What I have a problem with is that this button is, to me, a criticism of Tolkien. While it may not be explicit criticism, i.e., 'Tolkien was a bad writer' I think it is very much implied. Under section 107 of the 1976 act, criticism is covered under fair use. Although the article doesn't say which law the Tolkien estate is citing, or even that they are using US law (although they have been fond of it in the past), I suspect it would have very little impact on "(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work"
The problem with this story in general is that it's almost completely devoid of facts. The only links to further information are to the guy's original blog post, which is titled (helpfully enough), "The J.R.R. Tolkien Estate can go fuck itself." It doesn't say what the complaint was, nor does it even say definitively that it was the Tolkien Estate, Ltd. that filed the request. (It could have been some other company, for all we know, such as Middle-Earth Enterprises, which owns some of the merchandising rights to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.) If he had posted Zazzle's actual email it might have been helpful, but there's nothing. The guy who made the buttons seems more interested in publicity than in actually discussing the matter.
I suspect there's a lot of this going on right now. I applied for a job recently with a company that used some kind of automated HR system. The application process had you submit a resume, then participate in an "online interview," meaning you answer a bunch of multiple-choice questions like, "How do you prioritize your workloads?" After you filled out the multiple-choice questionnaire, you were presented with two buttons: "Go Back and Review" or "Submit." Press "Submit," the Web site says, "Thanks! We'll let you know."
About two and a half days later I received back an automated email saying, "Thanks for applying, but after carefully considering your resume and experience, we have determined there are candidates better qualified for the job." That email arrived at 12:38am on a Thursday.
Mind you, I'm not saying I was necessarily the best candidate for this particular job. Maybe I wasn't. What I can say, though, is that I had about five years' experience with this same job title, and three of them were at this same company, which is still holding a 401(k) account for me.
See, you can't trademark someone's name. I was chatting with Tolkien last week. His name is actually Rob Tolkien. If I were to print this, would it suddenly be taken down by the "Tolkien estate"?
I don't think you understand how trademarks and licensing work.
> The Tolkien estate alleges these buttons do that.
Fair enough. So this guy should challenge Zazzle's decision to remove the product. If they have no procedure for that, or if they won't budge, he should find another vendor or make the buttons himself.
nobody here dislikes tolkien or his estate. but everybody here dislikes the bullshit intellectual property laws that enable this behavior. your rant assumes the wrong target. nobody is gunning for tolkien or his estate, they are gunning for bullshit laws
I don't know about that. Go back and see all the griping about the evil Tolkien estate on the last thread, a few days back.
And let me throw something else into the mix. This guy seems to be reacting like the vast, evil Tolkien estate is bringing the hammer down on one hapless individual who made a few buttons. What he doesn't seem to grok is that the Tolkien estate isn't going after one guy, it is going after Zazzle, which, if it were allowed to print Tolkien-related products with impunity, could do the Tolkien estate a lot more damage than one guy with some buttons ever could. A law that enables a company to maliciously take down one guy might be a bullshit law, but a law that protects an entire product licensing business is not. (At least, not necessarily.) Case in point: Zazzle drafted policy long ago that it is not willing to fight the issue.
Now this guy has some options. As I said, he could make the buttons himself. He could also look for another printer that has fewer qualms about using the word "Tolkien" in its offerings. It strikes me that he's chosen Plan C: Whine about it, wrap himself in the flag, and settle for a pat on the back from the Internet.
Can we please get off this hobby horse? The Tolkien estate isn't "censoring speech," it's protecting its trademarks, which it is required to do by law. If this guy had made a bunch of buttons for himself and as many of his friends as wanted them (all three), nothing would have happened. Instead he set up a store on Zazzle and tried to sell them. Zazzle has a clear policy that it will not sell items that violate copyrights, trademarks, or other intellectual property. These buttons do that. So the Tolkien estate complained, this guy's product was pulled, end of story. He wasn't sued, he wasn't thrown in jail -- in fact, he can still go buy a button maker and make himself some buttons and nothing would happen to him. The idea that he's being "censored" is silly, and there are lots of companies that are far more litigious about such things than the Tolkien estate.
I don't know much about Apple's "security culture," but since you're asking what's missing from your list, the missing piece would be acting upon the information they receive and releasing security patches on a timely basis.
Oh -- and one of the central themes of the show (and how they get away with House having his unusual diagnostic approach), is that House believes it doesn't matter how much you "warm up" to your patients, because everybody lies, and the more critical the condition, the bigger the lies. So the classic example is the wife who keeps concealing information and giving red herrings because it turns out she got her disease by sleeping with her husband's best friend.
WTF??? How do you pick up diagnostic clues without having the patient warm up to you so you can understand the details of his/her illness in context?
Here's the deal:
House M.D. was conceived as a medical take on the Sherlock Holmes concept. The lead character's name is House (as in "homes"). His best friend is Wilson (Watson). He resides at 221B Something-street. He doesn't treat patients, he solves medical mysteries.
The genesis of the show was a series of essays that appeared in the New Yorker, called "Annals of Medicine," which presented unusual and often striking medical cases. Several of these cases have been directly adapted into House episodes.
In real life, there really aren't that many diseases that will take you from a slight cough to death in 48 hours without obvious supporting symptoms, which is why the medicine in many of the episodes seems less than plausible (they're short on ideas).
The first season was very good. The second was also good. The show has declined from there, to where most episodes these days concentrate more on the soap opera aspect than the medicine.
It's still more interesting than a lot of soap opera shows, because they tend to concentrate on the negative aspects of human personalities. Not just House, but everyone on his team has profound personality flaws. So do most of the patients. The real focus of the show (at least as they write it now) is often not on how the patient is cured, but how they react to their ailment and the decisions they make, which they often seem to make for ignoble or misguided reasons.
If you're going to be chained to a RAID array, why would you use a laptop when an equivalent desktop is going to be around twice as fast ?
Portability, obviously. It's a lot easier to take a laptop and a RAID box out in the field than to carry around a desktop, keyboard, mouse, monitor, monitor cables, power cables, speakers, etc.
Yeah, no kidding. This would be the Apple that invented Firewire, right? The Apple that brought networking to casual PC users? The Apple that killed off the floppy drive? The Apple that was first to trade old-school serial ports for USB? The Apple that was first to embrace 802.11b wireless? The Apple that was the first manufacturer to ship systems with Nehalem chips? I could do a Google search for "Apple was the first manufacturer" but what would be the point? That one sentence is so ludicrously off base, it makes me not want to read another word.
Are you saying that American expats can't vote? I'm neither American nor expat, but I'm reasonably sure they can. They need to mail in their votes some days or weeks before the actual election, I believe.
Hmmm, I believe you're right. I hadn't really thought about it that way. Then again, American citizens are expected to file taxes in the USA, no matter where they live or for how long, for the entirety of their natural lives. I reckon it's only fair to let them vote, then.
Except they suck, at least the ones I've tried. They often won't turn on at all unless you crank the dimmer to the top setting, then dial it back down -- which means you have to sit there fiddling with them every time you switch them on, because they take a minute or so to reach full brightness, so you can't tell where to set the dimmer. Even then, they seldom dim across the full range of the switch, and they seem to dim in a range of steps rather than a smooth transition -- in other words, the dimmer switch doesn't work the way it was designed to. And even then, dim fluorescent light just looks murky and flickery, completely unlike dim incandescent light, which tends to look warm and yellow.
A light should not be producing heat, if you want heat get a heat. Heating cord is available, but 90% of the time insulation is where you should be looking first.
Right, so let me just call my landlord and ask him to retrofit the entire building with insulation in the walls. I can't believe what an idiot I've been for killing two birds with one stone.
Life isn't fair because it isn't and so some should get more than they deserve, is simply a circular, nonsensical, argument
Is it? Black coffee isn't as sweet as Coca-Cola, is that a circular, nonsensical argument? At some point you're going to have to stop dealing in philosophy and confront the world as it exists. It would be nice if everybody had every advantage that everybody else has, but that will never happen. But a vision of society that advocates stealing from everybody who earned something so you can give it to somebody who didn't earn it simply won't work.
the Amish, part time students in CA, and government retirees in CT
I don't know where you're getting your information, but while you might not need an SSN if you want to be a part-time student in California, if you want to hold a job at the same time, you definitely do.
Yes and no. There are lots of different ways to look at dual nationalities. You get a class of people who have double the voting power of others, because they can vote in two different countries. Would I like to be able to vote in the US, as well as in my own country (and maybe some others)? Of course! But that violates some basic democratic principle.
Well, a little bit yes and a little bit no. Most jurisdictions have some sort of residency requirement before they allow you to vote. When I vote in the U.S., for example, they tell me where to go to file my ballot. It's usually someplace close to my home. It might be someone's garage, or a school, or something like that. But although I don't actually have to show an ID to vote, my polling place will have a list of people who they expect to vote in that area. If I were to go back to the country of my birth, on the other hand, I believe I would still have the right to vote, but it would be much more convoluted than it would be for most citizens, because I would not have a local residence on record.
There's also a difference in global mobility: some people are welcome in several countries, while most people are only welcome in their own country.
In the case of my triple nationality, it doesn't make a whole lot of difference. For casual travel, a passport from any one of these countries would be enough for me to move freely between all of them (I'm talking about the USA, Canada, and the UK specifically). The advantage of citizenship is that you can work and settle in that country -- and the EU makes this even more attractive.
I guess my only exception to your ideal world is that there are places on the globe that are rather lawless, or outright hostile to the form of government under which I grew up, so I like the idea that there embassies who will help me out if I run into awkward circumstances. An example of a place where it's probably easy to settle without a lot of bureaucracy: Somalia. Sound good to you?
It is possible to lose your U.S. citizenship. But just having foreign citizenship generally isn't enough, even if you acquire it after already being a U.S. citizen.
I believe your U.S. citizenship may be in jeopardy of you acquire citizenship of a short list of unfriendly nations, such as Iran, North Korea, etc. (Again, I say "may be" because it's going to be at some agency's discretion, not automatic.)
Also, the general rule is that, for purposes of your life in the United States, your U.S. citizenship is what matters and nothing else. If you're a U.S. citizen and you get drafted into the military, for example, you can't claim you don't have to serve because you're a citizen of some other country. Talking about your other nationality when dealing with U.S. government agents is considered very bad form, in general. When you enter or leave the United States, you should also show a U.S. passport to border officials.
But as for the general attitude toward dual nationality, it makes sense if you think about it. We're a nation of immigrants, for one, no matter what Arizona wants to believe. Also, I have triple citizenship myself -- I'm a naturalized U.S. citizen, but the other two are by birth. So in other words, yes I'm a U.S. citizen, but as for the other two, I can't actually help that. As long as I uphold my obligations as a U.S. citizen, it would be unreasonable to expect me to renounce the circumstances of my own birth.
he doesn't have an SSN - sure it made life more difficult.. but at the same time he doesn't have to pay into SS which is nice..
Drug dealers who trade in cash don't "have to" pay Social Security tax either, but that doesn't make it legal. If you work in the United States, you are required to pay Social Security tax, period.
Slashdot Mirror
What I have a problem with is that this button is, to me, a criticism of Tolkien. While it may not be explicit criticism, i.e., 'Tolkien was a bad writer' I think it is very much implied. Under section 107 of the 1976 act, criticism is covered under fair use. Although the article doesn't say which law the Tolkien estate is citing, or even that they are using US law (although they have been fond of it in the past), I suspect it would have very little impact on "(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work"
The problem with this story in general is that it's almost completely devoid of facts. The only links to further information are to the guy's original blog post, which is titled (helpfully enough), "The J.R.R. Tolkien Estate can go fuck itself." It doesn't say what the complaint was, nor does it even say definitively that it was the Tolkien Estate, Ltd. that filed the request. (It could have been some other company, for all we know, such as Middle-Earth Enterprises, which owns some of the merchandising rights to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.) If he had posted Zazzle's actual email it might have been helpful, but there's nothing. The guy who made the buttons seems more interested in publicity than in actually discussing the matter.
Ford is a company named after its founder. Tolkien is an author.
But the product licensing and merchandising associated with Tolkien's name and works is quite definitely a business.
To my knowledge, there is no Tolkien, Inc. founded by said author.
That would be the Tolkien Estate, Ltd.
I suspect there's a lot of this going on right now. I applied for a job recently with a company that used some kind of automated HR system. The application process had you submit a resume, then participate in an "online interview," meaning you answer a bunch of multiple-choice questions like, "How do you prioritize your workloads?" After you filled out the multiple-choice questionnaire, you were presented with two buttons: "Go Back and Review" or "Submit." Press "Submit," the Web site says, "Thanks! We'll let you know."
About two and a half days later I received back an automated email saying, "Thanks for applying, but after carefully considering your resume and experience, we have determined there are candidates better qualified for the job." That email arrived at 12:38am on a Thursday.
Mind you, I'm not saying I was necessarily the best candidate for this particular job. Maybe I wasn't. What I can say, though, is that I had about five years' experience with this same job title, and three of them were at this same company, which is still holding a 401(k) account for me.
See, you can't trademark someone's name. I was chatting with Tolkien last week. His name is actually Rob Tolkien. If I were to print this, would it suddenly be taken down by the "Tolkien estate"?
I don't think you understand how trademarks and licensing work.
No, but you can put his name on a button.
I wouldn't be so confident until I talked to a lawyer and did a trademark search.
I have a last name, should I have the ability to ban anyone else from using it to gather money?
You're misrepresenting the issue.
This lawsuit is insane.
There is no lawsuit.
Except "Tolkien" in this case is a dead person's name, not a brand.
So if I come up with a new salad dressing, can I put Paul Newman's name on it?
> The Tolkien estate alleges these buttons do that.
Fair enough. So this guy should challenge Zazzle's decision to remove the product. If they have no procedure for that, or if they won't budge, he should find another vendor or make the buttons himself.
nobody here dislikes tolkien or his estate. but everybody here dislikes the bullshit intellectual property laws that enable this behavior. your rant assumes the wrong target. nobody is gunning for tolkien or his estate, they are gunning for bullshit laws
I don't know about that. Go back and see all the griping about the evil Tolkien estate on the last thread, a few days back.
And let me throw something else into the mix. This guy seems to be reacting like the vast, evil Tolkien estate is bringing the hammer down on one hapless individual who made a few buttons. What he doesn't seem to grok is that the Tolkien estate isn't going after one guy, it is going after Zazzle, which, if it were allowed to print Tolkien-related products with impunity, could do the Tolkien estate a lot more damage than one guy with some buttons ever could. A law that enables a company to maliciously take down one guy might be a bullshit law, but a law that protects an entire product licensing business is not. (At least, not necessarily.) Case in point: Zazzle drafted policy long ago that it is not willing to fight the issue.
Now this guy has some options. As I said, he could make the buttons himself. He could also look for another printer that has fewer qualms about using the word "Tolkien" in its offerings. It strikes me that he's chosen Plan C: Whine about it, wrap himself in the flag, and settle for a pat on the back from the Internet.
A historical figure is not, and cannot be, anyone's property. End of story.
And yet Ford is a valid trademark. Weird, ain't it?
Can we please get off this hobby horse? The Tolkien estate isn't "censoring speech," it's protecting its trademarks, which it is required to do by law. If this guy had made a bunch of buttons for himself and as many of his friends as wanted them (all three), nothing would have happened. Instead he set up a store on Zazzle and tried to sell them. Zazzle has a clear policy that it will not sell items that violate copyrights, trademarks, or other intellectual property. These buttons do that. So the Tolkien estate complained, this guy's product was pulled, end of story. He wasn't sued, he wasn't thrown in jail -- in fact, he can still go buy a button maker and make himself some buttons and nothing would happen to him. The idea that he's being "censored" is silly, and there are lots of companies that are far more litigious about such things than the Tolkien estate.
I don't know much about Apple's "security culture," but since you're asking what's missing from your list, the missing piece would be acting upon the information they receive and releasing security patches on a timely basis.
Oh -- and one of the central themes of the show (and how they get away with House having his unusual diagnostic approach), is that House believes it doesn't matter how much you "warm up" to your patients, because everybody lies, and the more critical the condition, the bigger the lies. So the classic example is the wife who keeps concealing information and giving red herrings because it turns out she got her disease by sleeping with her husband's best friend.
WTF??? How do you pick up diagnostic clues without having the patient warm up to you so you can understand the details of his/her illness in context?
Here's the deal:
If you're going to be chained to a RAID array, why would you use a laptop when an equivalent desktop is going to be around twice as fast ?
Portability, obviously. It's a lot easier to take a laptop and a RAID box out in the field than to carry around a desktop, keyboard, mouse, monitor, monitor cables, power cables, speakers, etc.
Yeah, no kidding. This would be the Apple that invented Firewire, right? The Apple that brought networking to casual PC users? The Apple that killed off the floppy drive? The Apple that was first to trade old-school serial ports for USB? The Apple that was first to embrace 802.11b wireless? The Apple that was the first manufacturer to ship systems with Nehalem chips? I could do a Google search for "Apple was the first manufacturer" but what would be the point? That one sentence is so ludicrously off base, it makes me not want to read another word.
Are you saying that American expats can't vote? I'm neither American nor expat, but I'm reasonably sure they can. They need to mail in their votes some days or weeks before the actual election, I believe.
Hmmm, I believe you're right. I hadn't really thought about it that way. Then again, American citizens are expected to file taxes in the USA, no matter where they live or for how long, for the entirety of their natural lives. I reckon it's only fair to let them vote, then.
You can buy dimmable CFLs. Use google.
Except they suck, at least the ones I've tried. They often won't turn on at all unless you crank the dimmer to the top setting, then dial it back down -- which means you have to sit there fiddling with them every time you switch them on, because they take a minute or so to reach full brightness, so you can't tell where to set the dimmer. Even then, they seldom dim across the full range of the switch, and they seem to dim in a range of steps rather than a smooth transition -- in other words, the dimmer switch doesn't work the way it was designed to. And even then, dim fluorescent light just looks murky and flickery, completely unlike dim incandescent light, which tends to look warm and yellow.
A light should not be producing heat, if you want heat get a heat. Heating cord is available, but 90% of the time insulation is where you should be looking first.
Right, so let me just call my landlord and ask him to retrofit the entire building with insulation in the walls. I can't believe what an idiot I've been for killing two birds with one stone.
Life isn't fair because it isn't and so some should get more than they deserve, is simply a circular, nonsensical, argument
Is it? Black coffee isn't as sweet as Coca-Cola, is that a circular, nonsensical argument? At some point you're going to have to stop dealing in philosophy and confront the world as it exists. It would be nice if everybody had every advantage that everybody else has, but that will never happen. But a vision of society that advocates stealing from everybody who earned something so you can give it to somebody who didn't earn it simply won't work.
the Amish, part time students in CA, and government retirees in CT
I don't know where you're getting your information, but while you might not need an SSN if you want to be a part-time student in California, if you want to hold a job at the same time, you definitely do.
Yes and no. There are lots of different ways to look at dual nationalities. You get a class of people who have double the voting power of others, because they can vote in two different countries. Would I like to be able to vote in the US, as well as in my own country (and maybe some others)? Of course! But that violates some basic democratic principle.
Well, a little bit yes and a little bit no. Most jurisdictions have some sort of residency requirement before they allow you to vote. When I vote in the U.S., for example, they tell me where to go to file my ballot. It's usually someplace close to my home. It might be someone's garage, or a school, or something like that. But although I don't actually have to show an ID to vote, my polling place will have a list of people who they expect to vote in that area. If I were to go back to the country of my birth, on the other hand, I believe I would still have the right to vote, but it would be much more convoluted than it would be for most citizens, because I would not have a local residence on record.
There's also a difference in global mobility: some people are welcome in several countries, while most people are only welcome in their own country.
In the case of my triple nationality, it doesn't make a whole lot of difference. For casual travel, a passport from any one of these countries would be enough for me to move freely between all of them (I'm talking about the USA, Canada, and the UK specifically). The advantage of citizenship is that you can work and settle in that country -- and the EU makes this even more attractive.
I guess my only exception to your ideal world is that there are places on the globe that are rather lawless, or outright hostile to the form of government under which I grew up, so I like the idea that there embassies who will help me out if I run into awkward circumstances. An example of a place where it's probably easy to settle without a lot of bureaucracy: Somalia. Sound good to you?
It is possible to lose your U.S. citizenship. But just having foreign citizenship generally isn't enough, even if you acquire it after already being a U.S. citizen.
I believe your U.S. citizenship may be in jeopardy of you acquire citizenship of a short list of unfriendly nations, such as Iran, North Korea, etc. (Again, I say "may be" because it's going to be at some agency's discretion, not automatic.)
Also, the general rule is that, for purposes of your life in the United States, your U.S. citizenship is what matters and nothing else. If you're a U.S. citizen and you get drafted into the military, for example, you can't claim you don't have to serve because you're a citizen of some other country. Talking about your other nationality when dealing with U.S. government agents is considered very bad form, in general. When you enter or leave the United States, you should also show a U.S. passport to border officials.
But as for the general attitude toward dual nationality, it makes sense if you think about it. We're a nation of immigrants, for one, no matter what Arizona wants to believe. Also, I have triple citizenship myself -- I'm a naturalized U.S. citizen, but the other two are by birth. So in other words, yes I'm a U.S. citizen, but as for the other two, I can't actually help that. As long as I uphold my obligations as a U.S. citizen, it would be unreasonable to expect me to renounce the circumstances of my own birth.
he doesn't have an SSN - sure it made life more difficult.. but at the same time he doesn't have to pay into SS which is nice..
Drug dealers who trade in cash don't "have to" pay Social Security tax either, but that doesn't make it legal. If you work in the United States, you are required to pay Social Security tax, period.
(after installing the GUI frontend to do that, which IIRC isn't installed by default anymore)
No, gconf-editor is still there in 10.10. It's not in the default menus, though, so you need to launch it from the command line.