I agree that copyrighted material shouldn't be freely distributed from an ethical standpoint.
If that's the way we're talking, then the RIAA have already won. There are plenty of legitimate circumstances to distribute a lot copyrighted material -- and that's not even getting into fair use yet. Consider examples in software, or other types of media.
It's not an issue of copyright per se, it's an issue of what's permitted by the license.
Unfortunately, Tolkien detested cinema and television as a matter of principle.
Also, from what I've read of his response to e.g. stage plays adapted from his work, he was pretty upset over anything that deviated from a literal translation.
(That last bit is hardly unique to Tolkien; a lot of writers have trouble "letting go" enough for a proper adaptation to other media. Rowling's hovering over the writers'/directors' shoulders had a lot to do with the first Harry Potter movie's problems)
As for Tolkien's son Christopher, he's pretty upset about the movies, all considered. His other son, John, seems to be okay with them as far as I know.
It's actually caused a fairly major split in the family between Christopher's side that hates the movies and the rest (especially the newer generations) who are either ambivalent or think the films are pretty cool.
Hmm, despite what many say, I think it's a pretty good article, really. Brin's trying more to provoke thought than advance a point.
But I don't think Brin gives Tolkien enough credit at all -- as far as sentient peoples in Sauron's service having been coerced into service or duped by Sauron's propaganda -- Tolkien actually proposes that possibility explicitly in the book.
For example, think of the scene (near the end of the Two Towers) where Sam encounters a fallen Easterling and starts thinking about his life and motivations.
Sam himself is a model of the non-aristocratic everyman-hero, and as Brin points out the most heroic figures in Tolkien always ally themselves with the common man, whatever their background.
As far as peoples allied with Mordor in the south, the implication was that once hostilities ended they were indeed offered peace and help in reconstruction. They were simply treated as human beings like everyone else; they were not inherently evil.
Orcs and related creatures were something of a different affair... they weren't actually sentient, per se. Their apparent intelligence was largely an extension of Sauron's will; they lost it when he was destroyed.
The ringwraiths simply dissipated, as not only their individual wills but their very beings had been subsumed and essentially replaced by Sauron's own.
That is something I think Brin misses; the great evil of Sauron was that he would, in the end, permit no independent will or existence outside his own.
"religious" prostitutes, while common in neighboring cultures, were forbidden in Israel
There was no temple in Israel at that time; they used a tent (the Tabernacle)
The real story isn't exactly "family values", but that's the point. It's about how David screwed up big time.
The actual story's in II Samuel 11-12:
David stays home from battle one weekend.
He sees Bathsheba bathing from the roof of his palace, and after a bit of voyeurism gets one of his servants to bring her to the palace.
Guess.
Oh. Did I mention she's married? Her husband Uriah's off fighting in David's army.
Oh, crap. She's pregnant.
David calls Uriah back and tells him he's done a great job fighting, and he should come back home and spend some quality time with his wife. Make it look like it could be Uriah's kid.
Uriah refuses, since it's unfair to the rest of the guys in the army.
David sends Uriah back to the front lines, and David tells General Joab (David's cousin) to make sure that Uriah doesn't come back.
Joab dies. David marries Bathsheba.
God is not happy.
God sends Nathan the Prophet to tell David off.
Nathan tells David a story about this guy who stole a sheep. The story sounds sounds strangely familiar.
David: "What a dick! The guy should be put to death... and... er... wait a minute..."
Nathan: "Yeah, and you killed some guy and stole his WIFE. What do you think God's going to do to YOU now?"
God does forgive David when David sincerely repents, but He still makes David deal with the (pretty nasty) consequences of this whole episode for the rest of his life (and explicitly forbids David from building a temple).
The point being that even someone in a position of authority isn't magically allowed to do what he wants with people.
Neither omitted nor added, exactly, though maybe saying omitted from Protestant bibles is closer to the truth.
This is a gross oversimplification, but there are two major forms of the OT involved here: the Massorah (Hebrew, first millennium AD), and the earlier Septuagint (Greek, ~2nd century BC). Neither is the original Hebrew, though to put it in perspective, they are better attested than most accepted historical documents of the era.
There aren't huge differences between them for the most part, but the Septuagint contains the additional books in question. It also (generally) matches the Dead Sea scrolls more closely than the Masoretic.
Palestinian Jews of Christ's era spoke primarily Greek and Aramaic (as a result of the Persian/Syrian/Alexandrian conquests), and consquently used the Septuagint. Naturally the early church also used it (OT quotations in the NT are from the Septuagint).
Modern Jews do use the Massorah. Luther and later Protestant reformers also adopted their canon from the set of Masoretic books, but to the best of my knowledge up until the Reformation, Christians used the OT canon as in the Septuagint.
IIRC, the Greek Orthodox church actually still uses the Septuagint directly, since they never made the switch to Latin.
Modern translations (whatever canon they use) often look at both the Septuagint and Masoretic copies (in addition to other sources), since they both offer valuable material for the translator.
I'd encourage you to research the history of the various documents on your own -- I am not an expert and this is only a very cursory treatment.
Ordinarily I wouldn't respond to a troll this strong, but you introduce some legitimate information.
Until recent changes to US copyright law, musical recordings were covered by common law copyrights, under which they never entered the public domain. The copyrights were granted in perpetuity. It is only very recently that federal copyright law has begun to be applied to music.
True -- but those are (P) copyrights applying only to a specific performance/recording. Just because Hogan Holler and the Hometown Hipsters record a Palestrina tune or "Happy Birthday" doesn't mean I suddenly start owing them royalties if I perform either one myself.
A (P) copyright only limits what I can do with their particular recording.
So things are definitely, unarguably improving re music copyrights.
Until you get into things like sampled music (which is pretty new) I don't think moving (P) copyrights under the more limited federal copyright law really carries much benefit. Meanwhile, (C) copyrights on music (which apply to all performances of a song) have been getting more oppressive as they get longer.
I used "Happy Birthday" as an example earlier; it's more than 100 years old (the melody composed in 1859, original lyrics published in 1893), and its singing has since been adopted as the standard birthday ritual in our culture.
However, AOL Time Warner still holds the (C) copyright on it (the modern form of the lyrics was copyrighted in 1935). This is why restaurant chains often have their own birthday songs -- they can't legally perform "Happy Birthday" without paying royalties.
Sure, it's fine if you just sing it at home or anywhere private -- as long as it's sufficiently "underground" that it won't be considered a public performance. De minimis non curat lex...
There's a point at which copyright stops supporting an artist and becomes a tax on cultural participation.
The current twenty year increase was granted to bring US copyright law into step with recent changes in EU law, so that US artists are able to benefit from the same protections domestically as they would have overseas. All previous extensions have been made either to bring the US into step with the international minimum for copyright law (in '78) or during the ten year deliberation over whether or not the US should adopt the international recommendations (nine temporary extensions from '68 to '78).
"Because everyone else is doing it" is not a valid argument for why something is safe, let alone beneficial.
Thanks to those works [among them, Shakespeare's] passing into the public domain, the publishers who print them have been able to exploit them for free for years. How the public has benefited from this is not clear.
Potential modern Shakespeares get to work from and adapt Shakespeare's works the same way Shakespeare did those of his predecessors (and contemporaries!).
The fog is water vapor, not CO2. Carbon dioxide is invisible, and hangs near the floor unless it starts to fill the room due to inadequate ventilation.
If it were above the safe concentration, you'd experience grogginess, unconsciousness, and eventual death from asphyxiation.
Well... assuming you weren't breathing TOO high a CO2 concentration (a problem when using CO2 to euthanize animals -- it's hard to get right). Too much and instead of "falling asleep", you go straight into acute respiratory disress. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200.
It's the same thing that happens any time you take codepoints across character sets.
iso-8859-1:
NEL (from EBCDIC) doesn't exist in iso-8859-1; what character gets used instead is up to the discretion of the tool doing the conversion. Since Unicode defines 0x0085 as a whitespace character, the tool could know to substitute another if that was desired.
UTF-8:
It's a non-lossy encoding of Unicode. All characters above 0x007f get stored as multi-byte sequences. 0x0085 becomes 0xc2 0x85.
If all these people want to use 0x85 in their XML 1.1 documents, then they'll have to properly convert them to Unicode as the specification allows. Surprising, that.
Or specify iso-8859-1 as their encoding in the XML prologue, which they were supposed to do in XML 1.0 anyway.
Because of Disney's cultural clout, people only know the Disney versions of most of these stories. Try telling them the originals and they look at you funny.
Once Disney releases one of their movies, alternate productions drop _way_ off.
I remember when I was small I used to see various interpretations of "Aladdin and the Magic Lamp" all the time on TV. Then the Disney movie came out. Over the next couple years non-Disney interpretations almost completely disappeared from media (though occasionally you can still find them in dinner theatres and the like, though lately many of those are licensed by Disney).
Something similar happened for pretty much all of the PD material Disney interpreted.
Do you remember how "The Little Mermaid" ends? The original one? How many other people you know do?
Some day in the near future, the fans will be able to make their own movies with decent effects and their own plots. Then the Hollywood big-wigs will have to adapt their approach.
No, they'll just sue for copyright infringement. They "own" the ST universe; the fans don't.
MP3 got bought out by the recording giants (Vivendi Universal) some time ago (this is why they're now plugging artists like eminem on the front page). Then they changed the mp3.com contract so it screwed the artists.
Most of my favorite mp3.com artists stopped posting new material after the contract change.
Slashdot Mirror
The "overlay" type Flash ads only work with the ActiveX version of the flash plugin. If you're not using IE, they're not an issue.
If that's the way we're talking, then the RIAA have already won. There are plenty of legitimate circumstances to distribute a lot copyrighted material -- and that's not even getting into fair use yet. Consider examples in software, or other types of media.
It's not an issue of copyright per se, it's an issue of what's permitted by the license.
Unfortunately, Tolkien detested cinema and television as a matter of principle.
Also, from what I've read of his response to e.g. stage plays adapted from his work, he was pretty upset over anything that deviated from a literal translation.
(That last bit is hardly unique to Tolkien; a lot of writers have trouble "letting go" enough for a proper adaptation to other media. Rowling's hovering over the writers'/directors' shoulders had a lot to do with the first Harry Potter movie's problems)
As for Tolkien's son Christopher, he's pretty upset about the movies, all considered. His other son, John, seems to be okay with them as far as I know.
It's actually caused a fairly major split in the family between Christopher's side that hates the movies and the rest (especially the newer generations) who are either ambivalent or think the films are pretty cool.
Hmm, despite what many say, I think it's a pretty good article, really. Brin's trying more to provoke thought than advance a point.
... they weren't actually sentient, per se. Their apparent intelligence was largely an extension of Sauron's will; they lost it when he was destroyed.
But I don't think Brin gives Tolkien enough credit at all -- as far as sentient peoples in Sauron's service having been coerced into service or duped by Sauron's propaganda -- Tolkien actually proposes that possibility explicitly in the book.
For example, think of the scene (near the end of the Two Towers) where Sam encounters a fallen Easterling and starts thinking about his life and motivations.
Sam himself is a model of the non-aristocratic everyman-hero, and as Brin points out the most heroic figures in Tolkien always ally themselves with the common man, whatever their background.
As far as peoples allied with Mordor in the south, the implication was that once hostilities ended they were indeed offered peace and help in reconstruction. They were simply treated as human beings like everyone else; they were not inherently evil.
Orcs and related creatures were something of a different affair
The ringwraiths simply dissipated, as not only their individual wills but their very beings had been subsumed and essentially replaced by Sauron's own.
That is something I think Brin misses; the great evil of Sauron was that he would, in the end, permit no independent will or existence outside his own.
s/Joab dies/Uriah dies/ ... but you probably got the idea
Some minor corrections...
The real story isn't exactly "family values", but that's the point. It's about how David screwed up big time.
The actual story's in II Samuel 11-12:
God does forgive David when David sincerely repents, but He still makes David deal with the (pretty nasty) consequences of this whole episode for the rest of his life (and explicitly forbids David from building a temple).
The point being that even someone in a position of authority isn't magically allowed to do what he wants with people.
It's called XRender + a couple related extensions. So far they're XFree86-specific, but probably not forever.
Actually Phoenix uses XUL too. The XUL UI for Mozilla is just badly written.
With the destruction of traditional culture, movies and other media more or less required if you want to participate culturally these days.
I don't think it's a good thing at all, but that's the way things have shaken out.
Neither omitted nor added, exactly, though maybe saying omitted from Protestant bibles is closer to the truth.
This is a gross oversimplification, but there are two major forms of the OT involved here: the Massorah (Hebrew, first millennium AD), and the earlier Septuagint (Greek, ~2nd century BC). Neither is the original Hebrew, though to put it in perspective, they are better attested than most accepted historical documents of the era.
There aren't huge differences between them for the most part, but the Septuagint contains the additional books in question. It also (generally) matches the Dead Sea scrolls more closely than the Masoretic.
Palestinian Jews of Christ's era spoke primarily Greek and Aramaic (as a result of the Persian/Syrian/Alexandrian conquests), and consquently used the Septuagint. Naturally the early church also used it (OT quotations in the NT are from the Septuagint).
Modern Jews do use the Massorah. Luther and later Protestant reformers also adopted their canon from the set of Masoretic books, but to the best of my knowledge up until the Reformation, Christians used the OT canon as in the Septuagint.
IIRC, the Greek Orthodox church actually still uses the Septuagint directly, since they never made the switch to Latin.
Modern translations (whatever canon they use) often look at both the Septuagint and Masoretic copies (in addition to other sources), since they both offer valuable material for the translator.
I'd encourage you to research the history of the various documents on your own -- I am not an expert and this is only a very cursory treatment.
It was called a culture's mythology.
I guess we still have it in a way, but it's all been fenced in.
Ordinarily I wouldn't respond to a troll this strong, but you introduce some legitimate information.
True -- but those are (P) copyrights applying only to a specific performance/recording. Just because Hogan Holler and the Hometown Hipsters record a Palestrina tune or "Happy Birthday" doesn't mean I suddenly start owing them royalties if I perform either one myself.
A (P) copyright only limits what I can do with their particular recording.
Until you get into things like sampled music (which is pretty new) I don't think moving (P) copyrights under the more limited federal copyright law really carries much benefit. Meanwhile, (C) copyrights on music (which apply to all performances of a song) have been getting more oppressive as they get longer.
I used "Happy Birthday" as an example earlier; it's more than 100 years old (the melody composed in 1859, original lyrics published in 1893), and its singing has since been adopted as the standard birthday ritual in our culture.
However, AOL Time Warner still holds the (C) copyright on it (the modern form of the lyrics was copyrighted in 1935). This is why restaurant chains often have their own birthday songs -- they can't legally perform "Happy Birthday" without paying royalties.
Sure, it's fine if you just sing it at home or anywhere private -- as long as it's sufficiently "underground" that it won't be considered a public performance. De minimis non curat lex...
There's a point at which copyright stops supporting an artist and becomes a tax on cultural participation.
"Because everyone else is doing it" is not a valid argument for why something is safe, let alone beneficial.
Potential modern Shakespeares get to work from and adapt Shakespeare's works the same way Shakespeare did those of his predecessors (and contemporaries!).
I am admittedly not a lawyer. Are you a writer?
The fog is water vapor, not CO2. Carbon dioxide is invisible, and hangs near the floor unless it starts to fill the room due to inadequate ventilation.
... assuming you weren't breathing TOO high a CO2 concentration (a problem when using CO2 to euthanize animals -- it's hard to get right). Too much and instead of "falling asleep", you go straight into acute respiratory disress. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200.
If it were above the safe concentration, you'd experience grogginess, unconsciousness, and eventual death from asphyxiation.
Well
If you want to know more about UTF-8, see RFC 2279.
It's the same thing that happens any time you take codepoints across character sets.
iso-8859-1:
NEL (from EBCDIC) doesn't exist in iso-8859-1; what character gets used instead is up to the discretion of the tool doing the conversion. Since Unicode defines 0x0085 as a whitespace character, the tool could know to substitute another if that was desired.
UTF-8:
It's a non-lossy encoding of Unicode. All characters above 0x007f get stored as multi-byte sequences. 0x0085 becomes 0xc2 0x85.
Or specify iso-8859-1 as their encoding in the XML prologue, which they were supposed to do in XML 1.0 anyway.
No. XML is defined in terms of Unicode, but XML files can be stored in any encoding with a known mapping to Unicode.
Most XML files these days are using iso-8859-1 or UTF-8, both of which manage fine in vi/pico/gedit.
chars 32-127 are identical in ASCII and Unicode, and iso-8859-1 is exactly identical to the bottom 8-bits worth of Unicode.
Also, UTF-8 is an encoding of the full Unicode range that is backwards-compatible with 7-bit ASCII.
in any case, note the entry for LF in your parent post -- 000A (hex) = 10 (decimal).
Actually, Tolkein was a self-described anarchist.
Because of Disney's cultural clout, people only know the Disney versions of most of these stories. Try telling them the originals and they look at you funny.
Once Disney releases one of their movies, alternate productions drop _way_ off.
I remember when I was small I used to see various interpretations of "Aladdin and the Magic Lamp" all the time on TV. Then the Disney movie came out. Over the next couple years non-Disney interpretations almost completely disappeared from media (though occasionally you can still find them in dinner theatres and the like, though lately many of those are licensed by Disney).
Something similar happened for pretty much all of the PD material Disney interpreted.
Do you remember how "The Little Mermaid" ends? The original one? How many other people you know do?
BK is in the range of several thousand dollars per seat.
Now that Larry's got the Linux kernel development going through BK, he's trying to hold it hostage and extort money.
Regardless of intent, that's what this amounts to.
That's pretty much it. Hooray for network effects.
No, they'll just sue for copyright infringement. They "own" the ST universe; the fans don't.
MP3 got bought out by the recording giants (Vivendi Universal) some time ago (this is why they're now plugging artists like eminem on the front page). Then they changed the mp3.com contract so it screwed the artists.
Most of my favorite mp3.com artists stopped posting new material after the contract change.
So, no, mp3.com is not an indy option. Sorry.