The whole issue of "taxing virtual money" or "paying with virtual money" is an invalid argument. This is no different than any other person who makes a profit off of one of their hobbies, and the tax system already has the means to handle it. Yeah, I think she's making the point that Second Life is a special case, and that other games (she uses WoW as an example) don't have a economic base on which to establish in-game taxation. She uses the example of getting an item in-game as a "drop", and it's an apt one.
Overall, when you sell a character or gold, that's real-world, countable profit. It should be taxed like any other profit.
Second Life is a different animal, and I'm not at all sure what the right answer is, there.
At some point (we can only hope it will be soon), folks are going to realize that the phrase, "information wants to be free," is no more a statement of wishful thinking than, "gasses want to expand to fill their contianer." It's an anthropomorphic way of stating something fundamental about the physics of information with respect to large groups of humans.
All attempts to a) disseminate information to large groups and b) control that dissemination will FAIL. They must fail. The energy required to contain information scales very much logarithmically with respect to the size of the group that receives it, and quickly becomes impractical. We're not telling the RIAA, MPAA, Japanese government, and many others that, "your information is something I should be allowed to have." Rather, we're trying to explain that, "your information is going to be knocking at my door several times a week, and if you make it illegal for me to answer my door, it's just going to end up with me going to jail... does that serve a purpose?
You mean it could have gone at any time... Not exactly. It could go at any time implies a time in the present or future. What you said implies any time at all. We know that it didn't happen more than 7,500 years ago (since that's the light we see).
If there were studies showing GMO food as anything other than a way to grow more, better food on the same land, I'd be the first in line, but there isn't.
Ah but there is. Some people are allergic to brazil nuts, some have gone into shock and have died. Soy was gentically engineered with a gene from the brazil nut. In a study it was shown those with an allergy to brazil nuts were also allergic to the soy. The gene inserted encoded for a protein that's an allergin.
I was under the impression that the test was specifically adding sequences that produced the allergic reaction and other sequences that did not in order to verify that unrelated sequences could be safely added from nuts. Of course, the test is always cited as having shown that sequences from nuts cause allergic reactions, but that's a distortion as it only presents half of the results.
What's more, you say "some have gone into shock and have died." This is not true of GMO foods, as far as I know.
I don't get it. Why is it shocking that the EFF would defend the provisions of the DMCA that make it even vaguely similar to something that's only mostly unreasonable? They still want to see the law removed on Constitutional grounds, but what it's the law of the land they at least want to see that its teeth not get any sharper.
YouTube users post infringing content, YouTube the organization does not.
Actually, the users upload content, which is then transcoded to flash video and posted by YouTube.
Unless you own Google stock, it shouldn't be too hard to see how this is different from an ISP hosting a file on their FTP that was uploaded by a user. Actually, all modern FTP servers have the ability to "transcode" into compressed formats on demand, so the argument holds no water. Translating between presentation formats doesn't involve any step at which a human being could reasonably be expected to identify infringement, and that's really what the spirit of the safe harbor provisions are about.
I'd like to point out that the greatest works of art of all time were produced in an era where there were no such things as copyright laws. It's called patronage, and it worked for thousands of years.
Thousands of years without every man, woman and child owning a high speed "printing press" in their homes
Hrm... bad point to make. You're actually defending the idea that copyright is obsolete. Patronage had one major problem: it was elitest. Only those who could capture the attention of those with great wealth could afford to produce creative works full-time.
With the advent of the Internet, cheap printing, etc., we can now change that. I can publish my works to a MUCH larger audience, and my "patrons" can be dozens of people around the world. If copyright were gone tomorrow, you would see a patronage system for the arts that would put the Renaissance to shame.
That said, I think this is a BAD IDEA. Why? Because the arts aren't the only beneficiary of copyright. I'm closest to software, and I can say for sure that software benefits from copyright. What it does not benefit from is the foolishly long period of copyrights. IMHO copyrights on software should last about 20 years, renewable in 5 year increments for another 20 years (the reasonable life expectency of a very popular or important piece of software). After that, it should become part of the public domain. There are many reasons for this, most of which are off-topic, but I'll maintain that software copyrights (not patents) are important and beneficial, only currently broken so that most of that benefit is offset by drawbacks.
I think the point was that the ORIGINAL texts (of which the, admitedly ancient text you refer to are mere copies) are lost to history. We'll never know if they're quite the same as what we're looking at, and certainly the Catholic church had a couple of rounds of eliminating books that they considered to be non-canon... and when I say eliminating, I mean hunting down every copy and burning them.
As for the literacy thing... you're correct insofar as the new testament goes, but the OT is another matter. Many of the stories told therin are believed to be word-of-mouth tales that were told through generations before being committed to the written word, and there's no evidence that the original tellers read or wrote any language.
Sure, there were brilliant Christians, Jews, Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists and members of many other faiths. That's not really the point. The people who created those religions and told us that invisible men in the sky were talking to them all died many, many generations ago (even Smith, the founder of Mormanism is long since dead, and that's a RECENT religion). We have no reason to believe that these people could forsee the social issues present hundreds or thousands of years later, nor that they understood the world around them well enough to craft a book that would speak to issues which would take other men millenia to figure out. Only if we appeal to the existance of invisible men in the sky can we believe that these books would continue to maintain any relevance other than historical.
Oh, that was just a troll. Revolution isn't the answer, it always leads to the most brutal and ruthless rising to the top, and becoming what you rebelled against. Sometimes true. Sometimes not. I think it's fair to say that Washington and his cronies were far more reasonable than King George. This has also been true in many revolutions fought over self-governance. It's outright civil wars that tend to result in the problems that you discuss, almost always because there's far too little time or resources available to plan out how to prevent that kind of problem ahead of time, and none during the war. Wars of self-governance on the other hand, are typically fought by established power-structures that simply have less autonomy than they desire.
Evolution is a theory of science, not a parlor talk theory. There is no faith in evolution, only vast reams of empirical data supporting it. That over-states the case rather drastically. First off, there's an awful lot of faith in evolution, and that's actually a point that far too many folks who defend evolution blindly should accept, otherwise they get blindsided with the news that... shock, some corner of the theory was actually wrong.
There's faith in the idea that what we observe is representative of what happened before recorded history. There's faith that empiricism is generally valid (watch how many people leap to defend empiricism and tell me that that's not faith). There's faith that the vast majority of collected data hasn't been tampered with. There's faith that, on the whole, scientists are conscientious about their work, and do not seek to deceive. There is even faith that no one is holding a gun to the heads of everyone who has ever worked in the field to gather data, and telling them to lie.
I happen to share all of this faith, as I think it's a fair set of assumptions on which to base one's faith (as opposed to invisible men in the sky, to paraphrase George Carlin). That doesn't mean that it's anything other than faith, however. Fundamentally, all of this can be boiled down to a faith in Occam's Razor, a principle which was the straw that broke the camel's back in terms of convincing the budding, and as yet unnamed scientific movement that the Church wasn't necessarily wrong (they didn't go that far for another 50-100 years), but that they were not the only authority on which to base the evaluation of truth. Occam's Razor leads directly to the explosion of thought surrounding empiricism in the Renaissance, and ultimately to what we call science, today. That we rely on this grounding in pre-Renaissance thought to this day is an often-explored and frequently questioned element of faith in the process that we call the scientific method.
As for the vast reams of facts supporting evolution... there are vast reams of fact supporting a lot of crazy ideas. What's interesting about evolution is that those facts corroborate each other in intricate ways that would be very difficult to unravel as a whole. Certain facts may turn out to support conclusions which they did not originally seem to point to, but the whole has many more inter-related facts on which to stand.
There are far more middle class and poor people than there are rich people, and if we want to we can just take all their shit and there is nothing they can do. Yeah, that's right you rich motherfuckers, the police and military are all poor and middle class to, who do you really think they'd side with? Whoever signs the checks?
Whoever seems to threaten their families the least?
YouTube has even offered to find infringing content for copyright owners -- but only if they do a licensing deal first.
If this is the case they are clearly in breach of clause B. They gain financial benefit from the service and they have the ability to control the infringment (not that it does not say eliminate - just control). I'm not seeing it.
How would this change the situation? Of course, they have the ability to control the infringement on a case-by-case basis. No one has argued that. What Viacom seems to think is that they could somehow control infringement on a global basis. There's simply no practical way, and so YouTube must rely on copyright holders to identify infringement of their works in order to act in their interests. They do this. That's no more true for YouTube than it is for a message board provider (who all, by the way, have the exact same problem). -~~~~
Diebold is saying that they were fairly sure they would win the contract, and then lost it. They're now demanding records of the selection process in order to determine how the choice was made and asking the court to hold up distribution of the new machines until that information has been analyzed.
I'm not taking a stand one way or the other, since it doesn't really matter on Slashdot (where we've made up our minds about Diebold a long time ago), but those are the facts as best I can tell.
You could call it reasonable transparency or a fishing expedition, depending on who you thought was in the right.
The movie machine" as you call it cares ONLY about the audience.
No, the "movie machine" cares only about money. Both statements are true and interchangeable in almost all cases. In those cases where the audience and the money do not share a common interest, I agree with you.
There are several people replying to my comment with words to the effect of "That can't possibly be true because if it was the effects would be devastating." Sorry - that is not how the law works....
To fall within this safe harbor YouTube would have to claim that they fall within clause A(ii) - if they are genuinely not aware of facts or circumstances from which infringing activity is apparent, then they are the only ones on the planet. Perhaps firing up their own search engine and looking for "The Daily Show" may be a clue. Sorry, but that's not how the law works. YouTube is making the case that they simply obey the law. Every time someone tells them that something violates their copyright, they take it down "expeditiously." That's what the law requires. They don't have to be unaware of the fact that copyright violations occur, only of a specific infringement. What Viacom is claiming is that YouTube relies on the window between the upload and the takedown for their profits and continued viability. Not just that, but Viacom is also trying to nudge the law in the direction of supporting the idea that, given the Internet, it's no longer reasonable to require copyright holders to find infringement, and rather it should be on the heads of the virtual "bookstores" to find infringement in their "books" (to use a metaphor).
This is both reasonable and unreasonable. The reasonable part is based on the idea that YouTube has much more advanced ways of searching for infringement than a bookstore does. The unreasonable part is that you're placing a financial burden on YouTube to fight the ever-escalating war between copyright holders and casual infringers. If they're required to, as you suggest, search for "The Daily Show," then it's reasonable to require them to search for any property owned by a copyright holder. Now, clearly that's not workable. So what do you do? Does Viacom submit a list of the 100 most popular shows/movies/whatever that they produce? Why doesn't an independent film maker get the same ear at YouTube? Should YouTube be forced to create a whole division just to deal with, not copyright infringement (remember they already do that), but tracking what's popular and searching for it on their site? And why doesn't Gilligan's Island get the same protection? Just because it's not popular?!
No, this is why it's the copyright holder's burden. Yes, it's a pain to police the thousands of copyrights you hold. Yes, it's gotten harder due to the Internet. No, that's not a reason to push that burden over onto those that simply host bits in various formats.
1. The Sci-Fi channel. How can anyone sample this crap and take sci-fi seriously?
You could say the same about pulp magazines in the 20s-50s. You would be equally wrong. Popular SF is, on the whole, crap. However, it gives an opportunity to some gems, and lets many good writers get their start.
2. Long films. For those of you have have seen the 27 different versions of Dune, you understand. What version is best? The longest, of course, unless you have a good insight into the social and technological structure of the fantasy world it does take 45 minutes of explanation to understand why "the floating fat man" and the spacing guild are wanting to beat up on the baron and his son. The story line doesn't need to involve sci-fi but it does. Without a good amount of background the sci-fi just becomes so much babble (read: an obstacle for the viewer).
The process of turning a book into a film is difficult. Good SF movies are typically either not based on a book or are only loosely based on one for this reason. To specifically cite one particular book that's widely considered to be a worst-case-scenario is an interesting intellectual game, but not generally useful.
3. George Lucas/Steven Spielberg
Cheap shot. Unsubstantiated.
They've both done some schlock and some good films. Close Encounters is on my list of some of the best SF films, and his Dreamworks studio has put out some excellent films.
4. Too many Trekkies. Maybe you're laughing or maybe you're shaking your fist at me but subcultures that become so heavily associated with a media franchise can do tons to harm it. Let's face facts: how many of you associate pro-wrestling with beer-bellied, screaming, toothless hicks? The same applies here.
The same what? The same harm done by stereotyping a subculture? Yeah, I'd agree. I suggest not doing so in future.
5. There are so many sci-fi fans that really want this material. Stepping off the beaten path is a risk. Hollywood doesn't like risks.
Hollywood does nothing - ABSOLUTELY NOTHING - but take risks. Making a movie is one of the most monumentally large risks you can take in business. It's a horrible investment, and MOST people who invest in making movies lose their shirts. Risk? You want to talk about risk? Turn a 50 year old trilogy into three movies before you find out how well the first one will do, and do so with a director who has never had a big success! That's damn-near suicidal, and yet it produced The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Try sucking down valuable theater space on a movie about a guy that gets migraines when he does math because he's trying to understand God.... there's an insane risk, and yet Pi was a great film.
But those are unusual risks. You have to understand that most times, you've already taken on so much risk that you're pretty much doomed from the get-go, so when someone comes along and says, "let's take out the elements that make success likely," you become very concerned about who exactly is going to pay for your lunch.
Hollywood takes more risks before breakfast than you could comprehend. What you meant to say is, Hollywood is risk-averse when it comes to diverging from successful trends. This is not universal, but generally true.
Cookie cutter is the name of the game in all film today. I wonder more why sci-fi was picked on over, let's say, chick flicks?
Both genres have some very bad and very good films, and not everyone agrees on which are which.
Sadly once the formula becomes a dime a dozen it's hard to make any progress in any other direction without going independent.
People point to independent film as an indictment of Hollywood... I'm confused by this. The fact that Hollywood has embraced the independent film is one of the most important ways that creative techniques of story telling and movie making have gotten a leg up in recent years. I
The industry just seems unwilling to depart from established formulas. There is inertia to be sure, but unwilling?! Hardly. I watch creative and innovative films all the time. The fact of the matter is that most people WILL NOT go to see a creative and innovative film unless a) it has something they already like (e.g. The Matrix, for all its SF plot was largely seen for its huge explosions and bullet-time fight scenes) or b) peer pressure is involved. What this means is that creative films that don't toe the line and add bombs, blood, breasts and beasts will remain relegated to the smaller, big-city-only theaters. THIS is why I live in a city, where there's a diverse enough audience within a close range that the financials for non-mainstream film works.
If you want to prove me wrong, all you have to do is make a truly original SF film that does not contain bombs, blood, breasts or beasts and hit it big at the box-office.
The result is that everything they do frequently is a beat-down version of something else done before. It's ironic that the industry behaves this way when the rare departure often results in movies that are ridiculously popular... example, Napoleon Dynamite. Perfect example, in fact. N.D. (one of the worst movies of all time, IMHO, but that's just me) cost about $400,000 to make and grossed $116,666 on its opening weekend. This, in the math of Hollywood is considered a flop. Now, it just so happens that it found an audience on DVD and fared much better in later sales, but DVD sales are so very hard to predict that there's almost no way to plan for them. If you think that's untrue, then I can trot out a list of 30 quirky movies that were fairly original, and yet didn't gain any following on DVD at all.
Another example might be clerks... hrm... weren't both of those independant films? I know Clerks was. Perhaps what this shows is that the movie machine is uncreative and cares nothing about the audience save that they surrender their dollars. First off, "independent" is an abused word, but pretending for a second that that word means what you think it means, there's still a problem. "The movie machine" as you call it cares ONLY about the audience. In fact, most of the problem that you're talking about relates to the fact that the audience is being given what it wants, not what challenges or surprises it. What the audience actually wants is THE single most important thing in the Hollywood "move machine" process.
Second, Clerks is a case of talent over subject. Smith is a very talented writer when it comes to building a rapport with a young audience, and most anyone else tackling Clerks would have failed to produce a movie that was as popular. To Hollywood's credit the result was that Smith was allowed subsequently to damn near anything he wanted up to and including insulting major religions. The man was an unquestionable and untouchable director for a time, and that's saying quite a lot. Hollywood recognizes that they can't manufacture writing talent, but they recognize something else: Pulitzer Prize winners, 9 times out of 10, can't write a successful movie to save their lives. The skill sets are too different.
Now, is there political infighting that hurts the industry? Sure. Are there stupid decisions, and even stupid people? Sure. Does the money hurt the art? Sure. All of these are true, but the widely held belief that Hollywood doesn't "get it" as a general rule is rather short-sighted.
another one who likes to talk before they RTFA: Other than the fact that you like to insult strangers, what makes you think this is the case?
Yes, some of the examples I used are cited in the article, but I disagree with the myopic view of the article, and was replying to the general point of view that the Slashdot summary presented (which is endemic to this sort of treatment of film).
We routinely compare the very best films from the 20s-70s with everything from the 80s, 90s and half of the 00s, and conclude that movies are trash now.
In reality the article goes a long way to make its own anti-point, but fails to see that fact.
It brings up some truly excellent films from the time period that it says is the low-point of SF film-making, and yet suggests only the audience as the culprit in many cases. It also makes the mistake of conflating a LACK of quality films with their failure at the box-office (which is not new circa the late 70s.
Bottom line: I was responding to a post, not the article, but if you want to discuss this article: I think it's junk.
It's also true that Star Wars was more responsible for a mental-block on the part of those looking back at film history than it was for a change in later films.
Some films that came before Star Wars:
Invisible Man, The (1966)
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Planet of the Apes (1968)
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
Time Machine, The (1960)
Andromeda Strain, The (1971)
Some films that came after Star Wars:
Blade Runner (1982)
Back to the Future (1985)
Twelve Monkeys (1995)
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982)
Gattaca (1997)
Pi (1998)
You will notice that when you search for movies from these different periods, the primary thing that leaps out at you is that movies that treated science fiction as a serious genre (Pi, Gattaca, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Andromeda Strain) are about evenly spaced. There aren't a lot of them, but they get neither more nor less frequent over the decades... We just have rose-tinted glasses when it comes to history.
I really don't want to Godwin the thread, but in this case there is a parallel that is best not ignored. Isn't one of the corollaries of Godwin's Law that in any sufficiently heated political debate, someone will eventually bring up Godwin's Law?
I think it was Moore's Law that specified that the rate of growth of the invocation of Godwin's Law was exponential with respect to the population....
This is absolutely false. Blocking spam from compromised domains, absolutely. I agree with you 100% that blocking those emails is a service to the consumer, and so does the author. Yes, but that's not what I was talking about. He's essentially taken a mental snapshot of spam-fighting techniques, and has decided that anyone who did anything he didn't like is fundamentally wrong on any related issue, going forward. He's free to think that, but this is not an article about net neutrality, it's an article about his historical spam-blocking pet peeves and how they RELATE to some individuals who currently have a net neutrality opinion.
Here's the problem: this article is misleading enough that it doesn't do justice to that point AT ALL. The article SEEMS to be about Net neutrality, but is instead a piece that essentially covers the history of RBLs, which have moved from a model of maximum-pain to a model of maximum-gain. That is, they've moved away from trying to cause pain to large blocks of the Net (which turns away users of the service, and defeats the point), to a model such as Spamhaus's where sites are filtered based on a) being a spam source b) being identified as a highly probable spam source (e.g. zombied PCs, open proxies, etc.) or c) being identified as a service which chronically abuses spamming as a marketing technique (e.g. servers whose Web services are commonly and often exclusively advertised in spam).
The attempt to conflate filtering traffic based on a desire for increased revenue and filtering traffic as a direct result of abuse is absurd. One is a valuable service to the customer. One is a self-serving abuse of the customer.
Most of Adobe's formats are NOT open, and in fact they're rather STRICTLY not open. In fact, it can be said that Adobe's patent lawsuit (which they won) against Macromedia over their "reconfigurable tabbed palette," was the reason taht Macromedia is now part of Adobe. PostScript is "open" in the sense that everyone knows the language, but most of what PostScript renderers must do is patented by Adobe (especially color-matching). If you think PhotoShop's file format is any more open than, say, Microsoft Word's, you're sorely mistaken.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course. Typo on my part.
Overall, when you sell a character or gold, that's real-world, countable profit. It should be taxed like any other profit.
Second Life is a different animal, and I'm not at all sure what the right answer is, there.
At some point (we can only hope it will be soon), folks are going to realize that the phrase, "information wants to be free," is no more a statement of wishful thinking than, "gasses want to expand to fill their contianer." It's an anthropomorphic way of stating something fundamental about the physics of information with respect to large groups of humans.
All attempts to a) disseminate information to large groups and b) control that dissemination will FAIL. They must fail. The energy required to contain information scales very much logarithmically with respect to the size of the group that receives it, and quickly becomes impractical. We're not telling the RIAA, MPAA, Japanese government, and many others that, "your information is something I should be allowed to have." Rather, we're trying to explain that, "your information is going to be knocking at my door several times a week, and if you make it illegal for me to answer my door, it's just going to end up with me going to jail... does that serve a purpose?
If there were studies showing GMO food as anything other than a way to grow more, better food on the same land, I'd be the first in line, but there isn't.
Ah but there is. Some people are allergic to brazil nuts, some have gone into shock and have died. Soy was gentically engineered with a gene from the brazil nut. In a study it was shown those with an allergy to brazil nuts were also allergic to the soy. The gene inserted encoded for a protein that's an allergin.
I was under the impression that the test was specifically adding sequences that produced the allergic reaction and other sequences that did not in order to verify that unrelated sequences could be safely added from nuts. Of course, the test is always cited as having shown that sequences from nuts cause allergic reactions, but that's a distortion as it only presents half of the results.What's more, you say "some have gone into shock and have died." This is not true of GMO foods, as far as I know.
Perl 6's pugs engine has been capable of producing JavaScript as a back-end for some time, certainly since before this patent's date.
I don't get it. Why is it shocking that the EFF would defend the provisions of the DMCA that make it even vaguely similar to something that's only mostly unreasonable? They still want to see the law removed on Constitutional grounds, but what it's the law of the land they at least want to see that its teeth not get any sharper.
Actually, the users upload content, which is then transcoded to flash video and posted by YouTube.
Unless you own Google stock, it shouldn't be too hard to see how this is different from an ISP hosting a file on their FTP that was uploaded by a user. Actually, all modern FTP servers have the ability to "transcode" into compressed formats on demand, so the argument holds no water. Translating between presentation formats doesn't involve any step at which a human being could reasonably be expected to identify infringement, and that's really what the spirit of the safe harbor provisions are about.
I'd like to point out that the greatest works of art of all time were produced in an era where there were no such things as copyright laws. It's called patronage, and it worked for thousands of years.
Thousands of years without every man, woman and child owning a high speed "printing press" in their homes
Hrm... bad point to make. You're actually defending the idea that copyright is obsolete. Patronage had one major problem: it was elitest. Only those who could capture the attention of those with great wealth could afford to produce creative works full-time.With the advent of the Internet, cheap printing, etc., we can now change that. I can publish my works to a MUCH larger audience, and my "patrons" can be dozens of people around the world. If copyright were gone tomorrow, you would see a patronage system for the arts that would put the Renaissance to shame.
That said, I think this is a BAD IDEA. Why? Because the arts aren't the only beneficiary of copyright. I'm closest to software, and I can say for sure that software benefits from copyright. What it does not benefit from is the foolishly long period of copyrights. IMHO copyrights on software should last about 20 years, renewable in 5 year increments for another 20 years (the reasonable life expectency of a very popular or important piece of software). After that, it should become part of the public domain. There are many reasons for this, most of which are off-topic, but I'll maintain that software copyrights (not patents) are important and beneficial, only currently broken so that most of that benefit is offset by drawbacks.
I think the point was that the ORIGINAL texts (of which the, admitedly ancient text you refer to are mere copies) are lost to history. We'll never know if they're quite the same as what we're looking at, and certainly the Catholic church had a couple of rounds of eliminating books that they considered to be non-canon ... and when I say eliminating, I mean hunting down every copy and burning them.
As for the literacy thing... you're correct insofar as the new testament goes, but the OT is another matter. Many of the stories told therin are believed to be word-of-mouth tales that were told through generations before being committed to the written word, and there's no evidence that the original tellers read or wrote any language.
Sure, there were brilliant Christians, Jews, Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists and members of many other faiths. That's not really the point. The people who created those religions and told us that invisible men in the sky were talking to them all died many, many generations ago (even Smith, the founder of Mormanism is long since dead, and that's a RECENT religion). We have no reason to believe that these people could forsee the social issues present hundreds or thousands of years later, nor that they understood the world around them well enough to craft a book that would speak to issues which would take other men millenia to figure out. Only if we appeal to the existance of invisible men in the sky can we believe that these books would continue to maintain any relevance other than historical.
There's faith in the idea that what we observe is representative of what happened before recorded history. There's faith that empiricism is generally valid (watch how many people leap to defend empiricism and tell me that that's not faith). There's faith that the vast majority of collected data hasn't been tampered with. There's faith that, on the whole, scientists are conscientious about their work, and do not seek to deceive. There is even faith that no one is holding a gun to the heads of everyone who has ever worked in the field to gather data, and telling them to lie.
I happen to share all of this faith, as I think it's a fair set of assumptions on which to base one's faith (as opposed to invisible men in the sky, to paraphrase George Carlin). That doesn't mean that it's anything other than faith, however. Fundamentally, all of this can be boiled down to a faith in Occam's Razor, a principle which was the straw that broke the camel's back in terms of convincing the budding, and as yet unnamed scientific movement that the Church wasn't necessarily wrong (they didn't go that far for another 50-100 years), but that they were not the only authority on which to base the evaluation of truth. Occam's Razor leads directly to the explosion of thought surrounding empiricism in the Renaissance, and ultimately to what we call science, today. That we rely on this grounding in pre-Renaissance thought to this day is an often-explored and frequently questioned element of faith in the process that we call the scientific method.
As for the vast reams of facts supporting evolution... there are vast reams of fact supporting a lot of crazy ideas. What's interesting about evolution is that those facts corroborate each other in intricate ways that would be very difficult to unravel as a whole. Certain facts may turn out to support conclusions which they did not originally seem to point to, but the whole has many more inter-related facts on which to stand.
Whoever seems to threaten their families the least?
Whoever controls what's on the television?
Just guesses.
If this is the case they are clearly in breach of clause B. They gain financial benefit from the service and they have the ability to control the infringment (not that it does not say eliminate - just control). I'm not seeing it.
How would this change the situation? Of course, they have the ability to control the infringement on a case-by-case basis. No one has argued that. What Viacom seems to think is that they could somehow control infringement on a global basis. There's simply no practical way, and so YouTube must rely on copyright holders to identify infringement of their works in order to act in their interests. They do this. That's no more true for YouTube than it is for a message board provider (who all, by the way, have the exact same problem). -~~~~
Diebold is saying that they were fairly sure they would win the contract, and then lost it. They're now demanding records of the selection process in order to determine how the choice was made and asking the court to hold up distribution of the new machines until that information has been analyzed.
I'm not taking a stand one way or the other, since it doesn't really matter on Slashdot (where we've made up our minds about Diebold a long time ago), but those are the facts as best I can tell.
You could call it reasonable transparency or a fishing expedition, depending on who you thought was in the right.
No, the "movie machine" cares only about money. Both statements are true and interchangeable in almost all cases. In those cases where the audience and the money do not share a common interest, I agree with you.
To fall within this safe harbor YouTube would have to claim that they fall within clause A(ii) - if they are genuinely not aware of facts or circumstances from which infringing activity is apparent, then they are the only ones on the planet. Perhaps firing up their own search engine and looking for "The Daily Show" may be a clue. Sorry, but that's not how the law works. YouTube is making the case that they simply obey the law. Every time someone tells them that something violates their copyright, they take it down "expeditiously." That's what the law requires. They don't have to be unaware of the fact that copyright violations occur, only of a specific infringement. What Viacom is claiming is that YouTube relies on the window between the upload and the takedown for their profits and continued viability. Not just that, but Viacom is also trying to nudge the law in the direction of supporting the idea that, given the Internet, it's no longer reasonable to require copyright holders to find infringement, and rather it should be on the heads of the virtual "bookstores" to find infringement in their "books" (to use a metaphor).
This is both reasonable and unreasonable. The reasonable part is based on the idea that YouTube has much more advanced ways of searching for infringement than a bookstore does. The unreasonable part is that you're placing a financial burden on YouTube to fight the ever-escalating war between copyright holders and casual infringers. If they're required to, as you suggest, search for "The Daily Show," then it's reasonable to require them to search for any property owned by a copyright holder. Now, clearly that's not workable. So what do you do? Does Viacom submit a list of the 100 most popular shows/movies/whatever that they produce? Why doesn't an independent film maker get the same ear at YouTube? Should YouTube be forced to create a whole division just to deal with, not copyright infringement (remember they already do that), but tracking what's popular and searching for it on their site? And why doesn't Gilligan's Island get the same protection? Just because it's not popular?!
No, this is why it's the copyright holder's burden. Yes, it's a pain to police the thousands of copyrights you hold. Yes, it's gotten harder due to the Internet. No, that's not a reason to push that burden over onto those that simply host bits in various formats.
Some problems with today's sci-fi...
1. The Sci-Fi channel. How can anyone sample this crap and take sci-fi seriously?
You could say the same about pulp magazines in the 20s-50s. You would be equally wrong. Popular SF is, on the whole, crap. However, it gives an opportunity to some gems, and lets many good writers get their start.
2. Long films. For those of you have have seen the 27 different versions of Dune, you understand. What version is best? The longest, of course, unless you have a good insight into the social and technological structure of the fantasy world it does take 45 minutes of explanation to understand why "the floating fat man" and the spacing guild are wanting to beat up on the baron and his son. The story line doesn't need to involve sci-fi but it does. Without a good amount of background the sci-fi just becomes so much babble (read: an obstacle for the viewer).
The process of turning a book into a film is difficult. Good SF movies are typically either not based on a book or are only loosely based on one for this reason. To specifically cite one particular book that's widely considered to be a worst-case-scenario is an interesting intellectual game, but not generally useful.
3. George Lucas/Steven Spielberg
Cheap shot. Unsubstantiated.
They've both done some schlock and some good films. Close Encounters is on my list of some of the best SF films, and his Dreamworks studio has put out some excellent films.
4. Too many Trekkies. Maybe you're laughing or maybe you're shaking your fist at me but subcultures that become so heavily associated with a media franchise can do tons to harm it. Let's face facts: how many of you associate pro-wrestling with beer-bellied, screaming, toothless hicks? The same applies here.
The same what? The same harm done by stereotyping a subculture? Yeah, I'd agree. I suggest not doing so in future.
5. There are so many sci-fi fans that really want this material. Stepping off the beaten path is a risk. Hollywood doesn't like risks.
Hollywood does nothing - ABSOLUTELY NOTHING - but take risks. Making a movie is one of the most monumentally large risks you can take in business. It's a horrible investment, and MOST people who invest in making movies lose their shirts. Risk? You want to talk about risk? Turn a 50 year old trilogy into three movies before you find out how well the first one will do, and do so with a director who has never had a big success! That's damn-near suicidal, and yet it produced The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Try sucking down valuable theater space on a movie about a guy that gets migraines when he does math because he's trying to understand God.... there's an insane risk, and yet Pi was a great film.
But those are unusual risks. You have to understand that most times, you've already taken on so much risk that you're pretty much doomed from the get-go, so when someone comes along and says, "let's take out the elements that make success likely," you become very concerned about who exactly is going to pay for your lunch.
Hollywood takes more risks before breakfast than you could comprehend. What you meant to say is, Hollywood is risk-averse when it comes to diverging from successful trends. This is not universal, but generally true.
Cookie cutter is the name of the game in all film today. I wonder more why sci-fi was picked on over, let's say, chick flicks?
Both genres have some very bad and very good films, and not everyone agrees on which are which.
Sadly once the formula becomes a dime a dozen it's hard to make any progress in any other direction without going independent.
People point to independent film as an indictment of Hollywood... I'm confused by this. The fact that Hollywood has embraced the independent film is one of the most important ways that creative techniques of story telling and movie making have gotten a leg up in recent years. I
If you want to prove me wrong, all you have to do is make a truly original SF film that does not contain bombs, blood, breasts or beasts and hit it big at the box-office. The result is that everything they do frequently is a beat-down version of something else done before. It's ironic that the industry behaves this way when the rare departure often results in movies that are ridiculously popular... example, Napoleon Dynamite. Perfect example, in fact. N.D. (one of the worst movies of all time, IMHO, but that's just me) cost about $400,000 to make and grossed $116,666 on its opening weekend. This, in the math of Hollywood is considered a flop. Now, it just so happens that it found an audience on DVD and fared much better in later sales, but DVD sales are so very hard to predict that there's almost no way to plan for them. If you think that's untrue, then I can trot out a list of 30 quirky movies that were fairly original, and yet didn't gain any following on DVD at all. Another example might be clerks... hrm... weren't both of those independant films? I know Clerks was. Perhaps what this shows is that the movie machine is uncreative and cares nothing about the audience save that they surrender their dollars. First off, "independent" is an abused word, but pretending for a second that that word means what you think it means, there's still a problem. "The movie machine" as you call it cares ONLY about the audience. In fact, most of the problem that you're talking about relates to the fact that the audience is being given what it wants, not what challenges or surprises it. What the audience actually wants is THE single most important thing in the Hollywood "move machine" process.
Second, Clerks is a case of talent over subject. Smith is a very talented writer when it comes to building a rapport with a young audience, and most anyone else tackling Clerks would have failed to produce a movie that was as popular. To Hollywood's credit the result was that Smith was allowed subsequently to damn near anything he wanted up to and including insulting major religions. The man was an unquestionable and untouchable director for a time, and that's saying quite a lot. Hollywood recognizes that they can't manufacture writing talent, but they recognize something else: Pulitzer Prize winners, 9 times out of 10, can't write a successful movie to save their lives. The skill sets are too different.
Now, is there political infighting that hurts the industry? Sure. Are there stupid decisions, and even stupid people? Sure. Does the money hurt the art? Sure. All of these are true, but the widely held belief that Hollywood doesn't "get it" as a general rule is rather short-sighted.
Yes, some of the examples I used are cited in the article, but I disagree with the myopic view of the article, and was replying to the general point of view that the Slashdot summary presented (which is endemic to this sort of treatment of film).
We routinely compare the very best films from the 20s-70s with everything from the 80s, 90s and half of the 00s, and conclude that movies are trash now.
In reality the article goes a long way to make its own anti-point, but fails to see that fact.
It brings up some truly excellent films from the time period that it says is the low-point of SF film-making, and yet suggests only the audience as the culprit in many cases. It also makes the mistake of conflating a LACK of quality films with their failure at the box-office (which is not new circa the late 70s.
Bottom line: I was responding to a post, not the article, but if you want to discuss this article: I think it's junk.
It's also true that Star Wars was more responsible for a mental-block on the part of those looking back at film history than it was for a change in later films.
Some films that came before Star Wars:
Some films that came after Star Wars:
You will notice that when you search for movies from these different periods, the primary thing that leaps out at you is that movies that treated science fiction as a serious genre (Pi, Gattaca, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Andromeda Strain) are about evenly spaced. There aren't a lot of them, but they get neither more nor less frequent over the decades... We just have rose-tinted glasses when it comes to history.
I think it was Moore's Law that specified that the rate of growth of the invocation of Godwin's Law was exponential with respect to the population....
Here's the problem: this article is misleading enough that it doesn't do justice to that point AT ALL. The article SEEMS to be about Net neutrality, but is instead a piece that essentially covers the history of RBLs, which have moved from a model of maximum-pain to a model of maximum-gain. That is, they've moved away from trying to cause pain to large blocks of the Net (which turns away users of the service, and defeats the point), to a model such as Spamhaus's where sites are filtered based on a) being a spam source b) being identified as a highly probable spam source (e.g. zombied PCs, open proxies, etc.) or c) being identified as a service which chronically abuses spamming as a marketing technique (e.g. servers whose Web services are commonly and often exclusively advertised in spam).
The attempt to conflate filtering traffic based on a desire for increased revenue and filtering traffic as a direct result of abuse is absurd. One is a valuable service to the customer. One is a self-serving abuse of the customer.
Most of Adobe's formats are NOT open, and in fact they're rather STRICTLY not open. In fact, it can be said that Adobe's patent lawsuit (which they won) against Macromedia over their "reconfigurable tabbed palette," was the reason taht Macromedia is now part of Adobe. PostScript is "open" in the sense that everyone knows the language, but most of what PostScript renderers must do is patented by Adobe (especially color-matching). If you think PhotoShop's file format is any more open than, say, Microsoft Word's, you're sorely mistaken.
Overall, Adobe is committed to creating lock-in.