While Slashdot's speculation is that "autocorrect gone horribly wrong" may be at the bottom of the submitter's odd new phrase, it is a safe bet that at least some of it has to do with a series of small aneurisms known as "Uruguay Syndrome."
Steve Jobs may very well have been an habitual reckless driver, but parking in handicapped spaces and driving without plates meets neither the legal nor commonsense definitions of "reckless driving."
I was about to launch into this counter story, "Well, one of our high school teachers actually had her coffee spiked with ecstasy and wigged out" etc etc. Then it occurred to me that this didn't actually happen on our watch.
It was some apocryphal account of events that had happened "a few years ago"... looking back, it has the same hazy mythical quality as the one about the goat that those "sometime in the late 70's" seniors actually got on the roof, and the one about the mechanical whiz kid who actually took apart our principal's car and rebuilt it in the courtyard.
Like for real. Really happened, dude, my older brother knew the guy.
This! Well, very close. AC gets this concept, but for the uninitiated:
You can copyright Batman the comic book drawing; you can copyright photos, images, scripts, etc. from Batman the movie; and you can copyright the *specific* character of Batman/Bruce Wayne, whose billionaire parents were shot in front of him on the streets of Gotham, who had a father-figure butler named Alfred, etc etc. You can trademark the logo on the Batsuit, and possibly even the whole suit if it's distinctive enough.
BUT you cannot copyright stock characters or concepts like "rich vigilante dons black suit and cape to fight crime" or "dapper British spy beds femmes fatales and saves the world." And you cannot copyright costumes (clothing is functional in the US, unless it's so completely unwearable that its only function could be as art). Which is a great reason to put trademarkable things like a logo and unique-looking suit on a character you want to protect.
Let's apply these to this case. What makes a Power Ranger a Power Ranger?
The Visuals:
--"Space-looking" spandex jumpsuits suits? Costumes are not copyrightable, possibly trademarkable.
--There are five different colors and white diamonds on their chests? Concepts are not copyrightable. A distinctive 5-color logo incorporating the rangers or some visual element like white diamonds could be trademarked, although the actual logos are all a variation on "lightning-y" words.
The Name:
--"Power Rangers" and "Mighty Morphin Power Rangers" are certainly protectable (and protected) under trademark. They are too short and functional to be protected under copyright.
The Characters:
--Desire to fight various space assholes who want to wreak nonspecific space evil? Sounds pretty generic...
--Five teenagers fighting together? And they sometimes combine into one big ass robot? That's not even unique amongst futuristic crime-fighting robo-tweens in children's television, let alone all of fiction.
--They.... are one dimensional do-gooders who are so devoid of individual characteristics as to be interchangeable and known entirely by suit color, race, and gender? Now you're getting it! These "characters" are stock at best, meaning they are not protectable under copyright. The individual kids that donned the suits apparently had some half-assed backstories, but a) these too are stock and b) I don't believe the director referenced anything of the sort.
Mea culpa, I should know better than to rely on Slashdot for my facts--in this case, that 1oz of hard liquor is a "drink." I should've consulted an authoritative source like urbandictionary, which tells me one drink is actually equal to casual sex.
Could I still try to argue that my 1 glass was closer than 8? Well, yeah, but a) that would be pretty obtuse, and b) drinking any positive integer number of 8oz glasses of vodka is inadvisable in any case.
I have already secured the domain name "nodeerzone.com" so that state and federal highway officials can start putting in for stretches of highway they don't want deer to cross over. They will pay $20K/km to add highway sections to a public list. The deer will know not to cross these sections because of signs ($500 apiece) that say:
--NO-- DEER CROSSING!
I mean it, deer, you better not fucking cross here
"Facebook engineers" are "game changing" the game by "rejecting" the "paradigm" that is "popular" (they're closing Facebook), instead embracing a "yet to be proven" "new approach" where your "pipe dreams" "look and feel like s__t " (unclear, they probably mean 'shat', which is short for William Shattner, who will buy the empty husk of Facebook and fold it into the Priceline Syndicate).
Focusing on a "groundbreaking" new business model, they'll be "approaching natives" (aboriginal peoples) with "samples and tutorials" that will give them "huge success internally" (Levitra and a lesson on handjobs). This new approach will definitely get the natives "stirred up", but will ultimately cause them to "React" poorly (an erection lasting more than four hours).
GD, you're a regular and thoughtful poster, so I don't think you're intentionally trolling. But if SCOTUS upheld slave ownership back in the 1800's, that's because the Constitution specifically contemplated and provided for slave ownership. It took a constitutional amendment (13th) to abolish slavery.
That doesn't mean SCOTUS is always (or even usually) right when it comes to protecting civil liberties. But that was just a Supremely bad example.:: ducks::
I need my iPad. For me, it is excelling in a critical role that neither phones nor laptops can fill. As a performing musician, I post the iPad up on my mic stand, and the access to music and lyrics triples (or more) the range of songs I can play. Granted, my use case isn't the most common. But there are actually tons of musical performers, and IME they're increasingly turning to tablets to replace sheet music and chord charts.
"I'm extremely angry that this monopoly-breaking company (the one that finally introduced innovation and competition into an industry stagnant for decades) isn't letting government officials use its own platform to bust it!"
I mean, countries/states/cities are free to enact bans and harsh penalties to prop up existing cartels. See also U.S. states banning Tesla direct sales to consumers, because, hey, entrenched dealership interests. And as a philosophical matter I encourage Uber to respect the rule of law (all over the world) and push for democratic change rather than just rolling down Main Street with a foam middle finger out the sunroof.
But I don't have to applaud legislative support for inefficient, customer-deaf monopolies, nor large-scale sting operations that look quite like a money making game. And Uber certainly doesn't have to welcome fake users into its app just so it can get fined. Cat, meet mouse.
P.S. - Maybe taxis in Australia are infinitely better than they are here in the U.S., in which case I'm infinitely sorry I painted them with the same brush. Good on ya, much-loved not-monopoly taxis!!
I went back and skimmed the complaint and... a few things. One, the whole thing is (predictably) batshit crazy. Legit verbiage in what look like the right places, but saying "on information and belief" before "Nixon put space monkeys in my timecube" doesn't somehow make it uncrazy.
Two, turns out Snowden is a named defendant, and he is in big trouble for enriching himself with all this Russian hospitality.
Three, you're correct--this constructive trust idea (along with everything else in the complaint) has absurd consequences. It's a clever but completely untenable attempt to game the threshold questions (standing, jurisdiction).
Correct (IAAL*). He has suffered no legally cognizable injury or adverse effect (nor even a plausible connection to harm). So no standing.
Also, there is no legal theory under which he has a cause of action. In order for there to have been a tort, the defendants must have owed this guy a duty, then breached that duty, and that breach must've been the factual and proximate cause of actual harm. But Joe Random USA was an unknown, unforeseeable, causally unconnected nonparty who suffered no harm. Snowden et al owed him no duty, certainly not a fiduciary one.** So no tort.
What about his quasicontract theory of unjust enrichment? Maybe he's taking the term too literally. It's not simply that someone was enriched and you find it unjust. It's that you had a real or implied contract with the other party and they benefitted to your detriment. Did this guy half finish building Snowden a deck and then not get paid? No? Then he can't sue for unjust enrichment. Similarly, he couldn't, as a random citizen, sue on my behalf if I was the one who built the deck for Snowden. Nor could he sue North Korea for "unjustly enriching" themselves at Sony's expense.
*I am not your lawyer and this is not legal advice.
**Snowden may have owed the US govt a fiduciary duty, or duty of confidentiality or loyalty. But despite this guy being a retired naval officer, he is not the US govt.
Slashdot Mirror
favoured by professional gamers
On this side of the pond, we'd spell it "gamours."
Cheers!
Kill or be killed.
Ooo hey I like making up arbitrary tests too!
The Bach-Dell Test
A movie is not pants if, at any point, two characters named Del Bachman are in a dell listening to Bach on Dell laptops.
The Bake 'Til Test:
A pastry passes this test if it was baked by bakers, for bakers, for a number of minutes equal to the number of bakers involved.
The Beck Tell Test:
A joke is only funny if it's about the musical artist Beck, and told by Beck to himself.
tl;dr: it's basically a yo dawg gag
+2 funny AND informative!
While Slashdot's speculation is that "autocorrect gone horribly wrong" may be at the bottom of the submitter's odd new phrase, it is a safe bet that at least some of it has to do with a series of small aneurisms known as "Uruguay Syndrome."
Steve Jobs may very well have been an habitual reckless driver, but parking in handicapped spaces and driving without plates meets neither the legal nor commonsense definitions of "reckless driving."
That is all
You know what? I think you're right.
I was about to launch into this counter story, "Well, one of our high school teachers actually had her coffee spiked with ecstasy and wigged out" etc etc. Then it occurred to me that this didn't actually happen on our watch.
It was some apocryphal account of events that had happened "a few years ago"... looking back, it has the same hazy mythical quality as the one about the goat that those "sometime in the late 70's" seniors actually got on the roof, and the one about the mechanical whiz kid who actually took apart our principal's car and rebuilt it in the courtyard.
Like for real. Really happened, dude, my older brother knew the guy.
It targets files associated with single-user games Call of Duty, Star Craft 2, Diablo, Fallout 3...
So this is how Tristram falls...
"You can't ban Tor! People might switch to something we can't intercept!"
This! Well, very close. AC gets this concept, but for the uninitiated:
You can copyright Batman the comic book drawing; you can copyright photos, images, scripts, etc. from Batman the movie; and you can copyright the *specific* character of Batman/Bruce Wayne, whose billionaire parents were shot in front of him on the streets of Gotham, who had a father-figure butler named Alfred, etc etc. You can trademark the logo on the Batsuit, and possibly even the whole suit if it's distinctive enough.
BUT you cannot copyright stock characters or concepts like "rich vigilante dons black suit and cape to fight crime" or "dapper British spy beds femmes fatales and saves the world." And you cannot copyright costumes (clothing is functional in the US, unless it's so completely unwearable that its only function could be as art). Which is a great reason to put trademarkable things like a logo and unique-looking suit on a character you want to protect.
Let's apply these to this case. What makes a Power Ranger a Power Ranger?
The Visuals:
--"Space-looking" spandex jumpsuits suits? Costumes are not copyrightable, possibly trademarkable.
--There are five different colors and white diamonds on their chests? Concepts are not copyrightable. A distinctive 5-color logo incorporating the rangers or some visual element like white diamonds could be trademarked, although the actual logos are all a variation on "lightning-y" words.
The Name:
--"Power Rangers" and "Mighty Morphin Power Rangers" are certainly protectable (and protected) under trademark. They are too short and functional to be protected under copyright.
The Characters:
--Desire to fight various space assholes who want to wreak nonspecific space evil? Sounds pretty generic...
--Five teenagers fighting together? And they sometimes combine into one big ass robot? That's not even unique amongst futuristic crime-fighting robo-tweens in children's television, let alone all of fiction.
--They.... are one dimensional do-gooders who are so devoid of individual characteristics as to be interchangeable and known entirely by suit color, race, and gender? Now you're getting it! These "characters" are stock at best, meaning they are not protectable under copyright. The individual kids that donned the suits apparently had some half-assed backstories, but a) these too are stock and b) I don't believe the director referenced anything of the sort.
Mea culpa, I should know better than to rely on Slashdot for my facts--in this case, that 1oz of hard liquor is a "drink." I should've consulted an authoritative source like urbandictionary, which tells me one drink is actually equal to casual sex.
Could I still try to argue that my 1 glass was closer than 8? Well, yeah, but a) that would be pretty obtuse, and b) drinking any positive integer number of 8oz glasses of vodka is inadvisable in any case.
A single 8oz glass of vodka is pretty close to 10 standard drinks. How can you be so obtuse?
I have already secured the domain name "nodeerzone.com" so that state and federal highway officials can start putting in for stretches of highway they don't want deer to cross over. They will pay $20K/km to add highway sections to a public list. The deer will know not to cross these sections because of signs ($500 apiece) that say:
--NO-- DEER CROSSING!
I mean it, deer, you better not fucking cross here
Oblig Bash.
No, all three of you missed the point.
"Facebook engineers" are "game changing" the game by "rejecting" the "paradigm" that is "popular" (they're closing Facebook), instead embracing a "yet to be proven" "new approach" where your "pipe dreams" "look and feel like s__t " (unclear, they probably mean 'shat', which is short for William Shattner, who will buy the empty husk of Facebook and fold it into the Priceline Syndicate).
Focusing on a "groundbreaking" new business model, they'll be "approaching natives" (aboriginal peoples) with "samples and tutorials" that will give them "huge success internally" (Levitra and a lesson on handjobs). This new approach will definitely get the natives "stirred up", but will ultimately cause them to "React" poorly (an erection lasting more than four hours).
See how easy that was?
SCOTUS also said owning slaves was ok
GD, you're a regular and thoughtful poster, so I don't think you're intentionally trolling. But if SCOTUS upheld slave ownership back in the 1800's, that's because the Constitution specifically contemplated and provided for slave ownership. It took a constitutional amendment (13th) to abolish slavery.
:: ducks ::
That doesn't mean SCOTUS is always (or even usually) right when it comes to protecting civil liberties. But that was just a Supremely bad example.
Oh it was whore! That was really bothering me. I mean, w***e? I was wracking my brain and the best I got was "waste" or... "weene"?
I need my iPad. For me, it is excelling in a critical role that neither phones nor laptops can fill. As a performing musician, I post the iPad up on my mic stand, and the access to music and lyrics triples (or more) the range of songs I can play. Granted, my use case isn't the most common. But there are actually tons of musical performers, and IME they're increasingly turning to tablets to replace sheet music and chord charts.
...was obliged to use a concise term of action instead of the oddly constructed term of obligation "has been obliged."
Iran canceled its space program; Ansari fled to the US. That wasn't so hard!
I, on the other hand, have erstwhile been obliged to undertake in grammatical pedantry.
Go have your little libertardian circle-jerk somewhere else; we just cleaned the rugs.
The Invisible Hand does give the best HJs...
"I'm extremely angry that this monopoly-breaking company (the one that finally introduced innovation and competition into an industry stagnant for decades) isn't letting government officials use its own platform to bust it!"
I mean, countries/states/cities are free to enact bans and harsh penalties to prop up existing cartels. See also U.S. states banning Tesla direct sales to consumers, because, hey, entrenched dealership interests. And as a philosophical matter I encourage Uber to respect the rule of law (all over the world) and push for democratic change rather than just rolling down Main Street with a foam middle finger out the sunroof.
But I don't have to applaud legislative support for inefficient, customer-deaf monopolies, nor large-scale sting operations that look quite like a money making game. And Uber certainly doesn't have to welcome fake users into its app just so it can get fined. Cat, meet mouse.
P.S. - Maybe taxis in Australia are infinitely better than they are here in the U.S., in which case I'm infinitely sorry I painted them with the same brush. Good on ya, much-loved not-monopoly taxis!!
I went back and skimmed the complaint and... a few things. One, the whole thing is (predictably) batshit crazy. Legit verbiage in what look like the right places, but saying "on information and belief" before "Nixon put space monkeys in my timecube" doesn't somehow make it uncrazy.
Two, turns out Snowden is a named defendant, and he is in big trouble for enriching himself with all this Russian hospitality.
Three, you're correct--this constructive trust idea (along with everything else in the complaint) has absurd consequences. It's a clever but completely untenable attempt to game the threshold questions (standing, jurisdiction).
Correct (IAAL*). He has suffered no legally cognizable injury or adverse effect (nor even a plausible connection to harm). So no standing.
Also, there is no legal theory under which he has a cause of action. In order for there to have been a tort, the defendants must have owed this guy a duty, then breached that duty, and that breach must've been the factual and proximate cause of actual harm. But Joe Random USA was an unknown, unforeseeable, causally unconnected nonparty who suffered no harm. Snowden et al owed him no duty, certainly not a fiduciary one.** So no tort.
What about his quasicontract theory of unjust enrichment? Maybe he's taking the term too literally. It's not simply that someone was enriched and you find it unjust. It's that you had a real or implied contract with the other party and they benefitted to your detriment. Did this guy half finish building Snowden a deck and then not get paid? No? Then he can't sue for unjust enrichment. Similarly, he couldn't, as a random citizen, sue on my behalf if I was the one who built the deck for Snowden. Nor could he sue North Korea for "unjustly enriching" themselves at Sony's expense.
*I am not your lawyer and this is not legal advice.
**Snowden may have owed the US govt a fiduciary duty, or duty of confidentiality or loyalty. But despite this guy being a retired naval officer, he is not the US govt.
Err, NE for Nebraska, not NB for niobium....