No, he didn't HAVE to. Weird Al always gets permission to do parodies and when the artist refuses, he obliges by not going against the wishes of the artist. This way he maintains the respect of the artists that he parodies, and in the worst case scenario, in spite of the fact he'd probably win, he virtually guarantees that nobody will ever even attempt to sue him.
However, in the rare circumstances where there's a misunderstanding, a la Coolio/Amish Paradise, he still has fair use law to fall back on.
In the case of Eminem, he agreed to the song, but wanted to hear the song before granting permission for the video, and apparently denied that request at that time. If Weird Al wanted to, he could go ahead and release it anyway, but that wouldn't really be classy. He definitely gets to take the higher ground in this case.
This is pretty much a slam dunk for free speach. His comments, by her own admission, are accurate, so she can't claim libel. She's a public figure, so she can't whine about privacy. If she wanted privacy in her life, the best way to accomplish that was to not strut around in a swimming suit for a national public audience. OF COURSE old boyfriends are going to come back from the dead when you reach celebrity status. If you're going to be a celebrity, make sure there isn't anything in your past that's going to embarrass you or others, or learn to live with the fact that somewhere out there some nutball is going to get his two minutes of fame by telling a story that nobody really cares about anyway. Well, the tabloids will care, but they're just as likely to make something up anyway, probably something worse.
I just wonder who is liable when a company sells a surplus laptop on eBay but gets their inventory control screwed up and reports it as stolen...
Exactly the same thing that would happen if someone checked the serial number and found it was reported stolen. Police investigate, the owner provides a transaction history, the original owner discovers the mistake, charges get dropped, original owner gets sued for negligence.
And should the HD get erased the FIRST TIME someone connects to the internet, it's not likely to create any serious data loss issues. The owner would probably think there's just something wrong with the computer. They'll complain, the problem will be discovered, etc etc.
Of course, this theftguard assumes a number of things. Certainly the BIOS won't have any interaction with the internet unless the OS permits it. Any intellegent thief would wipe the drive and resinstall without ever booting it, let alone connecting it to the internet. There are many other ways to trace a stolen computer once it gets online, assuming the OS wasn't reloaded first. Having a machine "check in" isn't a bad idea in theory, but there's no particular advantage to using a hardware solution over a software one.
Mind you, I'd put all the CDs in full sized jewel cases and put all of them in racks on the walls. There's something about an entire room with the walls covered with full CD racks that's somewhat..... appealing to me, but as long as jewel cases cost 3x as much as the CDRs do, there's no real point. I hate storing them on spindles though.
A preferable alternative would be multi-100 cd changers that can work with data CDs. If the per CD cost of such a changer is cheap enough, a network of them would function well as a storage method for the CDs AND I would have instant access to all of them at any time. Perfect ideal setting for data storage where it's always accessible from the network, but I don't necessarily need to retrieve it as quickly as if it were on a HD.
It's gaming when you should be working that hurts productivity. Of course, if you weren't being particularly productive before you started gaming, it might not make much difference.
Hey.. if they want to blow another $100 million to try it again, go ahead. I personally would have figured it out the first time, but that's just me.
-Restil
18 cent coin.... sure.
on
Making Change
·
· Score: 1
You can still find people that do a doubletake when they see a $2 bill, a bill that contrary to popular belief is in circulation and still gets printed, but hardly anyone ever uses, and when someone does get ahold of one, they hoarde it. Retailers will accept them as payment, but they'll end up depositing it and therefore it won't recirculate. Same goes with the dollar coins. Granted, I see them more often than I see $1 bills, but they just don't "fit" anywhere, so they tend to fall into obscurity.
If 18 cent or 29 cent coins suddenly got introduced into circulation, everyone who ran across them would hang onto them. Cash registers wouldn't be redesigned to hold them, so retailers wouldn't stock them or keep a quantity of them around. They'll be out there, they'll be perfectly legal tender, but you'll hardly ever see them, so any hopes of reducing the average number of coins returned in a transaction would probably be better served by a more proactive use of the penny trays.
There are better paying jobs in the summer than mcdonalds that fewer people want to do, and therefore more positions are available.
Of course, you probably wouldn't want to do them either, but they pay better!
Try UPS. Get paid to work out, AND they even have tuition reimbursement.
And some people have been known to work 3 jobs just to make ends meet. Of course, that would suck greatly, but you WERE concerned about HOW you would pay your bills. There are always options, and some of them involve flipping burgers. When burger flipping becomes a coveted job, THEN you can start whining.
Actually, Picard's encounter with the Ferrengi was THAT CREW's first encounter with them. The ferrengi were even mentioned in the farpoint episode, and Riker acknowledged that he both knew about them and had enough information to offer a retort to the comment made about them.
However, if the Ferrengi didn't get too involved in the early years, they would have been mostly ignored for a couple centuries. The Federation had bigger fish to fry back in Kirk's day. The Ferrengi probably never established themselves as a significant race until the TNG timeline.
If American McGee wanted to sue, there would still be the whole parody/fair use issue, but at least it would make sense. What the hell does AmericanGreetings have to do with it? The only commonality is the word "American", which, if I'm not mistaken, is used QUITE frequently in the United States, for a great many things. This isn't even a parody issue. This is a "what the hell does this have to do with anything" issue.
This kid committed espionage and he's being charged with an espionage related crime using an espionage related law. Don't get too excited about it. This isn't reverse enginnering, this isn't applying liberal "fair use" to otherwise public documents, this is the outright theft of documents that the public were never meant to see, and wouldn't if he hadn't made illegal copies of them.
A 19 year old broke a technology related law. It happens. There's really nothing newsworthy about this, unless there was some implied wrongdoing by the authorities, but that certainly doesn't seem to apply here.
And why 2003? Go back to 1999, make $350 million in 2 weeks, and nobody would notice. Heck, you wouldn't even need to be a time traveller... just have a stupid dot com name and a guillible venture captialist.
The itch scratcher is the most common. It's something that's easy enough to do with the technology of the time it was invented, but it was a novel idea that hadn't been though of before, or at least nobody had the patience or resources to follow through on it.
You also have improvement on existing technology. The Pentium 4 processor is significantly different than the 4004, but it's more of a derivative product rather than an entirely new technology. Nobody who's familiar with the 4004 will look at the P4 and slap themselves on the head wondering "Why didn't *I* think of that!" Certainly there are steps of innovation along the way. The components got smaller, pipelines and cache were implemented to get more bang out of each clock cycle, the bus was widened. But in the end, it's just a technology that evolved from a simpler version.
Then you have the pipedreams. These are the inventions that should have been invented but never were, simply because innovation didn't follow the path that everyone expected. We don't have flying cars today. AI is little more than a novelty except for a few nitch applications. No colonies on the moon, no men on Mars. Yet for all the fantastic technological advances that didn't happen, nobody predicted the rise of the internet. The concept of a computer on every desk and every lap was difficult to envison when the average computer occupied an entire room.
Progress provides innovation opportunities. We can always interpolate what we have today to determine what we'll have tomorrow. CPU's will always get faster and cheaper over time and a CPU a year from now will most likely closely resemble a CPU today. But at some point, technology gives us an opporunity to do things that wouldn't have been possible before, and as a result, people will start finding unique solutions. But it's hard to determine what those solutions will be if we aren't aware of the factors that would lead someone to come up with that idea in the first place. And if people COULD predict the future in such a way, the patent office wouldn't be getting overwhelmed with patents based on 20 year old technology.
The kids that actually do their homework don't require the parents to watch over their shoulder every minute of every day. There are already progress notices, report cards, and teachers calling home when the kids aren't doing the work. This doesn't exactly deprive the students of any more privacy, but if the parents require this degree of supervision over the student, then it's available. Like another poster said, it's a lot easier than calling all the teachers to confirm if there's actually a problem or not.
And if parents are as overprotective as your example demonstrates, they're probably already doing that.
Are you upset because random strangers might be able to see what your grade in Math is, or are you upset because your school made it remarkably simple to keep your parents involved in your education?
Not to mention, if you read the first two paragraphs of the article and get bored with it, there's no reason to use up their bandwidth downloading all the text and images for all the pages if you're not going to look at it anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
If you think it's saturday night, perhaps you don't really need the bong.
-Restil
"If you're not part of the solution, there's good money to be made in prolonging the problem."
-- seen on a demotivational poster
-Restil
No, he didn't HAVE to. Weird Al always gets permission to do parodies and when the artist refuses, he obliges by not going against the wishes of the artist. This way he maintains the respect of the artists that he parodies, and in the worst case scenario, in spite of the fact he'd probably win, he virtually guarantees that nobody will ever even attempt to sue him.
However, in the rare circumstances where there's a misunderstanding, a la Coolio/Amish Paradise, he still has fair use law to fall back on.
In the case of Eminem, he agreed to the song, but wanted to hear the song before granting permission for the video, and apparently denied that request at that time. If Weird Al wanted to, he could go ahead and release it anyway, but that wouldn't really be classy. He definitely gets to take the higher ground in this case.
-Restil
This is pretty much a slam dunk for free speach. His comments, by her own admission, are accurate, so she can't claim libel. She's a public figure, so she can't whine about privacy. If she wanted privacy in her life, the best way to accomplish that was to not strut around in a swimming suit for a national public audience. OF COURSE old boyfriends are going to come back from the dead when you reach celebrity status. If you're going to be a celebrity, make sure there isn't anything in your past that's going to embarrass you or others, or learn to live with the fact that somewhere out there some nutball is going to get his two minutes of fame by telling a story that nobody really cares about anyway. Well, the tabloids will care, but they're just as likely to make something up anyway, probably something worse.
-Restil
What's next? People learning C by writing 3D modelling software?
:)
Are you attempting to imply that this is unreasonable?
-Restil
What would be the point of "minimalist" if it wasn't lacking a large quantity of things that tend to betray the meaning of minimal?
-Restil
If that doesn't say unbiased, I don't know what does. :)
-Restil
Clusters.
-Restil
I just wonder who is liable when a company sells a surplus laptop on eBay but gets their inventory control screwed up and reports it as stolen...
Exactly the same thing that would happen if someone checked the serial number and found it was reported stolen. Police investigate, the owner provides a transaction history, the original owner discovers the mistake, charges get dropped, original owner gets sued for negligence.
And should the HD get erased the FIRST TIME someone connects to the internet, it's not likely to create any serious data loss issues. The owner would probably think there's just something wrong with the computer. They'll complain, the problem will be discovered, etc etc.
Of course, this theftguard assumes a number of things. Certainly the BIOS won't have any interaction with the internet unless the OS permits it. Any intellegent thief would wipe the drive and resinstall without ever booting it, let alone connecting it to the internet. There are many other ways to trace a stolen computer once it gets online, assuming the OS wasn't reloaded first. Having a machine "check in" isn't a bad idea in theory, but there's no particular advantage to using a hardware solution over a software one.
-Restil
And to make things even more confusing, dime, used as an adjective, means 10 DOLLARS. :)
-Restil
Mind you, I'd put all the CDs in full sized jewel cases and put all of them in racks on the walls. There's something about an entire room with the walls covered with full CD racks that's somewhat..... appealing to me, but as long as jewel cases cost 3x as much as the CDRs do, there's no real point. I hate storing them on spindles though.
A preferable alternative would be multi-100 cd changers that can work with data CDs. If the per CD cost of such a changer is cheap enough, a network of them would function well as a storage method for the CDs AND I would have instant access to all of them at any time. Perfect ideal setting for data storage where it's always accessible from the network, but I don't necessarily need to retrieve it as quickly as if it were on a HD.
-Restil
It's gaming when you should be working that hurts productivity. Of course, if you weren't being particularly productive before you started gaming, it might not make much difference.
-Restil
Hey.. if they want to blow another $100 million to try it again, go ahead. I personally would have figured it out the first time, but that's just me.
-Restil
You can still find people that do a doubletake when they see a $2 bill, a bill that contrary to popular belief is in circulation and still gets printed, but hardly anyone ever uses, and when someone does get ahold of one, they hoarde it. Retailers will accept them as payment, but they'll end up depositing it and therefore it won't recirculate. Same goes with the dollar coins. Granted, I see them more often than I see $1 bills, but they just don't "fit" anywhere, so they tend to fall into obscurity.
If 18 cent or 29 cent coins suddenly got introduced into circulation, everyone who ran across them would hang onto them. Cash registers wouldn't be redesigned to hold them, so retailers wouldn't stock them or keep a quantity of them around. They'll be out there, they'll be perfectly legal tender, but you'll hardly ever see them, so any hopes of reducing the average number of coins returned in a transaction would probably be better served by a more proactive use of the penny trays.
-Restil
There are better paying jobs in the summer than mcdonalds that fewer people want to do, and therefore more positions are available.
Of course, you probably wouldn't want to do them either, but they pay better!
Try UPS. Get paid to work out, AND they even have tuition reimbursement.
And some people have been known to work 3 jobs just to make ends meet. Of course, that would suck greatly, but you WERE concerned about HOW you would pay your bills. There are always options, and some of them involve flipping burgers. When burger flipping becomes a coveted job, THEN you can start whining.
-Restil
Actually... you can.
Either overpower the other signal, or take out the other security camera.
It would be a lot more effective than hanging a picture in front of the camera.
-Restil
If the ads weren't working, you wouldn't see them all the time.
-Restil
Actually, Picard's encounter with the Ferrengi was THAT CREW's first encounter with them. The ferrengi were even mentioned in the farpoint episode, and Riker acknowledged that he both knew about them and had enough information to offer a retort to the comment made about them.
However, if the Ferrengi didn't get too involved in the early years, they would have been mostly ignored for a couple centuries. The Federation had bigger fish to fry back in Kirk's day. The Ferrengi probably never established themselves as a significant race until the TNG timeline.
-Restil
If American McGee wanted to sue, there would still be the whole parody/fair use issue, but at least it would make sense. What the hell does AmericanGreetings have to do with it? The only commonality is the word "American", which, if I'm not mistaken, is used QUITE frequently in the United States, for a great many things. This isn't even a parody issue. This is a "what the hell does this have to do with anything" issue.
-Restil
This kid committed espionage and he's being charged with an espionage related crime using an espionage related law. Don't get too excited about it. This isn't reverse enginnering, this isn't applying liberal "fair use" to otherwise public documents, this is the outright theft of documents that the public were never meant to see, and wouldn't if he hadn't made illegal copies of them.
A 19 year old broke a technology related law. It happens. There's really nothing newsworthy about this, unless there was some implied wrongdoing by the authorities, but that certainly doesn't seem to apply here.
-Restil
And why 2003? Go back to 1999, make $350 million in 2 weeks, and nobody would notice. Heck, you wouldn't even need to be a time traveller... just have a stupid dot com name and a guillible venture captialist.
-Restil
The itch scratcher is the most common. It's something that's easy enough to do with the technology of the time it was invented, but it was a novel idea that hadn't been though of before, or at least nobody had the patience or resources to follow through on it.
You also have improvement on existing technology. The Pentium 4 processor is significantly different than the 4004, but it's more of a derivative product rather than an entirely new technology. Nobody who's familiar with the 4004 will look at the P4 and slap themselves on the head wondering "Why didn't *I* think of that!" Certainly there are steps of innovation along the way. The components got smaller, pipelines and cache were implemented to get more bang out of each clock cycle, the bus was widened. But in the end, it's just a technology that evolved from a simpler version.
Then you have the pipedreams. These are the inventions that should have been invented but never were, simply because innovation didn't follow the path that everyone expected. We don't have flying cars today. AI is little more than a novelty except for a few nitch applications. No colonies on the moon, no men on Mars. Yet for all the fantastic technological advances that didn't happen, nobody predicted the rise of the internet. The concept of a computer on every desk and every lap was difficult to envison when the average computer occupied an entire room.
Progress provides innovation opportunities. We can always interpolate what we have today to determine what we'll have tomorrow. CPU's will always get faster and cheaper over time and a CPU a year from now will most likely closely resemble a CPU today. But at some point, technology gives us an opporunity to do things that wouldn't have been possible before, and as a result, people will start finding unique solutions. But it's hard to determine what those solutions will be if we aren't aware of the factors that would lead someone to come up with that idea in the first place. And if people COULD predict the future in such a way, the patent office wouldn't be getting overwhelmed with patents based on 20 year old technology.
-Restil
The kids that actually do their homework don't require the parents to watch over their shoulder every minute of every day. There are already progress notices, report cards, and teachers calling home when the kids aren't doing the work. This doesn't exactly deprive the students of any more privacy, but if the parents require this degree of supervision over the student, then it's available.
Like another poster said, it's a lot easier than calling all the teachers to confirm if there's actually a problem or not.
And if parents are as overprotective as your example demonstrates, they're probably already doing that.
-Restil
Are you upset because random strangers might be able to see what your grade in Math is, or are you upset because your school made it remarkably simple to keep your parents involved in your education?
-Restil
Not to mention, if you read the first two paragraphs of the article and get bored with it, there's no reason to use up their bandwidth downloading all the text and images for all the pages if you're not going to look at it anyway.
-Restil