isn't separation of church and state implied by the first ammendment?
No. The First Amendment is where you will find the Establishment Clause that I mention in my parent post. That clause was never intended to seperate church from government, but rather to allow the states themselves to determine the nature of their own relationships to organized religion, rather than having it force fed them by the federal government.
Specifically, there were only two Founding Fathers who wanted to see real seperation through all levels of government with religion (well, only two that felt strongly enough to write about it at length). Both were Virginian, btw, and neither considered it a deal breaker. Seperation of Church and State as an implication of the First Amendment only holds water if you beleive that the only Founding Fathers who mattered were the Virginian ones, which as a Virginian I like, but as a scholar I recognize to be false. Many voices came together to write the Constitution and almost all of them saw no problem with the state governments and organized religions being in cahoots.
even though the US has a supposed separation of church and state
I don't mean to nitpick, heck I basically agree with your points; however, it is worth noting that we do not have a seperation of church and state anywhere in the constitution. That was a phrase taken from the writings of one of our Founding Fathers and used in a Supreme Court case to justify said seperation. The Establishment Clause, though, was only designed to keep the federal government from establishing a state religion because, and this is key, it wanted that right to fall upon the individual states.
That is why, even after that amendment was added, 8 states maintained official state religions. It was not until LONG after that when anti-catholic sentiment ran high did the Establishment Clause grow in practiced scope. They wanted to avoid a Catholic state in favor of the current default Protestant state. Hardly a noble endeavor.
Disclaimer: I'm Methodist, not Catholic, though I do have a degree in religion.
"when's the day that I can roll out my own live CDs without TOO much effort? Just select the packages you want, kernel, drivers, etc, wait as the program churns out a nice ISO for you which you can burn to a CD and voila, insta-Linux!"
When? Today.
What you just described is what Gentoo is about entirely. Gentoo fanaticism aside, if that's what you want, then you should look into it.
Firstly, it assumes that IP violations are a form of "theft". No court has yet ruled it to be the case. IP Violations are their own seperate crime aside from stealing. So using terms like theft when referring to IP violations is a bit like name-calling. Everyone hates thieves, so let's call IP violators thieves so that no one will want to be one....similar to the latest craze of calling everyone who isn't strongly pro-Bush a terrorist.
Secondly, it assumes that my reasons are because I am cheap and/or dishonest. The assumption here is incorrect. I am neither. Indeed, I see a large moral problem with the artists themselves expecting to get paid over and over again for the same piece of work. Music is a performing art. Let them perform for it. I will attend concerts of bands I enjoy, but I will not pay them over and over again for the same 3.5 minutes of work on their part. I don't expect that of my work, and I won't accept it with theirs. That way lies madness and greed.
Before you jump to the next set of conclusions, let me add that, yes, I'm a programmer. No I don't accept royalties on my work. I get paid for time worked and no more. I refuse to do business any other way. I word my contracts such that they understand that any work I do is free for whatever use they'd like to apply it to, and that I to am free to do the same (excepting any trade secrets they insist be maintained, of course). Further, yes I realize that my ideas would mean less canned music and more live recordings (cheaper than hiring studio mixers and crap like that) and frankly, I see that as a Good Thing(tm).
Is there a constitutional right to privacy that I missed?
The Ninth Amendment had been mentioned infrequently in decisions of the Supreme Court until it became the subject of some exegesis by several of the Justices in Griswold v. Connecticut. There a statute prohibiting use of contraceptives was voided as an infringement of the right of marital privacy. Justice Douglas, writing the opinion of the Court, asserted that the "specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance." Thus, while privacy is nowhere mentioned, it is one of the values served and protected by the First Amendment, through its protection of associational rights, and by the Third, the Fourth, and the Fifth Amendments as well. The Justice recurred to the text of the Ninth Amendment, apparently to support the thought that these penumbral rights are protected by one Amendment or a complex of Amendments despite the absence of a specific reference. Justice Goldberg, concurring, devoted several pages to the Amendment.
Children are the responsibility of adults, whether they like to think so or not. If they commit an act of vandalism, for instance, it's the parents/gaurdians who pay. It is only the state that must assume children's rights (mostly due to the US Supreme Court via the Tinker decision, which thankfully has since gotten some reasonable limits placed on it). Parents maintain the right to restrict children's movements, speech, and general freedom with fairly loose limits.
Now if only we had more parents who did that responsibily and intelligently.:-(
Don't take this as total disagreement with what you've said. In fact, I whole-heartedly agree with your point, being that a woodenly literal interpretation of the bible is doomed to bring you toward ignorance not toward enlightenment....however, I have one small clarification.
The books of the bible have been edited at times, but what we have now allows us to have a remarkably accurate idea of what was originally written. When 5 people edit a passage and 50 don't, and we find all 6 versions, we can see use modern redaction criticism and archeological evidence (which is older, from what sect, etc...) to figure out what is more accurate. We know, for instance, that the end of the gospel of Mark is an add-on. Most modern bibles label it as such now, too (cf, RSV, NRSV, and NKJV for examples of this). The bible, contrary to popular opinion isn't full of edits and deletions. Scholars have a great ability to weed through those things and get to the truth of things. Any modern interpretation from a scholarly source (ie, not Pat Robertson's "The Book") will give the reader an excellent idea of what was originally written as long as the reader know what biases the interpreters brought to the table (which is why I prefer the RSV, broad agreeent across religious lines, beautiful language, excellents scholarship in the process).
Disclaimer: I am a Christian, I tend to think there are aliens (but not in a " conspiracy fruitcake" way), I beleive in Divine creation, but not via a literal interpretation of Genesis, and I have a degree in Religious Studies.
Public Enemy was forced to remove recordings of their songs from their site that they had made free for download. These were not recordings that Public Enemy had made under contract by a recording agency, but the songs themselves were originally recorded under such a contract.
When they talk about signing away rights to a song, they are not talking about signing away rights to an instance of a song, but rather to the song in all its incarnations. Only a few shrewd artists have managed to keep any real rights for their own work, and even then, only for owkrs they've done after becoming mega-stars. Prior to that, they didn't have the clout to make such demands.
Conservative fucks? Please. Take an honest look at the politics of the situation. The Senate (conservatives and liberals alike) voted unanimously against ratifying the treaty.
Not one single European country has ratified it. Not one Senator here voted for it. Hell, even some ex-officials from former President Clintons regime have come out saying it is fundementally flawed.
Just becuase you don't like conservatives, don't go blaming them for all your troubles. Political rhetoric irritates the fuck outta me.
Now, go ahead and assume I'm making it up, but before you reply accusing me of it, I suggest you do some googling and research your opinions before you post on this topic again.
I'm not saying they were right for dropping the Kyoto Treaty, but I am saying that it had little to do with being a conservative fuck and more to do with some real flaws in the details.
I'm pretty sure they can't do that. Said act would violate the United States' patent on Absurdity and may even tread onto our long-standing patent on Stupidity.
Seriously, come on! This is f'ing stupid. The fact that we enjoy games of violence is a symptom, not a cause, of our violent tendencies as a species. This is yet another way for politicians and policy-makers to pretend that they've struck a blow for humanity, when all they've really done is further bury a problem that needs to be addressed.
Don't worry it's a future post, so if you are a/. subscriber, you still have 20 minutes or so to comment about the end of the world before it really happens.
Perhaps I wasn't clear enough about this. I don't care that people make mistakes, mispellings, or errors, what disturbs me is erronous grammar that isn't seen as erronous.
Forgetting a question mark is not a big deal. Mispelling a word is not a big deal. Even misconjugating a word isn't an issue with me. What bothers me is people who make a mistake then claim it wasn't a mistake at all.
I used to use the word "irregardless". Someone corrected me. She let me know it wasn't a real word. I had the sense to look into it and when I discovered she was right, I stopped using it.
That's what bugs me about the "Microsoft are" syndrome. People really beleive that's how it's supposed to be and they don't seem interested in hearing otherwise.
...on/. we can't even get people to conjugate verbs correctly. There still exists a large enough group here that chooses to conjugate verbs relating to companies in the plural as in:
"Microsoft are doing something evil."
as opposed to the proper:
"Microsoft is doing something evil."
If they can't figure out simple singular/plural conjugation, do you really think they gain anything by reading such a book.
I think you are thinking of Vorbis, a subset of the OGG project. OGG itself is a wrapper for media (basically). It is Ogg VORBIS that applies psychoacoustic filters to the music. Therefore, when they say Flac will join Ogg, they mean to say that the Ogg family will now consist of:
You wrote "you should get some knowledge [...] Publishing houses have historically had a huge role to play, historically more so than today!! [...] Come on, don't post this crap."
I was trying to politely disagree. I should've known that wouldn't work on slashdot.
Get some knowledge? I have a degree in Theology and English Literature, am published, and I can list a host of some of the best books in history that had no need for, and did not use a publisher at all.
The works of Plato were copied by hand by, essentially, fans and later by monks who saw value in keeping these works around. Every book on the bible went straight to the public without benefit of publisher middlemen mucking things up. The works of Blake were self-published. Wordsworth contracted a publisher solely for the purposes of printing and nothing else.
So no matter how you spin it, the publishing middlemen are basically an unneeded (or in some cases barely needed) component of the chain, especially in a world where it is trivially easy to self-publish on a small scale to establish reputation without marketing departments and publishers.
If the work is good, it will speak for itself. If it isn't, then good riddance. Who needs it gathering dust in the already overcrowed Library of Congress?
Publishers try pretty hard to justify their place in the world. Middlemen are socially parasitic, which is an acceptable drain so long as they serve a purpose. A publisher's purpose ought to be to print and distribute books for those who are willing to share the profits of the larger distribution. Nothing more. All this BS about how much publisher's do for their authors is little more than another way to justify their fees.
If an author needs 3rd party spellchecking and grammar correction, then call me crazy, but I don't see a reason to encourage them to publish...unles I made my living off of publishing people, whether they were worth publishing or not. If they need help changing plot points, or making it more concise, or some other writing related task then they are not ready to publish. You think that setting up a few book signings, glossy ads, and NPR review spots adds something?
I say it adds nothing but more marketing to an already overmarketed world. Who needs it? Bad writers whose works don't stand on their own? I have no sympathy for bad writers who are published and I have no sympathy for middlemen whose supposed usefullness is dwindling.
Not to be too contrary, becuase I can appreciate parts of your point, but your argument seems to rest on the idea that all the work you do upon a manuscript after the author writes it is added value.
This isn't so, and if it is, then was the original work that good in the first place?
We survived for millenia without publishing middlemen in the sense that you describe. The difference was that not every jackass who can figure out a qwerty keyboard got his work published. I see nothing wrong with going back to those days. There are too damn many useless, repetitve texts out there now.
Yes, I am, and I have never asked for royalties, and I have gone out of way to ask only for an hourly rate. I have contributed to several oss projects and I have given up entire software solutions that I wrote and that I know I could have sold to others, but I simply do not beleive in intellectual property.
You may not agree with me, but I am not acting with hypocrasy.
I also haven't bought a single CD in a very long time (like on the order of 5 years now!) in lieu of downloading it for free. I will continue to do so becuase I, like many people, have come to realize that it is simply wrong to ask that you be paid over and over again (ad nauseum) for the same 1 hour of work. The system is broke. I go to concerts, where artists get paid for the work they do on the spot. CD are and have always been a form of advertising to get people to their concerts (whehther they want to admit it or not!). Musicians can make a good living as long as they are willing to perform their works. That is/why/ we call music a performance art.
I see absolutely no reason why I should pay anyone for work that they have already done and for which they will be amply rewarded by driving ticket sales. It's overkill. Noone goes back to a dishwasher years later to give him royalties for a job well done, nor to a doctor (to whom you'd arguably own a greater long term, ongoing debt of gratitude for his services). Why do artists get this special (and relatively new, let's not forget how new this idea of Intellectual property is in terms of the history of the world) treatment? If that means polished studio CD's go the way of the DoDo, so be it. Hell, more live music isn't such a bad thing, is it?
Inclusion of text into the bible was not arbitrary. Texts were chosen based upon a set of fairly clear criteria that became established over centuries of debate. Not everyone agrees with the final decision, but that hardly makes it arbitrary.
Additionally, BS Catholic conspiracies aside, they have no earthly reason to hide works that they disagreee with. In fact the works they are putting onine were already available to visiting scholars and practically anyone with an interest. I, for instance, have the full text on the 20-something different Gospels we have discovered to date at home on my shelf...and if you read them all, you'd see pretty quick why some were excluded. I also have the many of the other non-canonical texts. No great hidden secret. Just order them from Amazon like I did.
There is no great scholastic coverup to keep the juicy religious bits away from the masses.
Disclaimer: I am not Catholic, but I do have a degree in Religious Studies.
CNN is singular. That requires a verb conjugated in the singular to compliment it. The conjugation of "be" in the 3rd person singular is "is", whereas the conjugation of "be" in the 3rd person plural is "are"; As in "They are" or "It is". CNN is an It, not a They. Contrary to what some people may believe, CNN isn't a plural noun. It's a single noun requiring a singular verb. It is simply incorrect to say "CNN are corporate entities." It is correct to say "CNN is a corporate entity."
This mistake seems to be driven by the misunderstanding that a corporation or group is plural. It is not. Ask your English teacher, Professor, Mom, Swami, HR Director, or Priest and they will give you the same answer I am. The grammar in that post is wrong and it is a very recent fad at slashdot.
Read a newspaper or a book written by a real author sometime and ask yourself why they don't do it the way you seem to think they should.
Again, not trying to get all Grammar perfect on anyone. I don't care if someone makes a mistake in typing (heck, I probably mistyped in this very message somewhere!) or even if someone legitmately doesn't know the right grammar/spelling rule, but in this case, this particular error seems to be gaining popularity, so I'm saying something.
It is not "CNN are" it is "CNN is"! Who started that antigrammatical fad anyway? More importantly, when will it die. Not to be the Grammar Police, but that particular incorrect conjugation seems to be catching on.
Now go ahead and mod me down as flamebait. I won't hold it against you.:)
Slashdot Mirror
isn't separation of church and state implied by the first ammendment?
No. The First Amendment is where you will find the Establishment Clause that I mention in my parent post. That clause was never intended to seperate church from government, but rather to allow the states themselves to determine the nature of their own relationships to organized religion, rather than having it force fed them by the federal government.
Specifically, there were only two Founding Fathers who wanted to see real seperation through all levels of government with religion (well, only two that felt strongly enough to write about it at length). Both were Virginian, btw, and neither considered it a deal breaker. Seperation of Church and State as an implication of the First Amendment only holds water if you beleive that the only Founding Fathers who mattered were the Virginian ones, which as a Virginian I like, but as a scholar I recognize to be false. Many voices came together to write the Constitution and almost all of them saw no problem with the state governments and organized religions being in cahoots.
-Tom
even though the US has a supposed separation of church and state
I don't mean to nitpick, heck I basically agree with your points; however, it is worth noting that we do not have a seperation of church and state anywhere in the constitution. That was a phrase taken from the writings of one of our Founding Fathers and used in a Supreme Court case to justify said seperation. The Establishment Clause, though, was only designed to keep the federal government from establishing a state religion because, and this is key, it wanted that right to fall upon the individual states.
That is why, even after that amendment was added, 8 states maintained official state religions. It was not until LONG after that when anti-catholic sentiment ran high did the Establishment Clause grow in practiced scope. They wanted to avoid a Catholic state in favor of the current default Protestant state. Hardly a noble endeavor.
Disclaimer: I'm Methodist, not Catholic, though I do have a degree in religion.
-Tom
"when's the day that I can roll out my own live CDs without TOO much effort? Just select the packages you want, kernel, drivers, etc, wait as the program churns out a nice ISO for you which you can burn to a CD and voila, insta-Linux!"
When? Today.
What you just described is what Gentoo is about entirely. Gentoo fanaticism aside, if that's what you want, then you should look into it.
-Tom
you're still stealing the music.
That statement assumes a lot.
Firstly, it assumes that IP violations are a form of "theft". No court has yet ruled it to be the case. IP Violations are their own seperate crime aside from stealing. So using terms like theft when referring to IP violations is a bit like name-calling. Everyone hates thieves, so let's call IP violators thieves so that no one will want to be one....similar to the latest craze of calling everyone who isn't strongly pro-Bush a terrorist.
Secondly, it assumes that my reasons are because I am cheap and/or dishonest. The assumption here is incorrect. I am neither. Indeed, I see a large moral problem with the artists themselves expecting to get paid over and over again for the same piece of work. Music is a performing art. Let them perform for it. I will attend concerts of bands I enjoy, but I will not pay them over and over again for the same 3.5 minutes of work on their part. I don't expect that of my work, and I won't accept it with theirs. That way lies madness and greed.
Before you jump to the next set of conclusions, let me add that, yes, I'm a programmer. No I don't accept royalties on my work. I get paid for time worked and no more. I refuse to do business any other way. I word my contracts such that they understand that any work I do is free for whatever use they'd like to apply it to, and that I to am free to do the same (excepting any trade secrets they insist be maintained, of course). Further, yes I realize that my ideas would mean less canned music and more live recordings (cheaper than hiring studio mixers and crap like that) and frankly, I see that as a Good Thing(tm).
-Tom
Haven't they started reconstructing it yet?!
Yeah, but like any good mechanic, they have parts left over.
-Tom
Is there a constitutional right to privacy that I missed?
The Ninth Amendment had been mentioned infrequently in decisions of the Supreme Court until it became the subject of some exegesis by several of the Justices in Griswold v. Connecticut. There a statute prohibiting use of contraceptives was voided as an infringement of the right of marital privacy. Justice Douglas, writing the opinion of the Court, asserted that the "specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance." Thus, while privacy is nowhere mentioned, it is one of the values served and protected by the First Amendment, through its protection of associational rights, and by the Third, the Fourth, and the Fifth Amendments as well. The Justice recurred to the text of the Ninth Amendment, apparently to support the thought that these penumbral rights are protected by one Amendment or a complex of Amendments despite the absence of a specific reference. Justice Goldberg, concurring, devoted several pages to the Amendment.
-Tom
Children are the responsibility of adults, whether they like to think so or not. If they commit an act of vandalism, for instance, it's the parents/gaurdians who pay. It is only the state that must assume children's rights (mostly due to the US Supreme Court via the Tinker decision, which thankfully has since gotten some reasonable limits placed on it). Parents maintain the right to restrict children's movements, speech, and general freedom with fairly loose limits.
:-(
Now if only we had more parents who did that responsibily and intelligently.
-Tom
Don't take this as total disagreement with what you've said. In fact, I whole-heartedly agree with your point, being that a woodenly literal interpretation of the bible is doomed to bring you toward ignorance not toward enlightenment....however, I have one small clarification.
The books of the bible have been edited at times, but what we have now allows us to have a remarkably accurate idea of what was originally written. When 5 people edit a passage and 50 don't, and we find all 6 versions, we can see use modern redaction criticism and archeological evidence (which is older, from what sect, etc...) to figure out what is more accurate. We know, for instance, that the end of the gospel of Mark is an add-on. Most modern bibles label it as such now, too (cf, RSV, NRSV, and NKJV for examples of this). The bible, contrary to popular opinion isn't full of edits and deletions. Scholars have a great ability to weed through those things and get to the truth of things. Any modern interpretation from a scholarly source (ie, not Pat Robertson's "The Book") will give the reader an excellent idea of what was originally written as long as the reader know what biases the interpreters brought to the table (which is why I prefer the RSV, broad agreeent across religious lines, beautiful language, excellents scholarship in the process).
Disclaimer: I am a Christian, I tend to think there are aliens (but not in a " conspiracy fruitcake" way), I beleive in Divine creation, but not via a literal interpretation of Genesis, and I have a degree in Religious Studies.
-Tom
Public Enemy was forced to remove recordings of their songs from their site that they had made free for download. These were not recordings that Public Enemy had made under contract by a recording agency, but the songs themselves were originally recorded under such a contract.
When they talk about signing away rights to a song, they are not talking about signing away rights to an instance of a song, but rather to the song in all its incarnations. Only a few shrewd artists have managed to keep any real rights for their own work, and even then, only for owkrs they've done after becoming mega-stars. Prior to that, they didn't have the clout to make such demands.
-Tom
Conservative fucks? Please. Take an honest look at the politics of the situation. The Senate (conservatives and liberals alike) voted unanimously against ratifying the treaty.
Not one single European country has ratified it. Not one Senator here voted for it. Hell, even some ex-officials from former President Clintons regime have come out saying it is fundementally flawed.
Just becuase you don't like conservatives, don't go blaming them for all your troubles. Political rhetoric irritates the fuck outta me.
Now, go ahead and assume I'm making it up, but before you reply accusing me of it, I suggest you do some googling and research your opinions before you post on this topic again.
I'm not saying they were right for dropping the Kyoto Treaty, but I am saying that it had little to do with being a conservative fuck and more to do with some real flaws in the details.
I'm pretty sure they can't do that. Said act would violate the United States' patent on Absurdity and may even tread onto our long-standing patent on Stupidity.
Seriously, come on! This is f'ing stupid. The fact that we enjoy games of violence is a symptom, not a cause, of our violent tendencies as a species. This is yet another way for politicians and policy-makers to pretend that they've struck a blow for humanity, when all they've really done is further bury a problem that needs to be addressed.
Don't worry it's a future post, so if you are a /. subscriber, you still have 20 minutes or so to comment about the end of the world before it really happens.
-Tom
You'll do some bad and you'll do some good. On the whole, just know that it'll all work out fine.
-Tom
[insert obligatory duplicate story joke here]
-Tom
"Please do not assume that everyone posting on /. had a US high school education"
Enough of them have that my comment stands.
-Tom
Perhaps I wasn't clear enough about this. I don't care that people make mistakes, mispellings, or errors, what disturbs me is erronous grammar that isn't seen as erronous.
Forgetting a question mark is not a big deal. Mispelling a word is not a big deal. Even misconjugating a word isn't an issue with me. What bothers me is people who make a mistake then claim it wasn't a mistake at all.
I used to use the word "irregardless". Someone corrected me. She let me know it wasn't a real word. I had the sense to look into it and when I discovered she was right, I stopped using it.
That's what bugs me about the "Microsoft are" syndrome. People really beleive that's how it's supposed to be and they don't seem interested in hearing otherwise.
-Tom
...on /. we can't even get people to conjugate verbs correctly. There still exists a large enough group here that chooses to conjugate verbs relating to companies in the plural as in:
"Microsoft are doing something evil."
as opposed to the proper:
"Microsoft is doing something evil."
If they can't figure out simple singular/plural conjugation, do you really think they gain anything by reading such a book.
-Tom
I think you are thinking of Vorbis, a subset of the OGG project. OGG itself is a wrapper for media (basically). It is Ogg VORBIS that applies psychoacoustic filters to the music. Therefore, when they say Flac will join Ogg, they mean to say that the Ogg family will now consist of:
Ogg Vorbis (lossy encoding)
Ogg Flac (lossless encoding)
Ogg Speex (voice encoding)
Ogg Theora (video encoding)
-Tom
You wrote "you should get some knowledge [...] Publishing houses have historically had a huge role to play, historically more so than today!! [...] Come on, don't post this crap."
I was trying to politely disagree. I should've known that wouldn't work on slashdot.
Get some knowledge? I have a degree in Theology and English Literature, am published, and I can list a host of some of the best books in history that had no need for, and did not use a publisher at all.
The works of Plato were copied by hand by, essentially, fans and later by monks who saw value in keeping these works around. Every book on the bible went straight to the public without benefit of publisher middlemen mucking things up. The works of Blake were self-published. Wordsworth contracted a publisher solely for the purposes of printing and nothing else.
So no matter how you spin it, the publishing middlemen are basically an unneeded (or in some cases barely needed) component of the chain, especially in a world where it is trivially easy to self-publish on a small scale to establish reputation without marketing departments and publishers.
If the work is good, it will speak for itself. If it isn't, then good riddance. Who needs it gathering dust in the already overcrowed Library of Congress?
Publishers try pretty hard to justify their place in the world. Middlemen are socially parasitic, which is an acceptable drain so long as they serve a purpose. A publisher's purpose ought to be to print and distribute books for those who are willing to share the profits of the larger distribution. Nothing more. All this BS about how much publisher's do for their authors is little more than another way to justify their fees.
If an author needs 3rd party spellchecking and grammar correction, then call me crazy, but I don't see a reason to encourage them to publish...unles I made my living off of publishing people, whether they were worth publishing or not. If they need help changing plot points, or making it more concise, or some other writing related task then they are not ready to publish. You think that setting up a few book signings, glossy ads, and NPR review spots adds something?
I say it adds nothing but more marketing to an already overmarketed world. Who needs it? Bad writers whose works don't stand on their own? I have no sympathy for bad writers who are published and I have no sympathy for middlemen whose supposed usefullness is dwindling.
Not to be too contrary, becuase I can appreciate parts of your point, but your argument seems to rest on the idea that all the work you do upon a manuscript after the author writes it is added value.
This isn't so, and if it is, then was the original work that good in the first place?
We survived for millenia without publishing middlemen in the sense that you describe. The difference was that not every jackass who can figure out a qwerty keyboard got his work published. I see nothing wrong with going back to those days. There are too damn many useless, repetitve texts out there now.
Yes, I am, and I have never asked for royalties, and I have gone out of way to ask only for an hourly rate. I have contributed to several oss projects and I have given up entire software solutions that I wrote and that I know I could have sold to others, but I simply do not beleive in intellectual property.
You may not agree with me, but I am not acting with hypocrasy.
-Tom
I also haven't bought a single CD in a very long time (like on the order of 5 years now!) in lieu of downloading it for free. I will continue to do so becuase I, like many people, have come to realize that it is simply wrong to ask that you be paid over and over again (ad nauseum) for the same 1 hour of work. The system is broke. I go to concerts, where artists get paid for the work they do on the spot. CD are and have always been a form of advertising to get people to their concerts (whehther they want to admit it or not!). Musicians can make a good living as long as they are willing to perform their works. That is /why/ we call music a performance art.
I see absolutely no reason why I should pay anyone for work that they have already done and for which they will be amply rewarded by driving ticket sales. It's overkill. Noone goes back to a dishwasher years later to give him royalties for a job well done, nor to a doctor (to whom you'd arguably own a greater long term, ongoing debt of gratitude for his services). Why do artists get this special (and relatively new, let's not forget how new this idea of Intellectual property is in terms of the history of the world) treatment? If that means polished studio CD's go the way of the DoDo, so be it. Hell, more live music isn't such a bad thing, is it?
-Tom
Inclusion of text into the bible was not arbitrary. Texts were chosen based upon a set of fairly clear criteria that became established over centuries of debate. Not everyone agrees with the final decision, but that hardly makes it arbitrary.
Additionally, BS Catholic conspiracies aside, they have no earthly reason to hide works that they disagreee with. In fact the works they are putting onine were already available to visiting scholars and practically anyone with an interest. I, for instance, have the full text on the 20-something different Gospels we have discovered to date at home on my shelf...and if you read them all, you'd see pretty quick why some were excluded. I also have the many of the other non-canonical texts. No great hidden secret. Just order them from Amazon like I did.
There is no great scholastic coverup to keep the juicy religious bits away from the masses.
Disclaimer: I am not Catholic, but I do have a degree in Religious Studies.
CNN is singular. That requires a verb conjugated in the singular to compliment it. The conjugation of "be" in the 3rd person singular is "is", whereas the conjugation of "be" in the 3rd person plural is "are"; As in "They are" or "It is". CNN is an It, not a They. Contrary to what some people may believe, CNN isn't a plural noun. It's a single noun requiring a singular verb. It is simply incorrect to say "CNN are corporate entities." It is correct to say "CNN is a corporate entity."
This mistake seems to be driven by the misunderstanding that a corporation or group is plural. It is not. Ask your English teacher, Professor, Mom, Swami, HR Director, or Priest and they will give you the same answer I am. The grammar in that post is wrong and it is a very recent fad at slashdot.
Read a newspaper or a book written by a real author sometime and ask yourself why they don't do it the way you seem to think they should.
Again, not trying to get all Grammar perfect on anyone. I don't care if someone makes a mistake in typing (heck, I probably mistyped in this very message somewhere!) or even if someone legitmately doesn't know the right grammar/spelling rule, but in this case, this particular error seems to be gaining popularity, so I'm saying something.
It is not "CNN are" it is "CNN is"! Who started that antigrammatical fad anyway? More importantly, when will it die. Not to be the Grammar Police, but that particular incorrect conjugation seems to be catching on.
:)
Now go ahead and mod me down as flamebait. I won't hold it against you.