A video game is a prime example. It takes a long time to write a good game but you can only sell it for $35-$50. You could make the game engine open source and still be blessed by RMS. RMS for some reason things that it is fine for the "content" of a video game not be open source. I have no idea why he feels that way.
RMS is a hacker. RMS thinks the innovative 3D engine in Quake is really cool, and wants to be able to play around with it to see what else he can make it do. He wants to create new things based on Quake: I recall, once the source was released, there was a mod that made Quake into a flight sim, another that gave you a warped fish-eye view, there was ttyQuake which was just deeply wrong, there were ports of Quake to every machine that would sit still long enough...
But RMS doesn't give a damn about the levels iD happened to provide along with Quake - why should he? To a hacker, they're irrelevant. Suppose Microsoft were to say 'right, you can have the code to the Windows kernel, NTFS, SMB, the Word and Excel file formats, all under GPL. But the fonts, sound effects and wallpapers, those we're keeping.' Well, who cares? We can create our own fonts and wallpapers, dammit...
a la Carte would kill said channels, especially BBC America
Would it? How does BBC America work? I gather it's a subscription channel, but the programmes have already been made anyway, for the UK audience. Wouldn't BBC America only have to cover its overheads - running costs, bandwidth, staff, premises and so forth - with anything beyond that being profit?
I can see BBC America losing audience share, but being killed off? Does BBC UK actually charge BBC America for the programming?
Right now there's a TON of crap on TV, and I don't mean 'offensive' I just mean crap (every reality show ever created comes to mind). And if a la carte means that some of the crap will go away for lack of interest, that's fine by me.
Look here, repeat after me:
Most People Are Stupid
They LIKE reality TV. They LIKE celebrity shows. They really, really LOVE game shows.
You think that once people can pick and choose only the channels they want, it'll be the good stuff that survives? No, no, no... It'll be the crap. A veritable tsunami of purest shite.
If your kids grow up seeing naked people on TV, they'll grow up comfortable with themselves and those around them, knowing we're all much the same underneath whatever regional and cultural variant on the theme of clothing we choose to wear, they'll probably be relaxed and comfortable with their sexualities of whatever kind, and will on the whole be happy and content.
If, on the other hand, they grow up seeing horrific violence portrayed as exciting, glamourous and cool, then they'll turn out desensitised, culturally ignorant and xenophobic, tormented by inner angst and emotional illiteracy leading to frustrations that are vented in the only way TV ever taught them, violence against others.
Now, under which scenario are we best going to be able to recruit young people to help defend our $sys$oilfields freedom? Support our troops! Show your kids violent TV today!
The Terrorist lives in a cave of 20 rooms. Each room has 3 tunnels leading to other rooms. (Look at a dodecahedron to see how this works - if you don't know what a dodecahedron is, ask someone.)
Hazards:
explosive mines - Two rooms have explosive mines in them. If you go there, you are blown up by the mine (and lose!)
Super Copters - Two other rooms have super Copters. If you go there, a Copter grabs you and takes you to some other room at random. (Which might be troublesome.)
Terrorist:
The Terrorist is not bothered by the hazards (he has sucker feet and is too big for a Copter to lift.) Usually he is asleep. Two things wake him up: your entering his room or your shooting an missile.
If the Terrorist wakes, he sometimes runs to the next room. If you happen to be in the same room with him, you lose.
You:
Each turn you may move or shoot a crooked missile.
Move: You can move one room (through one tunnel.)
missile: You have 5 missiles. You lose when you run out. Each missile can be shot from 1 to 5 rooms away. You aim by telling the computer the room #'s you want the missile to go to. If the missile can't go that way, it moves at random to the next room.
If the missile hits the Terrorist, you win. If the missile hits you, you lose.
Warnings:
When you are one room away from Terrorist or hazard.
The computer says:
Terrorist - I smell a Terrorist Copter - Copters Nearby mine - I feel a draft
However, as Dragonball Z gets going it turns out that Son Gokuu is in fact an alien Saiyajin called Kakarotto, sent to earth as a baby in a space pod, and found and raised by some country guy. His home planet seems to have been destroyed, and the surviving threee Saiyajin promptly turn up on Earth. Superman 2, anyone? KNEEL BEFORE VEGETA!
IIRC the Great Wall's effects expires with the discovery of metallurgy.
Sure, but the Romans never built the Great Wall - the Chinese did. The Romans under Emperor Hadrian had to make do. They built a bunch of fortresses along the northern border of England, garrisoned them, backed them with garrison towns and counted on the zones of control to keep the Caledonians out. Fortresses don't go obsolete, and neither do city walls. However, bombers, stealth bombers, and howitzers ignore city walls. So the original poster was right:)
Superman is merely a super man; the Spectre, at least in some versions, has been presented as the literal Wrath of God.
Plus, though we're getting a little way away from the traditional superhero here, the population of certain Vertigo titles is, well... they'd eat up Superman for lunch, devour Phoenix for afters, and then start looking around for Gokuu.
I didn't intend the fanboy explanation to be condescending or anything. I just wanted to be clear on why I labeled you as such.
Oh, don't worry. You were quite right; I love Batman. Although I think it's actually his wonderful rogues' gallery of villains that sells me the comics. Those guys rock.
Personally, I think that Superman works just as hard at being a hero as Batman. Superman can do pretty much what he pleases. It has to be tempting to toss morality to the wind and just worry about himself.
I don't think so. I think Superman could no more do that than I could leap tall buildings in a single bound. It's just not him.
If Superman were to lose self-control, I think the outcome would be the benevolent God-King. Superman's problem must be to restrain this idealistic altruism, this deep belief of his that the world can be made better and that he can do it, and to remain only a hero and not an emperor. The temptation must be there to seize power - and there's little on earth that could oppose him, unless we're allowing the existence of the rest of the League - and to reorder the world for the benefit of mankind, eliminating hunger and want and crime and so forth and incidentally reducing the earth to one big Kandor.
My absolute favorite variation is Kim Stanley Robinson's short story "Ubermensch!", in which a slight variation in timing causes Kal-El's lifeboat to land on a farm near Kleinberg in Germany, instead of Smallville in America. (keep in mind when 'Superman' first appeared.)
A similar idea was used in Red Son - in which Kal-El landed in the Ukraine. Superman fought for truth, justice, and the workers' revolution! Wonderful idea, fabulous Soviet propaganda-style artwork of Superman as the ideal Stakhanovite... ended badly, though, with Brainiac and stuff.
You get the label as a Batman fanboy because of how often you mention Batman. You mention that you like Superman better in the Justice League but then only because of his contrast to Batman. And then in the discussion of a Superman movie you mention you would most like to see a Batman movie
Sure, I like Batman. I don't deny that Batman camps it up too - I mean, some days you just can't get rid of a bomb - but he has the alternative available. You can have the Caped Crusader, camp as you like, or the Dark Knight posing all gothic on a moonlit rooftop. But that aside, if critically discussing Superman as a superhero, Batman is the most obvious subject to examine along with him. He's the alternative model of the hero: the avenger, not the protector. The billionaire, not the farm boy. Batman has to work hard to be a hero; Superman would have to work hard not to.
I think the two of them go well together. The idealist and the cynic. Light and dark. Paladin and rogue. Sure, they're both heroes, but they could so easily be at each other's throats. Opposites in every way except the one that counts. Each is weakened when the other isn't around - Batman less so, I think, because he's got the best villains, but that might just be me.
That said, if I could see a film made of any superhero of all, I think the world's ready for J'onn. I mean, I don't think I've ever seen the guy outside the comics. Martian Manhunter, your time has come!
The possibility that extraterrestrials will take over SETI is pretty remote, but SETI is still a security risk.
I doubt there's a risk of ET hacking SETI@home and pwning the internet; they'd be working completely blind. The risk from alien signals is one that I think was raised by someone in Contact: what if they hack us?
Send down a message, prime number sequences and so forth, describe the periodic table, build a scientific vocabulary, the whole SETI thing. Then begin describing plans for a machine. Make it look like a spaceship. When built and switched on: boom!
A very cheap and efficient means of exterminating potential upstart rivals in the universe. No expensive, slow battlefleet needed, just a trick signal and we do all the work ourselves.
You can't have the man married, then pretend it never happend (which it should not have in the first place).
Yes. You. Can.
You can do whatever the hell you like. Superman is too big now to be constrained by continuity. Nobody has read all the comics, seen all the shows, listened to the fifties radio serial. If you have a cool Superman story to tell, then tell it, and don't be concerned if some nerd complains that it contradicts Action Comics issue 145, page 4, or something someone once said in Smallville. Did Superman marry Lois or not? Or did he go off with Wonder Woman? Did he ever fight Batman? Do the other heroes even exist? Just how powerful is Superman? All up to the writer.
I'd complain if an episode of Smallville contradicted something established in an earlier episode of Smallville, or if two comics in the same line contradicted each other... but I don't worry about cross-consistency. Every writer has grown up with Superman and has their own Superman in mind, and as long as their own Superman stories are reasonably internally consistent, and hold with the basic principles of who Superman is, then that doesn't bother me.
Will this take place before or after the Marriage to Lois? Will it say that ever happened or just write it off as "no one will remember" I really didn't care about the outcome of Lois & Clark, but I care for some continuity in my stories.
Superman has been going for eighty years, in comics, radio, TV serials and movies, at least two alternate universes, and through a Crisis on Infinite Earths. Don't expect full consistency in his history:-)
Even his powers have changed over time. Didn't you ever think that 'able to leap tall buildings in a single bound' was a strange way to describe a guy who can fly?
Nonsense. Lex Luthor was a fiendishly clever meglomaniac.
Not sure if you already know this - hard to detect through raw text - but that wasn't a dig at Bush. Lex Luthor has actually been president of the United States in recent comics; a quick check of Wikipedia reveals that he became POTUS in 2000, and went on the run in 2004 after all his evil started to come to light.
Anyone worth Superman's effort to be fighting should be busy running for Congress anyway. Everyone knows that's where you go if you want to be able to do some real damage...
Which is why Lex Luthor is president now.
You're right about Superman being overpowered, though. The series tends to suffer from occasional bouts of Dragonballitis. Oh, here comes yet another insanely powerful enemy...
I just want to see a good retelling of the story. No camp please.
You're kidding, right? Superman is, in the end, a big goofy boy-scout in blue tights. He's not a sophisticated urban socialite with a dark secret like Bruce Wayne; he's an all-American country boy who does what's right, by golly! You can't get away from the silliness by going nasty and gothic, like you can with the Gotham crowd; Superman will always be a bit camp.
As for a retelling of the story: which story? Superman has been in thousands of stories. Personally, I was never too keen on Superman solo; he worked best for me in the context of the Justice League, where the permanent tension between him and Batman made things a lot more interesting. I'd like to see a film of The Dark Knight Returns, which really gets to the heart of what both Superman and Batman are really all about...
Yep. It comes of having a single currency across twelve countries with far too many languages, each with its own way of forming the plural. Should two be called 'euros', 'euraux', 'euronen'? The easiest way around this problem is to just declare that 'euro' does not change in the plural.
When you nitpik, at least make sure you are reading correctly
He was reading correctly. Hardly anyone seems to know how to use apostrophes these days, though.
The Lego collector's web site - the web site of or belonging to the Lego collector. In the context of the article, this would be taken to mean the Lego collector who has been arrested.
The Lego collectors' web site - the web site of or belonging to the Lego collectors. In the context of the article, this would be taken to mean the community of Lego collectors, to whom the Lego collector who has been arrested was selling ill-gotten Lego.
Punctuation is extremely important in English, if you wish to avoid ambiguities like this one.
Actually I think Sapporo and Kirin are much better Japanese beers. Asahi make some pretty pissy beers, especially their Red label (urrgrgrghhhh!) and the even worse Green label (bleuaghghhggh!)
I like the Asahi we get in.uk - silver label, but I don't know if it's the same branding they use elsewhere. I've been told before that Sapporo is better, but I've never seen it for sale here. Never heard of Kirin at all, except as a setting for appallingly formulaic Enid Blyton adventure stories...
Here is an example of one of the song names that was a part of the complaint against kazaa "Yellow". This basicly means anyone searching for "yellow something" is going to have their download blocked.
I seem to remember the same problem arising when Napster started blocking searches based on keyword. A lot of people were very cross that their own music they were sharing got blocked along with the RIAA's stuff.
With Kazaa, it's even worse because people share all kinds of material; as you say, it's yellow anything. Maybe they've recruited Hal Jordan to clean up Kazaa, and want to make sure he's safe to do so?
I must admit I am surprised Jeremy Paxman is still working for them, or that anybody agrees to be interviewed by him. Even when he is interviewing people you dislike, you cant help feeling sorry for them.
Newsnight is a pretty important show, watched by a lot of major players and opinion-formers. If there's been talk that day of a scandal within the government and nobody involved turns up to the interview... well, the Opposition will certainly have the relevant shadow minister there, and if Paxo turns to camera after interviewing him and says 'Nobody from the Government was available for interview tonight, but they released this statement...' and proceeds to read out some cover-your-ass release - well, it looks very bad indeed.
As a result, you can't simply refuse to turn up. Viewers will assume the worst.
A practice that seems quite widespread is to identify an expendable junior minister loosely connected with whatever's been done and throw him to the wolves. I wonder what it must be like to be the one who gets the pager message from Millbank, 'ALASTAIR SAYS YOU'RE GOING ON NEWSNIGHT TONIGHT'... Scary.
Any NPR (American "public" radio) listeners here listen to the BBC news programs we get over here? Those interviewers really are kind of pushy. I wouldn't call them "probing", I'd call them biased and rude.
Biased? Yes, but not in the sense that the/. mob will understand it. BBC interviewers are very strongly biased towards the assumption that the politician they are interviewing is hiding something. Now, maybe that's wrong, maybe you should be nice and assume that you're dealing with a politician who is completely honest and has nothing to hide, but when did we last see one of those involved in anything newsworthy?
This assumption on the part of political interviewers that all interviewees are hiding something probably stems in great part from the example of Jeremy Paxman, who has been presenting Newsnight for years; this is one of the main political analysis shows on British TV. Paxman's widely-quoted motto is 'why is this lying bastard lying to me?' After his celebrated interview with Michael Howard (already quoted in a +5 above, in which he asked the same question again and again to receive increasingly pathetic and terribly obvious evasions) he inspired a whole generation of interviewers to emulate his very aggressive style. Everyone wants to be the new Paxo.
It's also, I think, a product of British culture as a whole. The metropolitan media elite in the UK especially have a tendency to sneer at everything. This is the world of Private Eye, of Spitting Image and Blackadder and Have I Got News For You, in which nobody ever has a virtuous motive for anything. I know British comedy is very popular among certain Americans, especially of a geeky persuasion, so you'll all know how dark and nasty a sense of humour we tend towards. We're a deeply cynical nation.
As far as I'm concerned, sycophantic interviews are a waste of time. Why does a politician give an interview? Not to explain details of policy; he does that in Parliament and it is then reported upon. He does it to explain his reasons, or what he wants us to think are his reasons. So we're outside the realm of dry unvarnished facts, we're getting the politician's angle, coloured by whatever his agenda may be or whatever the whips or the guys in Millbank want said. If left to his own devices the politician will deliver a distorted view of reality; we therefore need interviewers who will assume the worst of their interviewees and take them to task on any inconsistencies, significant omissions, blatant evasions or outright lies they may commit.
I might further add, though I've gone on far too long already, that it's not just the BBC who have this attitude. Parliament is a rowdy and cynical place, too. Here's the latest of Blair's weekly half-hour Q&A sessions there.
Slashdot Mirror
RMS is a hacker. RMS thinks the innovative 3D engine in Quake is really cool, and wants to be able to play around with it to see what else he can make it do. He wants to create new things based on Quake: I recall, once the source was released, there was a mod that made Quake into a flight sim, another that gave you a warped fish-eye view, there was ttyQuake which was just deeply wrong, there were ports of Quake to every machine that would sit still long enough...
But RMS doesn't give a damn about the levels iD happened to provide along with Quake - why should he? To a hacker, they're irrelevant. Suppose Microsoft were to say 'right, you can have the code to the Windows kernel, NTFS, SMB, the Word and Excel file formats, all under GPL. But the fonts, sound effects and wallpapers, those we're keeping.' Well, who cares? We can create our own fonts and wallpapers, dammit...
Would it? How does BBC America work? I gather it's a subscription channel, but the programmes have already been made anyway, for the UK audience. Wouldn't BBC America only have to cover its overheads - running costs, bandwidth, staff, premises and so forth - with anything beyond that being profit?
I can see BBC America losing audience share, but being killed off? Does BBC UK actually charge BBC America for the programming?
Look here, repeat after me:
Most People Are Stupid
They LIKE reality TV. They LIKE celebrity shows. They really, really LOVE game shows.
You think that once people can pick and choose only the channels they want, it'll be the good stuff that survives? No, no, no... It'll be the crap. A veritable tsunami of purest shite.
If your kids grow up seeing naked people on TV, they'll grow up comfortable with themselves and those around them, knowing we're all much the same underneath whatever regional and cultural variant on the theme of clothing we choose to wear, they'll probably be relaxed and comfortable with their sexualities of whatever kind, and will on the whole be happy and content.
If, on the other hand, they grow up seeing horrific violence portrayed as exciting, glamourous and cool, then they'll turn out desensitised, culturally ignorant and xenophobic, tormented by inner angst and emotional illiteracy leading to frustrations that are vented in the only way TV ever taught them, violence against others.
Now, under which scenario are we best going to be able to recruit young people to help defend our $sys$oilfields freedom? Support our troops! Show your kids violent TV today!
Welcome to Hunt the Terrorist
The Terrorist lives in a cave of 20 rooms. Each room has 3 tunnels
leading to other rooms. (Look at a dodecahedron to see how this works
- if you don't know what a dodecahedron is, ask someone.)
Hazards:
explosive mines - Two rooms have explosive mines in them. If you go
there, you are blown up by the mine (and lose!)
Super Copters - Two other rooms have super Copters. If you go there, a Copter
grabs you and takes you to some other room at random. (Which might be
troublesome.)
Terrorist:
The Terrorist is not bothered by the hazards (he has sucker feet and is
too big for a Copter to lift.) Usually he is asleep. Two things wake
him up: your entering his room or your shooting an missile.
If the Terrorist wakes, he sometimes runs to the next room. If you
happen to be in the same room with him, you lose.
You:
Each turn you may move or shoot a crooked missile.
Move: You can move one room (through one tunnel.)
missile: You have 5 missiles. You lose when you run out. Each missile can
be shot from 1 to 5 rooms away. You aim by telling the computer the
room #'s you want the missile to go to. If the missile can't go that way,
it moves at random to the next room.
If the missile hits the Terrorist, you win. If the missile hits you, you
lose.
Warnings:
When you are one room away from Terrorist or hazard.
The computer says:
Terrorist - I smell a Terrorist
Copter - Copters Nearby
mine - I feel a draft
However, as Dragonball Z gets going it turns out that Son Gokuu is in fact an alien Saiyajin called Kakarotto, sent to earth as a baby in a space pod, and found and raised by some country guy. His home planet seems to have been destroyed, and the surviving threee Saiyajin promptly turn up on Earth. Superman 2, anyone? KNEEL BEFORE VEGETA!
Sure, but the Romans never built the Great Wall - the Chinese did. The Romans under Emperor Hadrian had to make do. They built a bunch of fortresses along the northern border of England, garrisoned them, backed them with garrison towns and counted on the zones of control to keep the Caledonians out. Fortresses don't go obsolete, and neither do city walls. However, bombers, stealth bombers, and howitzers ignore city walls. So the original poster was right :)
Plus, though we're getting a little way away from the traditional superhero here, the population of certain Vertigo titles is, well... they'd eat up Superman for lunch, devour Phoenix for afters, and then start looking around for Gokuu.
For instance: Superman vs The Saint of Killers.
Oh, don't worry. You were quite right; I love Batman. Although I think it's actually his wonderful rogues' gallery of villains that sells me the comics. Those guys rock.
Personally, I think that Superman works just as hard at being a hero as Batman. Superman can do pretty much what he pleases. It has to be tempting to toss morality to the wind and just worry about himself.
I don't think so. I think Superman could no more do that than I could leap tall buildings in a single bound. It's just not him.
If Superman were to lose self-control, I think the outcome would be the benevolent God-King. Superman's problem must be to restrain this idealistic altruism, this deep belief of his that the world can be made better and that he can do it, and to remain only a hero and not an emperor. The temptation must be there to seize power - and there's little on earth that could oppose him, unless we're allowing the existence of the rest of the League - and to reorder the world for the benefit of mankind, eliminating hunger and want and crime and so forth and incidentally reducing the earth to one big Kandor.
A similar idea was used in Red Son - in which Kal-El landed in the Ukraine. Superman fought for truth, justice, and the workers' revolution! Wonderful idea, fabulous Soviet propaganda-style artwork of Superman as the ideal Stakhanovite... ended badly, though, with Brainiac and stuff.
Sure, I like Batman. I don't deny that Batman camps it up too - I mean, some days you just can't get rid of a bomb - but he has the alternative available. You can have the Caped Crusader, camp as you like, or the Dark Knight posing all gothic on a moonlit rooftop. But that aside, if critically discussing Superman as a superhero, Batman is the most obvious subject to examine along with him. He's the alternative model of the hero: the avenger, not the protector. The billionaire, not the farm boy. Batman has to work hard to be a hero; Superman would have to work hard not to.
I think the two of them go well together. The idealist and the cynic. Light and dark. Paladin and rogue. Sure, they're both heroes, but they could so easily be at each other's throats. Opposites in every way except the one that counts. Each is weakened when the other isn't around - Batman less so, I think, because he's got the best villains, but that might just be me.
That said, if I could see a film made of any superhero of all, I think the world's ready for J'onn. I mean, I don't think I've ever seen the guy outside the comics. Martian Manhunter, your time has come!
I doubt there's a risk of ET hacking SETI@home and pwning the internet; they'd be working completely blind. The risk from alien signals is one that I think was raised by someone in Contact: what if they hack us?
Send down a message, prime number sequences and so forth, describe the periodic table, build a scientific vocabulary, the whole SETI thing. Then begin describing plans for a machine. Make it look like a spaceship. When built and switched on: boom!
A very cheap and efficient means of exterminating potential upstart rivals in the universe. No expensive, slow battlefleet needed, just a trick signal and we do all the work ourselves.
Yes. You. Can.
You can do whatever the hell you like. Superman is too big now to be constrained by continuity. Nobody has read all the comics, seen all the shows, listened to the fifties radio serial. If you have a cool Superman story to tell, then tell it, and don't be concerned if some nerd complains that it contradicts Action Comics issue 145, page 4, or something someone once said in Smallville. Did Superman marry Lois or not? Or did he go off with Wonder Woman? Did he ever fight Batman? Do the other heroes even exist? Just how powerful is Superman? All up to the writer.
I'd complain if an episode of Smallville contradicted something established in an earlier episode of Smallville, or if two comics in the same line contradicted each other... but I don't worry about cross-consistency. Every writer has grown up with Superman and has their own Superman in mind, and as long as their own Superman stories are reasonably internally consistent, and hold with the basic principles of who Superman is, then that doesn't bother me.
To wipe out the inhabitants so that the Kryptonians could sell the planet off for development, right?
... Huh? Oh, sorry. Wrong superpowered space baby from vanished planet. My bad :)
Superman has been going for eighty years, in comics, radio, TV serials and movies, at least two alternate universes, and through a Crisis on Infinite Earths. Don't expect full consistency in his history :-)
Even his powers have changed over time. Didn't you ever think that 'able to leap tall buildings in a single bound' was a strange way to describe a guy who can fly?
Not sure if you already know this - hard to detect through raw text - but that wasn't a dig at Bush. Lex Luthor has actually been president of the United States in recent comics; a quick check of Wikipedia reveals that he became POTUS in 2000, and went on the run in 2004 after all his evil started to come to light.
Which is why Lex Luthor is president now.
You're right about Superman being overpowered, though. The series tends to suffer from occasional bouts of Dragonballitis. Oh, here comes yet another insanely powerful enemy...
You're kidding, right? Superman is, in the end, a big goofy boy-scout in blue tights. He's not a sophisticated urban socialite with a dark secret like Bruce Wayne; he's an all-American country boy who does what's right, by golly! You can't get away from the silliness by going nasty and gothic, like you can with the Gotham crowd; Superman will always be a bit camp.
As for a retelling of the story: which story? Superman has been in thousands of stories. Personally, I was never too keen on Superman solo; he worked best for me in the context of the Justice League, where the permanent tension between him and Batman made things a lot more interesting. I'd like to see a film of The Dark Knight Returns, which really gets to the heart of what both Superman and Batman are really all about...
Yep. It comes of having a single currency across twelve countries with far too many languages, each with its own way of forming the plural. Should two be called 'euros', 'euraux', 'euronen'? The easiest way around this problem is to just declare that 'euro' does not change in the plural.
He was reading correctly. Hardly anyone seems to know how to use apostrophes these days, though.
The Lego collector's web site - the web site of or belonging to the Lego collector. In the context of the article, this would be taken to mean the Lego collector who has been arrested.
The Lego collectors' web site - the web site of or belonging to the Lego collectors. In the context of the article, this would be taken to mean the community of Lego collectors, to whom the Lego collector who has been arrested was selling ill-gotten Lego.
Punctuation is extremely important in English, if you wish to avoid ambiguities like this one.
Golden Fleece
Great deals on Golden Fleece
Shop on eBay and Save!
www.eBay.com
Hmm. This guy jason@argo.gr has pretty good feedback...
I like the Asahi we get in .uk - silver label, but I don't know if it's the same branding they use elsewhere. I've been told before that Sapporo is better, but I've never seen it for sale here. Never heard of Kirin at all, except as a setting for appallingly formulaic Enid Blyton adventure stories...
I seem to remember the same problem arising when Napster started blocking searches based on keyword. A lot of people were very cross that their own music they were sharing got blocked along with the RIAA's stuff.
With Kazaa, it's even worse because people share all kinds of material; as you say, it's yellow anything. Maybe they've recruited Hal Jordan to clean up Kazaa, and want to make sure he's safe to do so?
Newsnight is a pretty important show, watched by a lot of major players and opinion-formers. If there's been talk that day of a scandal within the government and nobody involved turns up to the interview... well, the Opposition will certainly have the relevant shadow minister there, and if Paxo turns to camera after interviewing him and says 'Nobody from the Government was available for interview tonight, but they released this statement...' and proceeds to read out some cover-your-ass release - well, it looks very bad indeed.
As a result, you can't simply refuse to turn up. Viewers will assume the worst.
A practice that seems quite widespread is to identify an expendable junior minister loosely connected with whatever's been done and throw him to the wolves. I wonder what it must be like to be the one who gets the pager message from Millbank, 'ALASTAIR SAYS YOU'RE GOING ON NEWSNIGHT TONIGHT'... Scary.
Biased? Yes, but not in the sense that the /. mob will understand it. BBC interviewers are very strongly biased towards the assumption that the politician they are interviewing is hiding something. Now, maybe that's wrong, maybe you should be nice and assume that you're dealing with a politician who is completely honest and has nothing to hide, but when did we last see one of those involved in anything newsworthy?
This assumption on the part of political interviewers that all interviewees are hiding something probably stems in great part from the example of Jeremy Paxman, who has been presenting Newsnight for years; this is one of the main political analysis shows on British TV. Paxman's widely-quoted motto is 'why is this lying bastard lying to me?' After his celebrated interview with Michael Howard (already quoted in a +5 above, in which he asked the same question again and again to receive increasingly pathetic and terribly obvious evasions) he inspired a whole generation of interviewers to emulate his very aggressive style. Everyone wants to be the new Paxo.
It's also, I think, a product of British culture as a whole. The metropolitan media elite in the UK especially have a tendency to sneer at everything. This is the world of Private Eye, of Spitting Image and Blackadder and Have I Got News For You, in which nobody ever has a virtuous motive for anything. I know British comedy is very popular among certain Americans, especially of a geeky persuasion, so you'll all know how dark and nasty a sense of humour we tend towards. We're a deeply cynical nation.
As far as I'm concerned, sycophantic interviews are a waste of time. Why does a politician give an interview? Not to explain details of policy; he does that in Parliament and it is then reported upon. He does it to explain his reasons, or what he wants us to think are his reasons. So we're outside the realm of dry unvarnished facts, we're getting the politician's angle, coloured by whatever his agenda may be or whatever the whips or the guys in Millbank want said. If left to his own devices the politician will deliver a distorted view of reality; we therefore need interviewers who will assume the worst of their interviewees and take them to task on any inconsistencies, significant omissions, blatant evasions or outright lies they may commit.
I might further add, though I've gone on far too long already, that it's not just the BBC who have this attitude. Parliament is a rowdy and cynical place, too. Here's the latest of Blair's weekly half-hour Q&A sessions there.