And you can hold them and touch them, resell them, and duplicate them for safekeeping, and you can play them a thousand times without having to engage a "service." They are property. How is this latest innovation any different from the old Divx?
Uh, what? You realize we're talking about a rental service here, right? And one that's been fairly successful? (And by that I mean actually profitable?)
I have still to own my own mac, but I probably will in the future, because everyone I know who bought one tells me how sweet they are to use, and why wouldn't I trust my friends? After all, what I've seen from it it delivers.
My next laptop will probably be a Macbook. Not because Macs are so "sweet" to use, but because they are less bad than modern Windows-based PC's.
I use a Mac at work almost exclusively. To say it works "intuitively", as Apple fans often do, is overstating things at best. It works intuitively if you already know how to use a Mac. There are some really basic things that I expect to be able to do on any computer that I still can't get used to not being able to do on a Mac. Stuff like basic file management (delete, copy, etc.) in file dialogue windows - can't do it on a Mac. You need to back out to the Finder, do your file management, then re-open the dialogue. Renaming a file requires an imprecisely measured long button press on the mouse button (which if you miss ends up opening the file), or clicking the "get info" option in the pop-up menu. There's no simple "rename" option! Stuff like that drives me absolutely batty on Macs.
Also, stuff that MS gets vilified for - like running a billion background processes on startup and hogging resources - Apple seems to get away with unscathed. Nobody complains about many of the same things in Mac OSX as they will rail endlessly against in Windows. The fact is the two OS's have a lot of the exact same shortcomings.
But I will say that Vista has really soured me on buying a new PC (I am using it right now on my new laptop, and I absolutely hate it), and OSX is much better at handling real-time apps like music recording, which I can't even do on the PC I just bought due to OS/driver latency. So my next laptop's going to be a Mac. It doesn't hurt that they're built very well, which most computers these days aren't - one thing I will say about Apple is that their hardware is top quality stuff. (I do have an iPod, and whatever some people say about them these days, mine's been going strong for about 4 years and is a lot more of a tank than it looks.)
Apple products have their pros and cons - probably more pros than cons, but still, the cons do exist. Steve Jobs has been a master at emphasizing the pros and basically making it seem like anyone who even brings up any of the cons is an idiot, or somebody who just "doesn't get it". I credit him with that. I still don't think he's a very good software engineer... but then I guess he never claimed to be.
Jesus Christ, the summary is a bit alarmist, no? "Wipe out half to 2/3 of the continental United States?" Uh, no. It would leave half the United States under a dusting of ash. That's not the same as "wiping it out". Because, see, once the ash is cleaned up, the people, places and things underneath are all still there. At worst, it'll mean some clogged pipes and some really dirty shoes for a week or so.
The eruption of Mount St. Helens in 1980 left approximately 1/3 of the United States under a dusting of ash as well. Guess what?! We're all still here! In fact, after a couple of weeks, it was like nothing had happened. During the eruption things got a little scary for those who were very close (and deadly for those who were very, very close), but it was just more annoying than anything else for those who dealt with the ash clouds further away. It was basically like just having a big pile of dirt slowly emptied all over a big swath of the country.
As apocalyptic predictions go, this one's pretty benign.
I've replaced all my home's incandescants with CFLs. Not all are created equal. The ones in the living room table lamps are a bit warm in color, while the dining room and back porch lights are cool to the point of being bluish.
But like you say, you get used to it.
You may get used to it, but it's still not right.
I'm one of the "wimps" who "whines" about the color of CFL's. The issue is not that the color is different, the issue is that the color is wrong. CFL's have a color rendering index that is always, always, always lower than incandescent bulbs - that means they just do not render color as accurately. Even the best ones still have spikes at certain wavelengths. And it doesn't matter what color temperature CFL you get.
Not to self-promote but I was so disgusted by the color rendering of CFL's when I tried replacing the bulbs in my house that I took a comparison photo that I think illustrates the point pretty well. Both of the bulbs in that photo were the same color temperature. The CFL just does not illuminate the spectrum evenly.
You may not see it in your house, and that's great, you should enjoy your lower electric bills. But other people do.
People who want accurate color rendering are not "wimps". You wouldn't accept a computer monitor that's as wrong on color as any CFL is, so why should you expect everyone else to accept it from their light bulbs?
I'm the type who obsessively backs up all my data just in case of shit like this, so until I find a suitable replacement, I'll still have my laptop to play my favourite music on. 50 dollars = no big loss.
Wait, you back your data up *from* your Zune *to* your laptop? Something seems a little backwards there.
Anyway, you didn't just lose $50 - you lost $50 plus the cost of eventual replacement, which you shouldn't have needed. The only way you've only lost $50 is if you never replace your broken Zune.
However... the downside was that many programmers didn't bother to learn how to touch type correctly. Because they typed fast enough to be useful for their code. However if you had a real typist on your hand it would make us look like hunt and pickers by default.
I'm not sure what a "real typist" is - it's like saying somebody's a "real guitarist" only if they took formal lessons. Was the self-taught Jimi Hendrix, who had terrible technique by classic standards, not a "real guitarist"?
Touch typing, to me, just means you can type by touch, ie. without looking at the keyboard. I can do that and I've had no formal training. I type 100WPM using three fingers and a thumb on my right hand and one on my left.
My hands at rest are also angled naturally. I never really looked before but it looks like I keep my left fingers rested on the space bar, M, K, L and;, with my right fingers resting on the space bar, C, D, S and A. I don't have that odd bend in my wrists that trained touch typists have to have and that causes carpal tunnel.
I think typing training is overrated. People should learn what works best for them and is comfortable. All these "ergonomic" keyboards and whatnot seem to me to be trying to compensate for typists who have been trained in ways that are bad for their fingers and wrists.
It seems to me that blockbusters are getting bigger, AND the tail is getting longer.
Except that the top albums now sell a fraction of the number that the top albums used to. Ditto for books. Movie blockbusters have not been hit as hard but they have been hit (revenue might be up, but ticket sales are down). So yes, #4 is happening, along with all the other numbers in that list.
You pay a certain amount each year and the amount you pay determines how many games you can have downloaded at a time and each game have a number of points allocated to it, so you could for example have Braid (1 point) and Bionic Commando (1 point) and Geometry Wars (1 point) or just BioShock (3 points).
This is essentially a slightly more complex version of the Netflix model. You've added a provision to make the more popular games more "expensive", which I don't think is really necessary or warranted. I mean, Bioshock in stores costs the same to buy as other games, and there's no artificial "shortage" of it as a physical game. So I don't think there should be on the download side.
I don't think doing a pure Netflix type service for downloads is a bad idea (minus the "points" system), where you just pay a certain amount each month to have a certain number of full games on your hard drive. $30 or so per month for 3 full games or whatever (that might sound low compared to $60 per game at retail, but that would be including "budget" games and also considering that some longer games might be on a person's hard drive for months).
But I would only think it's a good idea if it's a choice. I would never buy a console if I knew that the only way to get games for it was to tack on a $30 per month service fee. And then what happens when the service goes away? The system's a doorstop.
Personally, I will always buy physical media. I have never downloaded a full game over the network, and I don't see how I ever would. There are some games that I would like to have on PSN right now, but the fact that I wouldn't actually own them is enough to stop me in my tracks. It's not a pricing issue, either - I won't even download Echochrome, which is something like 10 bucks.
Re:not uncommon
on
Sleep Mailing
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Now that there's ambien and those other zombie drugs, people are sleep driving, jogging, typing, cooking, and eating.
Well I hate to tell you this but those things were all reported before sleep aids even existed.
I'm not saying this lady necessarily took them, but that sort of thing has been known to happen on some sleep aids.
I think it's more likely that it happens to people taking sleep aids because they are overtired to begin with... which is why they're taking sleep aids.
In other words, correlation != causality.
Now, as for this, I found the summary both interesting and hilarious. I would be both freaked out and amused if I woke to find the stream of my subconscious having been typed out into a series of emails. Of course, I'd put a lock on my computer that would require complex thought to unlock shortly after...
Clearly you either work for Sony or are otherwise tasked with promoting Home. And I don't just mean that because I find it so unbelievable that anyone could be so gung-ho about such an obviously flawed program, but also because you've clearly got your hands on information that nobody could possibly know given the limited amount of time the public has had to digest this thing at this point. I played around in there last night for a few hours and I didn't see half the stuff you're talking about.
There are 18 million PS3 already worldwide with 14 million PSN accounts. So the massive amount of traffic on the Home servers yesterday was understandable. No other MMORPG or online world has ever been build to handle such a gigantic userbase.
Then why did I only see about 200 people total in the entire world last night?
Let's break it down. Last night when I tried to connect to the PSN network, I was told I'd need a system update. Half an hour later, my system went through its reboot and I was done with that. So, then, go to load home. Another download, another reboot, another half an hour. So, now I'm finally in my apartment. I go to leave, and am confronted with yet another download.
What regular person is going to put up with this? This only even has a prayer with the truly hardcore. It's too much work to even get started.
Everyone is filling out their friends list with people they've met. People are playing the in Home games together, checking out the initial game spaces for Uncharted and Far Cry 2, dancing in the social music area, or just hanging out chatting with their old or new friends.
I saw, and I am totally serious about this, nobody doing any of these things.
There are things to unlock in the various games throughout Home for your avatar or personal spaces. And of course there are things you can buy if you wish to.
I certainly found things I could buy (who is Sony kidding with this? I'm going to pay $1 for a fake table?). I found nothing I could unlock. And if I couldn't, no average person who doesn't have four hours to kill on a Thursday night is going to.
If you are a solo player you can setup up an online game and then invite or have people join you while you are in Home. It shows which game you have setup under your name for other to see. Once you are ready you all launch together right into the game as a party.
Again, I saw not a single person doing this. Why would you invite people this way? It is much, much easier to simply start up the game and send out an invite.
And then there are the third party game spaces that almost every console developer is in the process of creating. You don't have to have the game to enter these areas. Each of these spaces look just like the real game and give you a feel for what the game is like with the overall art style of the space, pictures from the games up on the walls, and movies streaming from the game.
You can't see it, but I'm rolling my eyes.
The ability to walk around in a space that looks kind of like a game is not very compelling to me, nor I suspect anyone else. Give me a demo and I'm a lot happier, not to mention a lot more likely to buy the game.
What you're saying is not unlike what Linden Labs was saying about Second Life (how every major company was building "islands" in the game). We all saw how well that worked out. People would rather just look at stuff on a web page.
And there are already third party non-game Spaces going into Home like Red Bull's space that is going live next week.
Great, so I can experience an ad!
Can you please tell me why you think people will want to do this? Every single time somebody has tried to position an ad as if it's some sort of compelling content, it has failed. Especially in virtual worlds. Every single time.
A year from now it looks like there will be easily more than a hundred different Sony, third party game, and third party non-g
TFA sounds more like; "Yeah, there was this really cool game a long time ago that did it right. Most of you probably never heard of it, so we are more 'leet' the you. It rocked! We hope we can do the same thing now, but better."
I'm not sure who they're even "leeting", because if you check around, there are countless articles going back years talking about Dune II's influence on the RTS genre. This is more like a "hey, let's look at a Wikipedia page and ape it for some page views" article. There's never been any mystery about where the RTS genre came from.
Yes Dune2 was kick-ass. (It still is too!) Most RTS now depend on who builds the most grunts the quickest, wins. That removes the whole 'S'trategy aspect of the game.
Dune (1) was pretty kick-ass too, and it always gets forgotten in these discussions - it actually introduced most of the concepts credited to Dune II. It just wasn't real-time as I remember. But it had the resource-gathering and the army-building and whatnot. I used to love watching the progress of the battles, with a little arm-wrestling icon representing who was winning:)
I agree about modern RTS's, which I can't even play online. I prefer playing them offline where I can play at my own pace.
If you don't draw the line at "no photo alterations, even if they're just cosmetic", where do you draw it?
Generally I agree, but this amounts to a portrait. It's not a "news" or "editorial" photo, it's more of a "publicity" photo. And those are *always* altered and *always* run by news organizations anyway. For example, this is Newsday - you think that photo of Bush came out of the camera looking exactly like that? No, it's been retouched like all portraits have - not so obviously, but still, it's not "unaltered". The wrinkles have been softened, blemishes edited out, etc.
The only difference here is that this general didn't get up and formally pose in front of a background, somebody made it for her afterwards. Maybe she didn't have time - she's a general in wartime, after all.
I get the opposite reaction. I find Apple's ads cute, fun, and surprisingly truthful as Microsoft runs desperate "I'm a PC, so I'm nowhere near my computer" ads.
MS's first ad in that series I thought was brilliant. (The two guys in Apple's ads are nowhere near PC's either.) It was both a really positive message for MS and a really subtle but effective needling of Apple. It showed the diversity of PC users, with both regular and famous/creative people, and by extension implied pretty effectively that Apple users were all just bratty hipsters without ever even mentioning Apple or the Mac. It was kind of like that 30 minute Obama ad where he never once mentioned John McCain's name, because he didn't have to.
They've since stupidly retired that ad after only showing it for about 2 weeks, and have now jumped on the "user generated" bandwagon with these horrible ads filled with YouTube-quality videos made by a bunch of dorks sitting in front of their webcams. Stupid.
I do agree about the Apple ads, though. Much as I like the first MS ad in that series and thought it was an effective counter-argument, the Apple ads it was in response to are just as effective and funny in their own way. And the latest two Vista ones really hit home, because they are true - and I can identify with them now that I'm an unhappy Vista owner myself. (Though a Mac is not an alternative for me, as so much of my software is not available on Mac and I'm not about to buy it all again anyway.) I laughed out loud at the "advertising, advertising, advertising, fix Vista" one.
How much have you used Vista, exactly? That's a pretty bold assertion to make considering that I haven't seen it crash once
I've had my Vista machine for three days and it's already frozen on me once (literally while just typing in Firefox). Not really a horrible record, but I've run XP for more than 200 days straight without any sort of hiccup, so in comparison, Vista's got a much worse failure rate.
It's just not worth the cost. If a computer comes with it, that's nice - I'll take it
You may come to regret that attitude, as I have. I needed to buy a new laptop (old one broke) and I considered whether I should pay extra to get a new XP license with it, but because this was an unexpected purchase I ended up deciding to save the money and go with Vista.
Big mistake.
For one thing, I discovered Vista's DPC latency is always, always worse than XP. This is a big deal for me as I record music, not professionally, but for myself and it's one of the things I use my computer for. Basically can't do it in Vista, the OS defers too many procedure calls.
And I've spent literally *days* now trying to get the OS to run the way I want it to run, figuring out what I can safely shut off and basically trying to streamline it to where I don't have a mess of useless junk running all the time and slowing down my system. (I have a ThinkPad, so I'm not talking about crapware that came pre-installed, I'm talking about Vista processes, services, etc.)
I actually ended up turning Aero off and going back to the Vista Basic interface. Aero is just tiring to look at after a while, and seems to serve no real purpose. I see no justification whatsoever for dedicating all those resources to it.
Someone said in another thread about Vista that while it's basically a functional OS, it fails at what an OS is supposed to do and that's let you run the programs you want to run without getting in the way. It is instead an impediment. It's like a spoiled child constantly begging for attention and throwing tantrums when you don't give it any. I feel like I need to babysit it all the time; I am literally working more on Vista than I am doing anything productive on my computer.
If I had it to do again, I would spend the extra money for the XP downgrade.
You can't get away with that in the U.S. If you advertise something as one price, and some sort of agreement is already made, i.e. you paid for it, it has to be honored.
If you paid for it, yes, then the price must be honored.
However, if you have not yet paid for it, ie. you submitted an order online but have not been charged, then the retailer is under no obligation to honor the price.
This all goes back to the FTC's "mail order rule" which has been in effect since before the internet. This rule was originally intended to specify time periods for shipment, but the side effect of that is that it defines what "order completion" and acceptance are. Basically, once payment is accepted, the order is considered a contract and the retailer has 30 days to ship the goods whether they want to or not. The FTC and the courts have held that this same idea of a "properly completed order" also extends to pricing. In other words, a sales contract is a sales contract, and the point when payment is accepted is the point when the contract is in force.
But until payment is made, the order is not considered properly completed and it can be changed or canceled by either side.
This is one of the main reasons most retailers do not charge your card until your order actually ships. They've turned this into a trust point, a selling point, but they do it to protect themselves against things like typos and inventory mistakes. As long as you're not actually charged, they can take as long as they want to send your order, and they can make any pricing changes they want. You obviously need to agree to any pricing changes, but the choices are to accept or cancel the order; you have no legal leverage to make the retailer honor their original price.
While I don't doubt that Wal-Mart has products specially made for it, I doubt that's the case with the Acer laptops in question. I have never seen an Acer laptop for sale anywhere (including Wal-Mart) that didn't look exactly the same as Acer laptops sold everywhere else.
And I bought one myself sold by CompUSA. Now, this particular *configuration* that I bought was made only for CompUSA and that may be true at Wal-Mart as well. But the laptop itself was just a regular Acer that just happened to have a particular set of specs.
Long story short, my Acer laptop died after 18 months. The power connector broke, physically broke. Around the same time, the lid cracked at the hinge.
The moral of the story is that Acer laptops are cheap pieces of shit.
His use of the word "socialist" was obviously satirical. As in, there is a large group of people in this country that calls government investment in public works projects with citizen tax money a "socialist" idea.
If you asked 100 Americans "do you think the federal government raising taxes on the top 1% of earners, then spending those tax dollars on a rail project thousands of miles away from where you live is a socialist idea?" I guarantee a majority of them will say yes. That was the parent poster's point, which you completely missed.
What if ultra-expensive trains, requiring (due to their speed) very smooth runs of rail, are justified by market and geographic conditions in Japan which do not exist in America? Japan's decision to proceed and America's decision to refrain are both therefore simple rational efficiency tradeoffs. Most people call that 'capitalism', in the sense that rail is only being laid in places that can turn a profit with it.
No, that's not capitalism, in the same way "redistribution of wealth" or using tax dollars for public works is not socialism.
Capitalism by its very nature is free market based. There is nothing free market about government spending billions of dollars investing in infrastructure. The free market may benefit from these public works, but the government itself does not. In fact, this is the point!
Similarly, calling progressive taxation "socialism" is ridiculous when you consider the fact that the entire reason taxes exist at all is redistribution of wealth! Whether it's a flat tax or a progressive tax, the entire point of taxes is taking money from somebody and putting it somewhere else that it might do more for the common good. So unless you believe taxes in general are socialist and nobody should ever have to pay them at all, there's no reason not to support whatever tax-funded programs might benefit society as a whole. (And even the most rabid anti-socialists in this country seem to support the military, which is one such tax-funded program. Your wealth has been redistributed to the military and the industrial complex that supports it!)
My point is there is a middle ground here, which is what even you, who don't sound like the most unreasonable person I've ever met, are missing. You acknowledge that government works can sometimes be good but yet you argue that in those cases, those works must be good only because they are capitalist! That does not follow.
There's no either/or when it comes to capitalism and socialism. This is yet another case where one side is trying to present things as black and white, but I think we've all learned by now that the real world doesn't work that way.
Some government programs are good, some are bad. The good ones aren't all capitalist and the bad ones aren't all socialist. Taxes are annoying but necessary. At the end of the day, you pick and choose what you support based on what you think is best for society (and yes, yourself). But assigning these loaded labels like socialist or capitalist to things when they have no bearing on what we're talking about is not helpful. (And the parent was trying to prove that.)
Amtrak just got a $13 billion funding authorization this week. That's about double what they usually get (per year). I'd hardly say rail is a "dead end" here, especially considering:
a) this funding increase came under a Republican president who has actually tried to kill Amtrak several times - imagine what will happen with a rail-friendly administration
and
b) Amtrak's ridership is at all time highs.
Not to mention that's all happening with antiquated equipment on poorly-maintained rails owned by freight companies that do not allow Amtrak trains to run on time. If rail travel can do this well under these circumstances, just imagine how well it could do if we actually invested properly in rail infrastructure like they do everywhere else in the industrialized world.
For me it's just that the games themselves have changed. I think the term "social gaming" is being misapplied here. The real story is just that older gamers don't like playing online, and that's my story as well. It's partly what's caused me to quit gaming so much.
The single-player or in-room multiplayer games that are left are mostly sports games or shooters. And sports games are just played out for a lot of people over 30, and shooters were played out 10 years ago for anyone over 30.
What's missing are the new, unique, but simple experiences that used to define gaming and that those of us over 30 grew up on. Where's the modern equivalent of Pac-Man? There is no such thing. Instead we just get Pac-Man itself, rehashed, for about the 400th time, as if that's what older gamers really want. We buy it, grudgingly, because we feel like we've got no other choice. But what we really want is an experience like that, only new.
In the book Lennon in America, written by Geoffrey Giuliano, Lennon commented that the song was "an anti-religious, anti-nationalistic, anti-conventional, anti-capitalistic song, but because it's sugar-coated, it's accepted." Lennon also described it as "virtually the Communist Manifesto".
Probably not a socialist or communist in the traditional sense, but I think he was politically very close to those ideas. Unlike most socialists and communists, I don't think he had clear ideas or plans about actually enacting change.
There are three stages of Communism. Most Americans only know of the first (revolution), because that's the only stage we ever actually saw.
From what I recall from my book-learnin' in college, the stages are:
1. Revolution - the entire world switches, violently if necessary, to a communist system.
2. Re-education - the population learns to sacrifice their personal possessions and live as one, with collective ownership. A transitional government would exist during this period to administer the re-education. This could occur region by region as revolution was completed in those areas. But for stage 3 to happen, re-education of the world would have to be complete worldwide.
3. "Utopia" (don't remember what it was actually called) - the world being united and re-educated, the government melts away and citizens of the world live in peace, free of the oppression of organized religion, government, or material possessions.
Now, "Imagine" sounds a lot like stage 3 of Communism, doesn't it?
It is a Communist song. Whether he actually believed stages 1 and 2 could work in practice, he clearly believed in at least the ideals of the ultimate stage of Communism. And I've always found it sort of ironic that so many Americans celebrate this song (and that it is in fact used in commercials!) when it is pretty much the antithesis of all we stand for.
That said, I don't think those ideals are anything most people could argue with (unless you're a rabid capitalist or very religious). Communism was intended to be benevolent - it was supposed to end all wars, all violence, all crime. It was supposed to bring world peace and overall prosperity (not for individuals, but for the world "commune" as a whole). And, again ironically, it was supposed to bring complete and total freedom in its final stage.
Obviously most of the world never got past stage 1. A few areas, like the USSR and China, made it to stage 2. But it was always an idea doomed to failure. If our goal (as it was) was to protect our current system, then the US was actually right to be scared of communism's march in the 1950's - the goal was to take over the world. That wasn't just paranoia. None of the communist countries were intended to last forever - the governments as designed were supposed to be temporary. All we really needed to do was block and then outlast them, and we were always in a naturally better position to do that.
The point being, while in the 1950's it may have been scary to hear somebody described as a Communist, these days it sounds almost quaint, somewhat naive. (Seinfeld taught us that.) People used to get really defensive when someone would say this song is Communist, but they really shouldn't.
I don't care how much you spend helping other people, so long as it is YOUR money you spend, and not through the process of raiding your neighbors' wallets.
So I guess your overall argument is that nobody should ever have to pay any taxes?
In every society, everybody has to pay such that society as a whole benefits. That doesn't mean every single person in society gets to see every single benefit that their taxes pay for. For example, you may never need an ambulance, but your taxes help pay for them for others. Does that make government a "thief" because it took your money to help pay for ambulances?
You likely *will* see other benefits that other taxpayers don't get, though. Maybe you won't ever need an ambulance, but maybe someday you need a state grant for college, or unemployment benefits, or a FEMA-guaranteed loan to rebuild a house destroyed by a natural disaster. That's the tradeoff, and we all accept it. It's part of living in a civilized society. If a benefit exists, it exists for anyone should someone be in a situation to need it, not just those who chose to pay for it. You don't get to directly choose what benefits you pay for and what you don't; that's called anarchy. And you know what? We tried that in this country - it was called the Wild West. And that's not the kind of country I think many people would want to live in these days.
Another phrase I saw was "intentionally ambiguous". It kind of sounds like it's supposed to be vague and left up to the courts to decide in each case, which doesn't sound like good law to me but then IANAL.
Some laws are written intentionally such that the standards of society can be applied through case law. There are times when congress doesn't intend to write a blanket law expressly forbidding or permitting something, but instead wants to allow for an organic definition of the law to form over time. There are pros and cons to that approach.
A lot of case law on fair use does exist, and based on what I know of it, I don't see how this case was "clearly" fair use as described in the article summary. The courts themselves have noted that each case has to be considered individually - there is no singular guiding principle to define what "fair" means in every context. Judgments in some cases seem to contradict judgments in other cases, although it usually comes down to some minor detail or just a question of degree. (For example, when 2 Live Crew was at one point found guilty of infringing for their use of "Pretty Woman", the problem was just the amount of the song that they used.)
One thing is for sure - the position of the copyright owners doesn't matter at all. The copyright owner doesn't get to decide what's fair use and what isn't. Otherwise the copyright owners would win every single lawsuit, and they don't. The law is what it is; it's a specific exception to copyright law. The only question is how to actually define that exception.
There are four criteria that are specifically mentioned in the law that courts use in deciding these cases, although the wording of the law makes it clear that those are not the *only* criteria to be used. Still, they are always the starting point. Generally, they will try to look at the balance of how the work in question fits in with those criteria. In other words, use of a copyrighted work can be fair use even if it's *not* parody (one of the four criteria), provided it's just a short excerpt and is used for criticism. It's not that all four criteria need to be satisfied for something to be fair use. Any one or all can be, plus more criteria not mentioned in the law specifically, and the courts have to decide all this on a case by case basis.
I would think this would be a tricky case. It's only 15 seconds, and you could argue it's being used for criticism and comment, but on the other hand it is a for-profit work (nothing about it being a documentary changes that) and it doesn't sound like the song had much to do with the theme of the film itself - an argument could be made that using this song in a documentary on creationism would harm the song's reputation and hurt its future commercial prospects. (ie. it'd be hard for an ad agency to use a song in a Nike ad that's closely associated with creationism). All that and more would be considered by the courts.
It's certainly not "clearly" a case of fair use. It may or may not be.
Have you seen the furor over Palin's belief in creationism? What about people who oppose all religion? All of these things show that they think they know better than the people that they're talking about.
People think that conservatives are anti-intellectual, which isn't necessarily the case. It's that they're anti-elitism.
If you believe in creationism, then yes, you are anti-intellectual by definition. There is no reason guiding a belief in creationism; only faith.
And "elite" means "above average" or "excellent". If you're anti-elite, then you're pro-mediocrity, and that's certainly not a quality I look for in a leader. But it is a belief that got us George Bush.
I'm pro-elite and proud of it. We should be demanding more from our leaders, not less. If I want somebody I can drink a beer with, I'll call up a friend. That's not what I'm expecting from a President (or Vice President, for that matter).
When it comes down to it, there are people in this country and in the world who think that if you hold a certain belief, you are instantly a moron and someone who isn't to be given respect.
When your beliefs have been disproven by science many, many times in many, many ways, and those scientific results have been published in very public ways over a period of a century or more, then they're probably right to think that.
Do you also believe the world is flat? And should I not think you a moron for that belief?
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And you can hold them and touch them, resell them, and duplicate them for safekeeping, and you can play them a thousand times without having to engage a "service." They are property. How is this latest innovation any different from the old Divx?
Uh, what? You realize we're talking about a rental service here, right? And one that's been fairly successful? (And by that I mean actually profitable?)
I have still to own my own mac, but I probably will in the future, because everyone I know who bought one tells me how sweet they are to use, and why wouldn't I trust my friends? After all, what I've seen from it it delivers.
My next laptop will probably be a Macbook. Not because Macs are so "sweet" to use, but because they are less bad than modern Windows-based PC's.
I use a Mac at work almost exclusively. To say it works "intuitively", as Apple fans often do, is overstating things at best. It works intuitively if you already know how to use a Mac. There are some really basic things that I expect to be able to do on any computer that I still can't get used to not being able to do on a Mac. Stuff like basic file management (delete, copy, etc.) in file dialogue windows - can't do it on a Mac. You need to back out to the Finder, do your file management, then re-open the dialogue. Renaming a file requires an imprecisely measured long button press on the mouse button (which if you miss ends up opening the file), or clicking the "get info" option in the pop-up menu. There's no simple "rename" option! Stuff like that drives me absolutely batty on Macs.
Also, stuff that MS gets vilified for - like running a billion background processes on startup and hogging resources - Apple seems to get away with unscathed. Nobody complains about many of the same things in Mac OSX as they will rail endlessly against in Windows. The fact is the two OS's have a lot of the exact same shortcomings.
But I will say that Vista has really soured me on buying a new PC (I am using it right now on my new laptop, and I absolutely hate it), and OSX is much better at handling real-time apps like music recording, which I can't even do on the PC I just bought due to OS/driver latency. So my next laptop's going to be a Mac. It doesn't hurt that they're built very well, which most computers these days aren't - one thing I will say about Apple is that their hardware is top quality stuff. (I do have an iPod, and whatever some people say about them these days, mine's been going strong for about 4 years and is a lot more of a tank than it looks.)
Apple products have their pros and cons - probably more pros than cons, but still, the cons do exist. Steve Jobs has been a master at emphasizing the pros and basically making it seem like anyone who even brings up any of the cons is an idiot, or somebody who just "doesn't get it". I credit him with that. I still don't think he's a very good software engineer... but then I guess he never claimed to be.
Jesus Christ, the summary is a bit alarmist, no? "Wipe out half to 2/3 of the continental United States?" Uh, no. It would leave half the United States under a dusting of ash. That's not the same as "wiping it out". Because, see, once the ash is cleaned up, the people, places and things underneath are all still there. At worst, it'll mean some clogged pipes and some really dirty shoes for a week or so.
The eruption of Mount St. Helens in 1980 left approximately 1/3 of the United States under a dusting of ash as well. Guess what?! We're all still here! In fact, after a couple of weeks, it was like nothing had happened. During the eruption things got a little scary for those who were very close (and deadly for those who were very, very close), but it was just more annoying than anything else for those who dealt with the ash clouds further away. It was basically like just having a big pile of dirt slowly emptied all over a big swath of the country.
As apocalyptic predictions go, this one's pretty benign.
I've replaced all my home's incandescants with CFLs. Not all are created equal. The ones in the living room table lamps are a bit warm in color, while the dining room and back porch lights are cool to the point of being bluish.
But like you say, you get used to it.
You may get used to it, but it's still not right.
I'm one of the "wimps" who "whines" about the color of CFL's. The issue is not that the color is different, the issue is that the color is wrong. CFL's have a color rendering index that is always, always, always lower than incandescent bulbs - that means they just do not render color as accurately. Even the best ones still have spikes at certain wavelengths. And it doesn't matter what color temperature CFL you get.
Not to self-promote but I was so disgusted by the color rendering of CFL's when I tried replacing the bulbs in my house that I took a comparison photo that I think illustrates the point pretty well. Both of the bulbs in that photo were the same color temperature. The CFL just does not illuminate the spectrum evenly.
You may not see it in your house, and that's great, you should enjoy your lower electric bills. But other people do.
People who want accurate color rendering are not "wimps". You wouldn't accept a computer monitor that's as wrong on color as any CFL is, so why should you expect everyone else to accept it from their light bulbs?
I'm the type who obsessively backs up all my data just in case of shit like this, so until I find a suitable replacement, I'll still have my laptop to play my favourite music on. 50 dollars = no big loss.
Wait, you back your data up *from* your Zune *to* your laptop? Something seems a little backwards there.
Anyway, you didn't just lose $50 - you lost $50 plus the cost of eventual replacement, which you shouldn't have needed. The only way you've only lost $50 is if you never replace your broken Zune.
However... the downside was that many programmers didn't bother to learn how to touch type correctly. Because they typed fast enough to be useful for their code. However if you had a real typist on your hand it would make us look like hunt and pickers by default.
I'm not sure what a "real typist" is - it's like saying somebody's a "real guitarist" only if they took formal lessons. Was the self-taught Jimi Hendrix, who had terrible technique by classic standards, not a "real guitarist"?
Touch typing, to me, just means you can type by touch, ie. without looking at the keyboard. I can do that and I've had no formal training. I type 100WPM using three fingers and a thumb on my right hand and one on my left.
My hands at rest are also angled naturally. I never really looked before but it looks like I keep my left fingers rested on the space bar, M, K, L and ;, with my right fingers resting on the space bar, C, D, S and A. I don't have that odd bend in my wrists that trained touch typists have to have and that causes carpal tunnel.
I think typing training is overrated. People should learn what works best for them and is comfortable. All these "ergonomic" keyboards and whatnot seem to me to be trying to compensate for typists who have been trained in ways that are bad for their fingers and wrists.
It seems to me that blockbusters are getting bigger, AND the tail is getting longer.
Except that the top albums now sell a fraction of the number that the top albums used to. Ditto for books. Movie blockbusters have not been hit as hard but they have been hit (revenue might be up, but ticket sales are down). So yes, #4 is happening, along with all the other numbers in that list.
The Long Tail is real.
One person had a doubt, then a second, therefore it multiplied by a factor of two.
Or nobody had any doubt, and it multiplied by infinity. Which means it's still zero.
Dumb headline, dumb summary too - the theory is about the tail being long, not thick or tall.
You pay a certain amount each year and the amount you pay determines how many games you can have downloaded at a time and each game have a number of points allocated to it, so you could for example have Braid (1 point) and Bionic Commando (1 point) and Geometry Wars (1 point) or just BioShock (3 points).
This is essentially a slightly more complex version of the Netflix model. You've added a provision to make the more popular games more "expensive", which I don't think is really necessary or warranted. I mean, Bioshock in stores costs the same to buy as other games, and there's no artificial "shortage" of it as a physical game. So I don't think there should be on the download side.
I don't think doing a pure Netflix type service for downloads is a bad idea (minus the "points" system), where you just pay a certain amount each month to have a certain number of full games on your hard drive. $30 or so per month for 3 full games or whatever (that might sound low compared to $60 per game at retail, but that would be including "budget" games and also considering that some longer games might be on a person's hard drive for months).
But I would only think it's a good idea if it's a choice. I would never buy a console if I knew that the only way to get games for it was to tack on a $30 per month service fee. And then what happens when the service goes away? The system's a doorstop.
Personally, I will always buy physical media. I have never downloaded a full game over the network, and I don't see how I ever would. There are some games that I would like to have on PSN right now, but the fact that I wouldn't actually own them is enough to stop me in my tracks. It's not a pricing issue, either - I won't even download Echochrome, which is something like 10 bucks.
Now that there's ambien and those other zombie drugs, people are sleep driving, jogging, typing, cooking, and eating.
Well I hate to tell you this but those things were all reported before sleep aids even existed.
I'm not saying this lady necessarily took them, but that sort of thing has been known to happen on some sleep aids.
I think it's more likely that it happens to people taking sleep aids because they are overtired to begin with... which is why they're taking sleep aids.
In other words, correlation != causality.
Now, as for this, I found the summary both interesting and hilarious. I would be both freaked out and amused if I woke to find the stream of my subconscious having been typed out into a series of emails. Of course, I'd put a lock on my computer that would require complex thought to unlock shortly after...
Clearly you either work for Sony or are otherwise tasked with promoting Home. And I don't just mean that because I find it so unbelievable that anyone could be so gung-ho about such an obviously flawed program, but also because you've clearly got your hands on information that nobody could possibly know given the limited amount of time the public has had to digest this thing at this point. I played around in there last night for a few hours and I didn't see half the stuff you're talking about.
There are 18 million PS3 already worldwide with 14 million PSN accounts. So the massive amount of traffic on the Home servers yesterday was understandable. No other MMORPG or online world has ever been build to handle such a gigantic userbase.
Then why did I only see about 200 people total in the entire world last night?
Let's break it down. Last night when I tried to connect to the PSN network, I was told I'd need a system update. Half an hour later, my system went through its reboot and I was done with that. So, then, go to load home. Another download, another reboot, another half an hour. So, now I'm finally in my apartment. I go to leave, and am confronted with yet another download.
What regular person is going to put up with this? This only even has a prayer with the truly hardcore. It's too much work to even get started.
Everyone is filling out their friends list with people they've met. People are playing the in Home games together, checking out the initial game spaces for Uncharted and Far Cry 2, dancing in the social music area, or just hanging out chatting with their old or new friends.
I saw, and I am totally serious about this, nobody doing any of these things.
There are things to unlock in the various games throughout Home for your avatar or personal spaces. And of course there are things you can buy if you wish to.
I certainly found things I could buy (who is Sony kidding with this? I'm going to pay $1 for a fake table?). I found nothing I could unlock. And if I couldn't, no average person who doesn't have four hours to kill on a Thursday night is going to.
If you are a solo player you can setup up an online game and then invite or have people join you while you are in Home. It shows which game you have setup under your name for other to see. Once you are ready you all launch together right into the game as a party.
Again, I saw not a single person doing this. Why would you invite people this way? It is much, much easier to simply start up the game and send out an invite.
And then there are the third party game spaces that almost every console developer is in the process of creating. You don't have to have the game to enter these areas. Each of these spaces look just like the real game and give you a feel for what the game is like with the overall art style of the space, pictures from the games up on the walls, and movies streaming from the game.
You can't see it, but I'm rolling my eyes.
The ability to walk around in a space that looks kind of like a game is not very compelling to me, nor I suspect anyone else. Give me a demo and I'm a lot happier, not to mention a lot more likely to buy the game.
What you're saying is not unlike what Linden Labs was saying about Second Life (how every major company was building "islands" in the game). We all saw how well that worked out. People would rather just look at stuff on a web page.
And there are already third party non-game Spaces going into Home like Red Bull's space that is going live next week.
Great, so I can experience an ad!
Can you please tell me why you think people will want to do this? Every single time somebody has tried to position an ad as if it's some sort of compelling content, it has failed. Especially in virtual worlds. Every single time.
A year from now it looks like there will be easily more than a hundred different Sony, third party game, and third party non-g
TFA sounds more like; "Yeah, there was this really cool game a long time ago that did it right. Most of you probably never heard of it, so we are more 'leet' the you. It rocked! We hope we can do the same thing now, but better."
I'm not sure who they're even "leeting", because if you check around, there are countless articles going back years talking about Dune II's influence on the RTS genre. This is more like a "hey, let's look at a Wikipedia page and ape it for some page views" article. There's never been any mystery about where the RTS genre came from.
Yes Dune2 was kick-ass. (It still is too!) Most RTS now depend on who builds the most grunts the quickest, wins. That removes the whole 'S'trategy aspect of the game.
Dune (1) was pretty kick-ass too, and it always gets forgotten in these discussions - it actually introduced most of the concepts credited to Dune II. It just wasn't real-time as I remember. But it had the resource-gathering and the army-building and whatnot. I used to love watching the progress of the battles, with a little arm-wrestling icon representing who was winning :)
I agree about modern RTS's, which I can't even play online. I prefer playing them offline where I can play at my own pace.
If you don't draw the line at "no photo alterations, even if they're just cosmetic", where do you draw it?
Generally I agree, but this amounts to a portrait. It's not a "news" or "editorial" photo, it's more of a "publicity" photo. And those are *always* altered and *always* run by news organizations anyway. For example, this is Newsday - you think that photo of Bush came out of the camera looking exactly like that? No, it's been retouched like all portraits have - not so obviously, but still, it's not "unaltered". The wrinkles have been softened, blemishes edited out, etc.
The only difference here is that this general didn't get up and formally pose in front of a background, somebody made it for her afterwards. Maybe she didn't have time - she's a general in wartime, after all.
I get the opposite reaction. I find Apple's ads cute, fun, and surprisingly truthful as Microsoft runs desperate "I'm a PC, so I'm nowhere near my computer" ads.
MS's first ad in that series I thought was brilliant. (The two guys in Apple's ads are nowhere near PC's either.) It was both a really positive message for MS and a really subtle but effective needling of Apple. It showed the diversity of PC users, with both regular and famous/creative people, and by extension implied pretty effectively that Apple users were all just bratty hipsters without ever even mentioning Apple or the Mac. It was kind of like that 30 minute Obama ad where he never once mentioned John McCain's name, because he didn't have to.
They've since stupidly retired that ad after only showing it for about 2 weeks, and have now jumped on the "user generated" bandwagon with these horrible ads filled with YouTube-quality videos made by a bunch of dorks sitting in front of their webcams. Stupid.
I do agree about the Apple ads, though. Much as I like the first MS ad in that series and thought it was an effective counter-argument, the Apple ads it was in response to are just as effective and funny in their own way. And the latest two Vista ones really hit home, because they are true - and I can identify with them now that I'm an unhappy Vista owner myself. (Though a Mac is not an alternative for me, as so much of my software is not available on Mac and I'm not about to buy it all again anyway.) I laughed out loud at the "advertising, advertising, advertising, fix Vista" one.
How much have you used Vista, exactly? That's a pretty bold assertion to make considering that I haven't seen it crash once
I've had my Vista machine for three days and it's already frozen on me once (literally while just typing in Firefox). Not really a horrible record, but I've run XP for more than 200 days straight without any sort of hiccup, so in comparison, Vista's got a much worse failure rate.
It's just not worth the cost. If a computer comes with it, that's nice - I'll take it
You may come to regret that attitude, as I have. I needed to buy a new laptop (old one broke) and I considered whether I should pay extra to get a new XP license with it, but because this was an unexpected purchase I ended up deciding to save the money and go with Vista.
Big mistake.
For one thing, I discovered Vista's DPC latency is always, always worse than XP. This is a big deal for me as I record music, not professionally, but for myself and it's one of the things I use my computer for. Basically can't do it in Vista, the OS defers too many procedure calls.
And I've spent literally *days* now trying to get the OS to run the way I want it to run, figuring out what I can safely shut off and basically trying to streamline it to where I don't have a mess of useless junk running all the time and slowing down my system. (I have a ThinkPad, so I'm not talking about crapware that came pre-installed, I'm talking about Vista processes, services, etc.)
I actually ended up turning Aero off and going back to the Vista Basic interface. Aero is just tiring to look at after a while, and seems to serve no real purpose. I see no justification whatsoever for dedicating all those resources to it.
Someone said in another thread about Vista that while it's basically a functional OS, it fails at what an OS is supposed to do and that's let you run the programs you want to run without getting in the way. It is instead an impediment. It's like a spoiled child constantly begging for attention and throwing tantrums when you don't give it any. I feel like I need to babysit it all the time; I am literally working more on Vista than I am doing anything productive on my computer.
If I had it to do again, I would spend the extra money for the XP downgrade.
You can't get away with that in the U.S. If you advertise something as one price, and some sort of agreement is already made, i.e. you paid for it, it has to be honored.
If you paid for it, yes, then the price must be honored.
However, if you have not yet paid for it, ie. you submitted an order online but have not been charged, then the retailer is under no obligation to honor the price.
This all goes back to the FTC's "mail order rule" which has been in effect since before the internet. This rule was originally intended to specify time periods for shipment, but the side effect of that is that it defines what "order completion" and acceptance are. Basically, once payment is accepted, the order is considered a contract and the retailer has 30 days to ship the goods whether they want to or not. The FTC and the courts have held that this same idea of a "properly completed order" also extends to pricing. In other words, a sales contract is a sales contract, and the point when payment is accepted is the point when the contract is in force.
But until payment is made, the order is not considered properly completed and it can be changed or canceled by either side.
This is one of the main reasons most retailers do not charge your card until your order actually ships. They've turned this into a trust point, a selling point, but they do it to protect themselves against things like typos and inventory mistakes. As long as you're not actually charged, they can take as long as they want to send your order, and they can make any pricing changes they want. You obviously need to agree to any pricing changes, but the choices are to accept or cancel the order; you have no legal leverage to make the retailer honor their original price.
While I don't doubt that Wal-Mart has products specially made for it, I doubt that's the case with the Acer laptops in question. I have never seen an Acer laptop for sale anywhere (including Wal-Mart) that didn't look exactly the same as Acer laptops sold everywhere else.
And I bought one myself sold by CompUSA. Now, this particular *configuration* that I bought was made only for CompUSA and that may be true at Wal-Mart as well. But the laptop itself was just a regular Acer that just happened to have a particular set of specs.
Long story short, my Acer laptop died after 18 months. The power connector broke, physically broke. Around the same time, the lid cracked at the hinge.
The moral of the story is that Acer laptops are cheap pieces of shit.
You're spinning this maglev project as socialism,
(Woosh!)
His use of the word "socialist" was obviously satirical. As in, there is a large group of people in this country that calls government investment in public works projects with citizen tax money a "socialist" idea.
If you asked 100 Americans "do you think the federal government raising taxes on the top 1% of earners, then spending those tax dollars on a rail project thousands of miles away from where you live is a socialist idea?" I guarantee a majority of them will say yes. That was the parent poster's point, which you completely missed.
What if ultra-expensive trains, requiring (due to their speed) very smooth runs of rail, are justified by market and geographic conditions in Japan which do not exist in America? Japan's decision to proceed and America's decision to refrain are both therefore simple rational efficiency tradeoffs. Most people call that 'capitalism', in the sense that rail is only being laid in places that can turn a profit with it.
No, that's not capitalism, in the same way "redistribution of wealth" or using tax dollars for public works is not socialism.
Capitalism by its very nature is free market based. There is nothing free market about government spending billions of dollars investing in infrastructure. The free market may benefit from these public works, but the government itself does not. In fact, this is the point!
Similarly, calling progressive taxation "socialism" is ridiculous when you consider the fact that the entire reason taxes exist at all is redistribution of wealth! Whether it's a flat tax or a progressive tax, the entire point of taxes is taking money from somebody and putting it somewhere else that it might do more for the common good. So unless you believe taxes in general are socialist and nobody should ever have to pay them at all, there's no reason not to support whatever tax-funded programs might benefit society as a whole. (And even the most rabid anti-socialists in this country seem to support the military, which is one such tax-funded program. Your wealth has been redistributed to the military and the industrial complex that supports it!)
My point is there is a middle ground here, which is what even you, who don't sound like the most unreasonable person I've ever met, are missing. You acknowledge that government works can sometimes be good but yet you argue that in those cases, those works must be good only because they are capitalist! That does not follow.
There's no either/or when it comes to capitalism and socialism. This is yet another case where one side is trying to present things as black and white, but I think we've all learned by now that the real world doesn't work that way.
Some government programs are good, some are bad. The good ones aren't all capitalist and the bad ones aren't all socialist. Taxes are annoying but necessary. At the end of the day, you pick and choose what you support based on what you think is best for society (and yes, yourself). But assigning these loaded labels like socialist or capitalist to things when they have no bearing on what we're talking about is not helpful. (And the parent was trying to prove that.)
Rail is a dead end for passengers in the US.
Amtrak just got a $13 billion funding authorization this week. That's about double what they usually get (per year). I'd hardly say rail is a "dead end" here, especially considering:
a) this funding increase came under a Republican president who has actually tried to kill Amtrak several times - imagine what will happen with a rail-friendly administration
and
b) Amtrak's ridership is at all time highs.
Not to mention that's all happening with antiquated equipment on poorly-maintained rails owned by freight companies that do not allow Amtrak trains to run on time. If rail travel can do this well under these circumstances, just imagine how well it could do if we actually invested properly in rail infrastructure like they do everywhere else in the industrialized world.
For me it's just that the games themselves have changed. I think the term "social gaming" is being misapplied here. The real story is just that older gamers don't like playing online, and that's my story as well. It's partly what's caused me to quit gaming so much.
The single-player or in-room multiplayer games that are left are mostly sports games or shooters. And sports games are just played out for a lot of people over 30, and shooters were played out 10 years ago for anyone over 30.
What's missing are the new, unique, but simple experiences that used to define gaming and that those of us over 30 grew up on. Where's the modern equivalent of Pac-Man? There is no such thing. Instead we just get Pac-Man itself, rehashed, for about the 400th time, as if that's what older gamers really want. We buy it, grudgingly, because we feel like we've got no other choice. But what we really want is an experience like that, only new.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imagine_(song)
Probably not a socialist or communist in the traditional sense, but I think he was politically very close to those ideas. Unlike most socialists and communists, I don't think he had clear ideas or plans about actually enacting change.
There are three stages of Communism. Most Americans only know of the first (revolution), because that's the only stage we ever actually saw.
From what I recall from my book-learnin' in college, the stages are:
1. Revolution - the entire world switches, violently if necessary, to a communist system.
2. Re-education - the population learns to sacrifice their personal possessions and live as one, with collective ownership. A transitional government would exist during this period to administer the re-education. This could occur region by region as revolution was completed in those areas. But for stage 3 to happen, re-education of the world would have to be complete worldwide.
3. "Utopia" (don't remember what it was actually called) - the world being united and re-educated, the government melts away and citizens of the world live in peace, free of the oppression of organized religion, government, or material possessions.
Now, "Imagine" sounds a lot like stage 3 of Communism, doesn't it?
It is a Communist song. Whether he actually believed stages 1 and 2 could work in practice, he clearly believed in at least the ideals of the ultimate stage of Communism. And I've always found it sort of ironic that so many Americans celebrate this song (and that it is in fact used in commercials!) when it is pretty much the antithesis of all we stand for.
That said, I don't think those ideals are anything most people could argue with (unless you're a rabid capitalist or very religious). Communism was intended to be benevolent - it was supposed to end all wars, all violence, all crime. It was supposed to bring world peace and overall prosperity (not for individuals, but for the world "commune" as a whole). And, again ironically, it was supposed to bring complete and total freedom in its final stage.
Obviously most of the world never got past stage 1. A few areas, like the USSR and China, made it to stage 2. But it was always an idea doomed to failure. If our goal (as it was) was to protect our current system, then the US was actually right to be scared of communism's march in the 1950's - the goal was to take over the world. That wasn't just paranoia. None of the communist countries were intended to last forever - the governments as designed were supposed to be temporary. All we really needed to do was block and then outlast them, and we were always in a naturally better position to do that.
The point being, while in the 1950's it may have been scary to hear somebody described as a Communist, these days it sounds almost quaint, somewhat naive. (Seinfeld taught us that.) People used to get really defensive when someone would say this song is Communist, but they really shouldn't.
I don't care how much you spend helping other people, so long as it is YOUR money you spend, and not through the process of raiding your neighbors' wallets.
So I guess your overall argument is that nobody should ever have to pay any taxes?
In every society, everybody has to pay such that society as a whole benefits. That doesn't mean every single person in society gets to see every single benefit that their taxes pay for. For example, you may never need an ambulance, but your taxes help pay for them for others. Does that make government a "thief" because it took your money to help pay for ambulances?
You likely *will* see other benefits that other taxpayers don't get, though. Maybe you won't ever need an ambulance, but maybe someday you need a state grant for college, or unemployment benefits, or a FEMA-guaranteed loan to rebuild a house destroyed by a natural disaster. That's the tradeoff, and we all accept it. It's part of living in a civilized society. If a benefit exists, it exists for anyone should someone be in a situation to need it, not just those who chose to pay for it. You don't get to directly choose what benefits you pay for and what you don't; that's called anarchy. And you know what? We tried that in this country - it was called the Wild West. And that's not the kind of country I think many people would want to live in these days.
Another phrase I saw was "intentionally ambiguous". It kind of sounds like it's supposed to be vague and left up to the courts to decide in each case, which doesn't sound like good law to me but then IANAL.
Some laws are written intentionally such that the standards of society can be applied through case law. There are times when congress doesn't intend to write a blanket law expressly forbidding or permitting something, but instead wants to allow for an organic definition of the law to form over time. There are pros and cons to that approach.
A lot of case law on fair use does exist, and based on what I know of it, I don't see how this case was "clearly" fair use as described in the article summary. The courts themselves have noted that each case has to be considered individually - there is no singular guiding principle to define what "fair" means in every context. Judgments in some cases seem to contradict judgments in other cases, although it usually comes down to some minor detail or just a question of degree. (For example, when 2 Live Crew was at one point found guilty of infringing for their use of "Pretty Woman", the problem was just the amount of the song that they used.)
One thing is for sure - the position of the copyright owners doesn't matter at all. The copyright owner doesn't get to decide what's fair use and what isn't. Otherwise the copyright owners would win every single lawsuit, and they don't. The law is what it is; it's a specific exception to copyright law. The only question is how to actually define that exception.
There are four criteria that are specifically mentioned in the law that courts use in deciding these cases, although the wording of the law makes it clear that those are not the *only* criteria to be used. Still, they are always the starting point. Generally, they will try to look at the balance of how the work in question fits in with those criteria. In other words, use of a copyrighted work can be fair use even if it's *not* parody (one of the four criteria), provided it's just a short excerpt and is used for criticism. It's not that all four criteria need to be satisfied for something to be fair use. Any one or all can be, plus more criteria not mentioned in the law specifically, and the courts have to decide all this on a case by case basis.
I would think this would be a tricky case. It's only 15 seconds, and you could argue it's being used for criticism and comment, but on the other hand it is a for-profit work (nothing about it being a documentary changes that) and it doesn't sound like the song had much to do with the theme of the film itself - an argument could be made that using this song in a documentary on creationism would harm the song's reputation and hurt its future commercial prospects. (ie. it'd be hard for an ad agency to use a song in a Nike ad that's closely associated with creationism). All that and more would be considered by the courts.
It's certainly not "clearly" a case of fair use. It may or may not be.
Have you seen the furor over Palin's belief in creationism? What about people who oppose all religion? All of these things show that they think they know better than the people that they're talking about.
People think that conservatives are anti-intellectual, which isn't necessarily the case. It's that they're anti-elitism.
If you believe in creationism, then yes, you are anti-intellectual by definition. There is no reason guiding a belief in creationism; only faith.
And "elite" means "above average" or "excellent". If you're anti-elite, then you're pro-mediocrity, and that's certainly not a quality I look for in a leader. But it is a belief that got us George Bush.
I'm pro-elite and proud of it. We should be demanding more from our leaders, not less. If I want somebody I can drink a beer with, I'll call up a friend. That's not what I'm expecting from a President (or Vice President, for that matter).
When it comes down to it, there are people in this country and in the world who think that if you hold a certain belief, you are instantly a moron and someone who isn't to be given respect.
When your beliefs have been disproven by science many, many times in many, many ways, and those scientific results have been published in very public ways over a period of a century or more, then they're probably right to think that.
Do you also believe the world is flat? And should I not think you a moron for that belief?