There are certain things that E-Books will have to do before I'll even consider touching one:
- Can you throw one you don't want to read again at a noisy cat?
- Can you use one of your collection to prop up the desk, while still being able to read all the others?
- Can you rip pages out and use them during a toilet paper shortage?
- Can you impress strangers with shelves and shelves of them?
- Can you drop them in the bath tub and have them emerge an unreadable glob of pulp?
- With a collection of several hundred, can you light them on fire to keep yourself warm for a few days?
- Will a library with the same number of them still be heavy enough that it's foundation doesn't begin to rise and destabilize?
Where these narrow-minded technocrats fail is in focusing on the words contained within the books. This is obviously ridiculous, as books spend 99.95% of the time with nobody looking at the words in them, and any one word spends 99.99995% of the time not being looked at. This means the words play an insignificantly small role in the use of a book, more a rationalization of why to keep the book around than a real rational reason.
Let's be reasonable, here. The only way for E-Books to succeed is to give up on the content, and concentrate on duplicating the physical existence of paper books. While simple enough to do, I can't see these eggheads ever recognizing the obvious necessity. --
that is analogous to calling those flying Chinese serpents "dragons"
Exactly. The sort of thing any English-speaking author would use rather than the unpronouncable foreign word.
When an English-speaker sees "elf" he knows how to say it, when he sees something like "sidhe" he scratches his head and makes a bad guess. So if he wants to write about a Celtic elf-like thing, he calls it an elf.
BTW, it's not like the Germanic and Celtic mythologies developed in isolation from one another, they grew up next to each other and resemble each other considerably. --
Re:This isn't a troll, and not that rare an opinio
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As for the rest of this, if you're so dismissive of Tolkien why the hell bother to write the commentary in the first place?
Did you consider that the obsessive following makes it worthy of analysis whether I like it or not?
I think it's popular because it was the first elf and wizard fantasy novel, feeding a great appetite for such works. Being first, it got a hold on minds of the early readers, who often recommend it as the first fantasy reading to others, who perpetuate this obsession in similar fashion.
Those of us who had read dozens of good fantasy novels, the polished gems to Tolkien's crude chippings, before ever looking to LOTR often don't have the same reverence for it. Nonetheless, members of the Cult of Tolkien will react with shock and disapproval at honest reactions to it, often loudly considering anyone who doesn't think LOTR is the best fantasy fiction ever written (or at least in the top 10) to be ignorant and uncultured.
A suggestion that new readers not even bother with Tolkien is generally considered irresponsible if not cruel.
Don't get me wrong, I may have come off a little harsher than I meant to. I think everybody who likes fantasy should read The Hobbit (which is small enough to work, IMHO), and anyone with an obsessive love for fantasy novels would find LOTR worth reading, but I wouldn't put the latter anywhere near my top 10.
Given the stilted dialog and otherwise awkward writing, I don't think most people would think it was that great without being told a hundred times that it was, or without being told that it was the first of its kind.
You wouldn't happen to be failed author by any chance, would you?
Failed? Only in the minds of mindless Tolkien-drones who can't bear to look at anything worth reading!! My inspiring tritritrilogy (27 books) on the life of an elflord who opposed custom to wed a she-troll is the greatest work of fiction ever created!
Just kidding.
I am a broken bootleg toy./. bitching is the closest I come to being an author. --
Tolkien's elves didn't have pointy ears. Not once does he refer to them as such. Celtic elves, however, had pointy ears, and were similar in stature and temperment to Tolkien's elves (though they fit into a more diverse fairy society).
The "high-elf" concept seems to be a product of the Seelie Court / Tuatha de Danan confusion. The Tuatha de Danan were supposedly either just superior people or the original faeries; they set the tone of the Seelie Court. Trim the Seelie Court down to elves (the most human-like of the bunch), tweaking them a bit to give them enough TdD characteristics to preserve this tone, and you're pretty close to standard fantasy elves.
As for forest dwelling, most of the humanoids hid in the forest, since that was a spooky mysterious place medieval peasants were afraid of. Anyway, while standard fantasy elves admire trees, as they love nature, they are only slightly more likely to be found hidden in forests than living in their own fancy elf-castles.
Tolkien's concept of elves is a fairly typical mishmash of ideas from one story to another, and diverges from what you might call 'standard fantasy elves' significantly. I really don't think he exerted that much influence over them.
As for the spelling, I seriously doubt that Tolkien was the first one to pluralize 'elf' as 'elves', regardless of what the dictionary standard of the day was. 'elves' is much more euphonious, and people love to tweak the spelling of such uncommon words (how many ways have you seen 'magic' spelt?). --
Wheel Of Time must be done in anime style!
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Lord of the Geeks
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· Score: 2
And at least 1/3 should be super-deformed.
Nothing else could do it justice, anime is the only video style I've ever seen that could successfully bounce between absurd character-based humor, scenes of supernatural horror, and heroic moments like Robert Jordan's writing. Also, anime handles ridiculously long stories fairly well, in series form. The Hobbit boiled down to a 2-hour cartoon quite nicely, and I expect an anime series could get through maybe 2 books per season.
For a completely different reason, I'd like to see the entire Dune series of books done up the same way. The idea of a super-deformed God Emperor is way too funny to pass up. Not to mention the whole Super-Sexy Mind Control Whores From Space plot arc. --
This isn't a troll, and not that rare an opinion.
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Lord of the Geeks
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· Score: 3
My own opinion on first reading was that Tolkien wrote in a stiff, unnatural style about a world that had many interesting pieces, but didn't really fit together into a believable whole. Many of the people I spoke to agreed with me. I still think The Hobbit was his best work.
However, I had not been told a hundred times before I read it that it was the Best Thing Ever, as I am reminded several times weekly on the internet. It's hard to develop or maintain an honest individual opinion about something presented as a major part of the basis of your adopted culture. Look at the above post, for example: moderated down as a troll just for wondering what the big deal is!
I wince every time I hear of anything containing wizards or goblins referred to as derived from Tolkien's work. Wizards and goblins were fairy-tale standards long before he came along, and they resonate deeply from the hundreds of years in which they were experimented with and tuned for maximum entertainment value.
I regard his work as merely a primitive early example of the western-european folklore-based fantasy novel, not the root from which all such works grow. The range of source materials used for novels was rapidly growing, and he just happened to be the first (or at least one of the first) to try cobbling together the monsters and heroes of medieval myth into a good long story to be printed up in cheap volumes for mass entertainment. In this way, he is more like the first man to cross the finish line in a race than an explorer who shows people a new place worth going to.
I believe strongly that if Tolkien had never lived, the main difference in fantasy literature would be no mentions of Tolkien in the reviews. There would still be stories about fireball-hurling wizards, sneaking goblins, vicious trolls, haughty elves, talking trees, and tough dwarves. Tales would still revolve around the world-threatening artifact and would still commonly feature the fish-out-of-water everyman-hero.
Why? Because the creatures are common in fairy tales (only recently driven from childhood bed-time reading by the incredible horde of modern authors), and the themes are common in ancient myths. --
I question the relevancy of this breakdown. If they really only cleared $0.59 per CD, they'd add a buck to the price and probably double their profit after the slight decrease in sales it would cause.
More likely, they make something close to the store's markup (in cleared profit) on real hits from undervalued artists (which they hope for with every release, of course, but rarely get), such that doubling their profit/CD would increase the price to $25 or more, sharply reducing their sales (which hurts a lot worse than just not getting the "profit"). At those prices, the break-evens might lose money and the moderate losers might not sell at all. --
Re:Functional != unprotected
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Duct Tape
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A VCR is a physical device. You can't print a VCR out and carry it around. You can't save it to a floppy disk.
A sculpture can be speech. You can't print one, or save it to a floppy disk. What makes the VCR anything other than a sculpture? Sure, it does something, but so does a program, which you adamantly insist is speech.
Intent makes an act or object speech or non-speech. A program's primary purpose is to cause a computer to function in a certain way, not to communicate some information to another person.
After all, I have to face reality that the government will violate the constitution.
Exactly. The US government can, has, and will continue to violate individual interpretations of the constitution. It is ruled by public opinion and private interest, not some mouldy old piece of parchment.
Take, for instance, the second amendment. It states in simple terms that the government can't disarm citizens (the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed). No mention of "reasonable for self-defense" or anything like that; at the time immediately after it was written it was legal for a private citizen to own live cannon and other major military weapons with no permits or other regulation. While the regulation of small arms is controversial, I don't hear anyone arguing that people should be allowed to walk around with a sack of grenades or an anti-tank missile, or that billionaires should be free to buy their own nuclear weapons, though this would be in line with the strict wording of the 2nd amendment.
Rather than go through the trouble of amending the constitution to remove this restriction, they simply "reinterpreted it". They found drafts with extra commas. They decided that the comment on justification (A well-regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State) eliminated all meaning. Now the only worry weapons-banners have is whether their laws will be popular.
The Vietnam war? The civil war? The gulf war? All completely unconstitutional. The world wars were iffy, but there were certainly completely unconstitutional things done during them.
Those are just some big, obvious examples. A little research will show no end to violations of any reasonable interpretation of the constitution.
The constitution is the subject of much lip service and little obedience. It is just words, and does not protect your freedom. Arguing over details of what is in it accomplishes nothing. Better to argue over what should be done and what must not be set into law based on consequences, rather than argue over whether technically this or that law is not allowed by your interpretation of the constitution.
The court of public opinion is where the battle against such laws will be won or lost, and it will be swayed by consequences, not technicalities of law. --
Re:Functional != unprotected
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Duct Tape
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That is a padlock's intended function? To lock, and unlock when the right combination is applied. Wow, that's just what CSS does. Or are you claiming that CSS's creator didn't envision that CSS encoded movies would be descrambled?
The computer's creators did not have DeCSS in mind when they built it, it could host any number of different programs. That makes the DeCSS program a seperate device, completely unlike a combination, which is only instructions for a human to unlock something.
DeCSS can be treated as a "black box" and used without understanding what it says. It was deliberately designed to function without necessarily being read by the user.
If you really want to stretch your definitions, a VCR is speech, since a sufficiently well-equipped and educated man could learn from it how to read the magetic field on a VHS tape and convert it into a TV signal. It doesn't do so entirely by itself, it needs both a human to operate it, and a source of power to make it do anything (in much the same way a computer program needs a source of execution units). It even has comments and markings to make it easier to understand. A large body of poorly commented source code is usually about as readable as a VCR.
I've "read" simple circuits and mechanical devices to see what they do, but the mere possibility of reading them doesn't make them speech. People perform actions to "send a message" but that doesn't mean freedom of speech allows you to "tell" someone you don't like them by punching them. Neither does it allow you to yell loudly and continuously, hurting the ears and drowning out the words of others, even if you are making an honest effort to communicate to a somewhat distant friend. How do you make the distinction? Speech is that which has the sole purpose and forseeable direct consequence of communication.
Computer programs are devices first, and speech second, if at all. The manner in which they are constructed proves it, emphasizing functionality over readability.
The copyright clause is self-limiting in duration, but the first amendment is the reason fair use exists.
Fair use is common to countries without such constitutional guarantees. It originated under British common law, and was retained after the colonies seperated. It predates the first amendment.
The use of information is prohibitable, the distribution of information is not.
Wrong and, frankly, stupid. There are plenty of laws prohibiting distribution of information, and they have been upheld by the courts time and again. Do you think you're accomplishing anything by repeating a lie over and over? Do you think your own personal interpretation is legal truth over the rulings of the courts?
Grow up and face reality. "Shouldn't" is a more realistic word to apply to government than "can't." --
Re:Functional != unprotected
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Duct Tape
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DeCSS is as much as device as the launch codes for a nuclear missle, or the combo to my gym locker.
In the right context they can perform a function, but they are speech nonetheless.
Wrong. They describe an action which can activate a specific device's intended function, they do not work together with another device to produce a new behavior not envisioned by the other device's creator.
Like most information, combinations serve a purpose, but do not perform a function.
If you want to prohibit the function they perform, make "speech-devices" illegal to use, not to distribute--and realize that making DeCSS illegal to use would lay bare the decimation of constitutionally required fair use that this ban on dissemination disguises.
The constitution does not require fair use, only that IP restrictions be temporary.
I don't agree with banning DeCSS, but I don't like to blow it out of proportion or talk about it in unrelated stories. I certainly don't like weaselly claims that it's not primarily a device for decrypting DVDs. --
1- probably not your typical boy scout
2- apples, oranges
3- the intersection of the set of speech items and the set of devices is a non-empty set which contains DeCSS, but not the contents of a nuclear physics textbook --
Parish & Co. would tell you that AOL and MS won't work together because they are mortal enemies, since MS is killing AOL.
He may be viciously biased, but I like this guy. There's a refreshing purity to his sincere hatred. He's not promoting anything, just attacking MS, and he comes up with some good ammunition. --
Somehow, when I see this kind of spin, I picture journalists in training, in a scene out of the Matrix:
"Do not try to bend the truth. That's impossible. Instead, realize that there is no truth, and that it is yourself that is bending. Not to mention your credibility." --
/. makes me want stuff from ThinkGeek. Especially "performance drinks" with stupid names like Whoop Ass. And mice. Really nice mice.
But only because I come day after day, and see exactly the kind of thing I'm interested in. I don't need to see it for long, but I need to see it ten or twenty times.
Not that I buy the crap, I just want it. But if it was something in my fridge, that I knew and liked, I'd probably go grab one. Something like that could easily skew my Coke:Coffee ratio (there's one for something other than coffee, I think it's one of those performance drinks I want, that shows a bunch of coffee cups and makes me want coffee). Why the hell aren't "Coca-Cola" banners all over the web like everywhere else? OTOH, there the generic problem: when I see Coke, I just want cola, it's all the same fizzy sweet stuff with caffeine (I still think they ruined the drink when they took the cocaine out of it).
BTW, one thing that really, really pisses me off is click-through ads that change with every reload. I navigate quickly, so usually, an ad that interests me only registers after I can't see it any more. I hit "back" and the ad is gone. I hit reload 3 or 4 times, and if the ad doesn't come up again, I go on with what I was doing (they should have "show me the last ad" links, or "show all ads in current rotation").
Incidentally, I usually miss anything animated. I expect certain sites I like to have ads I like, so I glance at the ads. Once. If I don't see anything informative in the frame that's up (such as "40 gb harddrive: $100 Shipping included!" or "Babes in bikinis, talking about sports."), they don't get another frame to convince me. I've long since learned not to bother watching after an "intriguing" frame.
Hmm. Looking back at the first paragraph... now I associate ThinkGeek with ass+mice, and from there to a story that starts "The real mistake was when I lit a match to see up the cardboard tube..." --
1) has no need for insurance
2) has no money left for insurance
3) has no interest in compensation if their systems go down, because they were already completely "secured" from any use
4) has nothing on their systems worth cracking them for (see 3)
5) has been taken over by their security people, as is the fate of anyone who relies on mercenaries ("money is not the sinews of war") --
I'm not disputing that 2001 is to some degree allegorical, though it also makes a very good literal hard scifi story. However, it accomplished this in major themes and a handful of blatant, hard-to-miss symbols (one could hardly argue that the monolith and space foetus were not symbolic). The creators did not waste their time hiding references in every stupid little detail and plot point, such as using anagrams for names, matching older works scene-for-scene, or designing space ships to look like anything other than practical, realistic space ships (in fact, they went to a lot of trouble to make them as realistic as possible).
An allegory is a work depicting deeper themes symbolicially, not a work depicting another work. 2001 depicted similar themes to the original Odyssey and Thus Spake Zaratustra, it didn't slavishly depict the events of these stories.
Competent allegory does not require dissection, it communicates its theme (or themes) on the first viewing. They rarely contain more than a handful of sly references in the details, and those are nothing but inside jokes, and can be removed without significant loss. Cast a wide enough net, though, and you'll find no end of coincidental similarities.
Speaking of allegories, have you perchance read "The Emperor's New Clothes?" There is nothing in the world easier than accusing people of being stupid for not seeing something that isn't there. --
There is very little vapor between here and Mars. However, the sheer amount of nothing is a major obstacle. A little vapor might be just the thing to sustain astronauts in transit. --
As a broken bootleg toy, I judge that google is henceforth to be considered:
evil, but still cool
You know, like George Lucas or Sony. So we should all continue supporting them individually while loudly proclaiming collectively that nobody should support them. --
Slashdot Mirror
There are certain things that E-Books will have to do before I'll even consider touching one:
- Can you throw one you don't want to read again at a noisy cat?
- Can you use one of your collection to prop up the desk, while still being able to read all the others?
- Can you rip pages out and use them during a toilet paper shortage?
- Can you impress strangers with shelves and shelves of them?
- Can you drop them in the bath tub and have them emerge an unreadable glob of pulp?
- With a collection of several hundred, can you light them on fire to keep yourself warm for a few days?
- Will a library with the same number of them still be heavy enough that it's foundation doesn't begin to rise and destabilize?
Where these narrow-minded technocrats fail is in focusing on the words contained within the books. This is obviously ridiculous, as books spend 99.95% of the time with nobody looking at the words in them, and any one word spends 99.99995% of the time not being looked at. This means the words play an insignificantly small role in the use of a book, more a rationalization of why to keep the book around than a real rational reason.
Let's be reasonable, here. The only way for E-Books to succeed is to give up on the content, and concentrate on duplicating the physical existence of paper books. While simple enough to do, I can't see these eggheads ever recognizing the obvious necessity.
--
Wan Hu - medieval chinese rocket scientist (who may not have been exactly a rocket scientist).
Hmm, or maybe that was Larry Walters.
--
[recounting of vague memories of secure deletion requirements]
[absurdly thorough overkill method for secure deletion]
[suggestion that previous method is barely adequate]
[expression of smug superiority]
--
[accusation of incompetence reiterated]
[inadequate deletion method presented as obvious solution]
[insultingly simple and inadequate recommendation for general solution to computer incompetence]
--
that is analogous to calling those flying Chinese serpents "dragons"
Exactly. The sort of thing any English-speaking author would use rather than the unpronouncable foreign word.
When an English-speaker sees "elf" he knows how to say it, when he sees something like "sidhe" he scratches his head and makes a bad guess. So if he wants to write about a Celtic elf-like thing, he calls it an elf.
BTW, it's not like the Germanic and Celtic mythologies developed in isolation from one another, they grew up next to each other and resemble each other considerably.
--
As for the rest of this, if you're so dismissive of Tolkien why the hell bother to write the commentary in the first place?
/. bitching is the closest I come to being an author.
Did you consider that the obsessive following makes it worthy of analysis whether I like it or not?
I think it's popular because it was the first elf and wizard fantasy novel, feeding a great appetite for such works. Being first, it got a hold on minds of the early readers, who often recommend it as the first fantasy reading to others, who perpetuate this obsession in similar fashion.
Those of us who had read dozens of good fantasy novels, the polished gems to Tolkien's crude chippings, before ever looking to LOTR often don't have the same reverence for it. Nonetheless, members of the Cult of Tolkien will react with shock and disapproval at honest reactions to it, often loudly considering anyone who doesn't think LOTR is the best fantasy fiction ever written (or at least in the top 10) to be ignorant and uncultured.
A suggestion that new readers not even bother with Tolkien is generally considered irresponsible if not cruel.
Don't get me wrong, I may have come off a little harsher than I meant to. I think everybody who likes fantasy should read The Hobbit (which is small enough to work, IMHO), and anyone with an obsessive love for fantasy novels would find LOTR worth reading, but I wouldn't put the latter anywhere near my top 10.
Given the stilted dialog and otherwise awkward writing, I don't think most people would think it was that great without being told a hundred times that it was, or without being told that it was the first of its kind.
You wouldn't happen to be failed author by any chance, would you?
Failed? Only in the minds of mindless Tolkien-drones who can't bear to look at anything worth reading!! My inspiring tritritrilogy (27 books) on the life of an elflord who opposed custom to wed a she-troll is the greatest work of fiction ever created!
Just kidding.
I am a broken bootleg toy.
--
Tolkien's elves didn't have pointy ears. Not once does he refer to them as such. Celtic elves, however, had pointy ears, and were similar in stature and temperment to Tolkien's elves (though they fit into a more diverse fairy society).
The "high-elf" concept seems to be a product of the Seelie Court / Tuatha de Danan confusion. The Tuatha de Danan were supposedly either just superior people or the original faeries; they set the tone of the Seelie Court. Trim the Seelie Court down to elves (the most human-like of the bunch), tweaking them a bit to give them enough TdD characteristics to preserve this tone, and you're pretty close to standard fantasy elves.
As for forest dwelling, most of the humanoids hid in the forest, since that was a spooky mysterious place medieval peasants were afraid of. Anyway, while standard fantasy elves admire trees, as they love nature, they are only slightly more likely to be found hidden in forests than living in their own fancy elf-castles.
Tolkien's concept of elves is a fairly typical mishmash of ideas from one story to another, and diverges from what you might call 'standard fantasy elves' significantly. I really don't think he exerted that much influence over them.
As for the spelling, I seriously doubt that Tolkien was the first one to pluralize 'elf' as 'elves', regardless of what the dictionary standard of the day was. 'elves' is much more euphonious, and people love to tweak the spelling of such uncommon words (how many ways have you seen 'magic' spelt?).
--
And at least 1/3 should be super-deformed.
Nothing else could do it justice, anime is the only video style I've ever seen that could successfully bounce between absurd character-based humor, scenes of supernatural horror, and heroic moments like Robert Jordan's writing. Also, anime handles ridiculously long stories fairly well, in series form. The Hobbit boiled down to a 2-hour cartoon quite nicely, and I expect an anime series could get through maybe 2 books per season.
For a completely different reason, I'd like to see the entire Dune series of books done up the same way. The idea of a super-deformed God Emperor is way too funny to pass up. Not to mention the whole Super-Sexy Mind Control Whores From Space plot arc.
--
My own opinion on first reading was that Tolkien wrote in a stiff, unnatural style about a world that had many interesting pieces, but didn't really fit together into a believable whole. Many of the people I spoke to agreed with me. I still think The Hobbit was his best work.
However, I had not been told a hundred times before I read it that it was the Best Thing Ever, as I am reminded several times weekly on the internet. It's hard to develop or maintain an honest individual opinion about something presented as a major part of the basis of your adopted culture. Look at the above post, for example: moderated down as a troll just for wondering what the big deal is!
I wince every time I hear of anything containing wizards or goblins referred to as derived from Tolkien's work. Wizards and goblins were fairy-tale standards long before he came along, and they resonate deeply from the hundreds of years in which they were experimented with and tuned for maximum entertainment value.
I regard his work as merely a primitive early example of the western-european folklore-based fantasy novel, not the root from which all such works grow. The range of source materials used for novels was rapidly growing, and he just happened to be the first (or at least one of the first) to try cobbling together the monsters and heroes of medieval myth into a good long story to be printed up in cheap volumes for mass entertainment. In this way, he is more like the first man to cross the finish line in a race than an explorer who shows people a new place worth going to.
I believe strongly that if Tolkien had never lived, the main difference in fantasy literature would be no mentions of Tolkien in the reviews. There would still be stories about fireball-hurling wizards, sneaking goblins, vicious trolls, haughty elves, talking trees, and tough dwarves. Tales would still revolve around the world-threatening artifact and would still commonly feature the fish-out-of-water everyman-hero.
Why? Because the creatures are common in fairy tales (only recently driven from childhood bed-time reading by the incredible horde of modern authors), and the themes are common in ancient myths.
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You mean that song with words written by an English lawyer, using the tune from Londonderry Air, and marketed most successfully in the United States?
It is an Irish style song, not an Irish song.
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The retail store gets $17 gross income.
Close enough, though.
I question the relevancy of this breakdown. If they really only cleared $0.59 per CD, they'd add a buck to the price and probably double their profit after the slight decrease in sales it would cause.
More likely, they make something close to the store's markup (in cleared profit) on real hits from undervalued artists (which they hope for with every release, of course, but rarely get), such that doubling their profit/CD would increase the price to $25 or more, sharply reducing their sales (which hurts a lot worse than just not getting the "profit"). At those prices, the break-evens might lose money and the moderate losers might not sell at all.
--
A VCR is a physical device. You can't print a VCR out and carry it around. You can't save it to a floppy disk.
A sculpture can be speech. You can't print one, or save it to a floppy disk. What makes the VCR anything other than a sculpture? Sure, it does something, but so does a program, which you adamantly insist is speech.
Intent makes an act or object speech or non-speech. A program's primary purpose is to cause a computer to function in a certain way, not to communicate some information to another person.
After all, I have to face reality that the government will violate the constitution.
Exactly. The US government can, has, and will continue to violate individual interpretations of the constitution. It is ruled by public opinion and private interest, not some mouldy old piece of parchment.
Take, for instance, the second amendment. It states in simple terms that the government can't disarm citizens (the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed). No mention of "reasonable for self-defense" or anything like that; at the time immediately after it was written it was legal for a private citizen to own live cannon and other major military weapons with no permits or other regulation. While the regulation of small arms is controversial, I don't hear anyone arguing that people should be allowed to walk around with a sack of grenades or an anti-tank missile, or that billionaires should be free to buy their own nuclear weapons, though this would be in line with the strict wording of the 2nd amendment.
Rather than go through the trouble of amending the constitution to remove this restriction, they simply "reinterpreted it". They found drafts with extra commas. They decided that the comment on justification (A well-regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State) eliminated all meaning. Now the only worry weapons-banners have is whether their laws will be popular.
The Vietnam war? The civil war? The gulf war? All completely unconstitutional. The world wars were iffy, but there were certainly completely unconstitutional things done during them.
Those are just some big, obvious examples. A little research will show no end to violations of any reasonable interpretation of the constitution.
The constitution is the subject of much lip service and little obedience. It is just words, and does not protect your freedom. Arguing over details of what is in it accomplishes nothing. Better to argue over what should be done and what must not be set into law based on consequences, rather than argue over whether technically this or that law is not allowed by your interpretation of the constitution.
The court of public opinion is where the battle against such laws will be won or lost, and it will be swayed by consequences, not technicalities of law.
--
That is a padlock's intended function? To lock, and unlock when the right combination is applied. Wow, that's just what CSS does. Or are you claiming that CSS's creator didn't envision that CSS encoded movies would be descrambled?
The computer's creators did not have DeCSS in mind when they built it, it could host any number of different programs. That makes the DeCSS program a seperate device, completely unlike a combination, which is only instructions for a human to unlock something.
DeCSS can be treated as a "black box" and used without understanding what it says. It was deliberately designed to function without necessarily being read by the user.
If you really want to stretch your definitions, a VCR is speech, since a sufficiently well-equipped and educated man could learn from it how to read the magetic field on a VHS tape and convert it into a TV signal. It doesn't do so entirely by itself, it needs both a human to operate it, and a source of power to make it do anything (in much the same way a computer program needs a source of execution units). It even has comments and markings to make it easier to understand. A large body of poorly commented source code is usually about as readable as a VCR.
I've "read" simple circuits and mechanical devices to see what they do, but the mere possibility of reading them doesn't make them speech. People perform actions to "send a message" but that doesn't mean freedom of speech allows you to "tell" someone you don't like them by punching them. Neither does it allow you to yell loudly and continuously, hurting the ears and drowning out the words of others, even if you are making an honest effort to communicate to a somewhat distant friend. How do you make the distinction? Speech is that which has the sole purpose and forseeable direct consequence of communication.
Computer programs are devices first, and speech second, if at all. The manner in which they are constructed proves it, emphasizing functionality over readability.
The copyright clause is self-limiting in duration, but the first amendment is the reason fair use exists.
Fair use is common to countries without such constitutional guarantees. It originated under British common law, and was retained after the colonies seperated. It predates the first amendment.
The use of information is prohibitable, the distribution of information is not.
Wrong and, frankly, stupid. There are plenty of laws prohibiting distribution of information, and they have been upheld by the courts time and again. Do you think you're accomplishing anything by repeating a lie over and over? Do you think your own personal interpretation is legal truth over the rulings of the courts?
Grow up and face reality. "Shouldn't" is a more realistic word to apply to government than "can't."
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DeCSS is as much as device as the launch codes for a nuclear missle, or the combo to my gym locker.
In the right context they can perform a function, but they are speech nonetheless.
Wrong. They describe an action which can activate a specific device's intended function, they do not work together with another device to produce a new behavior not envisioned by the other device's creator.
Like most information, combinations serve a purpose, but do not perform a function.
If you want to prohibit the function they perform, make "speech-devices" illegal to use, not to distribute--and realize that making DeCSS illegal to use would lay bare the decimation of constitutionally required fair use that this ban on dissemination disguises.
The constitution does not require fair use, only that IP restrictions be temporary.
I don't agree with banning DeCSS, but I don't like to blow it out of proportion or talk about it in unrelated stories. I certainly don't like weaselly claims that it's not primarily a device for decrypting DVDs.
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1- probably not your typical boy scout
2- apples, oranges
3- the intersection of the set of speech items and the set of devices is a non-empty set which contains DeCSS, but not the contents of a nuclear physics textbook
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The good ole' reliable rocket they built it on failed before they could test the scramjet.
Pretty sad...
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Parish & Co. would tell you that AOL and MS won't work together because they are mortal enemies, since MS is killing AOL.
He may be viciously biased, but I like this guy. There's a refreshing purity to his sincere hatred. He's not promoting anything, just attacking MS, and he comes up with some good ammunition.
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A number of times it has been mistaken for PC running Windows (tm) until I point out that there is no PC, just a mouse and a computer monitor or TV.
Not new, but still pretty cool. Too bad they don't show an actual picture of the whole setup instead of a screen capture.
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He's right, you know. There is no story.
Somehow, when I see this kind of spin, I picture journalists in training, in a scene out of the Matrix:
"Do not try to bend the truth. That's impossible. Instead, realize that there is no truth, and that it is yourself that is bending. Not to mention your credibility."
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Back to microcommodity trading!
Carry slugs of valuable pure metals, use ultrafunky electromagnetic measurements to determine their composition with perfect accuracy. Voila!
But as a wise man once said, "Governments don't like gold, because they can't print more of it whenever they choose."
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/. makes me want stuff from ThinkGeek. Especially "performance drinks" with stupid names like Whoop Ass. And mice. Really nice mice.
But only because I come day after day, and see exactly the kind of thing I'm interested in. I don't need to see it for long, but I need to see it ten or twenty times.
Not that I buy the crap, I just want it. But if it was something in my fridge, that I knew and liked, I'd probably go grab one. Something like that could easily skew my Coke:Coffee ratio (there's one for something other than coffee, I think it's one of those performance drinks I want, that shows a bunch of coffee cups and makes me want coffee). Why the hell aren't "Coca-Cola" banners all over the web like everywhere else? OTOH, there the generic problem: when I see Coke, I just want cola, it's all the same fizzy sweet stuff with caffeine (I still think they ruined the drink when they took the cocaine out of it).
BTW, one thing that really, really pisses me off is click-through ads that change with every reload. I navigate quickly, so usually, an ad that interests me only registers after I can't see it any more. I hit "back" and the ad is gone. I hit reload 3 or 4 times, and if the ad doesn't come up again, I go on with what I was doing (they should have "show me the last ad" links, or "show all ads in current rotation").
Incidentally, I usually miss anything animated. I expect certain sites I like to have ads I like, so I glance at the ads. Once. If I don't see anything informative in the frame that's up (such as "40 gb harddrive: $100 Shipping included!" or "Babes in bikinis, talking about sports."), they don't get another frame to convince me. I've long since learned not to bother watching after an "intriguing" frame.
Hmm. Looking back at the first paragraph... now I associate ThinkGeek with ass+mice, and from there to a story that starts "The real mistake was when I lit a match to see up the cardboard tube..."
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1) has no need for insurance
2) has no money left for insurance
3) has no interest in compensation if their systems go down, because they were already completely "secured" from any use
4) has nothing on their systems worth cracking them for (see 3)
5) has been taken over by their security people, as is the fate of anyone who relies on mercenaries ("money is not the sinews of war")
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I'm not disputing that 2001 is to some degree allegorical, though it also makes a very good literal hard scifi story. However, it accomplished this in major themes and a handful of blatant, hard-to-miss symbols (one could hardly argue that the monolith and space foetus were not symbolic). The creators did not waste their time hiding references in every stupid little detail and plot point, such as using anagrams for names, matching older works scene-for-scene, or designing space ships to look like anything other than practical, realistic space ships (in fact, they went to a lot of trouble to make them as realistic as possible).
An allegory is a work depicting deeper themes symbolicially, not a work depicting another work. 2001 depicted similar themes to the original Odyssey and Thus Spake Zaratustra, it didn't slavishly depict the events of these stories.
Competent allegory does not require dissection, it communicates its theme (or themes) on the first viewing. They rarely contain more than a handful of sly references in the details, and those are nothing but inside jokes, and can be removed without significant loss. Cast a wide enough net, though, and you'll find no end of coincidental similarities.
Speaking of allegories, have you perchance read "The Emperor's New Clothes?" There is nothing in the world easier than accusing people of being stupid for not seeing something that isn't there.
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There is very little vapor between here and Mars. However, the sheer amount of nothing is a major obstacle. A little vapor might be just the thing to sustain astronauts in transit.
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You know, like George Lucas or Sony. So we should all continue supporting them individually while loudly proclaiming collectively that nobody should support them.
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