I picked Kill Bill because I thought it would be a funny example.
Allrighty then. Absurd, I dig.
I'm always imagining Once Were Warriors when I think of a movie full of stuff they would cut out that is essential to the entire point of the movie. Without all the violence, sex and substance abuse, you're left with, an empty, soulless shell. That masterpiece should never be seen like that... or by kids under 16, for that matter.
One of these things is not like the others. One of these things just doesn't belong. Can you find the thing that's not like the others? By the time, I finish this...
marriage is a recognition of: the drive to find a partner and raise children with that partner, at least until they are old enough to fend for themselves.
I'm sorry, was I supposed to parse "until death do us part" as "until puberty hits our first born"?
Suppose I've bought Kill Bill and want to see it, but not the violent bits
You want to see a movie calledKill Bill, featuring a woman with a sword on the poster, but you don't want to see violence? Well, I suppose I'd bitch-slap you, first, and then I'd have you commited.
I could've sent it to this company.
And they would have sent you back... the opening and closing credits?
This ruling limits the ways in which a person can enjoy content they've legitimately purchased.
Nope, since selling these edited copies is illegitimate. As per the ruling. They can enjoy their legitimatly purchased content all they want.
if the author doesn't like that, too bad--as far as I'm concerned, they can take their "art" and shove it up their ass (knowing Holleywood, that's where they pulled it from in the first place).
How hard is it to NOT BUY OR WATCH movies you don't want to see? I'm currently not buying hundreds of thousands of movies! Amazing!
What they need to sell are universal remotes programmed to hit the fast forward button at certain times during playback. I would assume you would have no problem with a system like that, that doesn't make unauthorized copies?
There's actually something like that. It's a player that uses a script that tells it where to skip. I think it's... sad, but not "wrong". And this one is legal (there was a bit of a fuss, but it got sorted out).
I don't know how much it relies on "them" editing the script VS letting you decide based on the nature of content (like, say you're fine with nudity but you hate bad language, you could keep the T&A and have it mute out the swearing, for instance). But I know the tech is there, for those that feel they need it.
They aren't making money off of your work. They're making money off of the effort of editting the gratuitous violence, language, and sex out of your movie.
I already paid a competent editor. If they don't want to see the important violence and sex, nor hear the language that is necessary to the story I wanted to tell, they don't have to watch my movie. It's not to their taste? Fine, can't please everybody.
Ahh, the real heart of the matter. You can't stand to see someone who has different values then you do. In that case, discussion closed.
You have it all wrong there, buddy boy. I can stand different values, I watch movies where no one drinks or swears, and I enjoy them (Have you seen Napoleon Dynamite? A Series of Unfortunate Events? The Incredibles? I love those, no naughty bits in there).
THEY (you?) are the ones that can't stand different values. THEY CENSOR what they can't stand! If they could stand different values, they would watch movies where characters with different value act, unabashedly, according to those values, and they would deal with it. They wouldn't BREAK THE LAW to demand to see these characters act ONLY according to their values. They wouldn't try to force these values on everyone else.
There are two sides to the culture wars, one which says anything goes and tries to force it on everybody, and one that says a certain amount of decency should be expected but who allow each his own. The smut merchants are against freedom, the decent people are for it.
Oh, fuck you! Show me the lobbies that pushed for laws that force smut into every show. I'll show you the ones that push to BAN it from every show.
There's one side that says people should be free to make content with or without smut, and one that says that all smut should be banned. Which one is against freedom? I'll tell you, because you don't seem to be able to understand this from the previous two posts: The side against freedom is the side that wants to ban the types of contents it doesn't like.
Not to mention that there's tons of smutt free movies. Go watch the Pixar movies, they're good.
You're not only using bad logic, you're exhibiting bad faith.
No, no, no. You can't actually edit his post, just like Cleanfix can't edit the original.
Cleanflix doesn't add "Re:" in front of the movie title, it doesn't take out the name of the director: It passes them along with the credits of those who actually made the movies. It might add their logo somewhere around there, but that's still not theirs to brand.
If my name was in those credits, I wouldn't want people to see a butchered version passing itself off as the genuine article.
Not to rain too heavily on your parade, but your edit is a "parody" and IS legal under the Fair Use provisions of copyright law, despite this recent court ruling, so long as it is labeled as being modified.
's allright, I just wanted to show that selectively cutting out parts of a whole can completely change the meaning of the edited work. The parody, well, I couldn't resist making it funny in the process : )
It's insane. Our culture has completely forgotten the purpose of I.P. law (to foster innovation and art by providing reasonable monetary incentive) and moved waaaaaaay past and into the "MINE!" area.
True, but this (the topic at hand) is, as far as I can tell, one of the rare example of the true intent of copyright law: To stop someone else from making money off your work. Though if you have to purchase the original and the third party provides you a modified version, maybe you're right, and this is just overboard... but on the other hand... ack, no, I can't stand by this. A company who's business is to butcher movies for prudes. Ack. I can't, I just can't.
Btw, copyright was first championed by a french playright who called it "author's right", which is something I find much more true to the intent than "copyright", which sounds to me like the inanimate object has rights, not the author.
I can buy one copy of 'The Da Vinci Code' and replace the content with 'The Da Vinci Load (XXX)' and resell it? Can I do this 10,000 times? That might be fun.
Well, it'll make a fun thread to read when you get caught;-)
Finaly, though you actually copyed my text, the people who make these edits often use technology that requires no copying whatsoever. They're capable of doing on-the-fly-edits. How on earth can this be a violation of copyright law if there is no copying?
That's a separate matter, and has been legalised properly. The ones this discussion is about are those that sell a modified copy of copyrighted works, not those that sell a device that can automatically skip scenes along with a list of scenes to skip.
Yes, it destroys the vision of the artist, but, ya know what? If I own the copy, it's my right to destroy it in whatever way I see fit.
Indeed it is, you just can't sell nor rent copies of what you did to your copy.
Personally, what I don't get is why they can't simply provide the airplane/tv versions for rent. If we can get "uncut, unrated, unedited" DVD versions because there is a demand for them, and they are already selling watered-down versions to airplane companies and tv stations, what's stopping them from distributing those lame versions directly to consummers? If they would stick to their artistic guns and never compromise, not to the ratings board, not to the airlines, not to the networks, then I'd be behind them 100%. But since they DO compromise ALL THE TIME, why not give these prudes what they give to other prudes?
Altering content has the power to change the movie completely. You can tell a completely different story when you cut away this, switch those scenes and so on. And this is where the danger lies in that.
Exactly. However (you're hitting something here which is an emotional issue for me, so I might have a hard time expressing it clearly,/*end disclaimer*/): Hollywood adaptations of books do this at the script level.
The best example I can think of is Bicentennial Man, a mediocre movie adapted from an EXCELLENT story by Isaac Asimov.
In the movie, they removed the motivation of the main character (a very disturbing scene involving rednecks in a pick up) and replaced it with the usual "love conquers all" hollywood trite. That made the whole movie pointless, because all the character's efforts are pointless, since he has everything he wants and there's no reason for him to go to the extremes he goes to in the movie, he just makes himself suffer for no reason. The movie was made after the author's death, and his estate has been clearly capitalising as much as possible on his life's work with zero consideration for his art. I can understand the retarded reasoning of the hollywood people here (disturbing scenes turn people off, raise the rating, affect revenue), but being the dumb, soulless suits that they are, they forgot that turning the story into inane drivel by removing the entire starting point of his quest would also negatively affect revenue.
So I'm ambiguous about this ruling. On the one hand, this is the good side of copyright. On the other hand, when they hold rights to someone else's work, they have no qualms whatsoever in doing the very same. Legally, maybe, but that doesn't make it right.//end rant
Homosexual sex for a gay person is a basic biological drive. That's why there ARE gay people. It's not a choice.
"Sex with a shoe for a fetishist is a basic biological drive. That's why there ARE fetishists. It's not a choice."
Not that I support the bigot you replied to. But using the existance of the focus of someone's sexuality as a basis for the validity of that focus makes no sense. Sex is a very basic biological drive, the focus, however, isn't (otherwise there wouldn't be more gay sex in prisons and on ships at sea than elswhere, q.e.d.) I'm appaled that I'm saying this, but: Go watch American Pie, it's educational.
Society hasn't found homosexual behavior to be "detrimental to it", it's nothing more than prejudice.
Sufficiently advanced civilisations do not suffer from homosexual behaviour. But an agricultural society that thrives on population growth to counteract all the disasters nature throws at it does find that behaviour that isn't strictly productive is detrimental to it. It's not valid in an industtrialised society where we can afford to have people that don't spend their life growing food and making babies, but much like the traditional partitioning of the essential tasks between men and women, discriminating against homosexuals was once a very logical and valid rule to apply. Cruel, but justified (like maiming the only blacksmith around so he can't leave the village, for instance).
However, people should know that "it was justified five thousand years ago" is no reason to oppose progress today.
Sex before marriage seems stupid to me [...] willfully engaging in behavior contrary to basic biological drives (reproduction) indicates something seriously wrong with an individual.
Marriage is contrary to the basic biological drive of fucking every attractive members of the opposite sex you can find.
Atleast two or three years ago in the UK a new type of lollypop started being sold, basicly you stick it in your mouth and it plays some cheesy music that only you can hear, this tech has been around for a while and is well developed enough to be made into a cheap throw away childrens toy.
RTFA, this is for SPEAKING, not listening: It's sound FROM your jaw, to the headset.
It would be good to be able to completely assess the entire gamut of users opinions.
If only there were some kind of list of messages containing the opinions of users of slashdot... messages that would be listed like a line, no.. a... a thread. Yes.
If only you could read the fucking thread. If only.
I read somewhere recently (some list of facts about Superman) some interesting stuff. One of the things was that "Faster than a speeding bullet... more powerful than a locomotive..." stuff was not part of the original Superman comics, it was apparently made up for a radio show. But more interesting to me, apparently Superman COULDN'T fly. He was able to jump REALLY HIGH. You know, "able leap tall buildings in a single bound." At some point that somehow turned into flying (this was a bulleted list of facts type thing, so it didn't expand on these).
I just wrote about this to someone else before I saw your post, but hey, since you're asking...
Originally, superman was from a planet called Krypton that had a gravity ten times that of earth. Therefore, the inhabitants of Krypton had a body adapted to this environment, which meant that on earth, they could jump really high, and were very strong and tough.
As the years went by, they quickly exhausted the interresting stories they could write about these powers, and added more and more. However, the most dramatic changes occured during world war two, when the comic book industry was taken over by the military as part of the propaganda for the war effort. This is when Superman went from "Fighting a neverending battle for truth, and justice!" to "Fighting a neverending battle for truth, justice, and the American Way!" and when he started to fly. You can see it happen by watching the (excellent) Fleischer superman cartoons from the early forties. They started production before the US went to war, and you see a clear break in storytelling after pearl harbour (all of a sudden every other story is about superman punching buck-toothed, coke-bottle glasses wearing, evil japs).
It's a phenomenon as old as language and storytelling, but I like to call it the Dragonball Effect because that story has the most extreme display of incremental power growth (and Son Goku is a healthy mix of an old chineese legend and of superman). Basically, you need a tough villain to make your story entertaining, and your hero needs to be tougher. But then, you need tougher opponent next time around, so you beef up the hero. Rinse, repeat, you end up with a character so strong he's moving stars with his bare hands.
Over the years, the powers of superman have grown and waned. Because once a character gets too powerfull, the stories become less interresting. This is what happened in the early eighties, they downgraded superman's powers in a storyline called "Crisis on infinate earth". Therefore, you'll have people referring to pre-crisis and post-crisis superman as an indicator of how strong he is.
They retconed ("retrocactive continuity", contracted and used as a verb), his origin to explain his new power, giving him the "red sun/yellow sun" explanation later on. And since he's getting his power from solar radiation, they eventually rationalised his increase in power as a factor of the time he spends exposed to the radiation, making him a solar-battery.
As for catching Lois, yes, flying up to catch her as she falls is similar to a car hitting another parked as opposed to a head-on collision of moving cars: Their velocities add up. To explain away this annoying tidbit, and other related details such as why his suit doesn't break, they added that superman has an invulnerability field that extends a few milimiters from his body, and to any body in contact with his. That was a retcon that erased the gravity expanation.
P.S. The Dragonball Effect is also visible in religions: Gods get stronger as their followers learn more about the world their deities govern.
the book "The Science of Superman" some time ago. Not a bad read, and it goes into the details of how Superman's powers might stem from the differential in intensity of the earth/krypton sun, gravity, etc.
I don't know that book, but I know my superheroes. Did the book mention that originally, Supes was from the planet Krypton, where the gravity is 10 times that of earth, and therefore he was super strong and could jump really high, and super tough?
As the years went by, he had more and more powers added to his repertoir, and so they retconed his origin to that of solar radiations giving him the ability to shoot lasers from his eyes, to fly and to see through objects.
But at first, he was just a super-strong man, not the god he later turned into.
P.S. The first time superman flew was to go punch some evil japanese spies that stole a plane. P.P.S. And that's when "and the American Way" was added to his list of things he figths for. Ah, propaganda, ain't it just so much fun?
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I picked Kill Bill because I thought it would be a funny example.
Allrighty then. Absurd, I dig.
I'm always imagining Once Were Warriors when I think of a movie full of stuff they would cut out that is essential to the entire point of the movie. Without all the violence, sex and substance abuse, you're left with, an empty, soulless shell.
That masterpiece should never be seen like that... or by kids under 16, for that matter.
One of these things is not like the others.
One of these things just doesn't belong.
Can you find the thing that's not like the others?
By the time, I finish this...
marriage is a recognition of: the drive to find a partner and raise children with that partner, at least until they are old enough to fend for themselves.
I'm sorry, was I supposed to parse "until death do us part" as "until puberty hits our first born"?
Suppose I've bought Kill Bill and want to see it, but not the violent bits
You want to see a movie calledKill Bill, featuring a woman with a sword on the poster, but you don't want to see violence?
Well, I suppose I'd bitch-slap you, first, and then I'd have you commited.
I could've sent it to this company.
And they would have sent you back... the opening and closing credits?
The ruling isn't about what you can and can't see. It's about what you can and can't sell.
Biiiiig difference.
This ruling limits the ways in which a person can enjoy content they've legitimately purchased.
Nope, since selling these edited copies is illegitimate. As per the ruling. They can enjoy their legitimatly purchased content all they want.
if the author doesn't like that, too bad--as far as I'm concerned, they can take their "art" and shove it up their ass (knowing Holleywood, that's where they pulled it from in the first place).
How hard is it to NOT BUY OR WATCH movies you don't want to see? I'm currently not buying hundreds of thousands of movies! Amazing!
If you don't like the art, leave it alone.
Is it your business if one man kills another?
I might be next...
Why are there laws against it?
I don't wanna be next.
What they need to sell are universal remotes programmed to hit the fast forward button at certain times during playback. I would assume you would have no problem with a system like that, that doesn't make unauthorized copies?
There's actually something like that. It's a player that uses a script that tells it where to skip.
I think it's... sad, but not "wrong". And this one is legal (there was a bit of a fuss, but it got sorted out).
I don't know how much it relies on "them" editing the script VS letting you decide based on the nature of content (like, say you're fine with nudity but you hate bad language, you could keep the T&A and have it mute out the swearing, for instance). But I know the tech is there, for those that feel they need it.
They aren't making money off of your work. They're making money off of the effort of editting the gratuitous violence, language, and sex out of your movie.
I already paid a competent editor. If they don't want to see the important violence and sex, nor hear the language that is necessary to the story I wanted to tell, they don't have to watch my movie. It's not to their taste? Fine, can't please everybody.
Ahh, the real heart of the matter. You can't stand to see someone who has different values then you do. In that case, discussion closed.
You have it all wrong there, buddy boy. I can stand different values, I watch movies where no one drinks or swears, and I enjoy them (Have you seen Napoleon Dynamite? A Series of Unfortunate Events? The Incredibles? I love those, no naughty bits in there).
THEY (you?) are the ones that can't stand different values.
THEY CENSOR what they can't stand! If they could stand different values, they would watch movies where characters with different value act, unabashedly, according to those values, and they would deal with it. They wouldn't BREAK THE LAW to demand to see these characters act ONLY according to their values. They wouldn't try to force these values on everyone else.
Hollywood thinks they can force crude junk on us.
DONT!
WATCH!
THEIR!
MOVIES!!!
There are two sides to the culture wars, one which says anything goes and tries to force it on everybody, and one that says a certain amount of decency should be expected but who allow each his own.
The smut merchants are against freedom, the decent people are for it.
Oh, fuck you! Show me the lobbies that pushed for laws that force smut into every show.
I'll show you the ones that push to BAN it from every show.
There's one side that says people should be free to make content with or without smut, and one that says that all smut should be banned. Which one is against freedom? I'll tell you, because you don't seem to be able to understand this from the previous two posts: The side against freedom is the side that wants to ban the types of contents it doesn't like.
Not to mention that there's tons of smutt free movies. Go watch the Pixar movies, they're good.
You're not only using bad logic, you're exhibiting bad faith.
No, no, no. You can't actually edit his post, just like Cleanfix can't edit the original.
Cleanflix doesn't add "Re:" in front of the movie title, it doesn't take out the name of the director: It passes them along with the credits of those who actually made the movies. It might add their logo somewhere around there, but that's still not theirs to brand.
If my name was in those credits, I wouldn't want people to see a butchered version passing itself off as the genuine article.
Yes, and there is the problem. We can make things uplifting or crude. The editing you did to the aforementioned post made it crude
You missed the point, and replied with HORRIBLE logic.
Bad slashdotter, no cookie!
Not to rain too heavily on your parade, but your edit is a "parody" and IS legal under the Fair Use provisions of copyright law, despite this recent court ruling, so long as it is labeled as being modified.
's allright, I just wanted to show that selectively cutting out parts of a whole can completely change the meaning of the edited work.
The parody, well, I couldn't resist making it funny in the process : )
It's insane. Our culture has completely forgotten the purpose of I.P. law (to foster innovation and art by providing reasonable monetary incentive) and moved waaaaaaay past and into the "MINE!" area.
True, but this (the topic at hand) is, as far as I can tell, one of the rare example of the true intent of copyright law: To stop someone else from making money off your work. Though if you have to purchase the original and the third party provides you a modified version, maybe you're right, and this is just overboard...
but on the other hand... ack, no, I can't stand by this. A company who's business is to butcher movies for prudes. Ack. I can't, I just can't.
Btw, copyright was first championed by a french playright who called it "author's right", which is something I find much more true to the intent than "copyright", which sounds to me like the inanimate object has rights, not the author.
I can buy one copy of 'The Da Vinci Code' and replace the content with 'The Da Vinci Load (XXX)' and resell it? Can I do this 10,000 times?
;-)
That might be fun.
Well, it'll make a fun thread to read when you get caught
You can do want you want to your copy (singular) and sell it. You can't make copies and sell them.
Well put and effective.
Danke.
Finaly, though you actually copyed my text, the people who make these edits often use technology that requires no copying whatsoever. They're capable of doing on-the-fly-edits. How on earth can this be a violation of copyright law if there is no copying?
That's a separate matter, and has been legalised properly.
The ones this discussion is about are those that sell a modified copy of copyrighted works, not those that sell a device that can automatically skip scenes along with a list of scenes to skip.
Yes, it destroys the vision of the artist, but, ya know what? If I own the copy, it's my right to destroy it in whatever way I see fit.
Indeed it is, you just can't sell nor rent copies of what you did to your copy.
Personally, what I don't get is why they can't simply provide the airplane/tv versions for rent.
If we can get "uncut, unrated, unedited" DVD versions because there is a demand for them, and they are already selling watered-down versions to airplane companies and tv stations, what's stopping them from distributing those lame versions directly to consummers?
If they would stick to their artistic guns and never compromise, not to the ratings board, not to the airlines, not to the networks, then I'd be behind them 100%. But since they DO compromise ALL THE TIME, why not give these prudes what they give to other prudes?
Altering content has the power to change the movie completely. You can tell a completely different story when you cut away this, switch those scenes and so on. And this is where the danger lies in that.
/*end disclaimer*/): Hollywood adaptations of books do this at the script level.
//end rant
Exactly. However (you're hitting something here which is an emotional issue for me, so I might have a hard time expressing it clearly,
The best example I can think of is Bicentennial Man, a mediocre movie adapted from an EXCELLENT story by Isaac Asimov.
In the movie, they removed the motivation of the main character (a very disturbing scene involving rednecks in a pick up) and replaced it with the usual "love conquers all" hollywood trite. That made the whole movie pointless, because all the character's efforts are pointless, since he has everything he wants and there's no reason for him to go to the extremes he goes to in the movie, he just makes himself suffer for no reason.
The movie was made after the author's death, and his estate has been clearly capitalising as much as possible on his life's work with zero consideration for his art. I can understand the retarded reasoning of the hollywood people here (disturbing scenes turn people off, raise the rating, affect revenue), but being the dumb, soulless suits that they are, they forgot that turning the story into inane drivel by removing the entire starting point of his quest would also negatively affect revenue.
So I'm ambiguous about this ruling. On the one hand, this is the good side of copyright. On the other hand, when they hold rights to someone else's work, they have no qualms whatsoever in doing the very same.
Legally, maybe, but that doesn't make it right.
Homosexual sex for a gay person is a basic biological drive. That's why there ARE gay people. It's not a choice.
"Sex with a shoe for a fetishist is a basic biological drive. That's why there ARE fetishists. It's not a choice."
Not that I support the bigot you replied to. But using the existance of the focus of someone's sexuality as a basis for the validity of that focus makes no sense. Sex is a very basic biological drive, the focus, however, isn't (otherwise there wouldn't be more gay sex in prisons and on ships at sea than elswhere, q.e.d.)
I'm appaled that I'm saying this, but: Go watch American Pie, it's educational.
Society hasn't found homosexual behavior to be "detrimental to it", it's nothing more than prejudice.
Sufficiently advanced civilisations do not suffer from homosexual behaviour. But an agricultural society that thrives on population growth to counteract all the disasters nature throws at it does find that behaviour that isn't strictly productive is detrimental to it.
It's not valid in an industtrialised society where we can afford to have people that don't spend their life growing food and making babies, but much like the traditional partitioning of the essential tasks between men and women, discriminating against homosexuals was once a very logical and valid rule to apply. Cruel, but justified (like maiming the only blacksmith around so he can't leave the village, for instance).
However, people should know that "it was justified five thousand years ago" is no reason to oppose progress today.
Sex before marriage seems stupid to me [...] willfully engaging in behavior contrary to basic biological drives (reproduction) indicates something seriously wrong with an individual.
Marriage is contrary to the basic biological drive of fucking every attractive members of the opposite sex you can find.
I have a very hard time understanding what the problem is.
Yeah, then be warned, I shall edit your post:
I absolutely care about getting a good release. I have a very hard unit. eveyone gets properly paid.
These are you own words, in the right order. I just edited out a few of them.
I hope that helps you understand what the problem is.
Atleast two or three years ago in the UK a new type of lollypop started being sold, basicly you stick it in your mouth and it plays some cheesy music that only you can hear, this tech has been around for a while and is well developed enough to be made into a cheap throw away childrens toy.
RTFA, this is for SPEAKING, not listening: It's sound FROM your jaw, to the headset.
It would be good to be able to completely assess the entire gamut of users opinions.
If only there were some kind of list of messages containing the opinions of users of slashdot... messages that would be listed like a line, no.. a... a thread. Yes.
If only you could read the fucking thread. If only.
I read somewhere recently (some list of facts about Superman) some interesting stuff. One of the things was that "Faster than a speeding bullet... more powerful than a locomotive..." stuff was not part of the original Superman comics, it was apparently made up for a radio show. But more interesting to me, apparently Superman COULDN'T fly. He was able to jump REALLY HIGH. You know, "able leap tall buildings in a single bound." At some point that somehow turned into flying (this was a bulleted list of facts type thing, so it didn't expand on these).
I just wrote about this to someone else before I saw your post, but hey, since you're asking...
Originally, superman was from a planet called Krypton that had a gravity ten times that of earth. Therefore, the inhabitants of Krypton had a body adapted to this environment, which meant that on earth, they could jump really high, and were very strong and tough.
As the years went by, they quickly exhausted the interresting stories they could write about these powers, and added more and more. However, the most dramatic changes occured during world war two, when the comic book industry was taken over by the military as part of the propaganda for the war effort. This is when Superman went from "Fighting a neverending battle for truth, and justice!" to "Fighting a neverending battle for truth, justice, and the American Way!" and when he started to fly. You can see it happen by watching the (excellent) Fleischer superman cartoons from the early forties. They started production before the US went to war, and you see a clear break in storytelling after pearl harbour (all of a sudden every other story is about superman punching buck-toothed, coke-bottle glasses wearing, evil japs).
It's a phenomenon as old as language and storytelling, but I like to call it the Dragonball Effect because that story has the most extreme display of incremental power growth (and Son Goku is a healthy mix of an old chineese legend and of superman). Basically, you need a tough villain to make your story entertaining, and your hero needs to be tougher. But then, you need tougher opponent next time around, so you beef up the hero. Rinse, repeat, you end up with a character so strong he's moving stars with his bare hands.
Over the years, the powers of superman have grown and waned. Because once a character gets too powerfull, the stories become less interresting. This is what happened in the early eighties, they downgraded superman's powers in a storyline called "Crisis on infinate earth". Therefore, you'll have people referring to pre-crisis and post-crisis superman as an indicator of how strong he is.
They retconed ("retrocactive continuity", contracted and used as a verb), his origin to explain his new power, giving him the "red sun/yellow sun" explanation later on. And since he's getting his power from solar radiation, they eventually rationalised his increase in power as a factor of the time he spends exposed to the radiation, making him a solar-battery.
As for catching Lois, yes, flying up to catch her as she falls is similar to a car hitting another parked as opposed to a head-on collision of moving cars: Their velocities add up.
To explain away this annoying tidbit, and other related details such as why his suit doesn't break, they added that superman has an invulnerability field that extends a few milimiters from his body, and to any body in contact with his. That was a retcon that erased the gravity expanation.
P.S. The Dragonball Effect is also visible in religions: Gods get stronger as their followers learn more about the world their deities govern.
the book "The Science of Superman" some time ago. Not a bad read, and it goes into the details of how Superman's powers might stem from the differential in intensity of the earth/krypton sun, gravity, etc.
I don't know that book, but I know my superheroes.
Did the book mention that originally, Supes was from the planet Krypton, where the gravity is 10 times that of earth, and therefore he was super strong and could jump really high, and super tough?
As the years went by, he had more and more powers added to his repertoir, and so they retconed his origin to that of solar radiations giving him the ability to shoot lasers from his eyes, to fly and to see through objects.
But at first, he was just a super-strong man, not the god he later turned into.
P.S. The first time superman flew was to go punch some evil japanese spies that stole a plane.
P.P.S. And that's when "and the American Way" was added to his list of things he figths for. Ah, propaganda, ain't it just so much fun?