This came up on another site yesterday, and I'll tell you the same thing I told them: Online gambling has always been illegal in the U.S.A. Heretofore, it has been implicitly illegal, under federal laws against betting over-the-phone. The federal government has already prosecuted overseas casino owners (including at least one from the U.K., where internet gambling is legal and regulated) under these laws. 60 Minutes re-aired a story on this issue just a couple of weeks ago.
The new legislation aims to make internet gambling explicitly illegal, forcing banks to prevent the transactions. Even before now, however, many banks have been co-operating with the government, blocking even merely questionable transactions (as they do on the child porn front, as well).
Personally, I think this is wrong-headed. As many have pointed out, many of the states make a substantial percentage of their income from lotteries (a far more insidious form of gambling); so how can we honestly claim to be honouring morality here? Online gambling will still take place, and all that this move guarantees, is that poorly-regulated overseas sites will have a monopoly on the trade, rather than directing the trafic to well-regulated domestic sites (and sites in countries with a decent regulatory structure, like the U.K.).
I don't actually remember the name (though that sounds right), but it's probably the same outfit. I think I heard there was only one flight-worthy Liberator around. As was said, though, I don't know if an ex-gunner would want to get back into one of those - too many bad memories, I'd bet. You never know until you ask, though, I suppose. My grandfather was in the anti-aircaft artillery, shooting down V-1s, and loved to reminisce about it, but that wasn't exactly the same experience that aircraft-gunners had.
They have one of those (and a B-24) at the airport here, every few years. They let you walk (or crawl, as is more often the case, given how cramped they are inside) through them, too. They even offer to take you on a flight (putting you in one of the crew positions), for a sizeable enough donation (a couple of hundred bucks, IIRC) - I've never taken them up on that, but I imagine it's quite a ride.
Apparently, the Phoenix was retired in '04 (yes, only the Tomcat used it). It was replaced by the AMRAAM (AIM-120), which is much shorter range, but used by all the current fighters.
...why is the F-117 called a fighter? I don't get it, why is a clearly pure attack aircraft called a fighter?
Probably for the same reason as the F-111 (for which it was one of the replacements). It's meant to be a fighter-bomber (though the F-117 is not a traditional fighter-bomber). Classicaly, the USAF. only had "F-" and "B-" for combat aircraft - "A-" for attack-bombers is originally a Navy designation. Even though both braches use the same designations now, the Air Force has tended not to use "A-" in the same sense as the Navy: the only Air Force aircraft with it is the A-10, which fills a very different role than the F-117 (close air-support, rather than fixed-target bombing). Though the F-117 fills a role very much like the old Navy A-6, the Air Force has never used the "A-" designation for that type of craft. Also of note is that "F-117" is in synch with the pre-'62 numbers (the last of which was the F-111/FB-111), rather than the post-'62 (which started with the F-4)
Haha. Yeah, I really should have qualified that by saying "a whole generation of American kids." I've never seen a Tornado in person (I saw a lot of them on TV during the 1991 war), but I would have to agree as to them. I always thought of them as being somewhat like a smaller F-111. The Harrier is a Harrier no matter where you go, I think (yeah, it is AV-8B here, but everyone just says "Harrier," and reporters are apt to say "Harrier jump-jet"). It's never gotten the publicity here, in U.S. Marines service, that it has with the British Navy, but I've always liked it - it's not without its charm, and it certainly can fight.
I get to see F-16s all the time, as the Vermont Air National Guard (the "Green Mountain Boys") fly over here a lot on training flights (they did it a lot more before they were pressed into guarding the East Coast, with so much of the regular Air Force in the Middle East). They just don't have the charm of the Phantom (which they used to fly, when I was younger) or the Tomcat to me. For some reason, I always liked the late-model MiGs (the -29 especially) and the Su-27 better than the F-15 and -16. I've had the pleasure of seeing the "Fulcrum" and "Flanker" do the "Cobra" and "Cobra Turn" moves at airshows - it's pretty spectacular.
Some of the British WWII-era ones were very sexy (e.g., the Lancaster). American makers never had the knack for pretty bombers until later, though the B-36 was a neat design. The B-58 was a sexy plane, and some people think the B-1 is. I've always been partial to the Tu-95 myself.
Only in the early design phase. It was made into a multi-purpose fighter (with both strike and air-air capabilities) well before it went into regular service.
Rather like the F-4 "Phantom," in the late '60s and the '70s, the F-14 was probably the most idealized fighter for an entire generation of kids in the '80s. Something about the design - the graceful lines, or the swing wings, perhaps - just made it more romantic than either the F-15 or F-16 to my mind. I got to see one at an airshow once, afterburners on and all, which was a treat given that I don't live on the coast.
Children of the '90s have their F-22s, and F-117s, to admire, I suppose. For the rest, the postively ancient B-52 still lives.
I was sad to see the F-4 fade away over the course of the '80s, though I wasn't around for its heyday. The same with the F-111 - the last true fighter-bomber (as opposed to strike fighter) in U.S. service. I have to wonder if the "Tomcat" won't be the last pure air-combat-fighter/interceptor ever put into production for the U.S. armed forces.
...stings like you see on Dateline NBC are undoubtably far, far more effective at catching and convicting pedophiles
Yep. The vast majority of people that are arrested, if newspaper reports in my area are any indication, were actively luring children - trying to arrange a meeting. It's only afterwards that the cops found a boatload of CP on their machines.
...organized crime is often shockingly net-ignorant, but kiddie porn has been shared by the net for years....
You've got that right. From what I hear, it was there before most of us were on the net. It pre-dates the web. Many of the hard-core pædophiles seem to be very net-smart. I don't think anyone seriously interested in that kind of material is surfing for it on the open web at this point. The stray image does get posted on USENET or on imageboards like 4chan (though at least on 4chan, it is deleted within seconds, thankfully), but neither of those is the principal vector. IRC used to be the main place for it, and they've been some of the earliest adopters of Tor.
Government spying just drives criminals further underground. It does not stop them. Meanwhile, it infringes on the rights of those of us who aren't doing anything illegal. The scary thing is that so much of the country just doesn't seem to care.
They really shouldn't be publsihing stuff a writer didn't want published after they're dead, to say nothing of 'finishing' their work.
If that were the case here, I would agree. I would also agree if this were just any person doing the editing.
However, that's not the case. It isn't that JRRT didn't want these books finished - indeed he specifically etrusted his son with doing just that - he just didn't manage to get it done before he died. Many an author has that problem, and JRRT had it in spades. The man was a professor of the highest calibre, and a perfectionist to boot; he left nearly unimaginable amounts of work unfinished. There is far more than the aging CJRT will ever be able to bring to publishable form, especially given that his standards seem to be, if anything, even more conservative than his father's.
As others have noted, it was these works, the histories of the first and second ages of Middle Earth, that were JRRT's life's work. It was these works which he truly longed to bring to finished form. "The Hobbit," and TLOTR were mere side stories, writen at the behest of publishers, and never meant to be the main story. "The Silmarilion" was the main story, and the publication of the other works is in part an attempt by CJRT to flesh out that story; which, sadly, was completed in more of a rush than might have been. If it had been known in the early '70s that anyone would still care about J.R.R. Tolkien in 30 years time, I think the finished "Silmarilion" would have been better for it.
Besides, this isn't some hack, pulp-paperback writer writing new stories to milk a popular series, this is the world's foremost scholar on JRRT - a man with a personal relationship to the author which allowed him to see much of the story as it developed - painstakingly piecing together decades of manuscripts and notes into some semblence of coherence. If anyone, ever, was qualified to finish the work of another, it would be Chistopher Tolkien being qualifed to finish his father's work.
Never mind that half of the Dems (or at least their leadership) don't think he's done anything that wrong either. Many of them would like to have such means at their own disposal one day. It's all just an old boys' club, anyhow. I wonder if this situation isn't rapidly approaching a state of affairs which may not be solvable by the "democratic process."
Perhaps the subject ought to be: "Why hasn't Bush been executed for treason yet?"
Note to the NSA, DoHS, FBI, etc. (because you can never be too careful): that was an observation, not a threat.
You know, when I saw T3, I figured that the fatalism would be resolved in T4. If they have to do it without Arnold (I've heard conflicting reports), though, I can't see myself dropping the money on it. T3 was iffy enough with the absence of Linda Hamilton, and without James Cameron directing. Doing a Terminator movie without Schwarzenegger would be utterly pointless.
IMO, T2 was one of those rare sequels that made the original movie better by its company (much like Empire and Jedi did). I figure T4 will determine whether istelf and T3 are categorized as passable-to-good sequels (I doubt anything could make them nearly as great as T2), or whether they are categorized with the Matrix sequels.
I must have missed that part. The other advantage of books for me is that I tend to skim less with them.
I wish they would convert over to using more rag, linen, and hempen paper for books. Wood paper has poor archival properties, in addition to putting an awful strain on the forests. I'm not opposed to harvesting of trees (my grandfather was a sawyer and a logger), but I hate the wanton destruction of trees just to produce largely disposable paper products.
You're right about reference. I'd much rather have a book lying around when I'm trying to troubleshoot something (possibly without network access), than have to search for a printout on my desk. Books are also more portable: I can take it with me and not be tethered to my box. For HTML use, I have used the W3C doc's as my primary reference, but only because I'm fanatical about valid HTML and never found a book that was as thorough and exacting as I wanted it to be. The same goes for CSS.
One can hope. AMD should certainly be awrae of the strong support they have amongst technically astute users, espicially the *nix crowd (BSD as well as Linux). If ATI released proper *nix drivers, I'd drop nVIDIA in a heartbeat.
If there's one thing a cartel hates worse than people giving away their stuff for free, it's people people giving away their stuff for money.
There's a quote for the ages. Very true.
Not to mention that the money would add a whole new dimension to "cam-whoring." I'm thinking that FBI trouble wouldn't be too far behind the RIAA/MPAA.
I didn't intend to say that at all, but maybe some of my sentences were a bit convoluted (a bad habit of mine, I suppose). Let me try to be clearer.
If you look at my post in context, I was making the point that people who have a problem with Brown's controversial ideas should take their problem up with the source of those ideas: the authors of the aforementioned title. Whether Brown plagiarized those ideas, in his book, is a separate issue. I don't know whether he did or not, that's for the courts to decide, but either way the controversial ideas are mostly not his (that much is not disputed).
As to your analogy, however, I would say your logic is nearly as faulty as mine would have been if I'd said what you thought I did. There is a world of difference between an acknowledged fiction, written in a non-fiction style, such as TLOTR, and, for that matter, The DaVinci Code; and a purported non-fiction title like Holy Blood, Holy Grail. It's usually pretty obvious which is which, and I certainly wouldn't think fiction should need to carry a disclaimer (in fact, an author/editor/publisher should probably recognize it as a warning sign if a fiction work should need to carry such a disclaimer).
I certainly wasn't saying that anyone has the right to plagiarize either type of work (or any other work, for that matter). I was merely making the point that non-fiction authors bear a greater responsibility to truth in their writing than fiction writers; and that when faulty ideas get passed around in this manner, it does no good to condemn the son (the fiction writer) for the sins of the father (the non-fiction writer), so to speak.
In other words, go ahead and condemn Brown for plagiarism: if he's guilty, I'm all for it; but don't then also blame him for the ideas which he may have stolen. To blame Brown for the ideas is to take credit (good or bad) from the original authors.
It really all boils down to giving credit where credit is due.
The problem is that Dan Brown states that the controversial parts of the plot (if you've read it you know what I'm talking about) are truth.
I haven't read it, but I know people who have, and I know the gist of it. The reason any of it is put forward as fact, though, is because Holy Blood, Holy Grail was put forward as fact. If you want to go after someone, go after the writers of that. It's okay to mention that it was used by Brown, but it's important to make sure that people know that Brown didn't do the research, and that Brown's book is, at it's core, fiction.
As Christians I feel we need to fire back more often against this stuff, the truth is important.
Yes, the truth is most important, and I'm not trying to excuse blasphemy, but we have to be very careful about how we get the message accross. I don't think all of those rioting Muslims have made any inroads towards spreading Islam by their actions (other than spreading it by fear and violence). If we go off half-cocked after the author of a fiction work, we do Christ no service. A lot of times, as I believe has happened in this case, we just end up drawing more attention to the offensive material. Unfortunately, controversy sells in this day and age.
I just think we need to pick our battles, and we need to fight them on our terms, rather than allowing ourselves to be manipulated into becoming a promotional vehicle.
Exactly. I really do wish more people would realize that. I'm a devout Catholic, but I just can't see why people are so worked up: it was fiction, and second-rate fiction at that. If people are upset by it, they'd be better off ignoring it, rather than ranting and raving and trying to discredit an acknowledged fiction. Much of the book's popularity is a product of the controversy over it. I highly doubt it would be being made into a big-budget motion picture if people had ignored it, rather than trying to "disprove" it.
99% is a theoretical ideal; real world numbers are more like 75%, and that's at preventing pregnancy, not virus transmission (viruses, esp. microviruses, are rather smaller than sperm cells).
Fox is especially bad in this respect, IMHO. The American networks have padded seasons out with reruns for as long as I remember (since the early '80s), and I expect they've done it since at least the '60s; but Fox is worse than usual about it - probably because they juggle the schedule so much. Growing up I would say that it was rare for a timeslot to change mid-season, unless something got cancelled; but Fox does this all the time (my family didn't get cable, and hence Fox, until around '95). There's no continuity from week to week, it's like all of their program planners are ADHD or something. Often times they don't give a show a chance to take hold in a timeslot before bumping it for a few weeks, when it comes back, they don't promote it, so only the most dedicated viewers are able to follow it.
Futurama was a prime example, as is Arested Development now: moved from timeslot to timeslot, aired inconsistently, and under-promoted, then the exec's wondered why they languished. Hell, Arested wasn't even given a chance to air during November sweeps, and went on hiatus (and, of course, came back without fanfare).
Furthermore, Fox doesn't seem to realise that some series popularity is not only timeslot-dependent, but dependent on the shows around it. E.g., Sliders did okay on Friday nights until The X-Files moved from Friday to Sunday.
Of course, now all the other networks have started to do these things as well (I swear it's contagious). In addition, summer series (which are a recent phenomenon - summer used to be just reruns) spill over into fall because of sports-related preemptions (not bad-mouthing sports, BTW, I watch a fair bit myself, though I do wish they could have the World Series games in the afternoon, like they used to, at least on weekends). This further mucks up the schedules, as they start the fall lineup in September, but are still airing summer shows until November, causing timeslot conflicts which the summer shows seem to win nine times out of ten.
You're right: it really is bizarre, and seems so even to those of us who've been watching American TV all along.
Slashdot Mirror
This came up on another site yesterday, and I'll tell you the same thing I told them: Online gambling has always been illegal in the U.S.A. Heretofore, it has been implicitly illegal, under federal laws against betting over-the-phone. The federal government has already prosecuted overseas casino owners (including at least one from the U.K., where internet gambling is legal and regulated) under these laws. 60 Minutes re-aired a story on this issue just a couple of weeks ago.
The new legislation aims to make internet gambling explicitly illegal, forcing banks to prevent the transactions. Even before now, however, many banks have been co-operating with the government, blocking even merely questionable transactions (as they do on the child porn front, as well).
Personally, I think this is wrong-headed. As many have pointed out, many of the states make a substantial percentage of their income from lotteries (a far more insidious form of gambling); so how can we honestly claim to be honouring morality here? Online gambling will still take place, and all that this move guarantees, is that poorly-regulated overseas sites will have a monopoly on the trade, rather than directing the trafic to well-regulated domestic sites (and sites in countries with a decent regulatory structure, like the U.K.).
I don't actually remember the name (though that sounds right), but it's probably the same outfit. I think I heard there was only one flight-worthy Liberator around. As was said, though, I don't know if an ex-gunner would want to get back into one of those - too many bad memories, I'd bet. You never know until you ask, though, I suppose. My grandfather was in the anti-aircaft artillery, shooting down V-1s, and loved to reminisce about it, but that wasn't exactly the same experience that aircraft-gunners had.
They have one of those (and a B-24) at the airport here, every few years. They let you walk (or crawl, as is more often the case, given how cramped they are inside) through them, too. They even offer to take you on a flight (putting you in one of the crew positions), for a sizeable enough donation (a couple of hundred bucks, IIRC) - I've never taken them up on that, but I imagine it's quite a ride.
Apparently, the Phoenix was retired in '04 (yes, only the Tomcat used it). It was replaced by the AMRAAM (AIM-120), which is much shorter range, but used by all the current fighters.
Probably for the same reason as the F-111 (for which it was one of the replacements). It's meant to be a fighter-bomber (though the F-117 is not a traditional fighter-bomber). Classicaly, the USAF. only had "F-" and "B-" for combat aircraft - "A-" for attack-bombers is originally a Navy designation. Even though both braches use the same designations now, the Air Force has tended not to use "A-" in the same sense as the Navy: the only Air Force aircraft with it is the A-10, which fills a very different role than the F-117 (close air-support, rather than fixed-target bombing). Though the F-117 fills a role very much like the old Navy A-6, the Air Force has never used the "A-" designation for that type of craft. Also of note is that "F-117" is in synch with the pre-'62 numbers (the last of which was the F-111/FB-111), rather than the post-'62 (which started with the F-4)
Haha. Yeah, I really should have qualified that by saying "a whole generation of American kids." I've never seen a Tornado in person (I saw a lot of them on TV during the 1991 war), but I would have to agree as to them. I always thought of them as being somewhat like a smaller F-111. The Harrier is a Harrier no matter where you go, I think (yeah, it is AV-8B here, but everyone just says "Harrier," and reporters are apt to say "Harrier jump-jet"). It's never gotten the publicity here, in U.S. Marines service, that it has with the British Navy, but I've always liked it - it's not without its charm, and it certainly can fight.
I get to see F-16s all the time, as the Vermont Air National Guard (the "Green Mountain Boys") fly over here a lot on training flights (they did it a lot more before they were pressed into guarding the East Coast, with so much of the regular Air Force in the Middle East). They just don't have the charm of the Phantom (which they used to fly, when I was younger) or the Tomcat to me. For some reason, I always liked the late-model MiGs (the -29 especially) and the Su-27 better than the F-15 and -16. I've had the pleasure of seeing the "Fulcrum" and "Flanker" do the "Cobra" and "Cobra Turn" moves at airshows - it's pretty spectacular.
Some of the British WWII-era ones were very sexy (e.g., the Lancaster). American makers never had the knack for pretty bombers until later, though the B-36 was a neat design. The B-58 was a sexy plane, and some people think the B-1 is. I've always been partial to the Tu-95 myself.
For its role, yes. Fear that 30mm! I wouldn't call it a pretty plane, though, but an attack bomber shouldn't be, IMHO.
Only in the early design phase. It was made into a multi-purpose fighter (with both strike and air-air capabilities) well before it went into regular service.
Rather like the F-4 "Phantom," in the late '60s and the '70s, the F-14 was probably the most idealized fighter for an entire generation of kids in the '80s. Something about the design - the graceful lines, or the swing wings, perhaps - just made it more romantic than either the F-15 or F-16 to my mind. I got to see one at an airshow once, afterburners on and all, which was a treat given that I don't live on the coast.
Children of the '90s have their F-22s, and F-117s, to admire, I suppose. For the rest, the postively ancient B-52 still lives.
I was sad to see the F-4 fade away over the course of the '80s, though I wasn't around for its heyday. The same with the F-111 - the last true fighter-bomber (as opposed to strike fighter) in U.S. service. I have to wonder if the "Tomcat" won't be the last pure air-combat-fighter/interceptor ever put into production for the U.S. armed forces.
Yep. The vast majority of people that are arrested, if newspaper reports in my area are any indication, were actively luring children - trying to arrange a meeting. It's only afterwards that the cops found a boatload of CP on their machines.
You've got that right. From what I hear, it was there before most of us were on the net. It pre-dates the web. Many of the hard-core pædophiles seem to be very net-smart. I don't think anyone seriously interested in that kind of material is surfing for it on the open web at this point. The stray image does get posted on USENET or on imageboards like 4chan (though at least on 4chan, it is deleted within seconds, thankfully), but neither of those is the principal vector. IRC used to be the main place for it, and they've been some of the earliest adopters of Tor.
Government spying just drives criminals further underground. It does not stop them. Meanwhile, it infringes on the rights of those of us who aren't doing anything illegal. The scary thing is that so much of the country just doesn't seem to care.
If that were the case here, I would agree. I would also agree if this were just any person doing the editing.
However, that's not the case. It isn't that JRRT didn't want these books finished - indeed he specifically etrusted his son with doing just that - he just didn't manage to get it done before he died. Many an author has that problem, and JRRT had it in spades. The man was a professor of the highest calibre, and a perfectionist to boot; he left nearly unimaginable amounts of work unfinished. There is far more than the aging CJRT will ever be able to bring to publishable form, especially given that his standards seem to be, if anything, even more conservative than his father's.
As others have noted, it was these works, the histories of the first and second ages of Middle Earth, that were JRRT's life's work. It was these works which he truly longed to bring to finished form. "The Hobbit," and TLOTR were mere side stories, writen at the behest of publishers, and never meant to be the main story. "The Silmarilion" was the main story, and the publication of the other works is in part an attempt by CJRT to flesh out that story; which, sadly, was completed in more of a rush than might have been. If it had been known in the early '70s that anyone would still care about J.R.R. Tolkien in 30 years time, I think the finished "Silmarilion" would have been better for it.
Besides, this isn't some hack, pulp-paperback writer writing new stories to milk a popular series, this is the world's foremost scholar on JRRT - a man with a personal relationship to the author which allowed him to see much of the story as it developed - painstakingly piecing together decades of manuscripts and notes into some semblence of coherence. If anyone, ever, was qualified to finish the work of another, it would be Chistopher Tolkien being qualifed to finish his father's work.
The problems of /b/ have rather less to do with forced anonymity and rather more to do with adolescent stupidity.
Never mind that half of the Dems (or at least their leadership) don't think he's done anything that wrong either. Many of them would like to have such means at their own disposal one day. It's all just an old boys' club, anyhow. I wonder if this situation isn't rapidly approaching a state of affairs which may not be solvable by the "democratic process."
Perhaps the subject ought to be: "Why hasn't Bush been executed for treason yet?"
Note to the NSA, DoHS, FBI, etc. (because you can never be too careful): that was an observation, not a threat.
You know, when I saw T3, I figured that the fatalism would be resolved in T4. If they have to do it without Arnold (I've heard conflicting reports), though, I can't see myself dropping the money on it. T3 was iffy enough with the absence of Linda Hamilton, and without James Cameron directing. Doing a Terminator movie without Schwarzenegger would be utterly pointless.
IMO, T2 was one of those rare sequels that made the original movie better by its company (much like Empire and Jedi did). I figure T4 will determine whether istelf and T3 are categorized as passable-to-good sequels (I doubt anything could make them nearly as great as T2), or whether they are categorized with the Matrix sequels.
I must have missed that part. The other advantage of books for me is that I tend to skim less with them.
I wish they would convert over to using more rag, linen, and hempen paper for books. Wood paper has poor archival properties, in addition to putting an awful strain on the forests. I'm not opposed to harvesting of trees (my grandfather was a sawyer and a logger), but I hate the wanton destruction of trees just to produce largely disposable paper products.
You're right about reference. I'd much rather have a book lying around when I'm trying to troubleshoot something (possibly without network access), than have to search for a printout on my desk. Books are also more portable: I can take it with me and not be tethered to my box. For HTML use, I have used the W3C doc's as my primary reference, but only because I'm fanatical about valid HTML and never found a book that was as thorough and exacting as I wanted it to be. The same goes for CSS.
One could, of course, print out a hard copy from a webpage. :-/
That said, I have to agree. Webpages are a good supplement to books, but not a replacement.
One can hope. AMD should certainly be awrae of the strong support they have amongst technically astute users, espicially the *nix crowd (BSD as well as Linux). If ATI released proper *nix drivers, I'd drop nVIDIA in a heartbeat.
If that happens, it will be because of Intel, not AMD/ATI.
There's a quote for the ages. Very true.
Not to mention that the money would add a whole new dimension to "cam-whoring." I'm thinking that FBI trouble wouldn't be too far behind the RIAA/MPAA.
If you look at my post in context, I was making the point that people who have a problem with Brown's controversial ideas should take their problem up with the source of those ideas: the authors of the aforementioned title. Whether Brown plagiarized those ideas, in his book, is a separate issue. I don't know whether he did or not, that's for the courts to decide, but either way the controversial ideas are mostly not his (that much is not disputed).
As to your analogy, however, I would say your logic is nearly as faulty as mine would have been if I'd said what you thought I did. There is a world of difference between an acknowledged fiction, written in a non-fiction style, such as TLOTR, and, for that matter, The DaVinci Code; and a purported non-fiction title like Holy Blood, Holy Grail. It's usually pretty obvious which is which, and I certainly wouldn't think fiction should need to carry a disclaimer (in fact, an author/editor/publisher should probably recognize it as a warning sign if a fiction work should need to carry such a disclaimer).
I certainly wasn't saying that anyone has the right to plagiarize either type of work (or any other work, for that matter). I was merely making the point that non-fiction authors bear a greater responsibility to truth in their writing than fiction writers; and that when faulty ideas get passed around in this manner, it does no good to condemn the son (the fiction writer) for the sins of the father (the non-fiction writer), so to speak.
In other words, go ahead and condemn Brown for plagiarism: if he's guilty, I'm all for it; but don't then also blame him for the ideas which he may have stolen. To blame Brown for the ideas is to take credit (good or bad) from the original authors.
It really all boils down to giving credit where credit is due.
I just think we need to pick our battles, and we need to fight them on our terms, rather than allowing ourselves to be manipulated into becoming a promotional vehicle.
Exactly. I really do wish more people would realize that. I'm a devout Catholic, but I just can't see why people are so worked up: it was fiction, and second-rate fiction at that. If people are upset by it, they'd be better off ignoring it, rather than ranting and raving and trying to discredit an acknowledged fiction. Much of the book's popularity is a product of the controversy over it. I highly doubt it would be being made into a big-budget motion picture if people had ignored it, rather than trying to "disprove" it.
I was reffering to a woman's chance of getting HIV from an infected man. The female-to-male transmission rate is rather lower to begin with.
99% is a theoretical ideal; real world numbers are more like 75%, and that's at preventing pregnancy, not virus transmission (viruses, esp. microviruses, are rather smaller than sperm cells).
Futurama was a prime example, as is Arested Development now: moved from timeslot to timeslot, aired inconsistently, and under-promoted, then the exec's wondered why they languished. Hell, Arested wasn't even given a chance to air during November sweeps, and went on hiatus (and, of course, came back without fanfare).
Furthermore, Fox doesn't seem to realise that some series popularity is not only timeslot-dependent, but dependent on the shows around it. E.g., Sliders did okay on Friday nights until The X-Files moved from Friday to Sunday.
Of course, now all the other networks have started to do these things as well (I swear it's contagious). In addition, summer series (which are a recent phenomenon - summer used to be just reruns) spill over into fall because of sports-related preemptions (not bad-mouthing sports, BTW, I watch a fair bit myself, though I do wish they could have the World Series games in the afternoon, like they used to, at least on weekends). This further mucks up the schedules, as they start the fall lineup in September, but are still airing summer shows until November, causing timeslot conflicts which the summer shows seem to win nine times out of ten.
You're right: it really is bizarre, and seems so even to those of us who've been watching American TV all along.