ever-changing) list of "AIDS-related diseases", all of which existed prior to the AIDS panic?
The immune deficiency, of course. As taught in American High Schools, AIDS doesn't kill you--it "just" shuts down your immune system, and thus makes you a much easier target for a lot of diseases that normally wouldn't stand a chance.
It's like a disease that attacks the eyes--it targets one part of the body that it's adapted to attack, and that by itself won't kill you; you just have a much higher chance of dying since you're now blind.
The definition of AIDS is "HIV infection with one of the AIDS-related diseases".
That's a definition codified after some twenty-odd years of AIDS. AIDS, which was always an immune difficincy problem, existed before the discovery of HIV. Now that the established belief is that HIV is the cure, a clynical definition of deadly AIDS is "an HIV infection and one of the diseases that'll kill someone with an HIV infection."
Given this definition, you must agree with me that your test is invalid. Since all of the AIDS-related diseases existed before the false discovery of HIV, would you consider, for example, a person with Kaposi's Sarcoma who is HIV- as proof that HIV is a lie? It doesn't make sense.
See above; the "AIDS-related diseases" aren't a part of AIDS, and no one makes the claim that they're started by or exlusive to AIDS. They're just the (long) list of what can kill you once AIDS destroyes your immune system.
(On a totally different tanget, this could help explain why poorer cultures than America suffer about the same ammount from AIDS--they have more infections, but less of a natural disease pool, since Americans/Europeans have traditionally had a hell of a lot of diseases hanging around us.)
And we haven't even started talking about the HIV tests (yes, plural!) and how accurate they are!
My wife's an EMT, her brother is a nurse, and I have two aunts who are doctors. Trust me--multiple semi-accurate tests are the norm for medicine. It's not like humans have an easy readout of what's wrong with us, and we don't always all react to the same conditions the same way. (Some folk can have sex with a dozen HIV+ folk who also have gonnorea and a really bad cold, and not get any of the diseases at all. Hell, there are instances on record of babies born from HIV+ mothers being born HIV-... and stories of cancer suddenly vanishing on its own.)
Now, please don't misinterpret me--I'm all for re-questioning just about any supposed fact. It's a basic principle of science. I just have concerns about the "group" linked to in your sig--they strike me as about
It's all well and good to call it "bad science", but it's hardly fraud or a hoax. The people working to stop the spread of HIV may be mistaken, but they're not intentionally misleading anyone. (Well, the drug companies might be--but that's a different topic.)
More disturbing, though, is the theorum that anti-AIDS drugs actually cause the disease--I mean, the darn disease has been around for quite awhile, whether or not HIV causes it. (The best way, IMO, to debunk an HIV-AIDS relationship is to find someone with AIDS who tests as HIV-)
Leftists hate individualism. They think people should be represented by their group, not by their own selves. They think people should be dependent on the government, not dependent on themselves. Individualism stands in the way of their big truth that all humans must embrace (or go to the gulag, as it always turns out in practice).
*blink, blink*.
Odd, I thought the intsitute-government-control, ban-free-speech side of the spectrum was the Right. No, wait, we were both wrong--the Right and the Left are both indipendant thinkers; it's the zealots that fit our stereotypes.
Hence, Leftists hate cars.
I find myself rather on the left side of the political spectrum, and I love cars. Heck, my co-workers all love or are married to someone who loves cars. Heck, a "leftist" program in the area GIVES cars to people!
Not that I like cars, myself. I would actually prefer to see American cities (particularly my own hometown of Atlanta where it is impossible to live sans auto and thus suffers from the worst, most redneck-engineered traffic jams in the country) become more pedestrian friendly.
How so, exactly? All the sidewalks in the world won't help if your job is still ten miles away.
But I'm not so blind as to understand why so many Star-Trek-worshipping pan-socialist latch-onto-the-government-teat know-it-all college-student crybabies would like to ban the automobile.
"I'm not so blind" and "understand" shouldn't go together. You can be "not so blind" that you AGREE with someone, or so blind that you don't "understand" them, but you can't be "so blind you don't understand."
FWIW, "they" want to "ban"* cars because they feel that a car-free city, or a city that isn't build around the automobile, would be a better place to live--and they recognize that no one would ever make a profit by banning cars, thus it must be a government action or it won't happen. (This is simliar to going to the moon, going to war, or protecting the environment--if the government doesn't do it, by law or by program, it won't get done.)
Oh, and the "it harms the environment" argument. To you, I say your God is Gaea, and I think your religion, like all religions, is superstitious garbage.
The rebuttal is "move out of Atlanta and go to a real city." When you can't breathe due to the smog, THEN you can say "the environment's fine."
Environmentalism is a cookey end in itself, but it's a perfectly viablle means to the real end of making life better for "us."
*: to be specific, the "they" = "leftist bogeymen" and "ban" = "legally restrict driving within a city"
So, the chances are actually incalculable. Lottery = your chances in getting picked out the pool may be one in a million, but your chances of picking the right number on the right day and being that one in a million are impossible odds. Then you have the odds of actually claiming your prize and meeting the eligibility/legitimacy of the prize.
Odd. I could swear that there are people who've actually won the lottery... a couple hundred in America, I wager, which puts them at just about 1 in a million.;)
Statistic impossibilities mean "don't plan on it happening to you," not "it'll never happen to anyone."
What do they do with old bills and coinage? Do they recycle it? Does anyone know?
AFAIK, they melt down old coins and re-use them (they're mostly just raw scrap anyway), and they burn the bills (which are just colored cotton & paper anyway.)
The problem with that is that no one really *knows* how the brain works beyond a very, very basic and limited understanding,
Actually, the understanding of the brain is rather intricate. It's just that the brain itself is really, really complex.
No one has ever been able to satisfactorily create/reproduce one.
Actually, I have it on good authority that a human brain can be made through a very simple act requiring no special skills, though the initial production and subsequent training of this "man-made" brain tends to take decades.:)
While on the surface it would seem having computers everywhere would save paper, the truth of the matter is more paper is consumed.
That's only true because the so-called "paperless office" has printers.
Dump the printer, get everyone a tablet PC (or a Newton), and your "paperless office" can actually get a real trial run.
Saying "the paperless office was proved to be false" is as dubious a claim as "the failure of tryannical facist communism has disproven all socialist ideas."
why does the RIAA think it deserves fast track treatment and special laws ?
Because the fringe element that helped create the internet decided that they have special rights and the ability to ignore the current system of compensation for artists & artist-promoters.
A good note is apple's music store--the RIAA, which is a concalmorate, will evolve, or will be supplemented. But whatever the replacement is, it will still be opposed to the uncompensated, unauthorized distribution of uncompleted works.
And they never say "But aren't comic books just incomprehensible babble about superheroes geared towards the same small, scary audience that's been reading them for twenty years."
They say THAT because no one lauds what a great art form they are--because those in a position to be great don't even try.
That's because it's fiction, and fiction has no responsibility to balance. Next.
This guy's the kind of worthless fuck who's responible for comic books, genre fiction, and just about every art I enjoy to be regelated to the "unprofessional" catagory.
Fiction can change reality and have exceptional circumstances--but it still has to be as plausible as it can be, and internally consistent.
Trouble with your reductionalist BS is that you can take sounds from other tracks and arrange them in a sufficently creative way to create a new original work.
You aren't familiar with how the law works, are you? (The song you quoted is obviously parody / commentary, and so is classic Fair Use.) (IANAL-RU?)
The parent poster's right about spot on. The problem isn't one of artistic merit, it's of who can convince what jury & judge that a particular part was both copied and significant enough to be a protected element.
Copyright has been totally perverted and sampling is a casualty as much as anything else.
While I agree that copyright has been perverted, how do you get "sampling" as a casualty?
Sure, but you can't sell anything you've sampled without permission; commercial re-use isn't "Fair Use".
Wrong. Fair Use is implicity commercial.
When lawyers talk about "Fair Use", they don't mean making short clips for your computer or making an MP3. They meah committing criminal / civil copyright infringment for a purpose that deserves to be exempted from the copyright monopoly.
But if by philosophy you mean anything vaguely legitimate on an academic level (I'm talking about old dead Greek and European guys here), then you're sorely mistaken.
I wager that the old dead Greek and European guys would have heart attacks from sheer shame if they knew that they were still being held up as the end-all and be-all of philosiphy centuries or millenia after their deaths.
I mean, they spoke in an entirely differnet language for Pete's sake! Is it really THAT hard for modern-day thinkers to elucidate their own quandaries and answers?
The "message" of the Matrix, if it can be called that, is sort of like Plato's Allegory of the cave, minus any actual intellectualism and plus a lot of guns.
So, just because it's not snobby means that it can't be philosiphy? Sheesh. There's more poetry in the lyrics of even manufactured pop music than in any modern-day poetry class, and more philosiphy in a dime-store novel than the quote-and-parrot classes they teach in college.
Anyway, enough of my jabs at elietist snobs. (By what meaure exactly is "pop music" not music? It's the sound that comes from instruments with some singing--it might not be everyone's favorite, or especially timeless, but it's sure as hell "music.")
The Matrix, and Fight Club, aren't "philisophical." They're a bit metaphysical, but that's something different.
They're both movies that I call "Mind Fucks." Fun movies that make you think when you see them for the first time, mostly because of a radical shift in perception. (When I saw the Matrix for the first time, I was expecting "The Net" with more action, not a distant-future matrial-arts fest.) "Signs" and "The Sixth Sense" also make the list, for just about the same reason.
Slashdot Mirror
That's where I got the quote, but making it a link goes over the 120 char limit :-(.
Oh, I'm not doubting the general point of the sig. ("Those who rely on the withdrawl method are often parents"), I'm just nitpicking the terminology.
It'd be like the doctor saying "being shot in the foot can kill you." It can't, really--not the way that being shot in the head can. But you can die of shock, bleeding to death, etc...
As far as limiting to one launch system, that's pretty much what we have now with the shuttle, isn't it? Something goes wrong, you don't launch again for a few years?
We're discussing rockets, not the shuttle. Essentially the same system can be used for most of our rockets, with only the absolutely necessary changes being made. (And the shuttle crawler, FWIW, could hypothetically be retrofited to launch heavy-carrier rockets, multi-launch small craft, or just hauling stuff around.)
The main barriers to laser/microwave systems are:
1) People wouldn't want to be near the launch site
People don't want to live near the SHUTTLE launch sight--well, not that near, anyway. (Maybe you meant "has a larger restricted zone on the ground", which would be an annoying problem.)
2) No military spinoff (except lower satellite launch costs).
I disagree with this one. I have great confidence in the ability of my military to take any technological advancement and find a way to make it reassure the USA's superpower status. (Think ICBMs, but on a much smaller, convential scale--we could launch cruise missiles from Florida and hit N. Korea!)
3) Most of the design would be on the ground system; the vehicle would be fairly simple. The big aerospace companies would pay their senators good money for a rocket replacement for the shuttle.
The big aerospace companies can dance almost as well as Microsoft--if a viable tech were invented, they'd lap it up and put it to use to beat their competition to the ground.
The first creationist who takes this opportunity to reply and infer that Einstein's "god does not play dice" comment is tacit proof of god is going to get beat with a dusty 1200 baud modem.
:)
Aw, c'mon. That'd only be proof of Einstein's belief in God.
Einstein's hair--now, THAT's proof of the divine sense of humor.
Withdrawal before climax is very ineffective and those who try this are usually called "parents."
Actually, it's a very, very effective anti-conception technique--beats the pants off the rythym method, no chemical inbalancing, and when it fails, you know immediatly. (Failure, of course, doesn't always result in a pregnancy.)
The problem isn't effectivenses--it's that, by relying on people to go against what their instinct are screaming at them to do, it has a god-awful high error rate. Especially given that those who aren't in a position to use a better form of birth control, or have the necessary operations, are of the segments of the population not known for their willpower or their ability to go against their instincts.
sigh, I can't believe I misspelled it twice
No, you didn't. You misspelled it once; the second time is simply being consistent.
Misspelling it twice would be writing "optomizing" and "optomezing"
Save rockets for the last resort. Yes they are good at a quick effective solution... but multiple space launches a day (manned or unmanned but something IMHO, necessary for more than the minor interest we have in space now)... rockets no longer become the best option.
Rockets aren't just a "good" solution. They're the ONLY solution we have for getting into space. (And, FWIW, they don't even have to make that much pollution--if the shuttle didn't have to be a heavy-lifter it could ditch the boosters, and run purely on a relatively clean peroxide or H20 combination.)
Most other proposed projects are about as feasible as bullets. Among other problems with "power on the ground" systems (pollution, overly expensive precision) you set yourself to one launch system--and with the costs needed to get that much energy into a transferrable form (ignoring the probably inefficiencies), it just doesn't make sense.
Now, two-stage jet-and-rocket designs make sense--they just haven't quite gotten there yet.
Oh, and about the Soyuz--it's great, but only if you can limit yourself to its three-person crew, and don't have to haul anything.
I challenge your claim that this is not a fraud. Who isolated the HIV virus?
That doesn't make it a fraud. Even if the first scientist was too shady with his results, HIV is still the leading explination for AIDS.
It is certainly not a different topic. AIDS is about money, and no one is making more money than the drug companies right now.
Yes--right now, in dealing with AIDS. Correct me if I'm wrong, but weren't there ten years of "AIDS" before we had a treatment--and a good five years or so of "HIDS" before that?
I hate to break this horrible fact to you, but all AIDS "therapies" are extremely toxic to the body
And amputation is a shock to the body. And cataurization causes burns. And CPR breaks ribs.
As long as the treatment is less damaging than the condition treated, it's fair medical practice.
I'll add here that no one admits any more that AZT is effective at prolonging life.
There you go with the bad grammar again. (Are you a native speaker?) If anyone "admited" AZT was effective, then it would be. You probably meant "...no one claims any more..."
And you know as well as I do that "the darn disease" is a really sloppy way of describing AIDS. Are you referring to immune deficiency, or one of the diseases on the (ever-changing) list of "AIDS-related diseases", all of which existed prior to the AIDS panic?
The immune deficiency, of course. As taught in American High Schools, AIDS doesn't kill you--it "just" shuts down your immune system, and thus makes you a much easier target for a lot of diseases that normally wouldn't stand a chance.
It's like a disease that attacks the eyes--it targets one part of the body that it's adapted to attack, and that by itself won't kill you; you just have a much higher chance of dying since you're now blind.
The definition of AIDS is "HIV infection with one of the AIDS-related diseases".
That's a definition codified after some twenty-odd years of AIDS. AIDS, which was always an immune difficincy problem, existed before the discovery of HIV. Now that the established belief is that HIV is the cure, a clynical definition of deadly AIDS is "an HIV infection and one of the diseases that'll kill someone with an HIV infection."
Given this definition, you must agree with me that your test is invalid. Since all of the AIDS-related diseases existed before the false discovery of HIV, would you consider, for example, a person with Kaposi's Sarcoma who is HIV- as proof that HIV is a lie? It doesn't make sense.
See above; the "AIDS-related diseases" aren't a part of AIDS, and no one makes the claim that they're started by or exlusive to AIDS. They're just the (long) list of what can kill you once AIDS destroyes your immune system.
(On a totally different tanget, this could help explain why poorer cultures than America suffer about the same ammount from AIDS--they have more infections, but less of a natural disease pool, since Americans/Europeans have traditionally had a hell of a lot of diseases hanging around us.)
And we haven't even started talking about the HIV tests (yes, plural!) and how accurate they are!
My wife's an EMT, her brother is a nurse, and I have two aunts who are doctors. Trust me--multiple semi-accurate tests are the norm for medicine. It's not like humans have an easy readout of what's wrong with us, and we don't always all react to the same conditions the same way. (Some folk can have sex with a dozen HIV+ folk who also have gonnorea and a really bad cold, and not get any of the diseases at all. Hell, there are instances on record of babies born from HIV+ mothers being born HIV-... and stories of cancer suddenly vanishing on its own.)
Now, please don't misinterpret me--I'm all for re-questioning just about any supposed fact. It's a basic principle of science. I just have concerns about the "group" linked to in your sig--they strike me as about
Actually, OGG works just fine in windows. There just aren't any environments that rip right to Ogg Vorbis for Win32.
(If someone's got one, respond and post a friggin' link!)
http://www.virusmyth.net/
It's all well and good to call it "bad science", but it's hardly fraud or a hoax. The people working to stop the spread of HIV may be mistaken, but they're not intentionally misleading anyone. (Well, the drug companies might be--but that's a different topic.)
More disturbing, though, is the theorum that anti-AIDS drugs actually cause the disease--I mean, the darn disease has been around for quite awhile, whether or not HIV causes it. (The best way, IMO, to debunk an HIV-AIDS relationship is to find someone with AIDS who tests as HIV-)
Leftists hate individualism. They think people should be represented by their group, not by their own selves. They think people should be dependent on the government, not dependent on themselves. Individualism stands in the way of their big truth that all humans must embrace (or go to the gulag, as it always turns out in practice).
*blink, blink*.
Odd, I thought the intsitute-government-control, ban-free-speech side of the spectrum was the Right. No, wait, we were both wrong--the Right and the Left are both indipendant thinkers; it's the zealots that fit our stereotypes.
Hence, Leftists hate cars.
I find myself rather on the left side of the political spectrum, and I love cars. Heck, my co-workers all love or are married to someone who loves cars. Heck, a "leftist" program in the area GIVES cars to people!
Not that I like cars, myself. I would actually prefer to see American cities (particularly my own hometown of Atlanta where it is impossible to live sans auto and thus suffers from the worst, most redneck-engineered traffic jams in the country) become more pedestrian friendly.
How so, exactly? All the sidewalks in the world won't help if your job is still ten miles away.
But I'm not so blind as to understand why so many Star-Trek-worshipping pan-socialist latch-onto-the-government-teat know-it-all college-student crybabies would like to ban the automobile.
"I'm not so blind" and "understand" shouldn't go together. You can be "not so blind" that you AGREE with someone, or so blind that you don't "understand" them, but you can't be "so blind you don't understand."
FWIW, "they" want to "ban"* cars because they feel that a car-free city, or a city that isn't build around the automobile, would be a better place to live--and they recognize that no one would ever make a profit by banning cars, thus it must be a government action or it won't happen. (This is simliar to going to the moon, going to war, or protecting the environment--if the government doesn't do it, by law or by program, it won't get done.)
Oh, and the "it harms the environment" argument. To you, I say your God is Gaea, and I think your religion, like all religions, is superstitious garbage.
The rebuttal is "move out of Atlanta and go to a real city." When you can't breathe due to the smog, THEN you can say "the environment's fine."
Environmentalism is a cookey end in itself, but it's a perfectly viablle means to the real end of making life better for "us."
*: to be specific, the "they" = "leftist bogeymen" and "ban" = "legally restrict driving within a city"
How long before they turn us all into remote control human drones?
Who are "they", and why would they bother spending the money on remote-control when they can just lawsuit- and reality-TV- us into submission?
History will eventually show electronic voting to be the most excellent means for subverting democracy ever invented.
Obviously you're not familiar with the history of democracy.
Democracy can survive corruption, fraud, graft, etc--hell, it seems to thrive on it, actually--
No, wait. Maybe you do know that, and "one voter one vote" and "everyone vote" count as subversions of democracy... yeah, that must be it...
So, the chances are actually incalculable. Lottery = your chances in getting picked out the pool may be one in a million, but your chances of picking the right number on the right day and being that one in a million are impossible odds. Then you have the odds of actually claiming your prize and meeting the eligibility/legitimacy of the prize.
;)
Odd. I could swear that there are people who've actually won the lottery... a couple hundred in America, I wager, which puts them at just about 1 in a million.
Statistic impossibilities mean "don't plan on it happening to you," not "it'll never happen to anyone."
What do they do with old bills and coinage? Do they recycle it? Does anyone know?
AFAIK, they melt down old coins and re-use them (they're mostly just raw scrap anyway), and they burn the bills (which are just colored cotton & paper anyway.)
The problem with that is that no one really *knows* how the brain works beyond a very, very basic and limited understanding,
:)
Actually, the understanding of the brain is rather intricate. It's just that the brain itself is really, really complex.
No one has ever been able to satisfactorily create/reproduce one.
Actually, I have it on good authority that a human brain can be made through a very simple act requiring no special skills, though the initial production and subsequent training of this "man-made" brain tends to take decades.
While on the surface it would seem having computers everywhere would save paper, the truth of the matter is more paper is consumed.
That's only true because the so-called "paperless office" has printers.
Dump the printer, get everyone a tablet PC (or a Newton), and your "paperless office" can actually get a real trial run.
Saying "the paperless office was proved to be false" is as dubious a claim as "the failure of tryannical facist communism has disproven all socialist ideas."
why does the RIAA think it deserves fast track treatment and special laws ?
Because the fringe element that helped create the internet decided that they have special rights and the ability to ignore the current system of compensation for artists & artist-promoters.
A good note is apple's music store--the RIAA, which is a concalmorate, will evolve, or will be supplemented. But whatever the replacement is, it will still be opposed to the uncompensated, unauthorized distribution of uncompleted works.
And they never say "But aren't comic books just incomprehensible babble about superheroes geared towards the same small, scary audience that's been reading them for twenty years."
They say THAT because no one lauds what a great art form they are--because those in a position to be great don't even try.
That's because it's fiction, and fiction has no responsibility to balance. Next.
This guy's the kind of worthless fuck who's responible for comic books, genre fiction, and just about every art I enjoy to be regelated to the "unprofessional" catagory.
Fiction can change reality and have exceptional circumstances--but it still has to be as plausible as it can be, and internally consistent.
Hey, they got us to the moon and have been operating nuclear-powered vehicles with a very impressive track record.
Anyway, space exploration isn't about science. It's about exploration & human achievement.
Trouble with your reductionalist BS is that you can take sounds from other tracks and arrange them in a sufficently creative way to create a new original work.
You aren't familiar with how the law works, are you? (The song you quoted is obviously parody / commentary, and so is classic Fair Use.) (IANAL-RU?)
The parent poster's right about spot on. The problem isn't one of artistic merit, it's of who can convince what jury & judge that a particular part was both copied and significant enough to be a protected element.
Copyright has been totally perverted and sampling is a casualty as much as anything else.
While I agree that copyright has been perverted, how do you get "sampling" as a casualty?
Sure, but you can't sell anything you've sampled without permission; commercial re-use isn't "Fair Use".
Wrong. Fair Use is implicity commercial.
When lawyers talk about "Fair Use", they don't mean making short clips for your computer or making an MP3. They meah committing criminal / civil copyright infringment for a purpose that deserves to be exempted from the copyright monopoly.
What you're think of is, AFAIK, "reasonable use."
Handwriting recgonition, no matter how good it gets, will NEVER be faster than a Keyboard, I don't care who you are or what you are doing.
Sitting on a bus, walking around, or just sitting in front of the TV.
For casual computing, a keyboard replacement will be more than "good enough."
A TabletPC user should be someone who CAN run Photoshop if he wants.
Guess what--you can. Photoshop 7 has very few options that can't be done with soley the mouse.
But if by philosophy you mean anything vaguely legitimate on an academic level (I'm talking about old dead Greek and European guys here), then you're sorely mistaken.
I wager that the old dead Greek and European guys would have heart attacks from sheer shame if they knew that they were still being held up as the end-all and be-all of philosiphy centuries or millenia after their deaths.
I mean, they spoke in an entirely differnet language for Pete's sake! Is it really THAT hard for modern-day thinkers to elucidate their own quandaries and answers?
The "message" of the Matrix, if it can be called that, is sort of like Plato's Allegory of the cave, minus any actual intellectualism and plus a lot of guns.
So, just because it's not snobby means that it can't be philosiphy? Sheesh. There's more poetry in the lyrics of even manufactured pop music than in any modern-day poetry class, and more philosiphy in a dime-store novel than the quote-and-parrot classes they teach in college.
Anyway, enough of my jabs at elietist snobs. (By what meaure exactly is "pop music" not music? It's the sound that comes from instruments with some singing--it might not be everyone's favorite, or especially timeless, but it's sure as hell "music.")
The Matrix, and Fight Club, aren't "philisophical." They're a bit metaphysical, but that's something different.
They're both movies that I call "Mind Fucks." Fun movies that make you think when you see them for the first time, mostly because of a radical shift in perception. (When I saw the Matrix for the first time, I was expecting "The Net" with more action, not a distant-future matrial-arts fest.) "Signs" and "The Sixth Sense" also make the list, for just about the same reason.
And they'd get off again, even if Nader were president. What, were you sleeping through the last trial?
You mean the one where they were found guilty, again, and pleaded at the last moment to keep from being broken up?
MS knows that they're a convicted monopolist, and if they push their hold to be MORE evasive, they're not going to get off this time.