You've just outlined precisely the attitude that spells out why the U.S. is languishing in maths, and countries like Australia (where I teach) are doing quite well. The purpose of any education system is most certainly not to churn out 'a few geniuses', leaving everyone else to languish in uneducated stupor.
Well that's funny, because the US doesn't generally track students; the best and the worst go to the same high school. The UK and Germany, however, do; you take a big test about 8th grade, and that dictates whether you go on to academic schooling or go to vocational schooling. Perhaps you need to look at the big picture more, before coming up with the one big, simple (and wrong) answer to everything.
Nice try. Canada is right up there near the top of the rankings, and our society is as heterogeneous as the US, if not more.
Really? A Canadian friend complained about CNN using pictures from the Watts Riots for the Toronto riots, saying the latter were not nearly as bad as the first. If you've got the extremes of poverty that the US has, why weren't the Toronto riots significant? I would have thought that most of the Mexicans would stop in the US rather than travelling another couple thousand miles, and the Cubans would rather boat a hundred miles than a thousand.
All the differences between the French, English, and First Americans don't matter a bit for stuff like this; it's the social and racial stratification. Without the slums and the riots and the illegal immigrants, Canada isn't hetrogenous in the ways that make these tests hard for the US.
Yeah, I know it's not supposed to be a serious game, but even in a joking game I still insist that I actually get to be a participant or there's no fun involved. They claimed it was an abberrant sceanrio that doesn't happen often, but I don't care. That it is possible at all indicates a major game design flaw.
If the game was over very quickly, then why worry about it? You got screwed by the cards; it can happen in any card game. If it were like the game of Nuclear Proliferation I played recently, where one player was killed before the first turn technically started, and then the game took another couple hours after that, I could see your complaint. But if you lose a hand of poker or blackjack or spades, you don't complain; you go onto the next hand. Just consider it one hand lost and keep playing.
Those that I've played have been pretty good. Give Me the Brain is a nice cute game; I doubt anyone would play it regularly, like some people play spades or euchre, but it's good for a few plays. Agora is an interesting strategy game; it probably has more replay value that Give Me the Brain, but it doesn't have the party value of playing fast-food worker zombies who need the brain to finish their shifts.
I love One False Step for Man... It's a 3-4 hour long board game that takes a lot of strategy, so I'd play it with the same people I'd play Rail Baron (another game I recommend, but it's out of print) or Axis and Allies with. It's biggest problem is that it's a Cheap Ass game; while coming up with a six-sided die for Give Me the Brain or a dozen counters for Agora isn't a problem, One False Step takes literally a hundred counters, in at least as many distinct varieties as you have players. Those of us roleplayers dragged out the mondo bags of dice and used different types of dice, or a Risk set would probably have enough counters, but you've got to be prepared before the game. The board is somewhat random, which keeps variety but makes it feel a little generic. Names like "Desperado City" just doesn't have the feel that using real cities names does. All in all, a great strategy game, but be prepared for a lengthy strategy game and get out the counters to start with.
seeing as to how most board games I've owned have been played about 3 times, max,
Yeah. What's worse, for games that have trivia cards, they start to lose their fun once you get familar with them. I've played Cranium enough times that I know what many of the cards are. (Again, Cranium; a decent game, if you like party games and are willing to spend $50 on a game where you learn a lot of the cards after playing it 3 or 4 times. Me, I prefer to go head to head in a nice multiplayer strategy game where it's strategy, tactics and a little bit of luck.)
the government knows how to get in touch with me; where's my new car and house?
I guess you can buy them, after the people who didn't get an education beyond fire-starting and hot-wiring steal your car and burn down your house, because there's nothing else they can do in society . . .
I think you have the copyright argument backward. The ultimate goal of copyright law is to allow people to create their works without having to worry about others republishing or taking claim of the creation.
The United States constitution states the goal of copyright law as "to promote the progress of science and useful arts". American copyright law (as opposed to European copyright laws) in no way protects the author from people taking claim of the creation. (In a complete sense, that's beyond the scope of copyright law; you don't need to copy a work to claim you wrote it.) Generally, authors in the US get credit because of the contracts they sign when selling the copyright, and the loss of reputation any reputable publisher would have among the author community if they failed to credit their authors.
The end result of strong copyright (and widespread respect for copyrights) is that publishers can present their works in simpler, universal formats.
They _can_ do that now. Many DRM examples have nothing to do with copyright protection; take region coding on a DVD, or fancy DRM schemes that stop you from viewing the text after a certain time.
they claim that there is no longer any respect for copyright law.
There never was any respect for copyright law as it applied to individuals. What changed was the fact that now individuals can copy others material easily.
The alternative is to change the language, which is fairly hard.
You have to change the orthography, which several Turkish languages have done three times in the last hundred years.
Even if you have a Tablet PC, you're still doing the same thing.
If the Tablet PC converts what you write to character data (as opposed to images), then there is crucial differences. You can output in an easy to read form that's easy to check for errors and easy for other people to decipher. Your input method is less important than how the data is stored and displayed.
The alternative is not half as good, and is not half as capable.
Then argue that, not the "tactile sensation of writing on paper". No technology feels like the last, and almost every technology has people who appreciate its particular sensations. That doesn't stop them for getting replaced; the only thing that does that is real arguments.
Maybe if people had taken their handwriting classes in 2nd and 3rd grades seriously, they would not be making mistakes of trying to confuse writing 5 and S.
Always blame the user for design flaws in the system. In any case, the fact still stands that people can read printed material easier than handwritten material, a fact that is merely aggravated, not caused, by bad handwriting.
Bad handwriting has killed people through misread prescriptions. There have been lawsuits centering around the question whether a handwritten will said "seventy" or "twenty". As always, it's easier to fix the system than the users.
As for the "next generation", man has been writing in some form or the other for thousands of years.
They were pressing cuniform symbols into clay for thousands of years, too. People typing instead of handwriting dates back to the first novels Twain pounded out on a typewriter, and is going to take many more decades to completely marginalize handwriting.
One counterexample of this is OpenBSD. Yes, all their code is Open Source and available, but they don't go out of their way to return patches to upstream. Several times, a vulnerability has been discovered and published, and OpenBSD said "Oh, we fixed that a year ago." Sure, you can dig through the OpenBSD changes, but they aren't cooperating by contributing their fixes upstream.
KHTML is licensed under LGPL - anyone who receives the Safari binaries has a right to ask for the modified KHTML source. Apple is contributing their bug fixes and additions that they are required to disclose under LGPL.
But they don't have to contribute them; they just have to reveal them. Merging someone's fork can be very hard, and Apple could make it much harder just by making a few changes to make the code fit Apple's coding standards, like changing variable names and code indention. The fact that Apple is actively working with KDE developers is above and beyond the call of duty.
Just look at what happened to airfares and phone bills when their respective industries were deregulated (hint: consumers got a better deal).
Hint: phone companies weren't deregulated; AT&T was broken up. Nobody could have broken into the industry with AT&T whole against them; they would have had to run telephone wires all over the place, for one thing. Of course, the people in Podunk, North Dakota still wouldn't have phone service without government regulation.
You can; it's called TeX. I hate trying to decipher my handwritten equations, worse yet, someone else's. Capital S versus s, u versus v, x versus y, 2 versus Z, 5 versus S, l versus 1, it's all a mess.
the tactile sensation of writing on paper is simply wonderful. No amount of typing can replace that.
The tactile sensation of pushing reeds into clay is simply wonderful. No amount of writing can replace cuniform.
Times change, and the ineffable qualities get ignored for the ineffable qualities of the next generation.
The best part is I don't have to worry about backing up my lab books. The only real threat is fire, and it is no more dangerous than it is to CDs or hard drives.
There's also water. If I spill a Coke on my keyboard, all my data's safe; if I spill one on my notebook, it's all gone.
It used to be people would judge others based on their handwriting skills in addition to their oratory.
I'm quite happy those days are gone, and people will grade my work on its content rather than handwriting or typing skills.
But games are only one example. Although the FOSS community has made several attempts at productivity software over the years, it's never been a real threat to proprietary packages like MS Office.
I'm not sure that's true. Games require (a) a lot of art (something that free software hasn't been strong on, historically) and (b) constant advances in the state of the art. Word processors, spreadsheets and similar things don't. Microsoft is quickly hitting the dead end on new features for MS Office that anyone needs. The main reason why MS Office is holding its own is because its file formats are virtually impossible to emulate correctly. (Which is what you get from doing raw memory dumps.) The one feature everyone complains that OpenOffice doesn't have is bug compatibility with MS Office file formats.
I think free software has problems with markets that need large amounts of art. It also has problems with markets where you have to run fast to stay in the same place. Anything else, free software will eventually build something (or get something freed) that's good enough and cut the market for proprietary solutions.
For example, GCC, for much of the market, is good enough. A huge part of the market for C, Pascal, Fortran77 and Ada compilers is removed by GCC. Likewise, the Unix shells that are free software annihilate any market there might be for a proprietary shell. Even if they stood still, there's no features a proprietary shell could have that would make many people switch. IE would not be a viable webbrowser if Microsoft didn't subsidize it. Mozilla and Konqueror have virtually cut out the market for proprietary webbrowsers on Un*x. Gimp is cutting out a large part of the low-level market for graphics editors.
Not-quite Free software also has that effect; there's dozens of semester-project level raytracers on the net, but PovRay is the only serious raytracer available for the home user. FractInt kills much of the market for Free or non-Free fractal programs.
All free software has to do is to hit that point where it's good enough for the market and it will kill much of the proprietary competition. I don't think that's an effect of an OS or webserver; anything that can collect enough developers to compete in a stable market will eventually become good-enough to starve the proprietary competition.
I find this incredibly short-sighted, and a wrong policy to persue in general, to "conform" to world opinion on a subject, particularly for what is in the most part a very local issue.
It's not a local issue; even in the days of Erasmus, his works were getting copied all over Europe within a short period of them being first published. Now, we work on projects with dozens of contributers from countries around the world. Anything but a global copyright is asking for trouble.
Or marriage laws in Massachusetts applying here as well.
It's quid pro quo. If a couple 17-year olds get married in Utah, is it okay for Massachusetts not to recognize their marriage, which wasn't legal under Massachusetts law? Or to ignore a Utah marriage because it was engaged without a blood test?
You picked _two_ examples of works under copyright. Peter Pan was under copyright in Europe and Canada (and elsewhere), and _possibly_ in the US at the time it was made into a movie. It's still under copyright in Europe, and under a form of perpetual copyright in the UK.
Bambi was published in 1923, so when disney made it, I think it was public domain.
No. Bambi was under copyright when Disney made the movie based off it, and still is. There was a court case between Disney and the copyright holders for Bambi a few years back where Disney claimed that the copyholders lost the copyright. While the URAA would have returned copyright to Bambi even if it had been lost, the (Ninth Districts?) decision implies that some books that were printed _before_ 1923 are still in copyright in the US, something generally held not to be true.
It's not invented by either, it's invented by the NIH and by the snack food industry in this country. "SUGAR CONTAINS NO FAT" - so what? It's a carbohydrate and it's dangerous to your pancreas in quantity. We've been trained to believe that fat is the problem, and it isn't.
Is that why calorie counting has been popular since the sixties? Blaming the NIH is just stupid. Their intent has never to been to cause the problem, and problem predates the NIH. (Did you know that in 1900, there were exclusive social clubs in New York only for fat people? Because being fat proved you were rich and decadent.) The snack food industry (and the resturant industry, for huge high-calorie portions) have some of the blame, but are selling people what they want to buy, including low-carb and diet products. The root problem is that people are eating too much.
How about in off-line groups, like engineering school? Were they pre-emptively sexually harassed somehow so they didn't sign up for those classes?
Yes, sometimes. I've heard several horror stories where a student would present a list of career choices to a counselor and the counselor would go down the list until he or she could find a job that was "suitable" for women. Or just look at slashdot; you can find several incredibly hostile posts around this one, but notice even the way that the very concept of a female hacker or programmer get incredulous and sexual remarks whenever it shows up. I wouldn't want to be part of an industry where I was going to be isolated, not by not having people of the same gender around, but by having people treat me as an alien because of my gender.
My fractured psyche is the direct result of horrible people like you, [...]
If you can't handle discussing this, then don't get involved with discussions of it. Blaming your fractured psyche on it is absurd; if it would fracture your psyche, then your psyche never could handle real life situations. If we can't discuss things, we can't find consensus and truth.
I do regard political correctness as stupid, but not all that is stupid is politically correct.
"Political correctness" basically means "something pointless that you do for purely political reasons". The line between verbal "political correctness" and "politeness" is whether you think something is a good idea. If you call Ms. Ferraro a "stupid whore", are you being politically incorrect, or rude? What about if you call her "Mrs. Zaccaro" instead of "Ms. Ferraro"?
If something is politically correctness, it is obviously bad. Therefore, if people think something is good, then it's obvious they don't think it's political correctness, and saying it is doesn't forward the argument.
"To almost exclusively use the male pronoun encourages people to think exclusively in terms of females" - I don't understand? I think you meant something else here.
Of course, sorry. Switch the last word of that sentence.
But I've got a more direct argument that this isn't politically correctness. Politically correctness centers around forcing other people to conform to your rules. If I were arguing that you should use both she and he as generic pronouns, that might be politically correctness. But I'm not; I'm arguing that those of us who want to can use them as generic pronouns. That's not political correctness; that's freedom of choice.
As it is now, the reason is apparently political correctness, which is the dumbest reason for anything in the world.
Calling something "Political correctness" is just a way to say that you think the change is stupid. To dismiss something for political correctness is circular reasoning; it's politically correct because it's stupid, it's stupid because it's politically correct.
Use of the male pronoun frequently colors the perception of people as to the possible gender. Switching between male and female is not really a change; as I pointed out, people will frequently use the female pronouns if most of the people in that position are female. To almost exclusively use the male pronoun encourages people to think exclusively in terms of females. At worst, using the female pronoun is equally correct.
No, in 2025 copyrights will have been re-extended to 150+ years. Thanks to Sonny Bono and friends, the public domain stopped in 1922.
Forget fatalism. If you make it worth more to your senators and representatives than the entertainment companies are willing to pay next time this comes up, it won't pass.
'He' is the singular indefinite pronoun in English [...] 'He' also happens to be the masculine personal pronoun.
You say that as if it just "happened". It's also not true; if you wrote "when a nurse comes, she will start by...", no one would blink.
'She' is the singular pronoun of personification in English
Ships are usually she. That doesn't mean it's the only pronoun of personification; if you wish to personify an object as male, it's entirely correct.
Confusing the two exhibits not a warm-and-fuzzy concern for the inclusion of women so much as a writer's or speaker's ignorance.
A speaker's ignorance for what, some grammarian's rigid idea of what English should be? It's clear, whatever English was a hundred years ago or even 20 years ago, that using she is appropriate in today's English.
This overbearing post about some rigid rules of someone's conception of what English's rules should be is worth trashing, not saving.
Slashdot Mirror
You've just outlined precisely the attitude that spells out why the U.S. is languishing in maths, and countries like Australia (where I teach) are doing quite well. The purpose of any education system is most certainly not to churn out 'a few geniuses', leaving everyone else to languish in uneducated stupor.
Well that's funny, because the US doesn't generally track students; the best and the worst go to the same high school. The UK and Germany, however, do; you take a big test about 8th grade, and that dictates whether you go on to academic schooling or go to vocational schooling. Perhaps you need to look at the big picture more, before coming up with the one big, simple (and wrong) answer to everything.
Nice try. Canada is right up there near the top of the rankings, and our society is as heterogeneous as the US, if not more.
Really? A Canadian friend complained about CNN using pictures from the Watts Riots for the Toronto riots, saying the latter were not nearly as bad as the first. If you've got the extremes of poverty that the US has, why weren't the Toronto riots significant? I would have thought that most of the Mexicans would stop in the US rather than travelling another couple thousand miles, and the Cubans would rather boat a hundred miles than a thousand.
All the differences between the French, English, and First Americans don't matter a bit for stuff like this; it's the social and racial stratification. Without the slums and the riots and the illegal immigrants, Canada isn't hetrogenous in the ways that make these tests hard for the US.
Yeah, I know it's not supposed to be a serious game, but even in a joking game I still insist that I actually get to be a participant or there's no fun involved. They claimed it was an abberrant sceanrio that doesn't happen often, but I don't care. That it is possible at all indicates a major game design flaw.
If the game was over very quickly, then why worry about it? You got screwed by the cards; it can happen in any card game. If it were like the game of Nuclear Proliferation I played recently, where one player was killed before the first turn technically started, and then the game took another couple hours after that, I could see your complaint. But if you lose a hand of poker or blackjack or spades, you don't complain; you go onto the next hand. Just consider it one hand lost and keep playing.
Those that I've played have been pretty good. Give Me the Brain is a nice cute game; I doubt anyone would play it regularly, like some people play spades or euchre, but it's good for a few plays. Agora is an interesting strategy game; it probably has more replay value that Give Me the Brain, but it doesn't have the party value of playing fast-food worker zombies who need the brain to finish their shifts.
I love One False Step for Man... It's a 3-4 hour long board game that takes a lot of strategy, so I'd play it with the same people I'd play Rail Baron (another game I recommend, but it's out of print) or Axis and Allies with. It's biggest problem is that it's a Cheap Ass game; while coming up with a six-sided die for Give Me the Brain or a dozen counters for Agora isn't a problem, One False Step takes literally a hundred counters, in at least as many distinct varieties as you have players. Those of us roleplayers dragged out the mondo bags of dice and used different types of dice, or a Risk set would probably have enough counters, but you've got to be prepared before the game. The board is somewhat random, which keeps variety but makes it feel a little generic. Names like "Desperado City" just doesn't have the feel that using real cities names does. All in all, a great strategy game, but be prepared for a lengthy strategy game and get out the counters to start with.
seeing as to how most board games I've owned have been played about 3 times, max,
Yeah. What's worse, for games that have trivia cards, they start to lose their fun once you get familar with them. I've played Cranium enough times that I know what many of the cards are. (Again, Cranium; a decent game, if you like party games and are willing to spend $50 on a game where you learn a lot of the cards after playing it 3 or 4 times. Me, I prefer to go head to head in a nice multiplayer strategy game where it's strategy, tactics and a little bit of luck.)
the government knows how to get in touch with me; where's my new car and house?
I guess you can buy them, after the people who didn't get an education beyond fire-starting and hot-wiring steal your car and burn down your house, because there's nothing else they can do in society . . .
I think you have the copyright argument backward. The ultimate goal of copyright law is to allow people to create their works without having to worry about others republishing or taking claim of the creation.
The United States constitution states the goal of copyright law as "to promote the progress of science and useful arts". American copyright law (as opposed to European copyright laws) in no way protects the author from people taking claim of the creation. (In a complete sense, that's beyond the scope of copyright law; you don't need to copy a work to claim you wrote it.) Generally, authors in the US get credit because of the contracts they sign when selling the copyright, and the loss of reputation any reputable publisher would have among the author community if they failed to credit their authors.
The end result of strong copyright (and widespread respect for copyrights) is that publishers can present their works in simpler, universal formats.
They _can_ do that now. Many DRM examples have nothing to do with copyright protection; take region coding on a DVD, or fancy DRM schemes that stop you from viewing the text after a certain time.
they claim that there is no longer any respect for copyright law.
There never was any respect for copyright law as it applied to individuals. What changed was the fact that now individuals can copy others material easily.
The alternative is to change the language, which is fairly hard.
You have to change the orthography, which several Turkish languages have done three times in the last hundred years.
Even if you have a Tablet PC, you're still doing the same thing.
If the Tablet PC converts what you write to character data (as opposed to images), then there is crucial differences. You can output in an easy to read form that's easy to check for errors and easy for other people to decipher. Your input method is less important than how the data is stored and displayed.
The alternative is not half as good, and is not half as capable.
Then argue that, not the "tactile sensation of writing on paper". No technology feels like the last, and almost every technology has people who appreciate its particular sensations. That doesn't stop them for getting replaced; the only thing that does that is real arguments.
Maybe if people had taken their handwriting classes in 2nd and 3rd grades seriously, they would not be making mistakes of trying to confuse writing 5 and S.
Always blame the user for design flaws in the system. In any case, the fact still stands that people can read printed material easier than handwritten material, a fact that is merely aggravated, not caused, by bad handwriting.
Bad handwriting has killed people through misread prescriptions. There have been lawsuits centering around the question whether a handwritten will said "seventy" or "twenty". As always, it's easier to fix the system than the users.
As for the "next generation", man has been writing in some form or the other for thousands of years.
They were pressing cuniform symbols into clay for thousands of years, too. People typing instead of handwriting dates back to the first novels Twain pounded out on a typewriter, and is going to take many more decades to completely marginalize handwriting.
His view is that people should use OpenBSD rather than NetBSD.
I wasn't talking about core BSD; I'm talking about all the little side utilities that the BSDs share with Linux.
Yes, I'm replying to myself.
One counterexample of this is OpenBSD. Yes, all their code is Open Source and available, but they don't go out of their way to return patches to upstream. Several times, a vulnerability has been discovered and published, and OpenBSD said "Oh, we fixed that a year ago." Sure, you can dig through the OpenBSD changes, but they aren't cooperating by contributing their fixes upstream.
KHTML is licensed under LGPL - anyone who receives the Safari binaries has a right to ask for the modified KHTML source. Apple is contributing their bug fixes and additions that they are required to disclose under LGPL.
But they don't have to contribute them; they just have to reveal them. Merging someone's fork can be very hard, and Apple could make it much harder just by making a few changes to make the code fit Apple's coding standards, like changing variable names and code indention. The fact that Apple is actively working with KDE developers is above and beyond the call of duty.
Just look at what happened to airfares and phone bills when their respective industries were deregulated (hint: consumers got a better deal).
Hint: phone companies weren't deregulated; AT&T was broken up. Nobody could have broken into the industry with AT&T whole against them; they would have had to run telephone wires all over the place, for one thing. Of course, the people in Podunk, North Dakota still wouldn't have phone service without government regulation.
I'd hate to be able to type in my equations
You can; it's called TeX. I hate trying to decipher my handwritten equations, worse yet, someone else's. Capital S versus s, u versus v, x versus y, 2 versus Z, 5 versus S, l versus 1, it's all a mess.
the tactile sensation of writing on paper is simply wonderful. No amount of typing can replace that.
The tactile sensation of pushing reeds into clay is simply wonderful. No amount of writing can replace cuniform.
Times change, and the ineffable qualities get ignored for the ineffable qualities of the next generation.
The best part is I don't have to worry about backing up my lab books. The only real threat is fire, and it is no more dangerous than it is to CDs or hard drives.
There's also water. If I spill a Coke on my keyboard, all my data's safe; if I spill one on my notebook, it's all gone.
It used to be people would judge others based on their handwriting skills in addition to their oratory.
I'm quite happy those days are gone, and people will grade my work on its content rather than handwriting or typing skills.
But games are only one example. Although the FOSS community has made several attempts at productivity software over the years, it's never been a real threat to proprietary packages like MS Office.
I'm not sure that's true. Games require (a) a lot of art (something that free software hasn't been strong on, historically) and (b) constant advances in the state of the art. Word processors, spreadsheets and similar things don't. Microsoft is quickly hitting the dead end on new features for MS Office that anyone needs. The main reason why MS Office is holding its own is because its file formats are virtually impossible to emulate correctly. (Which is what you get from doing raw memory dumps.) The one feature everyone complains that OpenOffice doesn't have is bug compatibility with MS Office file formats.
I think free software has problems with markets that need large amounts of art. It also has problems with markets where you have to run fast to stay in the same place. Anything else, free software will eventually build something (or get something freed) that's good enough and cut the market for proprietary solutions.
For example, GCC, for much of the market, is good enough. A huge part of the market for C, Pascal, Fortran77 and Ada compilers is removed by GCC. Likewise, the Unix shells that are free software annihilate any market there might be for a proprietary shell. Even if they stood still, there's no features a proprietary shell could have that would make many people switch. IE would not be a viable webbrowser if Microsoft didn't subsidize it. Mozilla and Konqueror have virtually cut out the market for proprietary webbrowsers on Un*x. Gimp is cutting out a large part of the low-level market for graphics editors.
Not-quite Free software also has that effect; there's dozens of semester-project level raytracers on the net, but PovRay is the only serious raytracer available for the home user. FractInt kills much of the market for Free or non-Free fractal programs.
All free software has to do is to hit that point where it's good enough for the market and it will kill much of the proprietary competition. I don't think that's an effect of an OS or webserver; anything that can collect enough developers to compete in a stable market will eventually become good-enough to starve the proprietary competition.
I find this incredibly short-sighted, and a wrong policy to persue in general, to "conform" to world opinion on a subject, particularly for what is in the most part a very local issue.
It's not a local issue; even in the days of Erasmus, his works were getting copied all over Europe within a short period of them being first published. Now, we work on projects with dozens of contributers from countries around the world. Anything but a global copyright is asking for trouble.
Or marriage laws in Massachusetts applying here as well.
It's quid pro quo. If a couple 17-year olds get married in Utah, is it okay for Massachusetts not to recognize their marriage, which wasn't legal under Massachusetts law? Or to ignore a Utah marriage because it was engaged without a blood test?
You probably mean Peter Pan or Bambi.
You picked _two_ examples of works under copyright. Peter Pan was under copyright in Europe and Canada (and elsewhere), and _possibly_ in the US at the time it was made into a movie. It's still under copyright in Europe, and under a form of perpetual copyright in the UK.
Bambi was published in 1923, so when disney made it, I think it was public domain.
No. Bambi was under copyright when Disney made the movie based off it, and still is. There was a court case between Disney and the copyright holders for Bambi a few years back where Disney claimed that the copyholders lost the copyright. While the URAA would have returned copyright to Bambi even if it had been lost, the (Ninth Districts?) decision implies that some books that were printed _before_ 1923 are still in copyright in the US, something generally held not to be true.
It's not invented by either, it's invented by the NIH and by the snack food industry in this country. "SUGAR CONTAINS NO FAT" - so what? It's a carbohydrate and it's dangerous to your pancreas in quantity. We've been trained to believe that fat is the problem, and it isn't.
Is that why calorie counting has been popular since the sixties? Blaming the NIH is just stupid. Their intent has never to been to cause the problem, and problem predates the NIH. (Did you know that in 1900, there were exclusive social clubs in New York only for fat people? Because being fat proved you were rich and decadent.) The snack food industry (and the resturant industry, for huge high-calorie portions) have some of the blame, but are selling people what they want to buy, including low-carb and diet products. The root problem is that people are eating too much.
How about in off-line groups, like engineering school? Were they pre-emptively sexually harassed somehow so they didn't sign up for those classes?
Yes, sometimes. I've heard several horror stories where a student would present a list of career choices to a counselor and the counselor would go down the list until he or she could find a job that was "suitable" for women. Or just look at slashdot; you can find several incredibly hostile posts around this one, but notice even the way that the very concept of a female hacker or programmer get incredulous and sexual remarks whenever it shows up. I wouldn't want to be part of an industry where I was going to be isolated, not by not having people of the same gender around, but by having people treat me as an alien because of my gender.
My fractured psyche is the direct result of horrible people like you, [...]
If you can't handle discussing this, then don't get involved with discussions of it. Blaming your fractured psyche on it is absurd; if it would fracture your psyche, then your psyche never could handle real life situations. If we can't discuss things, we can't find consensus and truth.
I do regard political correctness as stupid, but not all that is stupid is politically correct.
"Political correctness" basically means "something pointless that you do for purely political reasons". The line between verbal "political correctness" and "politeness" is whether you think something is a good idea. If you call Ms. Ferraro a "stupid whore", are you being politically incorrect, or rude? What about if you call her "Mrs. Zaccaro" instead of "Ms. Ferraro"?
If something is politically correctness, it is obviously bad. Therefore, if people think something is good, then it's obvious they don't think it's political correctness, and saying it is doesn't forward the argument.
"To almost exclusively use the male pronoun encourages people to think exclusively in terms of females" - I don't understand? I think you meant something else here.
Of course, sorry. Switch the last word of that sentence.
But I've got a more direct argument that this isn't politically correctness. Politically correctness centers around forcing other people to conform to your rules. If I were arguing that you should use both she and he as generic pronouns, that might be politically correctness. But I'm not; I'm arguing that those of us who want to can use them as generic pronouns. That's not political correctness; that's freedom of choice.
"They" is plural. It's a fact.
It's not a fact; writers since Chaucer have used it as an unspecific singular.
Using "they" to refer to a singular noun is slang.
The slang of one decade is often the standard language of the next.
As it is now, the reason is apparently political correctness, which is the dumbest reason for anything in the world.
Calling something "Political correctness" is just a way to say that you think the change is stupid. To dismiss something for political correctness is circular reasoning; it's politically correct because it's stupid, it's stupid because it's politically correct.
Use of the male pronoun frequently colors the perception of people as to the possible gender. Switching between male and female is not really a change; as I pointed out, people will frequently use the female pronouns if most of the people in that position are female. To almost exclusively use the male pronoun encourages people to think exclusively in terms of females. At worst, using the female pronoun is equally correct.
No, in 2025 copyrights will have been re-extended to 150+ years. Thanks to Sonny Bono and friends, the public domain stopped in 1922.
Forget fatalism. If you make it worth more to your senators and representatives than the entertainment companies are willing to pay next time this comes up, it won't pass.
'He' is the singular indefinite pronoun in English [...] 'He' also happens to be the masculine personal pronoun.
...", no one would blink.
You say that as if it just "happened". It's also not true; if you wrote "when a nurse comes, she will start by
'She' is the singular pronoun of personification in English
Ships are usually she. That doesn't mean it's the only pronoun of personification; if you wish to personify an object as male, it's entirely correct.
Confusing the two exhibits not a warm-and-fuzzy concern for the inclusion of women so much as a writer's or speaker's ignorance.
A speaker's ignorance for what, some grammarian's rigid idea of what English should be? It's clear, whatever English was a hundred years ago or even 20 years ago, that using she is appropriate in today's English.
This overbearing post about some rigid rules of someone's conception of what English's rules should be is worth trashing, not saving.