A little proof of that can be found here where anyone can see that a world that spend three times the cost of solving all the major problems in the world, on military strength for defense against "threats" instead, certainly is a world bent on destruction.
I mean damn, here we are spending so much resource in a futile effort rather than spending those resource (seti, military, etc..) in a way that might show us as being civilized enough for another intelligent life form to want consider contacting us.
What about that mid-80's TV show where the aliens came to the UN and said that we weren't worthy and would be destroyed. The UN leaders were able to get a one day reprieve in order to make the world worthy enough to not be destroyed. In a single day, a lasting peace was forged throughout the world. The aliens were shown the new peace, and they laughed. We weren't worthy because we weren't warlike enough.
I'd love to see that episode again, but I can't even remember what series it was on...Amazing Stories, maybe...or else maybe a renewed Twilight Zone or something else...
...lifting characters, names and situations verbatim..."
Hrm...I assume you're refering to Nancy Stouffer's lawsuit as the basis of your claim. From her web site, realmuggles.com, muggles are "Humans left behind on Aura, The Forgotten People, conscientious objectors, sick and diseased, physically challenged, elderly, blind, deaf, savants, dwarfs, earning disabled, the Have Not's. They became genetically mutated humans, hybrid humans, resemble children when fully grown, large hairless heads, tiny ears, large oval eyes, eyelids with no eyelashes, blue, violet, brown & green, lump cheeks, narrow shoulders, thin arms, chubby hands, three fingers & one thumb, no fingernails, thin legs, chubby feet, four toes, no toenails, round plump bellies, half-moon shaped belly button, height: 3'- 4', weight: 45 lb.- 90 lb., skin Color: white, brown, beige or olive, vegetarians." Rowling's muggles, however, are completely ordinary humans, fingernails and all.
Stouffer's Larry Potter is completely unconnected to her Muggles, they're in different books. Just because the characters share the same surname and their first names ryhme that Rowling lifted her character from Stouffer's? Check out Stouffer's "Infringement Examples Chart" to see more reaches to draw comparisons between the books where they don't exist. My favorite is Rowling's "MUGGLES REJOICING "HAPPY, HAPPY DAY" & MUGGLES PLAY SOCCER-LIKE GAME" vs. Stouffer's "MUGGLES REJOICING "OH WHAT A WONDERFUL DAY" & MUGGLES PLAY CROQUET-LIKE GAME." Can anyone point out to me where Rowling's muggles rejoice or where they play a soccer-like game (unless she means soccer itself)?
As for derivative, Nancy Stouffer has started refering to herself as "N.K. Stouffer". Please.
Anyone else notice how Stouffer's Muggles look like the Thompsons from last week's South Park? Nancy's got another lawsuit! Her claim that Rowling is "irreparably damaging my properties and goals" is ridiculous, she's gotten more attention since Rowling's books than she had gotten in the 13 years previous. Why hadn't Stouffer sold her books to a big publishing house? Because "before I could enter into another agreement I had to clear the title rights through the Federal Courts." She who lives by the courts, dies by the courts.
Personally, I don't think anyone who says "I designed him a logo" on their web site should call themselves an author, children's or otherwise. Stouffer's a two-bit wanna-be who thinks that she might have some sort of claim, too bad it's just "In The Year of the Purple Haze".
If the workers in both cases DID THEIR FSCKING JOB, then no one would have to deal with deer piss in the warehouse in the first place. Since there's apparently no consequences for UPS destroying fragile shipments, maybe this will give UPS the impeteus for creating such consequences.
Ignore the revenge factor for a second, what about someone who legitimately sends deere urine via UPS. God forbid they label it fragile.
Not to nitpick your nitpicking, but the Colecovision actually did pretty well. Unless you want to re-open the whole Atari 5200 vs. ColecoVision holy war again...
Play it again...
on
XBox Released
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· Score: 2, Informative
Bad Religion did provide some of the music for Crazy Taxi. When I play on the Dreamcast, it's usually the second song, after the first one by The Offspring. From the game's web site: "Rockin' soundtrack by hit bands Offspring and Bad Religion."
Breaking News - Musicians are stupid!
on
XBox Released
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· Score: 2
From the article:
"I asked them who else was on the soundtrack and made some suggestions, but they said they wanted to stick with certain labels because they didn't have to pay for licensing."
Then the guy quoted gave MS his label's music. For free! Maybe someone should have clued this guy into the fact that MS needs a certain type of music for the game that was being discussed (an "extreme" snowboard game which needs punk music.)
I, for one, would be pissed off to find out that Bad Religion got no money love out of Crazy Taxi. Music can make a game, it shouldn't be given to a megacorporation without compensation.
You know, I've seen links to SST before, and I've clicked on them before, just like I clicked on this one just now, but I've never followed through and played, even though it sound cool for one simple reason...There's no information for a newbie to have a clue what s/he's signing up for. No gameplay info. No instructions. No screenshots (although I see a ss for the linux build now.) No idea to the length of the learning curve. Not so much as even a summary as to what the hell the game is about.
Maybe in two months I'll see another link to the game. Maybe I'll follow the link again. But if I can't find out anything about the game other than it's about trading starships, I probably won't sign up, again.
...[A] good strategy will certainly not help you in a chess game unless you know exactly how to tacticaly get an advantage from it.
But similarly, a good tactic is nothing without the strategy fit it into. Having one, but not the other, is a sure road to defeat. How do you know what the right tactic is if you haven't worked out the strategy? In my own chessplay, I'm strong tacticly, but my strategic game sucks. Tacticly, the US won in Vietnam, strategically, we lost there.
The gripe about RTS games is that they're really RTT (Real Time Tactic) games and ignore the strategic elements. Warhammer tries to insert some strategy by making your forces persistent across missions. Try to kill everything on the map, and you'll probably lose enough troops to make later missions much harder. But ultimately, this too is just another RTT game, just with more consequences for bad tactics.
The dictionary definition is helpful here; Strategy: "The science of military command, or the science of projecting campaigns and directing great military movements; generalship." - Tactics: "The military science that deals with securing objectives set by strategy, especially the technique of deploying and directing troops, ships, and aircraft in effective maneuvers against an enemy." By these definitions, the best strategy game might be Civ or Empire since they are fought on the campaign scale and not just the mission scale.
I agree with you mostly, but for two little nitpicks...
You said, "It would appear that the ONLY reason they've said as much as they've said now [to turn over bin Laden]is because we're actively dropping bombs on their heads." Actually, they made the offer to turn over bin Laden to a third party before we launched the initial airstrikes.
Re: Opium - The Taliban had won worldwide appreciation for their dramatic reductions in Afghanistani-produced opium before the 9/11 attacks. Not due to draught or rugged terrain, but due to their extreme anti-drug policies, based on their strict interpretation of Islamic laws. No one was willing to risk their life just to produce opium.
Yes, this is a story about how the US government is proposing massive restrictions on US computing, a story posted on a US-based web site under the "U.S." topic area. It's US-centric by definition. Is a story about the German Bundestag (sp?) migrating away from Microsoft Euro-centric? Worse than that, it's German-centric!
Get off your high "I'm-not-American" horse, and let us who care discuss the implications of this dire policy proposal. This article apparently doesn't apply to you, so ignore it already.
"This will open a Pandora's box," he said, promoting the idea of "elaborate rights." These, he said, could move the concept of buy-once rights to time-based rights -- "you can make it so the user can, say, only read this book on Tuesday" -- or location-based rights.
Is it just me or:
Isn't opening a Pandora's Box supposed to be a bad thing?
Who the hell would buy a book that they could only read on Tuesdays?
It seems they're thinking too much about what they can do, and not enough about what they should do.
Then again, they had my dad spend 4 hours d'loading DirectX 8 when all he needed was the correct video adapter driver.
BTW, to all of you who say that real techies don't buy Gateway (or other name brands), some do because of family employee discounts, spousal insistance of a warrantee, assumed level of QA, or just plain convienence...or all four. Only 20 minutes to get everything set up, the wife bitching at Gateway instead of me when something breaks, and other convienences make up for the couple hundred I could've saved building it myself.
"When many of this bots are linked together, they call the result a polybot."
With apologies to Dr. Seuss...
What do you know about polybots? Well...
When polybots fight,
it's called a polybottle battle.
And when they battle in a puddle,
it's a polybottle puddle battle.
AND when polybottles battle with paddles in a puddle,
they call it a polybottle puddle paddle battle.
AND...
When polybots battle polybots in a puddle paddle battle
and the polybot battle puddle is a puddle in a bottle... ...they call this a polybottle bottle puddle paddle battle muddle.
AND...
When polybottles fight these battles in a bottle with their paddles
and the bottle's on a poodle and the poodle's eating noodles... ...they call this a muddle puddle poly poodle bottle noodle
bottle paddle battle.
I've actually got quite a bit of political experience (an internship at a state capital, paid staff on many campaigns, volunteer work at the state party level, and currently a political director for a consulting firm) so I know how to actually contact a legislator and how to lobby them, but I can't help but feel helpless regarding tech issues. I'm not a lobbyist (yet) and as a constituent, my voice is pretty small.
I'm not normally against corporations having input with government (somebody has to employ all of the citizens,) but in the tech arena, legislators seem to be absolutely cowed to the industry. If a gas company went to a legislator to push a "Gas EULA" at the pump, the legislator would laugh the lobbyist out of the office, but tech companies come along and legislators can't wait to get behind them.
How's the best way to get it through their thick skulls that the DMCA radically alters copyrights to the benefit of large corporations, that the UCITA steals consumer's rights, and see the budget savings by using more open software? How can you make them see that the short-sighted legislation that they're passing at the bequest of corporate interests are so damaging to the citizens?
While I heartily agree with your second point, you're wrong on the first. Simply because he's not a US citizen doesn't absolve him of obeying the law while here. A German can't drive 210 mph down I-80 in Chicago just because he could drive 415 kph (or whatever) in Duseldorf.
...proclaiming him as innocent merely makes one look uninformed.
No, it makes one look like they understand that under our legal system, he is innocent until proven guilty. Saying that he's unquestionably guilty, especially when one has only read mainstream news reports, makes one look like an ignorant moron.
While the legal difference you note is valid in our legal system, the effect of this Australian decision is that by publishing anything to the Internet, you become subject to the legal system in all jurisdictions. Other jurisdictions may not make such a distinction between information and defamation as the U.S.
Want proof? In France, there are laws which limit discussion regarding Nazis, these laws were invoked to force eBay to pull auctions on Nazi items. Another example is the very incident this article is about. A U.S. publisher printed something completely reasonable under U.S. law. The Austrailian citizen referenced, working in the U.S. sues in Austrialian court to make the U.S. company stop.
If you think that this precedent won't be used again and further expanded upon, you're deluding yourself.
What this means is that by publishing my web page, I'm opening myself to prosecution in any country with an internet connection. Right now, I can't see anything too objectionable on my site, but what if I post a section from the Bible that some Islamic fundamentalist government has outlawed? What if I post the Declaration of Independance and China outlaws that? What if I print something not "nice" and Lichetenstein decides to pass a no "not nice" libel policy?
A decision like this is more than overbroad, it's overboard. In a questionable attempt to make enforce Australian libel standards, this decision would quell Constitutionally-protected speech in America because even though it's protected within our borders, you'd be prosecuted on your first step onto foreign land. This decision also creates an absurd legal fiction that a person is everywhere at once. Posting something to a server in Boondocks, IA from Bumblefart, MN shouldn't subject you to Austrialian, Etheopian, or even Californian jurisdiction. It's bad law.
Why would you speak (or publish on the internet) if you'd get arrested when you traveled abroad? (The similarities to the Skylarov case are very much in mind here.)
I don't mind too much if corporations want to lock their customers into "their" internet, and I don't care if the government attempt to regulate because they'll fail for a variety of reasons. I'm much more concerned about the rights issues. While decisions like this won't kill the internet(no, there's no immenient demise of the internet), but it will surely make it a less interesting place.
-sk
The Atlas of Pern is incredible! Like Tolkien's work, McCaffery's work leans heavily on a detailed geography. I'm re-reading the Dragonriders series right now and using the Atlas alongside of the books adds so much to the experience. I'm not depending on a convolutued description of the geography, I can see it and form a better mental image of the area.
The only problem with Pern is that McCaffery has added so much to the original story that the maps are incomplete. The Atlas covers only the original Dragonriders trilogy, the Harpers trilogy, and the Moreta book. A revised version would be much appreciated (and three times as thick.) At least with Middle Earth, the canon is closed and the Atlas can be considered complete.
Slashdot Mirror
-sk
I'd love to see that episode again, but I can't even remember what series it was on...Amazing Stories, maybe...or else maybe a renewed Twilight Zone or something else...
-sk
Stouffer's Larry Potter is completely unconnected to her Muggles, they're in different books. Just because the characters share the same surname and their first names ryhme that Rowling lifted her character from Stouffer's? Check out Stouffer's "Infringement Examples Chart" to see more reaches to draw comparisons between the books where they don't exist. My favorite is Rowling's "MUGGLES REJOICING "HAPPY, HAPPY DAY" & MUGGLES PLAY SOCCER-LIKE GAME" vs. Stouffer's "MUGGLES REJOICING "OH WHAT A WONDERFUL DAY" & MUGGLES PLAY CROQUET-LIKE GAME." Can anyone point out to me where Rowling's muggles rejoice or where they play a soccer-like game (unless she means soccer itself)?
As for derivative, Nancy Stouffer has started refering to herself as "N.K. Stouffer". Please.
Anyone else notice how Stouffer's Muggles look like the Thompsons from last week's South Park? Nancy's got another lawsuit! Her claim that Rowling is "irreparably damaging my properties and goals" is ridiculous, she's gotten more attention since Rowling's books than she had gotten in the 13 years previous. Why hadn't Stouffer sold her books to a big publishing house? Because "before I could enter into another agreement I had to clear the title rights through the Federal Courts." She who lives by the courts, dies by the courts.
Personally, I don't think anyone who says "I designed him a logo" on their web site should call themselves an author, children's or otherwise. Stouffer's a two-bit wanna-be who thinks that she might have some sort of claim, too bad it's just "In The Year of the Purple Haze".
-sk
Ignore the revenge factor for a second, what about someone who legitimately sends deere urine via UPS. God forbid they label it fragile.
Not to nitpick your nitpicking, but the Colecovision actually did pretty well. Unless you want to re-open the whole Atari 5200 vs. ColecoVision holy war again...
Bad Religion did provide some of the music for Crazy Taxi. When I play on the Dreamcast, it's usually the second song, after the first one by The Offspring. From the game's web site: "Rockin' soundtrack by hit bands Offspring and Bad Religion."
I, for one, would be pissed off to find out that Bad Religion got no money love out of Crazy Taxi. Music can make a game, it shouldn't be given to a megacorporation without compensation.
-sk
- First they ignore you
- Then they laugh at you
- Then they fight you
- Then you win.
Seems we're at #3...Maybe in two months I'll see another link to the game. Maybe I'll follow the link again. But if I can't find out anything about the game other than it's about trading starships, I probably won't sign up, again.
Too bad...it sounds kinda neat.
-sk
The gripe about RTS games is that they're really RTT (Real Time Tactic) games and ignore the strategic elements. Warhammer tries to insert some strategy by making your forces persistent across missions. Try to kill everything on the map, and you'll probably lose enough troops to make later missions much harder. But ultimately, this too is just another RTT game, just with more consequences for bad tactics.
The dictionary definition is helpful here; Strategy: "The science of military command, or the science of projecting campaigns and directing great military movements; generalship." - Tactics: "The military science that deals with securing objectives set by strategy, especially the technique of deploying and directing troops, ships, and aircraft in effective maneuvers against an enemy." By these definitions, the best strategy game might be Civ or Empire since they are fought on the campaign scale and not just the mission scale.
-sk
Get off your high "I'm-not-American" horse, and let us who care discuss the implications of this dire policy proposal. This article apparently doesn't apply to you, so ignore it already.
-sk
Oh, I see. 6000 Americans are only equal to, what, say 10 Afghans?
- Isn't opening a Pandora's Box supposed to be a bad thing?
- Who the hell would buy a book that they could only read on Tuesdays?
It seems they're thinking too much about what they can do, and not enough about what they should do.-sk
BTW, to all of you who say that real techies don't buy Gateway (or other name brands), some do because of family employee discounts, spousal insistance of a warrantee, assumed level of QA, or just plain convienence...or all four. Only 20 minutes to get everything set up, the wife bitching at Gateway instead of me when something breaks, and other convienences make up for the couple hundred I could've saved building it myself.
-sk
-sk
I'm not normally against corporations having input with government (somebody has to employ all of the citizens,) but in the tech arena, legislators seem to be absolutely cowed to the industry. If a gas company went to a legislator to push a "Gas EULA" at the pump, the legislator would laugh the lobbyist out of the office, but tech companies come along and legislators can't wait to get behind them.
How's the best way to get it through their thick skulls that the DMCA radically alters copyrights to the benefit of large corporations, that the UCITA steals consumer's rights, and see the budget savings by using more open software? How can you make them see that the short-sighted legislation that they're passing at the bequest of corporate interests are so damaging to the citizens?
-sk
-sk
-sk
Want proof? In France, there are laws which limit discussion regarding Nazis, these laws were invoked to force eBay to pull auctions on Nazi items. Another example is the very incident this article is about. A U.S. publisher printed something completely reasonable under U.S. law. The Austrailian citizen referenced, working in the U.S. sues in Austrialian court to make the U.S. company stop.
If you think that this precedent won't be used again and further expanded upon, you're deluding yourself.
-sk
What this means is that by publishing my web page, I'm opening myself to prosecution in any country with an internet connection. Right now, I can't see anything too objectionable on my site, but what if I post a section from the Bible that some Islamic fundamentalist government has outlawed? What if I post the Declaration of Independance and China outlaws that? What if I print something not "nice" and Lichetenstein decides to pass a no "not nice" libel policy?
A decision like this is more than overbroad, it's overboard. In a questionable attempt to make enforce Australian libel standards, this decision would quell Constitutionally-protected speech in America because even though it's protected within our borders, you'd be prosecuted on your first step onto foreign land. This decision also creates an absurd legal fiction that a person is everywhere at once. Posting something to a server in Boondocks, IA from Bumblefart, MN shouldn't subject you to Austrialian, Etheopian, or even Californian jurisdiction. It's bad law.
Why would you speak (or publish on the internet) if you'd get arrested when you traveled abroad? (The similarities to the Skylarov case are very much in mind here.)
I don't mind too much if corporations want to lock their customers into "their" internet, and I don't care if the government attempt to regulate because they'll fail for a variety of reasons. I'm much more concerned about the rights issues. While decisions like this won't kill the internet(no, there's no immenient demise of the internet), but it will surely make it a less interesting place. -sk
The only problem with Pern is that McCaffery has added so much to the original story that the maps are incomplete. The Atlas covers only the original Dragonriders trilogy, the Harpers trilogy, and the Moreta book. A revised version would be much appreciated (and three times as thick.) At least with Middle Earth, the canon is closed and the Atlas can be considered complete.
-sk