You are correct about the copyright thing... I set that sig in 2003. I'll update it. Overall, it's just my attempt to bring recognition to the idea that with infinite copyright extensions, if you want to enrich the public domain, you have to explicitly claim, and then set an expiration on your copyrights.
Actually, you should look at the link (though you have to copy/paste it because Bugzilla is refusing connections that have a Slashdot URL as referer). The bug was reported by someone who wrote, tested and bug-fixed a patch. Two years later (TWO YEARS) someone from the Mozilla Team (and by that, I mean people with control over the released source) said that they thought it wasn't a good idea. A few months later the exploits were "discovered".
This whole incident is a huge black-eye for Open Source's theory of many eyes. The eyes saw. The fingers fixed. The brain ignored.
PS: I am still an open source advocate and I still believe in the many-eyes theory of security, but this incident shows that we cannot be abolutely confident in that theory producing better results that proprietary solutions.
Oh please. We all know that Slashdot comments are dashed off in less time than it takes to drink a glass of hemlock. Why would you get upset with someone for a typo for gods' sake?
I'd hardly call Aliens a "testosterone-fest" considering the main character is a woman
I think you're mis-understanding what I mean.... The influence that Cameron brought to the film (and I respect him for this) was to move it away from the tension-filled haunted house idea and into more of a military firefight genre. If you replace Ripley with Jack Ryan and the Aliens with Terrorists, you could easily see that movie as a Tom Clancy-based movie set somehwere in Africa.
The fact that Ripley was a woman has no bearing on how "testosterone laden" the movie is... it was pure Cameron, and Ripley was really not that different from Sarah Connor or even (if you think in terms of the years that are mentioned, but not shown) Rose in Titanic. Cameron loves strong female leads, so he puts them in situations that bring that out... usually involving nuclear weapons in some way;-)
I love Aliens AND Alien, but what Aliens did to Alien in terms of setting expectations, did not allow for a sequel of the type that Joss wrote... then again I don't know what that would have been like, since much of the script was tossed and the direction on the film wasn't exactly show-casing the story.
Second, Alien Resurrection was a failed premise from the start. Cloning Ripley? Give me a break.
Personally I was pleased with that part. Most of the reason behind it made sense (at least in so far as the first two movies did), and I enjoyed the way she reacted to that information as she learned, little-by-little, what was going on.
Originally, Ripley was supposed to get raped by an alien.
That was hardly a new concept... look at the first movie and think about the end (in the restored version) with the captain strapped to the wall begging for Ripley to kill him... I think that's as close as they could come to the idea at the time, and it still had to be cut for the ratings.
You don't like the movie. That's cool, you're not required to. I thought it was passable, but had serious warts. I'm not willing to ascribe those to Joss Whedon, though, after seeing his work elsewhere where he WASN'T being heavily edited. Buffy and early Angel were well written and while he's no Aaron Sorkin, he's good.
I should say, I never, ever got the appeal of the Buffy TV show either, but, hey, different strokes.
Indeed. Though in the case of Buffy, I'd suggest going back and looking at the first two seasons with a mind toward what high school was like... the core idea behind the show was showing you a bunch of scary monsters and showing you high school... and noting that high school was worse. It was a good vehicle for some great dark comedy, IMHO.
It was also the primary reason that the show started to become less interesting in seasons 6 and 7 (a couple of really good episodes aside); they had left high school, and eventually college, so now it was just about the monsters more than the main characters'. Attempts to develop the characters in the "real world" were just not going to work, and thankfully both SMG and Joss realized that and mutually agreed to end on the 7th season.
Holy Cow, that's the best idea I've heard in a long time.
Sad, isn't it? It's not that it's a particularly great idea... I mean I could come up with a dozen off the top of my head that would be just as interesting (in fact, one of the most engaging parts of ST:TMP and STIII:TSFS was the fact that a fraction of the movie was from the perspective of the Klingons).
The problem is that Star Trek's current executive mindset is "milk the cow", not "tell the story".
You could tell the story of Federation food inspectors and still come up with a really engaging movie... the problem is that that wouldn't be a franchise film. It would be hard to justify actions figures... the Burger King tie in would be rather unpleasant... there's no series in it... the characters would not fit the archetypes... the demographics are all wrong... etc, etc.
Star Trek stopped being about the story a long time ago.
On another point:
Making a Star Trek movie about current events is a mistake. Look at the original series. The topics were all about the nature of humanity and the nobility (as the Great Bird saw it) of our spirit. Even the famous "interracial kiss" wasn't the focus of the episode at all. If you turn Star Trek into a soap box, it loses the power of the pulpit (which is EXACTLY how G.R. used it).
If you want to use Star Trek to comment on the war in Iraq using Romulans, I think you would be better off by exploring the larger issues of sovreignty and control. Turn the Romulan War around. Show us the debate in the Romulan Senate. Show us the fear that the Federation instills in them.
The Federation is growing at an unprecidented rate. The Romulans would, of course, assume that there's coercien and duplicity involved, but spies are bringing back terrifying news: these humans are consensus builders without peer! The Romulans have no fear of a conquering army because they know that no conquerer could hold the Empire for long, but this... this cabal of cooperative worlds... they could tear down the Empire for good.
Tell the story of what control means to the Federation and to the Romulans. You don't have to make the metaphor paper-thin, just tell the story and let people think about it. Plant the seed....
Alien Resurrection 1) wasn't really Joss' story as written (though MORE of it was his than X-Men, from which they kept only 2 lines and the actress butchered 1 of them... the other was one of the best lines in the movie) and 2) was a fairly decent story that I think was somewhat poorly directed (if I had READ that story, I think I would have liked it a lot more than I did) and 3) mostly failed in the box-office because Cameron had done such a good job of transforming the series into a testosterone-fest that anything less was going to be a dissapointment.
As director of the Firefly movie, we're more likely to get a solid Joss story told and translated well onto the screen. Perhaps that will suck, but I doubt it.
That said, no Joss is not perfect. Fan-boys (and girls) who say he is are... well, fan-boys, so what can you expect (by fan-boy I mean the gushing, "my hero can do no wrong" sorts of fans, not the run-of-the-mill enthusiast... judge for yourself where I belong in that spectrum).
On the other hand, his work is often far more compelling than 90% of what we see on television (so much so that after swearing off the entire vampire genre and with a title that made me groan, B:TVS pulled me in and made me enough a fan to buy and watch the seasons that I had missed).
If you want to know Joss' highs and lows look at the first two seasons of Buffy and then look a the last season (7). There it is in a nutshell, and while I found the seventh season to be far below the level of what he did in the first two, I'd still rank it well above most of what's on TV.
As for movies... the bar is higher. Science Fiction has seen some real winners (Forbidden Planet, 2001, Star Wars, Alien, Blade Runner, Empire, The Matrix)... and living up to that standard is a lot harder than living up to the standard of American TV (which has a few major winners like Twilight Zone, Star Trek: TOS and Babylon 5 and a handfull of fast-from-the-gate shows that couldn't hold it together or got cancelled like Andromeda, Firefly, Jerrimiah).
In the end, I'll go see the Firefly movie and just try to enjoy it and judge it on its own merits. We shall see....
copyright does appear to have more relevance to the publisher than the musician, who still needs the patronage of the labels to earn a living...
Ok, let's just talk about music for a minute....
Well, yes and no. I wonder how many artist web sites have Paypal links these days. Can you live on patronage today outside of the label system? Probably not. Is it viable as a model for the future? I would think so.
I think the problem right now is that the labels have made the process of patronage into fast food, and so very few people think in those terms. Still, symphonies rely on patronage. People like Danny Elfman make most of their money from commisioned works for film. Patronage is still alive and well, it's just that (as with most of our society) there are large corporations that do a very good job of marketting their product, and that makes it hard to tell that this sort of thing is still going on.
Good points. I did not know about Medelssohn's copying.
I think the crux of this "lawlessness" or at least "flagrant copyright violation" is the sense that the equitability of copyright has gone away. I'm not saying that every Kazaa user is a constitutional law scholar, but there is a general sense that the rules have changed, and that they're not fair any more.
When that happens civil disobedeance is often the result. Is copying songs and movies and books right? Probably not as a singular act, but in this case, I think treating the symptom would be a greater wrong (though I have no doubt that that's the road we're going to walk down).
Imagine if Beethoven or Van Gogh had been unable to earn a living creating their art.
Ooops, you just stepped on a land-mine there....
Beethoven and Van Gogh are two examples of artists who DID NOT benefit from copyright. They made money based on patronage (the primary way that artists made money as pure artists, not counting trade-skills, until fairly recently in history).
My take is that patronage is the way to go if we're abandoning copyright terms. Why? Because copyright terms made copyright a "deal" between the public and the publishers (as a friend of mine points out, copyright is more about publishers than artists). The publishers get a lock on profits for a term and in exchange the publisher produces works that will enrich the public domain after the expiration period.
Without the public domain (and right now, it looks like the public domain has been doomed to a static existance, since Congress in the US has made it clear that they will extend copyright terms every time they are about to expire), what benefit does the public get from copyright? Not the art, unless you really want to say that today's art is richer than that of Shakespear or Homer's day. So, what is better about copyright than patronage?
Under a patronage system you don't need to have copyright. The value of an artist is in the ability to a) control the production of art as a symbol of status and power and b) to commission specific works of art or literature which meet specific needs.
This could apply equally well to software, and in fact is mostly how the open source software business works.
Now, I'm a realist, and I don't think we're going to go there in this country (the US in my case). However, the fact that a viable alternative has existed for centuries and has produced some of the greatest works of mankind certainly cannot be ignored in such a debate.
PS: Your snide comments about my "uniqueness" also serve to hurt your credibility in any kind of informed debade. Let's keep the ad hominem to a minimum please.
You're missing the point. You keep focusing on "more important" and the like, but I'm not making any such comparisons.
You're also assuming that I'm trying to advocate style over substance. I'm not. In fact, just the oposite. When your images use alpha blending you can do user-friendly thinks like comply with the user's preferences by defaulting your background colors (the browser will then do the right thing when blending). You can also stop worrying about your images as much and focus more on the text.
I think you're looking for an argument... that's the third door down on the left.
Wouldn't it suck if your favorite band only ever released one album
No.
No amount of bold-text will change that.
1. That happens anyway (my favorite bands are mostly non-mainstream and most of them have to have day jobs to support their art... many produce only one or a small number of albums).
2. There is value in the purchace that goes beyond having the binary data that represents the songs, and THAT is why (even at what I consider obscene prices) albums continue to sell today.
3. You're not responding to the point he made: artists will produce no matter what, so what is the value of copyright (I have an answer, and so did the framers of the constitution, but THAT pact has been broken by congress via perpetual copyright terms, so I'm no longer sure why we enshrine copyright)? Remember that for most of history artists could NOT make a living selling their works (patronage was the way artists made a living).
4. Your comments like "I don't usually respond to Anonymous Cowards" and "People who resort to sarcasm to make a point usually do so because they are unable to otherwise formulate a serious rebuttal" are non-points and really don't serve to do anything but bias readers against your real points.
Killing a man in cold blood and killing a man in self-defense are two different things. [...] Under what circumstances is it acceptable for me to download a copy of Photoshop CS without paying for it?
Apples and oranges anyone? The question here is this: should we continue this pointless tactic of rhetorically equating theft and copyright (and/or contract) violation? That's the question on the table.
Now, can you see the analog to murder vs manslaughter? Different moral and ethical implications. Same goes for theft and copyright violation. When you steal from me I can point to the thing that you now have that I do not. I am deprived of my property. When you copy my works, I am potentially deprived of one customer per copy (and per copy of your copy, of course). That's a fairly serious difference in impact, and I think it merits asking people not to equate the two in terms of rhetoric or law.
Theft and stealing are agressive acts which deprive someone of something that they once had.
Copyright violation does not deprive anyone of anything that they once had. It might remove a potential customer, but in most cases even that's not true.
Now here comes a key point that the grandparent didn't address: is it wrong? Actually, I'm going to wimp out there. Stealing is not always wrong, and neither is copyright violation. Copyright violation is "breaking the rules" and while I would suggest that it's a less serious rules violation than theft, that does not make it acceptable in all circumstances.
What makes it harder to justify copyright violation than stealing (and I'm sure the grandparent isn't happy with this argument) is that we specifically outline acceptable violations of copyright ("fair use"). The only analog in property that I know of are salvage and eminent domain, and those aren't very close.
So, it's not a black-and-white thing. I would back up the idea that copying software for purely educational reasons (e.g. someone who got a pirated copy of Word for self-training purposes) is at least damn close to the spirit of fair use. However, installing one copy of Word for your whole company because you don't feel like paying for it is just silly. Go buy a cheaper word processor or use an open source one. If the limitations in compatibility bother you, then pay for the features you obviously want. You don't have a God-given right to not have to tell your customers / vendors / partners "could you re-send that in 7.0 format so I can read it?"
The quality of a web site is determined more by it's substance than by it's appearance. Good web site design doesn't even require images.
We're talking about 2 VERY different things. You're talking about design from a communication-of-information standpoint, I'm talking about design from a software standpoint.
Regardless of what information your site might contain (or it might not contain any, but just be a system like PHPNuke or bricolage, that manages ANY information) good software and content management design require alpha blending. Right now, everyone either hacks around this and suffers or lets the users who don't have alpha-blending PNG suffer.
This is a sad state of affairs, and fixing is... IMHO... more important than spell-checking your mother's chocolate chip cookie recipie, though it's actually an orthoganal concern.
Zlib is publically specified, the IETF has an RFC on it, and it has an open source reference implementation. You don't need this (relatively obsolete) algorithm for your research when better, more widely available algorithms exist.
GIF is interesting only for backward compatiblity, not for the algorithms that go into it (which were state-of-the-art at the time, mind you).
Alpha transparency is critical to good Web site design for many reasons. Among them:
1. Blending with any background means you can change the background globally and not worry about re-blending all of the images. 2. An image which is produced externally (e.g. by a partner) can blend with your layout cleanly without being customized.
However, MOST uses of alpha blending in web design would ACTUALLY be better done in SVG if SVG in browsers could finally get first-class status.
Why? Well, just for starters, LCDs and CRTs have different optimial anti-aliasing strategies. If I want to put a circle on a Web page, right now I have to choose one of those strategies ahead of time (or resort to a plug-in). If we allow SVG "images", then we can simply render that circle however the user directs it to be (presumably because they've selected a "CRT-friendly" or "LCD-friendly" preference in their browser or desktop).
Once you eliminate anti-aliasing as a concern, there are still reasons to do alpha-blending in regular images (such as those above), but the general case (logos, text, shapes, etc) will be handled more cleanly.
I see it alot too. In fact, I see it so often that at this point, I treat it as a valid compound word. This, of course, makes me a bad person and probably a comunist or terrorist or the like, but I tend to read, write and speak colloquial English as it is presented to me, not what the OED has pre-approved. I prefer a living, breathing language to bookworm-food.
If you know what the word means from context or repeated usage, why bother "correcting"? Next thing, you're going to go tell e.e. cummings that it's spelled "I";-)
The next 50 years are going to be really hard for those who cling to the idea that written languages are defined by an elite who are "published".
Oh and speaking of Linus as author (or not) of Linux: as I understand it he wrote his name incorrectly on a paper for school, and the got caught up in a Three's Company style cycle of crumbling lies about the existance of this "Linux" until eventually he had to hire SCO to write it for him....
Indeed, but I'm starting to see the wisdom in this. Keeping KDE around is good for the user, but it's also good for Gnome. KDE came first, and from day one has always pushed Gnome to BE and to BE BETTER.
I like Gnome a lot, but I really hope KDE sticks around for the forseeable future.
most of the people I know with really distorted worldviews have either been into heavy drugs or very permiscuous sex
There are several things in your statement that I think you need to analyze:
What do you consider distorted? It might just be that you've lumped those whose world views would pre-dispose them to drug use into that umbrella.
How large is your sample set? Anything less than about 20 people who fit this model would be statistically insignificant, and any less than 100 is pretty weak evidence for a link.
It sounds like you're fairly conservative (pardon the assumption), so I'm guessing that any train of logic that would lead one to promiscuous sex would probably strike you as "distrorted" in the first place, so again I ask how you're defining the term here.
As counter-examples, let me point to a few folks who've used drugs:
President William J. Clinton President George W. Bush Thomas Alva Edison Newt Ginrich Thomas Jefferson Steve Jobs Pope Leo XIII Jack Nicholson
That's just a small list, of course, but it kind of introduces the breadth of personality type and accomplishments that we're talking about here, doesn't it?
Now, as for having a profound effect: yes. Psychoactive drugs have an effect similar at least in scope to any traumatic (good or bad) event in one's life. Halucinagens especially can result in substantial shifts in world-view. This can be good or bad, and using these drugs without thinking about what you're doing and the magnitude of the choice you are making is just dumb. I wasn't trying to suggest otherwise here, just trying to temper what I see as a rather over-reaching conclusion.
Banning alcohol causes more problems than it solves because it's so embedded in our society, but we'd all be much better off without it.
No, banning alcohol causes problems because it's something people want enough to circumvent the law, and that creates a black market. Black markets are dangerous and harmful to normal markets.
Let's just take as an example, Marajuanna (a drug which I would argue is far less harmful than Alcohol or Tobacco).
Right now it's illegal. This means that everyone who sells it does to in secret, so you have no real way to control how it's processed and distributed. What would happen if it were legal?
For one, the financial benefiots are gigantic. Taxation is obvious and often cited, but then there's the fact that the companies growing it will be real companies that actually employ people in traditional ways that help to strengthen the economy.
For another, you could cripple the industries that get it into the hands of kids. Many will get it from their parents the way many get alcohol, but ask yourself which you'd rather see: that they got it from their parents or a dealer? 30 years of the war on drugs has proven that none of the above is not an available option.
You could also slash the budget of the DEA and still step up the amount of money spent on stopping hard drugs. Cost savings AND a boost to law enforcement; imagine that.
What's more -- and this is a point often missed -- you get to regulate it. That's right, you actually get MORE control over the drugs because they are legal. Why? Because the companies that are selling the drugs put the illegal dealers out of business, and those companies are going to be constrained by the laws far more than the dealers were.
You also end a lot of violence that hurts hundreds of innocents every year. If you're a drug dealer and another drug dealer does something that hurts your business, you have no recourse to the courts because your business is illegal. So, violence is your only option. Make the drugs legal and the companies can sue each other when they're wronged or even press criminal charges. Notice that as powerfull as R.J. Renolds is, you don't see them gunning down the competition.
The rule to remember is this: make it illegal and you lose control over it. If the demand is high, you also create a black market.
My impression is that the stuff being forced onto the Linux desktop is as huge of a bloated and hacked mess as anything coming out of Redmond
I see just the opposite, though it DOES vary.
In some places (e.g. video viewers, pre-helix) you are correct.
However, the core of (just for example because I know it, other desktop folks chime in if you like, as I'm sure much the same is true) the Gnome desktop is far more functional than the MS equivalent.
I use Galeon, Evolution, Gaim, gnome-terminal, nautilus and XChat. Some things ARE bloated. For example, the internationalization support is huge. On the other hand, I'm darned glad that's in there. Theming is gigantic, but it too serves a useful purpose in making the desktop usable to people who work in different ways.
nautilus is mostly useless to me (I'm a shell kind of guy), but when I need it it's great. I use it for photo organization and various other large-scale file management tasks for which a visual mode is more suited.
Evolution (as I've posted elsewhere) is just brilliant. I can get things done pretty darned fast in mutt, but some things are just easier in Evolution (mostly stemming from virtual mailboxes), and the total transparency with which diverse IMAP/POP accounts are managed as a single pool of mail is almost dauntingly powerful.
The office suites are getting better, but I honestly don't use them enough to comment coherently.
Overall, the Linux desktop is pretty slick, and getting better every day.
The thing is that on the earth we have this pesky atmosphere AND the moon and sun to contend with.
On the moon two of those problems go away. If you're on the far side of the moon, the earth never rises. This is a huge boon in terms of viewing time. Also, there's far less atmosphere on the moon (less even than in Hubble's orbit, I believe).
The atmosphere's distortion effects (due to varying density and composition) can be removed to a great extent using AO (adaptive optics), but certain wavelengths never reach the surface, and that's a problem for some kinds of viewing.
On the other hand, on the moon, maintenance is even harder than in orbit, and you are at the bottom of a gravity well, so the chances of getting hit by rocks are quite a bit higher. Communication back to Earth from the far side of the moon can also be an interesting challenge, though a solvable one using one of any number of techniques (e.g. a relay at an L point).
Why is there always an assumption that the folks at NASA are idiots?
I never made any soch assumption at all. In fact, I assume just the opposite. Please don't leap to such conclusions about what I think of NASA or any other part of the US Government for that matter.
What I was saying was that THOSE READING Slashdot should consider these other ideas before suggesting (mostly for nostagia's sake) the idea that Hubble should not be decommisioned.
Then again, most Slashdotters have no input to the process, so that's kind of moot.
Slashdot Mirror
You are correct about the copyright thing... I set that sig in 2003. I'll update it. Overall, it's just my attempt to bring recognition to the idea that with infinite copyright extensions, if you want to enrich the public domain, you have to explicitly claim, and then set an expiration on your copyrights.
Actually, you should look at the link (though you have to copy/paste it because Bugzilla is refusing connections that have a Slashdot URL as referer). The bug was reported by someone who wrote, tested and bug-fixed a patch. Two years later (TWO YEARS) someone from the Mozilla Team (and by that, I mean people with control over the released source) said that they thought it wasn't a good idea. A few months later the exploits were "discovered".
This whole incident is a huge black-eye for Open Source's theory of many eyes. The eyes saw. The fingers fixed. The brain ignored.
PS: I am still an open source advocate and I still believe in the many-eyes theory of security, but this incident shows that we cannot be abolutely confident in that theory producing better results that proprietary solutions.
Oh please. We all know that Slashdot comments are dashed off in less time than it takes to drink a glass of hemlock. Why would you get upset with someone for a typo for gods' sake?
I'd hardly call Aliens a "testosterone-fest" considering the main character is a woman
;-)
I think you're mis-understanding what I mean.... The influence that Cameron brought to the film (and I respect him for this) was to move it away from the tension-filled haunted house idea and into more of a military firefight genre. If you replace Ripley with Jack Ryan and the Aliens with Terrorists, you could easily see that movie as a Tom Clancy-based movie set somehwere in Africa.
The fact that Ripley was a woman has no bearing on how "testosterone laden" the movie is... it was pure Cameron, and Ripley was really not that different from Sarah Connor or even (if you think in terms of the years that are mentioned, but not shown) Rose in Titanic. Cameron loves strong female leads, so he puts them in situations that bring that out... usually involving nuclear weapons in some way
I love Aliens AND Alien, but what Aliens did to Alien in terms of setting expectations, did not allow for a sequel of the type that Joss wrote... then again I don't know what that would have been like, since much of the script was tossed and the direction on the film wasn't exactly show-casing the story.
Second, Alien Resurrection was a failed premise from the start. Cloning Ripley? Give me a break.
Personally I was pleased with that part. Most of the reason behind it made sense (at least in so far as the first two movies did), and I enjoyed the way she reacted to that information as she learned, little-by-little, what was going on.
Originally, Ripley was supposed to get raped by an alien.
That was hardly a new concept... look at the first movie and think about the end (in the restored version) with the captain strapped to the wall begging for Ripley to kill him... I think that's as close as they could come to the idea at the time, and it still had to be cut for the ratings.
You don't like the movie. That's cool, you're not required to. I thought it was passable, but had serious warts. I'm not willing to ascribe those to Joss Whedon, though, after seeing his work elsewhere where he WASN'T being heavily edited. Buffy and early Angel were well written and while he's no Aaron Sorkin, he's good.
I should say, I never, ever got the appeal of the Buffy TV show either, but, hey, different strokes.
Indeed. Though in the case of Buffy, I'd suggest going back and looking at the first two seasons with a mind toward what high school was like... the core idea behind the show was showing you a bunch of scary monsters and showing you high school... and noting that high school was worse. It was a good vehicle for some great dark comedy, IMHO.
It was also the primary reason that the show started to become less interesting in seasons 6 and 7 (a couple of really good episodes aside); they had left high school, and eventually college, so now it was just about the monsters more than the main characters'. Attempts to develop the characters in the "real world" were just not going to work, and thankfully both SMG and Joss realized that and mutually agreed to end on the 7th season.
Holy Cow, that's the best idea I've heard in a long time.
Sad, isn't it? It's not that it's a particularly great idea... I mean I could come up with a dozen off the top of my head that would be just as interesting (in fact, one of the most engaging parts of ST:TMP and STIII:TSFS was the fact that a fraction of the movie was from the perspective of the Klingons).
The problem is that Star Trek's current executive mindset is "milk the cow", not "tell the story".
You could tell the story of Federation food inspectors and still come up with a really engaging movie... the problem is that that wouldn't be a franchise film. It would be hard to justify actions figures... the Burger King tie in would be rather unpleasant... there's no series in it... the characters would not fit the archetypes... the demographics are all wrong... etc, etc.
Star Trek stopped being about the story a long time ago.
On another point:
Making a Star Trek movie about current events is a mistake. Look at the original series. The topics were all about the nature of humanity and the nobility (as the Great Bird saw it) of our spirit. Even the famous "interracial kiss" wasn't the focus of the episode at all. If you turn Star Trek into a soap box, it loses the power of the pulpit (which is EXACTLY how G.R. used it).
If you want to use Star Trek to comment on the war in Iraq using Romulans, I think you would be better off by exploring the larger issues of sovreignty and control. Turn the Romulan War around. Show us the debate in the Romulan Senate. Show us the fear that the Federation instills in them.
The Federation is growing at an unprecidented rate. The Romulans would, of course, assume that there's coercien and duplicity involved, but spies are bringing back terrifying news: these humans are consensus builders without peer! The Romulans have no fear of a conquering army because they know that no conquerer could hold the Empire for long, but this... this cabal of cooperative worlds... they could tear down the Empire for good.
Tell the story of what control means to the Federation and to the Romulans. You don't have to make the metaphor paper-thin, just tell the story and let people think about it. Plant the seed....
Alien Resurrection 1) wasn't really Joss' story as written (though MORE of it was his than X-Men, from which they kept only 2 lines and the actress butchered 1 of them... the other was one of the best lines in the movie) and 2) was a fairly decent story that I think was somewhat poorly directed (if I had READ that story, I think I would have liked it a lot more than I did) and 3) mostly failed in the box-office because Cameron had done such a good job of transforming the series into a testosterone-fest that anything less was going to be a dissapointment.
... judge for yourself where I belong in that spectrum).
As director of the Firefly movie, we're more likely to get a solid Joss story told and translated well onto the screen. Perhaps that will suck, but I doubt it.
That said, no Joss is not perfect. Fan-boys (and girls) who say he is are... well, fan-boys, so what can you expect (by fan-boy I mean the gushing, "my hero can do no wrong" sorts of fans, not the run-of-the-mill enthusiast
On the other hand, his work is often far more compelling than 90% of what we see on television (so much so that after swearing off the entire vampire genre and with a title that made me groan, B:TVS pulled me in and made me enough a fan to buy and watch the seasons that I had missed).
If you want to know Joss' highs and lows look at the first two seasons of Buffy and then look a the last season (7). There it is in a nutshell, and while I found the seventh season to be far below the level of what he did in the first two, I'd still rank it well above most of what's on TV.
As for movies... the bar is higher. Science Fiction has seen some real winners (Forbidden Planet, 2001, Star Wars, Alien, Blade Runner, Empire, The Matrix)... and living up to that standard is a lot harder than living up to the standard of American TV (which has a few major winners like Twilight Zone, Star Trek: TOS and Babylon 5 and a handfull of fast-from-the-gate shows that couldn't hold it together or got cancelled like Andromeda, Firefly, Jerrimiah).
In the end, I'll go see the Firefly movie and just try to enjoy it and judge it on its own merits. We shall see....
copyright does appear to have more relevance to the publisher than the musician, who still needs the patronage of the labels to earn a living...
Ok, let's just talk about music for a minute....
Well, yes and no. I wonder how many artist web sites have Paypal links these days. Can you live on patronage today outside of the label system? Probably not. Is it viable as a model for the future? I would think so.
I think the problem right now is that the labels have made the process of patronage into fast food, and so very few people think in those terms. Still, symphonies rely on patronage. People like Danny Elfman make most of their money from commisioned works for film. Patronage is still alive and well, it's just that (as with most of our society) there are large corporations that do a very good job of marketting their product, and that makes it hard to tell that this sort of thing is still going on.
Good points. I did not know about Medelssohn's copying.
I think the crux of this "lawlessness" or at least "flagrant copyright violation" is the sense that the equitability of copyright has gone away. I'm not saying that every Kazaa user is a constitutional law scholar, but there is a general sense that the rules have changed, and that they're not fair any more.
When that happens civil disobedeance is often the result. Is copying songs and movies and books right? Probably not as a singular act, but in this case, I think treating the symptom would be a greater wrong (though I have no doubt that that's the road we're going to walk down).
Imagine if Beethoven or Van Gogh had been unable to earn a living creating their art.
Ooops, you just stepped on a land-mine there....
Beethoven and Van Gogh are two examples of artists who DID NOT benefit from copyright. They made money based on patronage (the primary way that artists made money as pure artists, not counting trade-skills, until fairly recently in history).
My take is that patronage is the way to go if we're abandoning copyright terms. Why? Because copyright terms made copyright a "deal" between the public and the publishers (as a friend of mine points out, copyright is more about publishers than artists). The publishers get a lock on profits for a term and in exchange the publisher produces works that will enrich the public domain after the expiration period.
Without the public domain (and right now, it looks like the public domain has been doomed to a static existance, since Congress in the US has made it clear that they will extend copyright terms every time they are about to expire), what benefit does the public get from copyright? Not the art, unless you really want to say that today's art is richer than that of Shakespear or Homer's day. So, what is better about copyright than patronage?
Under a patronage system you don't need to have copyright. The value of an artist is in the ability to a) control the production of art as a symbol of status and power and b) to commission specific works of art or literature which meet specific needs.
This could apply equally well to software, and in fact is mostly how the open source software business works.
Now, I'm a realist, and I don't think we're going to go there in this country (the US in my case). However, the fact that a viable alternative has existed for centuries and has produced some of the greatest works of mankind certainly cannot be ignored in such a debate.
PS: Your snide comments about my "uniqueness" also serve to hurt your credibility in any kind of informed debade. Let's keep the ad hominem to a minimum please.
You're missing the point. You keep focusing on "more important" and the like, but I'm not making any such comparisons.
You're also assuming that I'm trying to advocate style over substance. I'm not. In fact, just the oposite. When your images use alpha blending you can do user-friendly thinks like comply with the user's preferences by defaulting your background colors (the browser will then do the right thing when blending). You can also stop worrying about your images as much and focus more on the text.
I think you're looking for an argument... that's the third door down on the left.
Wouldn't it suck if your favorite band only ever released one album
No.
No amount of bold-text will change that.
1. That happens anyway (my favorite bands are mostly non-mainstream and most of them have to have day jobs to support their art... many produce only one or a small number of albums).
2. There is value in the purchace that goes beyond having the binary data that represents the songs, and THAT is why (even at what I consider obscene prices) albums continue to sell today.
3. You're not responding to the point he made: artists will produce no matter what, so what is the value of copyright (I have an answer, and so did the framers of the constitution, but THAT pact has been broken by congress via perpetual copyright terms, so I'm no longer sure why we enshrine copyright)? Remember that for most of history artists could NOT make a living selling their works (patronage was the way artists made a living).
4. Your comments like "I don't usually respond to Anonymous Cowards" and "People who resort to sarcasm to make a point usually do so because they are unable to otherwise formulate a serious rebuttal" are non-points and really don't serve to do anything but bias readers against your real points.
Killing a man in cold blood and killing a man in self-defense are two different things. [...] Under what circumstances is it acceptable for me to download a copy of Photoshop CS without paying for it?
Apples and oranges anyone? The question here is this: should we continue this pointless tactic of rhetorically equating theft and copyright (and/or contract) violation? That's the question on the table.
Now, can you see the analog to murder vs manslaughter? Different moral and ethical implications. Same goes for theft and copyright violation. When you steal from me I can point to the thing that you now have that I do not. I am deprived of my property. When you copy my works, I am potentially deprived of one customer per copy (and per copy of your copy, of course). That's a fairly serious difference in impact, and I think it merits asking people not to equate the two in terms of rhetoric or law.
You're wrong.
Theft and stealing are agressive acts which deprive someone of something that they once had.
Copyright violation does not deprive anyone of anything that they once had. It might remove a potential customer, but in most cases even that's not true.
Now here comes a key point that the grandparent didn't address: is it wrong? Actually, I'm going to wimp out there. Stealing is not always wrong, and neither is copyright violation. Copyright violation is "breaking the rules" and while I would suggest that it's a less serious rules violation than theft, that does not make it acceptable in all circumstances.
What makes it harder to justify copyright violation than stealing (and I'm sure the grandparent isn't happy with this argument) is that we specifically outline acceptable violations of copyright ("fair use"). The only analog in property that I know of are salvage and eminent domain, and those aren't very close.
So, it's not a black-and-white thing. I would back up the idea that copying software for purely educational reasons (e.g. someone who got a pirated copy of Word for self-training purposes) is at least damn close to the spirit of fair use. However, installing one copy of Word for your whole company because you don't feel like paying for it is just silly. Go buy a cheaper word processor or use an open source one. If the limitations in compatibility bother you, then pay for the features you obviously want. You don't have a God-given right to not have to tell your customers / vendors / partners "could you re-send that in 7.0 format so I can read it?"
The quality of a web site is determined more by it's substance than by it's appearance. Good web site design doesn't even require images.
We're talking about 2 VERY different things. You're talking about design from a communication-of-information standpoint, I'm talking about design from a software standpoint.
Regardless of what information your site might contain (or it might not contain any, but just be a system like PHPNuke or bricolage, that manages ANY information) good software and content management design require alpha blending. Right now, everyone either hacks around this and suffers or lets the users who don't have alpha-blending PNG suffer.
This is a sad state of affairs, and fixing is... IMHO... more important than spell-checking your mother's chocolate chip cookie recipie, though it's actually an orthoganal concern.
Zlib is publically specified, the IETF has an RFC on it, and it has an open source reference implementation. You don't need this (relatively obsolete) algorithm for your research when better, more widely available algorithms exist.
GIF is interesting only for backward compatiblity, not for the algorithms that go into it (which were state-of-the-art at the time, mind you).
Alpha transparency is critical to good Web site design for many reasons. Among them:
1. Blending with any background means you can change the background globally and not worry about re-blending all of the images.
2. An image which is produced externally (e.g. by a partner) can blend with your layout cleanly without being customized.
However, MOST uses of alpha blending in web design would ACTUALLY be better done in SVG if SVG in browsers could finally get first-class status.
Why? Well, just for starters, LCDs and CRTs have different optimial anti-aliasing strategies. If I want to put a circle on a Web page, right now I have to choose one of those strategies ahead of time (or resort to a plug-in). If we allow SVG "images", then we can simply render that circle however the user directs it to be (presumably because they've selected a "CRT-friendly" or "LCD-friendly" preference in their browser or desktop).
Once you eliminate anti-aliasing as a concern, there are still reasons to do alpha-blending in regular images (such as those above), but the general case (logos, text, shapes, etc) will be handled more cleanly.
thanks, you made my point far more clearly than I did.
"That's okay, I see 'alot' a lot."
;-)
I see it alot too. In fact, I see it so often that at this point, I treat it as a valid compound word. This, of course, makes me a bad person and probably a comunist or terrorist or the like, but I tend to read, write and speak colloquial English as it is presented to me, not what the OED has pre-approved. I prefer a living, breathing language to bookworm-food.
If you know what the word means from context or repeated usage, why bother "correcting"? Next thing, you're going to go tell e.e. cummings that it's spelled "I"
The next 50 years are going to be really hard for those who cling to the idea that written languages are defined by an elite who are "published".
Oh and speaking of Linus as author (or not) of Linux: as I understand it he wrote his name incorrectly on a paper for school, and the got caught up in a Three's Company style cycle of crumbling lies about the existance of this "Linux" until eventually he had to hire SCO to write it for him....
What does "Basic ROM Features" mean on disk 10?
Indeed, but I'm starting to see the wisdom in this. Keeping KDE around is good for the user, but it's also good for Gnome. KDE came first, and from day one has always pushed Gnome to BE and to BE BETTER.
I like Gnome a lot, but I really hope KDE sticks around for the forseeable future.
There are several things in your statement that I think you need to analyze:
As counter-examples, let me point to a few folks who've used drugs:
President William J. Clinton
President George W. Bush
Thomas Alva Edison
Newt Ginrich
Thomas Jefferson
Steve Jobs
Pope Leo XIII
Jack Nicholson
That's just a small list, of course, but it kind of introduces the breadth of personality type and accomplishments that we're talking about here, doesn't it?
Now, as for having a profound effect: yes. Psychoactive drugs have an effect similar at least in scope to any traumatic (good or bad) event in one's life. Halucinagens especially can result in substantial shifts in world-view. This can be good or bad, and using these drugs without thinking about what you're doing and the magnitude of the choice you are making is just dumb. I wasn't trying to suggest otherwise here, just trying to temper what I see as a rather over-reaching conclusion.
Banning alcohol causes more problems than it solves because it's so embedded in our society, but we'd all be much better off without it.
No, banning alcohol causes problems because it's something people want enough to circumvent the law, and that creates a black market. Black markets are dangerous and harmful to normal markets.
Let's just take as an example, Marajuanna (a drug which I would argue is far less harmful than Alcohol or Tobacco).
Right now it's illegal. This means that everyone who sells it does to in secret, so you have no real way to control how it's processed and distributed. What would happen if it were legal?
For one, the financial benefiots are gigantic. Taxation is obvious and often cited, but then there's the fact that the companies growing it will be real companies that actually employ people in traditional ways that help to strengthen the economy.
For another, you could cripple the industries that get it into the hands of kids. Many will get it from their parents the way many get alcohol, but ask yourself which you'd rather see: that they got it from their parents or a dealer? 30 years of the war on drugs has proven that none of the above is not an available option.
You could also slash the budget of the DEA and still step up the amount of money spent on stopping hard drugs. Cost savings AND a boost to law enforcement; imagine that.
What's more -- and this is a point often missed -- you get to regulate it. That's right, you actually get MORE control over the drugs because they are legal. Why? Because the companies that are selling the drugs put the illegal dealers out of business, and those companies are going to be constrained by the laws far more than the dealers were.
You also end a lot of violence that hurts hundreds of innocents every year. If you're a drug dealer and another drug dealer does something that hurts your business, you have no recourse to the courts because your business is illegal. So, violence is your only option. Make the drugs legal and the companies can sue each other when they're wronged or even press criminal charges. Notice that as powerfull as R.J. Renolds is, you don't see them gunning down the competition.
The rule to remember is this: make it illegal and you lose control over it. If the demand is high, you also create a black market.
My impression is that the stuff being forced onto the Linux desktop is as huge of a bloated and hacked mess as anything coming out of Redmond
I see just the opposite, though it DOES vary.
In some places (e.g. video viewers, pre-helix) you are correct.
However, the core of (just for example because I know it, other desktop folks chime in if you like, as I'm sure much the same is true) the Gnome desktop is far more functional than the MS equivalent.
I use Galeon, Evolution, Gaim, gnome-terminal, nautilus and XChat. Some things ARE bloated. For example, the internationalization support is huge. On the other hand, I'm darned glad that's in there. Theming is gigantic, but it too serves a useful purpose in making the desktop usable to people who work in different ways.
nautilus is mostly useless to me (I'm a shell kind of guy), but when I need it it's great. I use it for photo organization and various other large-scale file management tasks for which a visual mode is more suited.
Evolution (as I've posted elsewhere) is just brilliant. I can get things done pretty darned fast in mutt, but some things are just easier in Evolution (mostly stemming from virtual mailboxes), and the total transparency with which diverse IMAP/POP accounts are managed as a single pool of mail is almost dauntingly powerful.
The office suites are getting better, but I honestly don't use them enough to comment coherently.
Overall, the Linux desktop is pretty slick, and getting better every day.
Why couldntwe just do this on earth?
We can and we are.
The thing is that on the earth we have this pesky atmosphere AND the moon and sun to contend with.
On the moon two of those problems go away. If you're on the far side of the moon, the earth never rises. This is a huge boon in terms of viewing time. Also, there's far less atmosphere on the moon (less even than in Hubble's orbit, I believe).
The atmosphere's distortion effects (due to varying density and composition) can be removed to a great extent using AO (adaptive optics), but certain wavelengths never reach the surface, and that's a problem for some kinds of viewing.
On the other hand, on the moon, maintenance is even harder than in orbit, and you are at the bottom of a gravity well, so the chances of getting hit by rocks are quite a bit higher. Communication back to Earth from the far side of the moon can also be an interesting challenge, though a solvable one using one of any number of techniques (e.g. a relay at an L point).
IANAA. YMMV.
Hope that all helps.
Why is there always an assumption that the folks at NASA are idiots?
I never made any soch assumption at all. In fact, I assume just the opposite. Please don't leap to such conclusions about what I think of NASA or any other part of the US Government for that matter.
What I was saying was that THOSE READING Slashdot should consider these other ideas before suggesting (mostly for nostagia's sake) the idea that Hubble should not be decommisioned.
Then again, most Slashdotters have no input to the process, so that's kind of moot.